MetaFilter posts tagged with Slavery

Minority Death Match

chunking express — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:07:49 -0800

Minority Death Match: Jews, Blacks, And The "Post-Racial" Presidency by By Naomi Klein. An interesting look at the failure of the two United Nations Durban conferences on racism — and a whole lot of other stuff. A critique of a portion of the essay by Joel Kovel. [The article originally appeared in the September issue of Harpers..]

The Price of Sex: Women Speak

autoclavicle — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 08:56:41 -0800

The Price of Sex: Women Speak Since the collapse of communism in 1989, millions of former Soviet bloc residents have migrated abroad, looking for opportunities. These waves of migration breathed life into one of the oldest yet darkest criminal enterprises--the trafficking of human beings into sexual slavery. Hundreds of thousands of Eastern European women have been sold into prostitution. Photojournalist Mimi Chakarova, a Bulgarian who immigrated to the United States in 1990, has documented their journeys from villages in Moldova to the streets of Turkey and nightclubs in Dubai--where prostitution is an equation of supply, demand and desperation.

Debt, slavery, and violence in history

languagehat — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 07:31:45 -0800

Debt: The first five thousand years. Anarchist anthropologist David Graeber (previously) writes about "debt and debt money in human history" in Eurozine. Lots of thought-provoking stuff here; I'll put a sample in the extended description. (Via wood s lot.)

Commodity money, particularly in the form of gold and silver, is distinguished from credit money most of all by one spectacular feature: it can be stolen. Since an ingot of gold or silver is an object without a pedigree, throughout much of history bullion has served the same role as the contemporary drug dealer's suitcase full of dollar bills, as an object without a history that will be accepted in exchange for other valuables just about anywhere, with no questions asked. As a result, one can see the last 5 000 years of human history as the history of a kind of alternation. Credit systems seem to arise, and to become dominant, in periods of relative social peace, across networks of trust, whether created by states or, in most periods, transnational institutions, whilst precious metals replace them in periods characterised by widespread plunder. Predatory lending systems certainly exist at every period, but they seem to have had the most damaging effects in periods when money was most easily convertible into cash.

The Fight To Abolish Slavery Continues

Pater Aletheias — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 11:45:08 -0800

Not For Sale: There are 27 million slaves worldwide right now. Here’s a map of where they are. For many people, awareness of modern slavery—especially slavery in America—began with John Bowe, when his article “Nobodies” was published in the New Yorker in 2003. That was subsequently followed by a book of the same title, part of which became the basis for This American Life #344 “The Competition.” Here’s Bowe on NPR’s Marketplace as well. Now ethicist David Batstone (interview) is devoting his time to abolishing slavery, through his book Not For Sale, and through co-founding the Not For Sale Campaign, which “equips and mobilizes Smart Activists to deploy innovative solutions to re-abolish slavery in their own backyards and across the globe.” Here’s an excerpt from the book.

The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African Photographs: 1860-1960

gman — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:55:45 -0800

"This week -- for the first time ever -- a searchable collection of thousands of rare photographs chronicling Europe’s colonization of East Africa becomes available to anyone with an Internet connection anywhere in the world, thanks to the efforts of staff at Northwestern University Library." (press release)

The temptation to continue to lie, to see yourself as the victim in a grand play is formidable

shothotbot — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 11:12:04 -0800

Ta-Nehisi Coates reflects on social myth-making from the losing side.

Central and Southern African tribal art and culture

nickyskye — Sun, 17 May 2009 13:13:23 -0800

The exceptionally informative and well illustrated Galerie Ezakwantu has great pages on African tribal art, culture and history [due to partial nudity many links NSFW]: African Lip Plugs - Lip Plates; African Currency - African Slave Beads; Jewelry; African Scarification; Thrones and Stools; Shields; Combs; Musical Instruments; Fertility Dolls; Weapons; Zulu Basketry; Contemporary Art; Cups; Tribal Currency; Zulu Ricksha attire; Southern Africa Tribal Migrations; South African Kings and Chiefs. Also some interesting pages on anger about Robert Mugabe; the sale of the gallery owner's property; Cape Dutch Homesteads and blueberry recipes. A little more about the Body Art of Africa: Scarification among African cultures.

Smells Like Spartacus

The Whelk — Thu, 02 Apr 2009 06:49:06 -0800

The Uprising Of The Ants: "Alexandra Achenbach and Susanne Foitzik from Ludwig Maximillians Universty in Munich found that some of the kidnapped workers don't bow to the whims of their new queen. Once they have matured, they start killing the pupae of their captors, destroying as many as two-thirds of the colony's brood. "

Serf Emancipation Day

shetterly — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 07:43:06 -0800

Tibet serf debate shadows China's "emancipation day". Like Juneteeth or Martin Luther King Day, Tibet's Serf Emancipation Day commemorates the freeing of a million serfs in 1959. Much like the descendants of slaveowners mocking Martin Luther King Day, the descendants of Tibet's aristocracy have announced Smurf Emancipation Day.

Politics of the plate

Ostara — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 13:34:14 -0800

If you have eaten a tomato this winter, chances are very good that it was picked by a person who lives in virtual slavery.

