2) After reading all of your Group Members’ essays, you will need to respond to AT LEAST 3 of your group members with 3-4 paragraphs (250-300 words) addressing their points, and offering them a question that you have about their conclusions. Please make sure all members of the group receive comments.
Group Member:
The Legacy of Slavery
After revisiting the brutal realities of slavery in America, it becomes easier to appreciate the Biblical verse, “The love of money is the root of all evil.”
Slavery as manifested in the U. S. arose from a boat leaving 20 Africans in Virginia in 1619, because of southern plantation owners’ greed and their love of money. Prior to that fateful arrival the plantation owners had unsuccessfully tried various means of staffing their fledgling agricultural operations without much success. They had land, they had a potentially successful crop, but they had no reliable source of labor. They had tried using white indentured servants, but those arrangements were often too expensive and temporary in nature; and their attempts to try and enslave native American Indians failed because they knew the land better than the settlers they would escape to their people; however, the owners soon discovered that Africans though initially engaged as indentured servants had no people to escape to and no where to go. Upon that realization, the colonists demonized the Africans and enslaved them as a means of free labor to cultivate their land, and as slaves were a source of unpaid labor, they were able to maximize their profits. Slavery produced unprecedented wealth for not only the slave owners but also for the country as a whole, making cotton picked by slaves the most valuable export pre-Civil War.
Given the Christian nature of the colonies at the time, the plantation owners used many forms of propaganda and indoctrination including misappropriated Biblical text to shape American culture and conscience as it relates to Africans, to justify slavery, and to establish a Paternalistic system of extreme inequality and injustice between the slaves and themselves to ensure that their wealth continued to grow and the money continued to flow. To assuage their “Christian” consciences, they also enacted laws to define slaves as chattel, not people, thereby exempting them from their civil, human, and God given rights as “men created in the image of God.” Additionally, they undergirded the entire system with horrific brutality and violence against the slaves as a means of ensuring that they stayed in their place.
After hundreds of years of awful and brutal enslavement, and hundreds more of racism and discrimination, the long-term implications of slavery upon African Americans are comprehensive. Everything from not knowing where they come from in Africa, to the affects of being demonized, mistreated, and marginalized for generations, to the challenging family dynamics that still plague them as result of families being ripped apart during slavery, and to never receiving justice or recompense for the atrocities perpetrated against them, or the hundreds of years of free labor that made this country successful and wealthy.
Today America still owes African Americans not only for the hundreds of years of free labor that built this country and that it never paid them for, but also for the pain and suffering that the brutality of slavery branded them with for generations. America never came through with the 40 acres and a mule, and every other means of reciprocity or trying to compensate for its undeniable, still unprecedented brutal injustice of slavery to this people like Affirmative Action it attacks as an “unfair advantage.” How does a people that endured 300 years of enslavement, forced free labor, and decades more of racism and discrimination ever get an “unfair advantage?” American slavery was unconscionable, and this country has never made amends for the evils of slavery – and they need to. This country became wealthy from slavery and because slavery was about money, the descendants of slaves are owed financial restitution.