Through the Lens of the Transatlantic Slave Trade

By Vinita Moch Ricks

Unacknowledged policies and mindsets from the Transatlantic Slave Trade continue to perpetuate injustices and instability, destroying people and the planet. It keeps the world in conquest, terror alert mode shaping human interactions and expectations. To address these issues and define our lens, Parts I and II answers two questions regarding the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1444-1888). The first question, “Where are we?," addresses the remnants of that Trade today. Millions of Africans were moved to the New World after 1) the Christian church, 2) European governments, and 3) the first multinational corporations organized for economic gain. New financial institutions were created to collect the taxes and manage the stolen land, labor and lumber (natural resources). Many of these institutions remain today.

The second question is more historical. The lenses are focused on "How did we get here?" The longitude continents (Africa and the America) met the latitude countries (in Europe and Asia). Each had different geography, resources and lifestyles. Part III illuminates the different ways they see each other and interact. Latitude countries and their lifestyles now dominate the World. It sharpens our focus by looking at lessons learned from the Trade. In Part IV I look at the games people play that perpetuate the dysfunctions. The unconscious wounds that emerged from the Trade need to be acknowledged and healed. This book seeks the truth and provides examples so that we can envision a world beyond this man-made tragedy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781483513645

Book preview

Appendix.

Introduction

Addressing a Worldwide Issue

Most problems have a simple answer that is obvious but wrong and a complicated answer that is counterintuitive but correct.

–Donald H. McBurney, How to Think Like a Psychologist: Critical Thinking in Psychology (2002)

For thirty years, I was a professor at one of the City Colleges of Chicago. I taught tens of thousands of college students. However, it was only after I retired that I started to unravel a problem that I have often seen in the United States.

How does a person change his or her mindset about minority groups in the States after years of learning incorrect history around the slave trade?

Here, I refer not only to the history told to people who were slaves, but also the history told to people who think that they benefited from the enslavement.

For example, by design, races and ethnic groups live very separate lives in separate neighborhoods. Intimate daily contact is quite rare. Thus, the workplace, the college dorm or classroom becomes the place where people from different ethnic and racial groups meet. Here, they have their first cross-cultural human interactions. Very often, long-held stereotypes are not dropped, but diverse people may learn to work together.

In the typical workplace, the bosses are almost always White. Whiteness is privileged. The classroom is theoretically more egalitarian. Although, I am not White, some students celebrated my presence in a college classroom (both Blacks and Whites). Some others resented my presence (again both Blacks and Whites). By contrast, Asians and Hispanics most often benignly accepted my presence. What I did not know then—but understand now—was that these commonplace observations made me an eyewitness to the remnants of the Slave Trade. In writing this book, I want you, too, to see and then acknowledge these events and their negative impact on our collective psyche.

Here is another example: Because of the lack of neighborhood interactions in the previous example, on a daily basis, I saw smart Black students defer to White students who were not nearly as smart. The Black students often thought that White students were smarter just because they were White. I saw White students get angry at low grades, even though they had not done appropriate level work. Black and Hispanic students in this class had done a better job. White students simply said, I don't get low grades.

White students are rewarded for being White. Black and Hispanic students are penalized for not being White. Meanwhile, underprepared Chinese students breeze through the classroom, using neighborhood services to boost their grades. I realize that these are gross generalizations that many will not like. Some will say that I don't have objective data. I have no studies or institutional data to confirm my informally gathered insights.

Fair enough. I must digress. Shortly after I started teaching, I became aware of something unanticipated: one cannot give a White or Chinese student a C grade or less and NOT hear from that student. S/he came to talk. The desire to talk was not surprising, but the numbers were. EVERY Chinese and MOST White students with a low grade came. (The White exception will be discussed below.) Meanwhile, only a few Black or Hispanic students came. Quickly, I had to learn to hold the same high standards for all my students in my new job. Why quickly? I wanted to be one of the good teachers that I admired: the ones with high standards who supported students for excellence.

White and the Chinese students approached me quite differently. White students just wanted a better grade. Maybe they would do additional work, maybe not. In the White student's minds, I was the one with the problem. I made a mistake. White students wanted me to change the grade—end of story.

