Project I Can Read University of Texas
This article was published in 2017
People retrieve they know everything nigh slavery in the United States, but they don't. They retrieve the majority of African slaves came to the American colonies, but they didn't. They talk nearly 400 years of slavery, but it wasn't. They claim all Southerners endemic slaves, just they didn't. Some argue it was all a long fourth dimension agone, but it wasn't.
Slavery has been in the news a lot lately. From the discovery of the auction of 272 enslaved people that enabled Georgetown University to remain in operation to the McGraw-Loma textbook controversy over calling slaves "workers from Africa" and the slavery memorial beingness built at the University of Virginia, Americans are having conversations about this difficult period in American history. Some of these dialogues have been wrought with controversy and conflict, like the University of Tennessee student who challenged her professor's understanding of enslaved families.
Equally a scholar of slavery at the University of Texas at Austin, I welcome the public debates and connections the American people are making with history. However, there are notwithstanding many misconceptions about slavery, as evidenced by the conflict at the University of Tennessee.
I've spent my career dispelling myths about "the peculiar institution." The goal in my courses is not to victimize 1 group and celebrate some other. Instead, we trace the history of slavery in all its forms to brand sense of the origins of wealth inequality and the roots of discrimination today. The history of slavery provides vital context to contemporary conversations and counters the distorted facts, internet hoaxes and poor scholarship I circumspection my students confronting.
Four myths most slavery
Myth 1: The majority of African captives came to what became the The states.
Truth: Only a little more than than 300,000 captives, or four-half dozen percent, came to the United States. The bulk of enslaved Africans went to Brazil, followed past the Caribbean area. A meaning number of enslaved Africans arrived in the American colonies by way of the Caribbean area, where they were "seasoned" and mentored into slave life. They spent months or years recovering from the harsh realities of the Center Passage. In one case they were forcibly accustomed to slave labor, many were and so brought to plantations on American soil.
Myth Two: Slavery lasted for 400 years.
Popular civilisation is rich with references to 400 years of oppression. There seems to be confusion betwixt the Transatlantic Slave Merchandise (1440-1888) and the institution of slavery, confusion merely reinforced past the Bible, Genesis 15:13:
Then the Lord said to him, 'Know for certain that for 4 hundred years your descendants will be strangers in a country non their ain and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there.'
Listen to Lupe Fiasco – but one hip-hop creative person to refer to the 400 years – in his 2011 imagining of America without slavery, "All Black Everything":
[Hook] You would never know If you could ever exist If y'all never try Yous would never come across Stayed in Africa We ain't never go out And so in that location were no slaves in our history Were no slave ships, were no misery, call me crazy, or isn't he See I fell comatose and I had a dream, it was all black everything [Poetry 1] Uh, and nosotros ain't get exploited White man own't feared so he did not destroy it We ain't work for gratis, encounter they had to employ information technology Built it up together then nosotros equally appointed First 400 years, meet we really enjoyed it 
Truth: Slavery was not unique to the United states of america; it is a office of near every nation's history, from Greek and Roman civilizations to contemporary forms of human being trafficking. The American part of the story lasted fewer than 400 years.
How, and then, do we calculate the timeline of slavery in America? Most historians use 1619 equally a starting point: 20 Africans referred to as "servants" arrived in Jamestown, Virginia on a Dutch transport. It's important to note, nonetheless, that they were not the commencement Africans on American soil. Africans first arrived in America in the late 16th century not as slaves but as explorers together with Castilian and Portuguese explorers.
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One of the all-time-known of these African "conquistadors" was Estevancio, who traveled throughout the Southeast from present-day Florida to Texas. Equally far as the institution of chattel slavery – the treatment of slaves equally property – in the United States, if we use 1619 equally the beginning and the 1865 13th Subpoena as its finish, so information technology lasted 246 years, not 400.
Myth Three: All Southerners owned slaves.
Truth: Roughly 25 percent of all Southerners owned slaves. The fact that 1-quarter of the southern population were slaveholders is still shocking to many. This truth brings historical insight to mod conversations about inequality and reparations.
Accept the case of Texas.
