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Slavery Apology Not Enough: Debate On
By admin | June 22, 2009
On Thursday June 18, 2009 the United States Senate passed a resolution calling on the United States to apologize officially for the enslavement and segregation of millions of African Americans and to acknowledge “the fundamental injustice, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery Jim Crow laws.” It is not enough. A urgent debate on the inherent intellectual capabilities of Black Africans and their descendants around the world is urgently needed.
Whatever is said or deliberated in that august body in the coming weeks or months will not change what tens of millions of Americans and other peoples around the world feel in their hearts or magically undo hundreds of years of racist propaganda.
As I write in Black Superman, my book on the Cultural and Biological History of the People Who Became the World’s Greatest Athletes. It is easy to believe, given the apparent ubiquity that the concept that Africans are intellectually inferior to other racial groups is a natural law, as old as history itself. In fact, it is a fairly recent invention, the result of an intensive systematic, decades-long campaign waged on both sides of the Atlantic to justify the sin of slavery. Seeking to reconcile the irreconcilable, Christian slave holders their supporters and apologists struggled to create a moral basis for excluding Black Africans.
Alarmed by the success of the abolitionists in exposing the contradiction between slavery and universal equality proclaimed both by the Declaration of Independence and the country’s religious teachings the defenders of slavery decided that their position could only be justified by a clear demonstration that black inferiority was an unalterable fact of nature.
Initially, much of the defense of slavery was based on scripture. But, as the writer and historian Dreu Gilpin Faust the first female to be elected the President of Harvard, explained, “For an age increasingly enamored of the vocabulary and methods of natural science, biblical guidance was not enough.” The result of this growing dependence on science was the development of a new ideology, polygeny, that sought to establish moral authority by creating a scientific rationale for slavery and postbellum racial oppression. Polygeny claimed that human races were separate biological species, the descendants of different Adams.
As I explained one of the major goals of the campaign to justify slavery was to convince the world, including the Africans themselves, that they were a people without history, a race of such natural and inherent inferiority that they had contributed virtually nothing to the civilization of the world. The stunning success of proslavery proproganda
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June 23rd, 2009 at 11:25 pm
Pretty cool post. I just found your site and wanted to say
that I have really liked browsing your blog posts. Anyway
I’ll be subscribing to your blog and I hope you post again soon!
June 27th, 2009 at 3:19 pm
I will be writing on this subject soon. Stay tuned.
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