Evolution and Emancipation

homunculus — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:31:28 -0800

Darwin the abolitionist. "The theory of evolution is regarded as a triumph of disinterested scientific reason. Yet, on the 150th anniversary of On the Origin of Species, new research reveals that Darwin was driven to the idea of common descent by a great moral cause." [Via]

Black and White Moors

nickyskye — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 05:34:56 -0800

"The Beydanes, also known as White Moors, are the ruling caste in Mauritania. They are Arab Berber tribesmen whose ancestors established control in the seventeenth century. The Haratin, also known as Black Moors, are the descendants of black West Africans conquered and enslaved by the Beydanes centuries ago." from the New Yorker story, A Slave in New York, about a former slave who escaped in 1978, came to live in America and now works with the American Anti-Slavery Group. The Moor of West Africa. Chronology for Black Moors in Mauritania. About the Haratins. The White Moors: Chleuhs, a gallery of images of their part of the world l Vallée des Mgoun and their amazing adobe castles (kasbahs), cities in the desert (At present, it hosts one of the largest movie studios in the world) l music. A little more about the Chleuhs, a Berber ethnic group. The etymology of the word, Moors.The Haratin. Slavery still weighs heavily on Mauritanian society despite ban. Map. Previously.

Deadly Symbiosis

lunit — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 11:59:14 -0800

Deadly Symbiosis: Rethinking race and imprisonment in twenty-first-century America.

The Dream is Alive

caddis — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 18:40:30 -0800

Happy Birthday Dr. King. Today is Martin Luther King Day. He was born 80 years ago, on January 15th, 1929. He was assassinated on April 4, 1968, at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee. He was just thirty-nine years old. Tomorrow, more than four decades after Dr. King’s death, Barack Obama will take his oath of office to become the 44th president of the United States and the first African American president in US history. The Reverend Joseph Lowery, a civil rights icon who co-founded the Southern Christian Leadership Conference with Dr, King, will deliver the benediction at the inauguration ceremony. Obama accepted the Democratic party nomination on the 45th anniversary of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, arguably his most famous address. While Dr. King is primarily remembered as a civil rights leader, he also championed the cause of the poor and organized the Poor People"s Campaign to address issues of economic justice. Dr. King was also a fierce critic US foreign policy and the Vietnam War. Amy Goodman had a fantastic show today commemorating Dr. King. It is perhaps some stuff that we have heard before, but here now, some 40 odd years later when he predicted a black president, and it has come true, it takes on a bit more poignancy. (I am re-posting this for Huplescat who perhaps did not word the same stuff well.)

The Frilled Bonnet of Oppression

Julia F***ing Sugarbaker — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 09:33:29 -0800

A throwback to slavery? The Azalea Trail Maids began as a celebration of horticulture in Mobile, AL in 1929, and right now they're scrambling to raise funds so they can stroll in Obama's inagural procession. The President of Alabama 's NAACP, however, is determined to see that they stay home.

Diaspora Database

cashman — Fri, 19 Dec 2008 07:06:38 -0800

Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database documents the slave trade from Africa to the New World between the 16th and 19th centuries. It provides searchable information on almost 35,000 trans-Atlantic voyages hauling human cargo, as well as maps, images and data on some individual Africans transported." Search for people. Search for voyages. NYTimes: ''It's not a super tool for genealogists because you cannot make that connection from ancestor to voyager, but it does give a context,'' he said, explaining that because the database lists the slaves' African names -- which were later Westernized -- researching an ancestor by name is difficult. [via]

389 years ago

desjardins — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 19:18:50 -0800

389 years ago...

A retrospective

greenie2600 — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 15:51:28 -0800

We're all anticipating the future right now, but don't forget to remember the past, as well. Up From Slavery: An Autobiography by Booker T. Washington (1901). The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois (1903). The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man by James Weldon Johnson (1912). Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, by Frederick Douglass (1845). Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs (1861). Segregation signs. An interview with Rosa Parks (text, with video clips). Photo gallery of the Little Rock Nine.

This Has Nothing to Do With Volkswagen.

gman — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 14:08:43 -0800

Tuaregian band, Tinariwen, are members of a nomadic tribe in the Northwest of Africa which still practises slavery.

Take these chains...

adamvasco — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 07:54:20 -0800

A World Enslaved: There are now more slaves on the planet than at any time in human history.
Restaveks are Haitian child slaves.
To understand more here is a Modern Slavery 101 and a BBC special. Slavery is often hidden as Bonded Labour.
On the positive side in Niger an ex-slave wins a landmark case .
Here is a country by country report.

Do you have a little chocolate craving?

adamvasco — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 13:01:37 -0800

A brief history of chocolate slavery: That Chocolate is an oligopoly might surprise a few people. Chocolate's Bittersweet Economy (pdf) shows that seven years after the industry had agreed to abolish child labour, little progress has been made. Cross-border Migration of Working Children has still been left out of Harkin-Engel Cocoa Protocol Process. Bitter Chocolate Reflects on the politics of cocoa and chocolate. With Halloween approaching you might consider a Fair Trade approach to Trick or Treat. (If Chocolate slavery doesn't make you throw up a little maybe this will.)