When it established statehood, the Lone Star State had a shorter period of Anglo-American chattel slavery than other southern states – just 1845 to 1865 – because Spain and Mexico had occupied the region for almost one-half of the 19th century with policies that either abolished or limited slavery. Nonetheless, the number of people impacted by wealth and income inequality is staggering. By 1860, the Texas enslaved population was 182,566, but slaveholders represented 27 per centum of the population, and controlled 68 percent of the government positions and 73 percent of the wealth. These are astonishing figures, but today's income gap in Texas is arguably more stark, with ten percent of tax filers taking home 50 percent of the income.
Myth Iv: Slavery was a long time ago.
Truth: African-Americans have been free in this country for less time than they were enslaved. Do the math: Blacks have been free for 152 years, which means that most Americans are only two to three generations away from slavery. This is not that long agone.
Over this same period, even so, one-time slaveholding families have built their legacies on the institution and generated wealth that African-Americans have not had admission to because enslaved labor was forced. Segregation maintained wealth disparities, and overt and covert discrimination express African-American recovery efforts.
The value of slaves
Economists and historians have examined detailed aspects of the enslaved experience for as long as slavery existed. My ain piece of work enters this conversation by looking at the value of individual slaves and the ways enslaved people responded to existence treated as a article.
They were bought and sold just like nosotros sell cars and cattle today. They were gifted, deeded and mortgaged the same way we sell houses today. They were itemized and insured the same manner we manage our avails and protect our valuables.
Enslaved people were valued at every stage of their lives, from before birth until after death. Slaveholders examined women for their fertility and projected the value of their "future increment." Every bit the slaves grew up, enslavers assessed their value through a rating system that quantified their work. An "A1 Prime mitt" represented one term used for a "first-rate" slave who could do the most work in a given day. Their values decreased on a quarter calibration from 3-fourths hands to one-fourth easily, to a rate of zero, which was typically reserved for elderly or differently abled bondpeople (another term for slaves).
For example, Guy and Andrew, two prime males sold at the largest sale in U.South. history in 1859, allowable different prices. Although similar in "all marketable points in size, age, and skill," Guy was US$1,280 while Andrew sold for $1,040 because "he had lost his right center." A reporter from the New York Tribune noted "that the market value of the correct eye in the Southern state is $240." Enslaved bodies were reduced to monetary values assessed from year to twelvemonth and sometimes from month to month for their entire lifespan and beyond. Past today's standards, Andrew and Guy would exist worth well-nigh $33,000-$twoscore,000.
Slavery was an extremely diverse economic establishment, 1 that extracted unpaid labor out of people in a diversity of settings – from modest unmarried-crop farms and plantations to urban universities. This variety was also reflected in their prices. And enslaved people understood they were treated as bolt.
"I was sold away from mammy at three years old," recalled Harriett Hill of Georgia. "I remembers it! It lack selling a dogie from the cow," she shared in a 1930s interview with the Works Progress Assistants. "We are human beings," she told her interviewer. Those in bondage understood their status. Even though Harriet Hill was besides lilliputian to remember her price when she was iii, she recalled beingness sold for $1,400 at age nine or 10: "I never could forget it."
Slavery in popular civilisation
Slavery is part and bundle of American popular culture, just for 40 years the telly miniseries Roots was the primary visual representation of the establishment, except for a handful of independent (and non widely known) films such as Haile Gerima's "Sankofa" or the Brazilian "Quilombo."
Today, from grassroots initiatives such as the interactive Slave Dwelling Project, where school-aged children spend the night in slave cabins, to comic skits on Sabbatum Night Live, slavery is front and center. In 2016 A&E and History released the reimagined miniseries "Roots: The Saga of an American Family unit," which reflected four decades of new scholarship. Steve McQueen'due south "12 Years a Slave" was a box office success in 2013, extra Azia Mira Dungey fabricated headlines with the popular web series called "Ask a Slave," and "The Underground" – a series nigh runaway slaves and abolitionists – was a hit for its network WGN America. With less than ane twelvemonth of functioning, the Smithsonian'due south National Museum of African American History, which devotes several galleries to the history of slavery, has had more than one meg visitors.
The elephant that sits at the eye of our history is coming into focus. American slavery happened – we are even so living with its consequences. I believe we are finally ready to face information technology, learn about it and acknowledge its significance to American history.
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Editor's note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Oct. 21, 2014.
Source: https://theconversation.com/american-slavery-separating-fact-from-myth-79620
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