Chinese students were not so bold. In Chinese culture, humility is a big deal. They offered to do additional work. They had suggestions. But the incredible part, they volunteered to bring the improved work the next day. Consider: a student had a take-home exam for, say, a week. S/he turned in something that got a D grade. Incredibly, the student promised to improve it in one night. I heard it over and over. Accidentally, I learned about educational services in Chinese communities that supported these students. In the Chinese culture at least, I had a support system. In other cultures I did not. I figured out how to correctly use the Chinese educational services to get this student to learn; THEN I awarded the higher grade.

With White students, I proceeded differently. I showed them a concrete example of an A paper. That paper answered the questions with more details and sophistication. Bottom line: I had not made the mistake, s/he had. There were always better papers. Grades could change, but after the student improved it. Skin color did not influence grades in my class.

After a few years, I started to notice a flaw. The flaw was not what happened, but what did not. Most of my students were students of color. Black and Hispanic low-grade students did not come. Slowly, I delicately inquired into the missing conversations. I heard resignation and passivity. The low-grade Black and Hispanic students did not think that coming to see the teacher made a difference. S/he had no confidence in his or her ability to talk and get a better grade. S/he had not learned to negotiate as White and Chinese students had.

As underdogs in the culture (primarily because of their slave trade past), Black and Hispanic low-income students had learned to accept what was given. That is an unidentified penalty. In a culture where Blacks and Hispanics are expected to fail and Whites and Chinese are expected to succeed, most teachers do not question this scenario. I did. These passive students needed to learn to negotiate with authority figures. It is a necessary skill in many areas of life. Going forward, on the first day of each new semester, I announced to the class: if you don't like your grade on any assignment except the final, then come see me and redo the work. You will get the better grade.

This policy change encouraged students to come and talk with me (or negotiate) about their grade. This change also revealed an overlooked group within my class: the low-income White student. They, too, were passive and resigned. Previously, the poor White students had also accepted the low grade or dropped the class. Now they came and learned to negotiate with an authority figure. No research data prepared me for this level of scrutiny of my failing student population.

Often, research is funded to obtain data on issues for which people already know the answer while ignoring other important issues. Or, corporations and other funders pay to arrive at conclusions that support the established point of view. This makes a mockery of objectivity. As the above discussion illustrates, if problems are not identified appropriately, the professional is not making objective assessments. Instead, the assessments are personal and subjective.

I was raised middle-class in a community in the Jim Crow South. I had never been passive or resigned, even though I am Black. My mostly low-income minority students had had different experiences than me. I did not know that passive and resigned students existed in such large numbers. This is why I initially ignored them. Anything that I told myself, I was making up. I had no data. Misinformation is not the best way to move people forward, which I considered to be the role of a teacher. The things we make up and give to other people are probably stereotypes, negative and mostly just incorrect.

Because I was curious, I figured out my mistake. The objective data does not exist. This is only the tip of that iceberg. There are SO very many issues on which empirical research data are not collected. People are reacting based on stereotypes. People act as if their way of being is standard. From my teaching career, this is incorrect. These other issues, unfortunately, are difficult to quantify, define or explore.

Unconscious, systemic bias in the States is one of those issues too difficult to study. It is not seen; it is not discussed. No one funds it; no one seeks answers to this issue. In my classrooms, I was made aware of issues no one was addressing. I saw problems improperly defined because they were not highlighted or studied. Post-retirement, upon learning about the slave trade, I decided to engage that subject. Until someone can untangle some of the murky issues within it, we can't see it. Nor can we begin to address it in constructive ways. We need to see beyond the stuck places, beyond stereotypes and misinformation. Habitual and reactionary thinking leads us to disrespect the positive contributions of too many people.

My goal is to help us figure out what we actually know and where that information takes us. The empirical, scientific data may never catch up to inform the real-life experiences of people seeking to navigate a multicultural world. In fact, as I will discuss in Chapter 11, empirical, scientific data is part of the problem. As the world gets smaller, people need at least some awareness of legitimate, multi-faceted cultural differences. Are we ready to move beyond the stereotypes and ingrained, destructive thinking patterns that dominate our lives?

