The Black Experience in the Americas
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The Black Experience in the Americas
Question 1
The documentary, Africans in America: America’s Journey through Slavery, provides documentation on the history of African Americans during the time of slavery in the colonial times when they were taken into slavery and the era of the civil war when they were fighting for their freedom (Fayer, 1998). I think the documentary effectively brings out the terrors of slavery and the horrors of racism that African Americans still experience. The story gets told through four episodes that explain in detail the lie that African Americans lived through different historical times as they served as slaves. This documentary focuses on the blacks that were enslaved and how they struggled in coping with and overcoming slavery. The various subjects that are getting articulated in this documentary include the horror and cruelty of slavery, the concomitant callousness displayed by white Americans, the punishments that were savagely imposed on the new slaves to compel them to be obedient and prevent them from escaping, the emergence of racism in the South and the north and generally, the inhumanity and brutality in the manner in which the whites treated the Blacks, handling them as objects of profit.
The two primary examples in include the cruelty and horrors of slavery in which the slaves were tortured and kept in unhealthy situations while getting transported, they were tortured and forced to work on white firms with little or no pay, exchanged like commodities, from one slaveholder to another. Some even murdered at the hands of their slavers. The second example is the emergence of racism in which African Americans were treated inhumanely. Another subject that gets addressed is the resilience of the slaves despite the torture and terrors that they went through. They still persevered with the hope that one day they will be free.
Question 2
The narrative about whites in Chapter 2 of the book Freedom on my Mind talks about the laws that were made in which the free blacks were allowed to do certain things (White et al., 2012). However, to get that freedom, there were conditions that were placed on them, like they had to work for the slavers for a specific period within which the whites kept making promises of what they would be given. With these promises, they retained the slaves as they kept working for them for years, under their cruelty, but the promises were hardly kept. When the promises of freedom were not observed, the blacks then organized rebellions to fight for their freedom. This caused the whites to be paranoid about the slaves freed as they knew they might end up turning against them. What makes this chapter’s provisions similar to the documentary includes the fact they both address the cruelty of the white slavers and the pint where the slaves grew tired and started organizing rebellions against the whites. The difference between the chapter and the documentary is that the documentary focuses on the horrors and resilience of the African Americans. In contrast, the chapter talks about a time when the laws were established to grant the slaves freedom and giving the free slaves certain rights, a tie that gave them the opportunities to begin fighting for their civil rights.
Question 3
Bell’s article talks about how black people will never gain full equality in the United States despite the efforts that they make in the fight against racial inequalities (Bell, 1991). He argues that laws and policies get created, but there is no way that they will ever be fully enforced in a system that is dominated by whites. He argues that the victories that black people achieve in the fight for equality are short-lived as the patterns of race adapt in ways that continues maintaining the dominance of white people. This reading is connected to the provisions in Chapter 2 of Freedom on the mind because they both address white supremacy and how difficult it is to achieve equality in a country dominated by whites. Some examples that interconnect these two readings include the fact they both address the ineffectiveness of policies in achieving equality. They both talk about policies and laws, just being a formality and not practically possible. The two readings refer to the victories that get accomplished by the black people as short-lived with no way of solving the problem of racial inequality. This fact that it is hard to accept, according to the two readings, is verified in all histories from the beginning of the fight for equality in colonial times.
Question 4
The inception and cultivation of slavery were influenced by periods in the sense that when the economy of the South was doing well and dependent on agricultural crops, the elites found the need to establish ways of finding cheap labor to gain more profits. At the same time, the slave trade was already ongoing in some regions of West Africa like Angola, dominated by merchants from Portugal. As such, there was a ready market to buy slaves that would provide cheap labor on the farms. The economy and the need for agricultural labor at that time for use in the cultivation of crops contributed to the establishment of the institution of slavery. The laws influenced the cultivation of slavery in the sense that the tobacco colonies had already established slavery as an institution that was legal, encouraging even more countries to engage in the trade. The segmented social order created space that needs to be filled with the upward striving middle class feeling the need to reach the top as fast, and slavery was a way to fill that gap between middle class to high class.
Question Five
What I found to be most interesting about the documentary and the readings was how resilient the African Americans were despite all the horrors and torture they went through as slaves. They were overworked with less pay and less food; they were used as business commodities that got sold from one slaver to another, whipped, tortured, and watched each other get murdered, but they still stood firm, working and hoping for a day when they would be free. To me, this was thought-provoking in the sense that it is hard to imagine how they managed to keep their sanity and survive while going through the worst experiences anyone could imagine.
References
Bell, D. (1991). Racial realism. Conn. L. Rev., 24, 363.
Fayer, S. (1998). Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery – Part 1. https://youtu.be/3aljUGMM-Yk
White, D. G., Bay, M., & Martin, W. E. (2012). Freedom on My Mind, Volume 2: A History of African Americans, with Documents (Vol. 2). Bedford/St Martins.