400 Years of African Slavery in America

[Bootstrap]

slavery has existed throughout history, on every continent, in Biblical times, in present day.

So have rape, sexual abuse, murder, and genocide.

I wish people would not minimize what slaves went through in America. I wish people would not make excuses for slaveholders. Slaveholders knew that they were taking advantage of other people by force. They knew they were dehumanizing helpless people.

That's an important part of American history.

That's why Exodus has always been such an important church in the Black preaching tradition in America.

[temporal1]

slavery has existed throughout history, on every continent, in Biblical times, in present day.

So have rape, sexual abuse, murder, and genocide.

I wish people would not minimize what slaves went through in America. I wish people would not make excuses for slaveholders. Slaveholders knew that they were taking advantage of other people by force. They knew they were dehumanizing helpless people.

That's an important part of American history.

That's why Exodus has always been such an important church in the Black preaching tradition in America.

WISH LIST TIME!
The thread takes another turn.

i don’t know anyone who doesn’t wish slavery, rape, sexual abuse, murder and genocide, never happened. Ever.
Esp not on this forum.

i wish .. forum members would stop leaving because they are insulted/exasperated.
i wish .. the pandemic did not happen.
i wish .. for profit corporate abortionists would stop.
i wish .. men would stay home and care for their wives and families,
i wish .. their families would value them.
i wish .. many things.

Do you have a response to Dan’s OP question? Have you noticed it? Just curious.

[temporal1]

This summer marks the 400th anniversary of the first African slaves coming to American shores - in Virginia 1619. Twenty slaves were sold by pirates who had taken them from a Portuguese ship they had raided off of Mexico - and that began America's nearly 250 year history of enslaving those of African decent. It may seem like ages ago that slavery was abolished, but for reference, when I was born there were still black people alive who had been born into slavery - and the after-effects of that evil practice still ripple through society to this day.

In terms of moral opposition to slavery, Mennonites and Brethren, while not leaders in the abolitionist movement like Quakers and later Methodists, appear to have been among the faith groups opposing slavery. I would have hoped so - if they were true to their theological heritage, the teachings of Jesus would have compelled them to oppose slavery. The Quakers led the way in this country and England, but four Mennonite brothers signed the first Quaker-initiated Anti-Slavery declaration in the US 1688, in Germantown PA. In 1782 the Brethren church took up a question of a particular member's ownership and impregnation of a female slave. It was decided that the "negro wench" should be set free, and her children schooled and cared for. Not all Anabaptists took up the cause, some opposed it, and those who were Abolitionists were characteristically quiet and non-militant about it. However, a number of Mennonites participated in the underground railroad.

What are the dehumanizing causes of the day that we Anabaptists should be morally attuned to?

Disclaimer:
i have not read this topic until recent posts, 19-ish pages in. i have not reviewed prior posts.
this topic is in “History.” (Referring to “the Americas?” not sure. maybe in part.)
now, if i’m reading correctly, the main question here is about Anabaptists and today’s problems (?) (current events?)
(often, subject lines and OPs do not exactly align.)

In response to the question in bold, i would suggest for all Christians, all moral people, regardless of faith or no faith,
caution to avoid organized political blocs+cults is priority. these human crafted entities, are not moral, not human, not of Jesus Christ.

Beware: they BEGIN with seductive and attractive moral premises. every time.
Jim Jones sounded good to a lot of people.

But, having no souls, having only goals of political power and control of the public treasury, they do not bear good fruit.
They can’t.

Jesus said it best: Perfectly. For slave and slave owner alike:
John 14:6
https://biblehub.com/john/14-6.htm

5“Lord,” said Thomas, “we do not know where You are going, so how can we know the way?”

6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

7If you had known Me, you would know My Father as well.
From now on you do know Him and have seen Him.”…
amen.

Thomas. Who better represents all we many doubtful impatient imperfect ones.

i am shocked to live in this time when Christians are refuting Jesus Christ in the name of what is somehow determined to be “superior understanding.”