In this book, published 500 years after the first Africans arrived in Haiti and 150 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, I will address two questions rarely engaged: Where are we? and How did we get here? Generally, to these questions, it is stated that being in the States is a good thing—more importantly, Blacks should be grateful to be here. The superiority of white skin is a given; the inferiority of black skin is ingrained, worldwide. Even influential Black scholars described our presence in the States as a problem.¹ To move the conversation beyond Black people as victims, or as a problem, I seek to change the conversation, or at least upgrade and enrich it. A paradigm shift is needed.

British historian Hugh Thomas wrote the book that shifted the paradigm for me. After reading his book, I saw the slave trade in a different light. I saw it from a different point of view. Thomas took thirty years to research and write his book, The Slave Trade. I studied slavery in college and beyond, but I had never studied or heard much about the Slave Trade. A new world opened to me. There have been few days since I read that book that I have not seen behavior, attitudes, procedures, laws, or common daily events that I KNOW began in the Slave Trade years.

To begin, the Transatlantic Slave Trade was NOT the typical enslavement. Typically, most people were enslaved after their group lost some war of conquest. Occasionally they had massive unpaid debts. Parents put their children into slavery because they could not feed them. Slaves could then move in and out, up (because of skill sets or political acumen) or down (as punishment). Movement of slaves from this large group was possible. The world had seen a lot of slavery before 1444. In fact, in Europe, it was dying out as a practice.

Then Portugal, seeking to trade its way to China by circumnavigating Africa, heard that African merchants had an excess supply of humans to trade. Discovering the New World further re-ignited the demand.

Now slavery—and the slave markets required to provide it—is tied to:

1. Finance and Commerce, and

2. The ill-conceived, insincere, humanitarian goal of improving the wellbeing of an unknown Other (See indented note below.)

Since that coupling, the world has never lost its need or appetite for slaves. The system derived from this coupling delivers economic resources and control, which the members of the Planter Class wanted.

[Note: The Other (especially when the O is capitalized) is a term in both philosophy and social science used to show that a person is distinct from or opposite from the standard. Others are often considered a lower kind than the dominant group, which is most often White. In today's world, females, Blacks, gays, and Muslims are Othered. Ruled over, yes, but also scorned, despised or deemed less than White males.]

The slave trade continues. In fact, trafficking in people is greater now than during the official Transatlantic Slave Trade period (1444-1888). Today many more people are caught in its web. It is economic at its core. Thus, many more people are potentially vulnerable to being enslaved.

The first shift in my thinking was to get beyond the Trade as something that involved Africans exclusively. Yes, Africans were the cargo, but many others participated from all over Europe. Some made lots of money through investments. They never saw a slave. They never came to the New World. Their participation was totally indirect (e.g. investors).

Beyond the indirect participants, many other Europeans were directly involved in the following ways:

They ran corporations that got contracts to provide large and small projects and/or trinkets that made the slave trade enterprise a reality (e.g. CEO's and Business Owners).

Some worked only from Europe (e.g. Bankers, Insurance Agents and Underwriters).

Others did their work between Europe, Africa and/or the New World (e.g. Salesmen, Accountants, Marketing Managers).

Some got jobs that moved them from Europe to Africa or the New World (e.g. Government Bureaucrats, Accountants, Underwriters).

Some brought their whole family to the New World, moving from Europe. International travel via ships was the new reality (e.g. European ex-pats, Plantation Owners, new members of the Planter Class).

Finally, some did the work of transporting, living, killing, and dying with the cargo (e.g. ship captains and crew).

From the European side, I have identified six layers of workers who directly had jobs and made money from the Slave Trade. This is the short list; there were many, many others. In Africa,

7. African workers kidnapped and brought slaves from the interior of the continent to the ships, and

8. African kings got trinkets from the European ship captains. They also received payment for the slaves from tribal warfare, which increased after they got guns as trinkets.

