Should African Americans today be grateful for slave traders?

Not a well educated African-American apparently.

 

This is pouhe and "affect vs effect" again.

Only that you're much worse.

 

Side note: The Majority of blacks in the US hate the term 'African American'.

 

Is this from your vast experience visiting black churches?

 

It's really an unusually good history of a region of the world I didn't know that much about, not as much as I thought I did, at any rate. And I should have stressed more the slave trade from East Africa to the Americas. As Caltex2 pointed out, and I hinted at, Portugal was a far worse "slave nation" compared to the United States, with its big possession of Mozambique as a base, and after Britain cracked down on the slave trade along the Atlantic Coast of Africa, they really ramped up their slave trade from East Africa to the Americas, particularly Brazil.

Britain had about half a dozen ships plying the Indian Ocean attempting to halt the trade, and it was a near impossible task. Imagine being crammed into a ship for a voyage from East Africa to Brazil, Cuba, and the French "sugar islands" of the Caribbean, with their huge sugar plantations. It boggles the mind to think of the horrific conditions endured by those Africans, the ones that survived the assault on their villages deep in the interior of the continent, the long, long trek to the coast in chains, often with crude wooden collars around their necks, hands bound, long lines of them tied together, simply killed on the spot if they became ill, and then tossed aside. That people are capable of such cruelty to other human beings is sickening. It doesn't matter that slavery had been a "fact of life" for thousands of years. There is no excuse for such behavior, ever.

 

I don't care about it either way though now days due to immigration it can lead to confusion. There are whites born in Africas now (like Oscar Pistorius) thanks to imperialism and since they may not be familiar with our terminologies, it can lead to confusion. I heard this white South African immigrant sued when she lost out on a scholarship because African American was assumed to mean a black person. Technically she is African American and ironically literally more so than me or almost any other person that fits in that criteria.

 

It's shortsighted because you're not looking at the big picture. Let's assume that blacks wanted to go back to Africa, well is there any nation that is just going to open up their borders and allow them to come in as automatic citizens or are you going to have to apply and go through the process of citizenship like most places? The cost of relocation is expensive just moving from one dwelling to the next in the same country let alone moving to one country from another. Despite what many people think, the African continent isn't just full of black people, it is very diverse and even in areas where blacks dominate there is going to be some level of culture shock. Many Africans actually resent black Americans. I remember hearing one say "They are Americans not Africans and should not seek to come to Africa."

I could go on and on but it is not simply get up and go if you want to go.

 

^

And as I pointed out in the case of the original American settlers of Liberia, it's virtually impossible to get accustomed to surroundings and a lifestyle you are completely unfamiliar with.

And yeah, I think most blacks, myself included, would be in for a rough adjustment if they went back to Africa except for perhaps the urban areas of South Africa and possibly Nigeria.

 

There probably is some co-mingling of issues there. If the objective was to solve economic problems, then race shouldn't have anything to do with it.

 

There is a link there and I have a problem when people try to say there is no link because there have been 150 years between present day and slavery or 50 years between Jim Crow and present day. I don't think anybody should use it as a crutch but I don't think you can dismiss the link either.

As far as affirmative action, it is not just black people pushing that as an agenda at all.

 

Really.....I've lived around African-Americans pretty much all my life and I've never heard a single one say this. (Outside of the youtube " I'm not African, I'm American" kind)

 

I get what you're trying to say, but how is she more "African" than you. If somebody compared a sample of your DNA to hers, you would have far more "African" DNA and she would have far more " European" DNA. While she may been an African in the cultural sense, when you get right down to it...she is a European born on the African continent.

 

You do know that the African continent has many major cities.....its not all "National Geographic" lol

 

Remember folks just because a cat has kittens in an oven, that doesn't make them kitty biscuits

 

This is all speculative but an interesting intellectual discussion. As I was debating with Stupidmoniker I don't think you can take slavery out as a big factor in creating the world we live in. While a good argument could be made that slavery was unnecessary for North America it was essential for the economic development of South America and the Carribean. Things like growing sugarcane and mining precious metals are very labor intensive and given the relatively small population of Europeans along with the genocide of Native Americans it is doubtful that those economies could've developed without African slave labor. If Europeans had not been able to exploit that wealth the whole history of world changes. Spain and Portugal never get rich. The English and Dutch never get rich off of first plundering the Spanish and Portugese and then later colonizing and exploiting the Americas themselves. If the Europeans don't get rich from the Americas they might not be able to undertake colonization of Asia.

Regarding the situation in North America. Cotton and sugarcane are labor intensive and while a system of farming those could've happened not using African slaves it likely would've been much more difficult. Also looking at the examples of Australia and New Zealand that didn't have slave labor, although they did have indentured servitude, both of those places are very sparsely populated compared to the Americas
and never became economic powerhouses until relatively recently.

Sure we can give credit to English like William Wilberforce who pressed the British into giving up slavery and the Royal Navy for suppressing the slave trade but keep in mind that the British Empire didn't formally end slavery until 1843 as they allowed it in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) up till then.

Pardon me also for not praising the navy that while they fought slavery in the first half of the 19th C. only a few years later fought to protect drug trafficking.

 

Just to add "African-American" is fitting to this debate since we are talking specifically about Americans who descended from Africans who were brought here as slaves.

 

I have never known an African American make a big deal out of the term, but I have been told a few times that the term "black" is preferred.

 

So Obama wouldn't qualify under your definition. In fact, his ancestors probably OWNED slaves, rather than served as slaves.

 

It is still vastly different than the USA. I have been in Africa a number of times. While it has major cities, it is a vastly different culture than the United States.

It would be like taking 10th generation Polish Americans and dropping them in Poland.... there are just differences.

 

Why does it matter?