wnyc.org / 93.9fm / am 820

Comments

• [1] John Celardo from Fanwood, NJ February 21, 2008 - 10:58AM

  The Schomburg Center is a great resource for African American genealogy, but there are many others. The National Archives on Varick and Houston Streets is a valuable resource for genealogy, and other historical research.

  
  
• [2] jane silver timm from hudson valley, NY February 21, 2008 - 10:59AM

  I must add here that for many Jewish families like my own, we can trace no one older than our grandparents who arrived here (USA) in the late 1800's or early 1900's. (my brothers and I are mid-aged).

  We are not even sure of all the family names.

  I believe this is common to many many Jewish families.

  
  
• [3] andy from manhattan February 21, 2008 - 11:01AM

  Although I'm empathetic to the call for African American research and history, it seems like there is a disconnect in this presentation of "pre-slavery" and "post-slavery" experiences. It seems to me that they are leaving out the words "North-American" in both those phrases, as slavery was common in a great many cultures within Africa before European "discovery."

  Is slavery any less slavery when the color of your "master's" skin is the same as yours?

  
  
• [4] hjs from 11211 February 21, 2008 - 11:04AM

  reports of problems with DNA testing

  http://www.jsonline.com/story/index.aspx?id=676770

  
  
• [5] Tony Butler from New York, NY February 21, 2008 - 11:08AM

  I would like to hear Dr. Dobson address the status of the so-called Amistad Commission legislation passed in NY state and New Jersey that attempts to get African and African American history incorporated into the mainstream curricula of public schools in those states.

  My sense is that, legislation on the books notwithstanding, the implementation of the legislation is stalled. What is his perspective on the initiative and is Schomburg involved in any way?

  
  
• [6] Bill from New York February 21, 2008 - 11:11AM

  There is no such thing as peoples. Said one famous bigot, "what thou lovest well is thy true heritage," which is very true, but too often what we love well or at all is dictated to us by racial and ethnic identity, all promoters of selective empathy. Whether African history is a legacy of savagery or the site of cradle-of-civilization narratives bears no reflection whatsoever on modern day Africans, let alone on African Americans. Nor does the long list of the triumphs and tragedies of European history represent anything for which I should be claiming credit or blame. The idea that it does is the truer and more pernicious myth. A thing is your heritage only by virtue of believing it to be. Culturalism (rightly called conservatism in hands of whites but trumpeted by liberals in the hands of blacks) argues for something frighteningly more essential. We still haven't waken from the nightmare of the first half of the last century.

  
  
• [7] ab February 21, 2008 - 11:34AM

  Andy,

  The nature of slavery has not been the same throughout each culture in history. For example in ancient Rome you will find that some aristocratic Romans were tutored by learned Greeks...who were also slaves...contrast that with the slavery of the USA where slaves were not allowed to learn how to read. Your basic point is right..no the color of your master's skin wouldn't matter...but the slavery of the Americas was particularly virulent and brutal.

  
  
• [8] Bennett Muraskin from Union, NJ February 21, 2008 - 01:50PM

  Slavery in the Caribbean was virulent and brutal. Slavery in Cuba and Brazil was virulent and brutal. There slaves were worked to death.

  Slavery in North America, by comparison, was not. Only 5% of the total # of African slaves brought to the New World arrived in North America (by which I mean the British colonies, later to become the US)---at most 600,000 people. Through natural increase that # grew to 4 million by the outbreak of the Civil War.

  Slavery was indeed a world wide institution. Before during and after the Atlantic slave trade, there was an Islamic slave trade run by Arabs and Moslem Africans which exported millions of slaves to North Africa,the Middle East and as far as India.

  In both slave trades the cooperation of African tribal chiefs was essential to capturing slaves and selling them to the slave traders.

  In the 1700s and early 1800s, North African states sent ships to Europe and carried back white European slaves to Morocco, Algeria.

  The term slave comes from Slav as Slavic peoples were enslaved by other Europeans during the Middle Ages.

  And so it goes.

  
  
• [9] perri February 21, 2008 - 11:57PM

  To me, the reason slavery in North America trumps all other forms seems rather simple. It is this form whose effects have endured. Of course there are no living slaves or slave masters, but the essence of that peculiar institution lingers. If not for slavery in North America would the concepts of race and racism even exist as we know it?

  And yes, we all know that Africans enslaved other Africans. (As if this is supposed to rationalize it's virulence; besides folks know this response is cognitive dissonance in full effect.) However, is it hard to fathom that the slavers would have obtained their bounty/human cargo with or with out their assistance?