How can this be?
The idea that Jesus spoke to all, died for all, offered salvation equally to all?
Is now somehow not good enough?

i have no idea why God has decided this must be endured. it is beyond all understanding.

[Szdfan]

I admit that I didn't know about the 50 treaties (I knew there were some treaties). Of course, where treaties existed, the government had no right to simply step away from them
More generally, I have a middle-of-the-road concept of property rights. Peasants have property rights to the ground they work on. But hunters have no property rights to the ground they hunt in. Big deer hunting as a lifestyle was only possible for a short time, after the Amerindians were provided with European horses and Europeans guns. This lifestyle consumed huge spaces of land in a way that was not sustainable. So, Amerindian big deer hunters tended to claim more property rights than can be justified.

I don’t follow this logic at all, especially since the farming that replaced nomadic native tribes on the Great Plains wasn’t sustainable at all. The Plains were opened up to farming by a series of Homestead acts in the late 19th Century. This led to an agriculture boom, which led to over farming, which led to the widespread destruction of native grasses, which played a significant role in keeping the soil anchored down. A series of droughts in the 1930s led to a period of frequent dust storms known as the “Dust Bowl.” Without the long roots of native grasses, the wind blew the dust off the farm fields, leading to widespread environmental and economic devastation.

The worst of these storms was “Black Sunday” on April 14, 1935.



The Dust Bowl is still considered to be one of the greatest human created ecological disasters and one of the largest non-war displacements of people (look up “Okies”) in history.

While soil conservation efforts have prevented dust storms of this magnitude from happening again, the area has never completely recovered. We still have dust storms occasionally that would have been unthinkable prior to white settlement.

I strongly recommend Timothy Egan’s book, The Worst Hard Time as one of the definitive histories of this period.

(I know this a topic I’ve posted about with some frequency— it’s a history I feel connected to, as someone who lives in an affected area. My in-laws families survived the Dust Bowl.)

[temporal1]

I admit that I didn't know about the (500) treaties (I knew there were some treaties). Of course, where treaties existed, the government had no right to simply step away from them
More generally, I have a middle-of-the-road concept of property rights. Peasants have property rights to the ground they work on. But hunters have no property rights to the ground they hunt in. Big deer hunting as a lifestyle was only possible for a short time, after the Amerindians were provided with European horses and Europeans guns. This lifestyle consumed huge spaces of land in a way that was not sustainable. So, Amerindian big deer hunters tended to claim more property rights than can be justified.

I don’t follow this logic at all, especially since the farming that replaced nomadic native tribes on the Great Plains wasn’t sustainable at all. The Plains were opened up to farming by a series of Homestead acts in the late 19th Century. This led to an agriculture boom, which led to over farming, which led to the widespread destruction of native grasses, which played a significant role in keeping the soil anchored down. A series of droughts in the 1930s led to a period of frequent dust storms known as the “Dust Bowl.” Without the long roots of native grasses, the wind blew the dust off the farm fields, leading to widespread environmental and economic devastation.

The worst of these storms was “Black Sunday” on April 14, 1935.

[img] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons

The Dust Bowl is still considered to be one of the greatest human created ecological disasters and one of the largest non-war displacements of people (look up “Okies”) in history.

While soil conservation efforts have prevented dust storms of this magnitude from happening again, the area has never completely recovered. We still have dust storms occasionally that would have been unthinkable prior to white settlement.

I strongly recommend Timothy Egan’s book, The Worst Hard Time as one of the definitive histories of this period.

(I know this a topic I’ve posted about with some frequency— it’s a history I feel connected to, as someone who lives in an affected area. My in-laws families survived the Dust Bowl.)

This is very good, Jeremy. i don’t think it erases PetrC’s points. only if over farming and the Dust Bowl were intentional.
as you describe, once problems were identified, they were mitigated, not ignored. in my view, this is part of PetrC’s point.

i look forward to his response.

i’m afraid there are unintended consequences of having higher (or lower) expectations of any one people group over another.

[Bootstrap]

i don’t know anyone who doesn’t wish slavery, rape, sexual abuse, murder and genocide, never happened. Ever.
Esp not on this forum.