Reenacting Slavery

marxchivist — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:10:03 -0800

Reenacting slavery at Chickamauga National Military Park. When a reenactor put his knapsack on the ground, the person portraying his slave picked up his knapsack and "moved it before I could say a word. I instantly knew that I had an opportunity to demonstrate the institution's cruelty here, and so I did not acknowledge his act, did not thank him for it, did not make eye contact, did not stop my talk. My own cruelty -- even to make a teaching point to the audience -- made me shudder inside." I read this blog post this morning and have been thinking about it on and off all day. They've been doing slavery interpretation at Colonial Williamsburg and Carter's Grove for awhile, but this isn't something you see on Civil War battlefields very often, if ever. Another thing that struck me about this was the portrayal of the day-to-day degradation of slavery and not even being acknowledged as person; rather than the more dramatic beatings, runaways, and slave auctions. And I'd love to read this from the point of view from the guy who portrayed the slave.

Thomas Jefferson Papers

marxchivist — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 08:33:53 -0800

The Massachusetts Historical Society has a nice collection of Thomas Jefferson's papers online. It includes two catalogs of Jefferson's books, a draft of the Declaration of Independence and his Garden Book. Architectural Drawings too! I kind of like the Garden Book for some reason. Some mundane things like March 21, 1774: "Peas of Mar. 10. are up" and interesting entries like May 22, 1773: "articles for contracts with overseers." Yes, he had slaves. Here is a list of some of them. I always think Jefferson is interesting, plus I think this site is straightforward and easy to navigate, and you can download nice, big images of the manuscript pages.

Taking Affirmative Action Against Crime and For Economic Reconstruction

orthogonality — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 01:12:57 -0800

The black backs by and on which the fortunes of the New South were built:

On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with “vagrancy.”... Cottenham’s offense was blackness.... [After a brief trial] Cottenham... was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North — U.S. Steel Corporation — the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence.... he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily “task” was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners.... Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.

— from the Introduction to Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black People in America from the Civil War to World War II. The book's website includes reviews of the book, an excerpt of the Introduction, and an extensive photo gallery that includes disturbing images of enslaved and tortured prisoners. For those unable to read the entire introductory excerpt, I've copied a few paragraphs, but you're better served reading the whole thing:

The camp had supplied tens of thousands of men over five decades to a succession of prison mines ultimately purchased by U.S. Steel in 1907. Hundreds of them had not survived. Nearly all were black men arrested and then “leased” by state and county governments to U.S. Steel or the companies it had acquired.3 Here and in scores of other similarly crude graveyards, the final chapter of American slavery had been buried. It was a form of bondage distinctly different from that of the antebellum South in that for most men, and the relatively few women drawn in, this slavery did not last a lifetime and did not automatically extend from one generation to the next. But it was nonetheless slavery—a system in which armies of free men, guilty of no crimes and entitled by law to freedom, were compelled to labor without compensation, were repeatedly bought and sold, and were forced to do the bidding of white masters through the regular application of extraordinary physical coercion. Instead of thousands of true thieves and thugs drawn into the system over decades, the records demonstrate the capture and imprisonment of thousands of random indigent citizens, almost always under the thinnest chimera of probable cause or judicial process. The total number of workers caught in this net had to have totaled more than a hundred thousand and perhaps more than twice that figure. Instead of evidence showing black crime waves, the original records of county jails indicated thousands of arrests for inconsequential charges or for violations of laws specifically written to intimidate blacks—changing employers without permission, vagrancy, riding freight cars without a ticket, engaging in sexual activity— or loud talk—with white women. Repeatedly, the timing and scale of surges in arrests appeared more attuned to rises and dips in the need for cheap labor than any demonstrable acts of crime. Hundreds of forced labor camps came to exist, scattered throughout the South—operated by state and county governments, large corporations, small-time entrepreneurs, and provincial farmers. These bulging slave centers became a primary weapon of suppression of black aspirations.... By 1900, the South’s judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace—often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina — where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived.... That the arc of Green Cottenham’s life led from a birth in the heady afterglow of emancipation to his degradation at Slope No. 12 in 1908 was testament to the pall progressing over American black life. But his voice, and that of millions of others, is almost entirely absent from the vast record of the era. Unlike the victims of the Jewish Holocaust, who were on the whole literate, comparatively wealthy, and positioned to record for history the horror that enveloped them, Cottenham and his peers had virtually no capacity to preserve their memories or document their destruction. The black population of the United States in 1900 was in the main destitute and illiterate. For the vast majority, no recordings, writings, images, or physical descriptions survive. There is no chronicle of girlfriends, hopes, or favorite songs of the dead in a Pratt Mines burial field. The entombed there are utterly mute, the fact of their existence as fragile as a scent in wind.

Elementary School Slavery Play

marxchivist — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:56:04 -0800

This is what happens when you ask a bunch of fifth-graders to write a play about slavery. The teacher claims the only advice he gave them was "Keep working, it isn't good enough." [via] My current favorite line: Going once....Going twice.... sold to the man with the whip in his hand. (Grabs another slave.)