All of the above parties had a vested interest in the continuation of the Slave Trade. This complex layering of people allowed for multiple layers of knowledge, interest, commitment and participation. Who did what, when and how became more elusive. Corruption and greed, like slavery, had also always existed. Now, it was rampant on both the African and the European sides.

The Slave Trade became a commerce theatre that defined, expanded and elaborated the way the world would transact business going forward. There were multiple layers of complications:

It involved long-term financial transactions involving credit and debt, along with interest and dividend payments. Initially, the shortest trip—from loading in Europe to return —took nine months. Copper-bottom boats increased the speed.²

The transactions were international. Initially, five continents were engaged.

Multiple countries in Europe were involved. Multiple governments rarely (if ever) had to coordinate and negotiate commerce among and between each other. There was no designated home base, as the Roman Empire had.

The international, long-term cargo was human, with different needs than say, transporting gold or goats.

Once the slaves reached the New World, individual slaveholders had to acquire and utilize their skills and labor. Rather than work on large government projects, they were auctioned off to the highest bidder, then scattered through four, but primarily three continents. Previous community and family networks were not taken into consideration.

I have found no other slavery system that was handled in this individualized (auctioned as individuals, not worked in groups), multi-layered, international, interconnected manner. The financial transactions were also exponentially evolving. In the beginning it was difficult and inefficient. Generally, governments were satisfied so they continued to use the slave trade Asiento contract. Most often, one country gave the Asiento contract (discussed in more detail in Chapter 6) to one company at a time. However, the company and the country could change before the contract expired. With the contract, the country officially collected the taxes or sold other commodities as part of the package, such as silver and gold.

After much fine-tuning, Great Britain was ultimately the biggest recipient of the Asiento contract system. The United States of America, its colony, was founded during the Slave Trade. The nuts and bolts of commerce that emerged from this financial enterprise had a lasting impact on U.S. culture and on day-to-day operations. Numerous procedures and policies happen uniquely in the States. I will begin with credit. (See #1 in the commerce theatre above.) Companies needed long-term credit to finance these long-term voyages. Banks gave it to them. Did you know that the rich members of the Planter Class bought most slaves on credit? I did not.

Today, credit in the States is more available than anywhere else in the world. Most countries do not allow citizens to buy homes without money down, as happened in the States before the housing bubble burst. Also, pre-2006, credit cards were just handed out to people. I would look up and another credit card was in my mailbox that I had not applied for or sought. I could add to my debt or impact my net worth without thinking. Few people around the world are allowed to have so many credit cards. Almost always, this leads to excessive debt.

After I traveled to different countries, I again saw people figuring out how to stretch their dollars. Major purchases were budgeted. In the States, the idea is to charge it and keep moving. This sort of buying with no restraint—because you could always get more credit—hurts more people than it helps.

Psychologists, personal coaches and gurus say that people must take personal responsibility for their fiscal and personal situations. But, in the rest of the world, citizens are not set up to fail. I have two questions:

1. Why do citizens in the States live in a country that preys on the less disciplined, less fiscally sophisticated members?

2. Whose responsibility is that?

To both questions, I say: slave trade. [1% Power Stain] (Please review the Clarifying Note page 7.)

By the time you finish this book, you may also agree.

Another unique enterprise in the States that is moving worldwide: suing people when you disagree. During the Slave Trade, with people speaking multiple languages and moving among five continents, conflict was inevitable. When members of the European Planter Class fell out with each other (most often about money), they took each other to court. That became the way to solve disputes. The States uses its court system and its legal documents to hide the fine print that traps people. We go after people to discredit them and/or their businesses via the courts. Yes, others around the world may use dishonest tactics, but we have more lawyers per capita than any other culture. We need them and can't live without them.

Again, I say: slave trade. [Constitution Stain]

There is an amazing interconnection of events once you pull back the curtain. In this book, I seek to help you connect the dots. Follow the complete trajectory so that you, too, can see more completely the impact of the Slave Trade in your daily life. One of its biggest unspoken impacts is that it minimized the value of people. I am not just talking about Black people, or those in the African Diaspora, but all of humankind.

To write this book I looked back at thousands of years of human interactions. I traveled to countries on five