I would like to hear you express compassion for black people when they talk about some of the things that happen to them. In this thread, slavery. Minimizing that is an issue.

Compassion is a deep Christian virtue that we see in Jesus.

Do you have a response to Dan’s OP question? Have you noticed it? Just curious.

This one?

What are the dehumanizing causes of the day that we Anabaptists should be morally attuned to?

To me, it is dehumanizing to insist that black people have no valid complaints, to imply that they are deluded by politicians and have no idea what they have experienced over history or what they experience today, to minimize things like slavery, the subject of this thread. To me, it is dehumanizing to tell history in a way that lets slaveholders completely off the hook.

That's not how Jews and Gentiles related to each other in the New Testament.

[Bootstrap]

Jesus said it best: Perfectly. For slave and slave owner alike:
John 14:6
https://biblehub.com/john/14-6.htm

5“Lord,” said Thomas, “we do not know where You are going, so how can we know the way?”

6 Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

7If you had known Me, you would know My Father as well.
From now on you do know Him and have seen Him.”…
amen.

Thomas. Who better represents all we many doubtful impatient imperfect ones.

Absolutely. I don't understand what that has to do with the subject of this thread, though. In Acts, when the Gentiles said that their widows were being neglected and the widows of Jews were being favored, the early church thought that was important and needed to be fixed. Today, when many black Christians are saying there are issues that need to be addressed, I think we should listen to them.

Sometimes I feel like some people have an attitude that black people have no valid complaints and should just shut up. And sometimes it feels like the same people imply that white people's complaints are really, really important.

And in this thread, when many black Christians and black preachers are telling us that the legacy of slavery is important to them, that the Exodus narrative has been central to the teaching of the black church for centuries, I think we should listen to them with appreciation.

[ken_sylvania]

“The Zero Sum Fallacy”
“There’s a false notion that poor countries are poor because rich countries are rich.”
- Michael Miller
https://www.povertycure.org/learn/issue ... um-fallacy

There are so many inconvenient fallacies.
Instant gratification folks love sound bites and bullying. The internet empowers it.
Not healthy.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic at hand. But I looked at the link and he is simply wrong. Or more precisely, misses the point. Of course international development isn't a zero sum game and poor countries aren't poor because rich countries are rich. But that is a straw man argument that no one actually makes.

It is, however true that many poor countries are poor due in part to exploitation, neglect, and self-centered polices that are, perpetrated by rich countries and the actions of corporations based in rich countries. Ask HondurasKeiser, for example, if the US government and foreign corporations have any complicity for the poverty and corruption that plagues Honduras and generates so many migrants at our borders.

For my own part, I worked in Guatemala for several years in the late 1980s and for shorter stints in the 1990s and saw many small scale farmers bankrupted and give up to migrate to the US as economic refugee after the imposition of CAFTA (the Central American version of NAFTA) during the Clinton years. The same "globalism" policies that has hollowed out much of the American industrial belt has done the same thing to rural Central America. The US has gotten richer as have Central American elites. But there are also many millions left behind.

In the case of Guatemala, if you expand the window of time you are looking at you'll also find that many policies intended to be benevolent and generous did their part in destroying the local economy.
After the 1976 earthquake, the US allowed many Guatemalans to enter the US as refugees and work. The "dollars" sent home by those who moved to the US turbocharged land prices to the extent that now in many areas of the country it is almost impossible to buy land without first going to the States to earn dollars. When the earthquake crisis was over and legal refugee status was no longer available people kept coming, illegally. Also, the vast flows of foreign aid entering Guatemala during the late '70s and early '80s provided an avenue for weapons smuggling into the country that contributed to the civil unrest during those years.

[Ken]

“The Zero Sum Fallacy”
“There’s a false notion that poor countries are poor because rich countries are rich.”
- Michael Miller
https://www.povertycure.org/learn/issue ... um-fallacy

There are so many inconvenient fallacies.
Instant gratification folks love sound bites and bullying. The internet empowers it.
Not healthy.

I'm not sure what this has to do with the topic at hand. But I looked at the link and he is simply wrong. Or more precisely, misses the point. Of course international development isn't a zero sum game and poor countries aren't poor because rich countries are rich. But that is a straw man argument that no one actually makes.

It is, however true that many poor countries are poor due in part to exploitation, neglect, and self-centered polices that are, perpetrated by rich countries and the actions of corporations based in rich countries. Ask HondurasKeiser, for example, if the US government and foreign corporations have any complicity for the poverty and corruption that plagues Honduras and generates so many migrants at our borders.

For my own part, I worked in Guatemala for several years in the late 1980s and for shorter stints in the 1990s and saw many small scale farmers bankrupted and give up to migrate to the US as economic refugee after the imposition of CAFTA (the Central American version of NAFTA) during the Clinton years. The same "globalism" policies that has hollowed out much of the American industrial belt has done the same thing to rural Central America. The US has gotten richer as have Central American elites. But there are also many millions left behind.

In the case of Guatemala, if you expand the window of time you are looking at you'll also find that many policies intended to be benevolent and generous did their part in destroying the local economy.
After the 1976 earthquake, the US allowed many Guatemalans to enter the US as refugees and work. The "dollars" sent home by those who moved to the US turbocharged land prices to the extent that now in many areas of the country it is almost impossible to buy land without first going to the States to earn dollars. When the earthquake crisis was over and legal refugee status was no longer available people kept coming, illegally. Also, the vast flows of foreign aid entering Guatemala during the late '70s and early '80s provided an avenue for weapons smuggling into the country that contributed to the civil unrest during those years.

Yes of course. I could go on and on about all of those topics. Another example is that a lot of the US military aid sent to Guatemala basically built the military infrastructure that was then used by corrupt officers to dabble in the drug trade and allowed Guatemala to become a transshipment point for Columbian cartels shipping cocaine to the US. Instead of paying them in dollars, they often got paid in drugs instead, which fueled the drug epidemic in Guatemala.

Point is that we are inextricably linked to countries like Guatemala on hundreds of levels large and small. Some of those linkages have counter-productive effects in Guatemala, some of them have positive effects. But it is completely incorrect to hand-wave it all away and say 'a rising tide raises all boats" or "development is not a zero sum game" or whatever argument that Michael Miller is making. US policy towards Central America (and policy neglect) has very real consequences many of them negative. And many of which we are seeing the consequence of on our southern border right now.

[PetrChelcicky]

On property rights: I don't think that we can accept documents as absolutes (denying every pre-modern "undocumented" property) and I don't think that we can accept actual "usage" as an absolute (favorizing the lifestyles of people who use and need the vastest amount of space). The reasonable standard must be somewhere between those extremes. That was all I wanted to say.
Generally, if there are questions of "just distribution", I try to define the boundaries: What is definitely too much on the one hand or too little on the other hand? And I am quite prepared to leave anything further - the vernier adjustment - to others. This is an example of my method.

As this has become a blog about economics and international relations, I perceive a certain tendency. Economical changes have often good as well as bad outcomes, and I perceive a trend to focus singularly on the bad outcomes (as examples of white or Western guilt). For example, when Gualtemaltequians earn money in the U.S. and send it back to their relatives, the natural outcome is that house prices in Guatemala will rise. This problem is in no way a matter of U.S. American guilt and U.S. Americans are not even the first who have to fix it. The Guameltequians have to fix it by building more houses, in that way (a) lowering again the cost of housing and (b) creating a local building industry. If things don't work that way, there's the question: What is wrong with Guatemala?

More generally, nobody denies that life contains, occasionally, zero sum situations. And I am all for replacing them by win-win situations. But even in win-win-situations the comparative advantage can differ more or less - things being only a bit better for one party and being a lot better for the other. Must we correct such differences in advantage, retroactively? I have no principles about that. Only I think that people who dream of a perfected "just" society ought to start their experiments on a private basis, for instance with a cooperative society - before they transfer their model to the more elevated level of national or world economy.