What were the effects of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade?

Q: “[What were the] effects of [the] slaves trade [?]”

– Elphas Okoth via our Facebook group

A: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, also referred to as The Maafa (a Swahili word meaning disaster), was one of the most catastrophic chapters in the annals of world history. The Maafa had a massive impact on the trajectory of the world economy. It laid the foundations of the ways that humans identify themselves today in relationship to one another. It further molded much of the psychology underlying the politics of the modern world and the attitudes that define popular culture.

The Social Effects of The Maafa

The Restructuring of Relationships

Africa has had many ups and many downs since the time that a large share of its people were scattered in every direction. But the effects of this displacement are still felt there today.

In his research on the history of slavery in Africa, Canadian historian Paul Lovejoy found that trends in the trading of slaves to regions outside the continent transformed existing practices of slavery inside the continent. Due to Arab influences and the intensity of the European market, African slavery, he says, became ‘a different indigenous setting.’

In short, the history of slavery was dynamic, and the changes that took place resulted in the emergence of slave societies where previously there had only been a few slaves in society. That is, slavery became a central institution and not a peripheral feature.

Paul Lovejoy in his book Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (2000)

By the 19th century, slavery was being practiced in many parts of Africa.

Even more so than enslavement under Christianity, enslavement under Islam was seen as an effective means of “civilizing” African people. As the wars of Muslim conquest spread across North Africa, many were enslaved and their only hope for freedom was through a gradual process of proving their loyalty to Allah and to Islamic precepts.

In the wake of these conversions, Islam remained a strong element within many societies in the savannahs of North Africa and on the eastern coasts up to the time of European contact.

The demographic shock caused by the trading of slaves across the Atlantic led to a disproportioning of the population along gender-specific lines. In essence, more males were removed from the continent than females (almost twice as many). This was the exact opposite of the high demand for captive women and children in Muslim societies. Lovejoy contends that the Arab system of slavery, which often made concubines of women and eunuchs of men, had an undeniable impact on traditional views of marriage even south of the Sahara (ex: an increase in relationships that mirrored harem arrangements) and led to the organization of an elite class in some places. But the Arab enslavement of African people did not have as much of an impact on African societies as slavery under the European system, which was responsible for around 73% of slave exports from the 16th century to the 19th century.

A 2015 study published by the World Economic Forum (WEF) revealed that the shock of this system was most severe in West Africa. The researchers further identified that the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade influenced family structures and sexual habits in many African countries.

Lovejoy already identified that as African women became more accessible to African men as slaves, their value decreased. The prominence of these slaves was also a disincentive for marriages with free women. After all, slave women in most places could be assimilated into the family lineage and their children could be freed. There is also the fact that marriage to a free woman was more likely to require a dowry payment to her family. Therefore, the general status of women and their reproductive rights were lower in places where slave traffic was higher.

This study was focused on the period of trading starting in 1500 and ending in the year 1860. In the regions of the continent where men were more depleted through wars or forced migrations, and population growth was slower, men are currently more likely to enter into polygynous relationships (that is, to have more than one wife). In these same areas, men (but not women) display more intense sexual activity and women (but not men) are more likely to engage in extramarital partnerships. One result of those partnerships, they found, is an increased spread of HIV infections – particularly among women, who represent around 3 out of every 4 cases in Sub-Saharan Africa.

In some cultures, there are practices reminiscent of slavery that have survived into the present such as trokosi (lifelong enslavement to the gods) and wahaya (the enslavement of the fifth wife) in Western Africa. Bride kidnapping originally served a purpose of mutual benefit in parts of Southern Africa where it is referred to as ukuthwala but this too is now increasingly understood to facilitate human trafficking, especially in other countries like Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda and Mali. These customs are the outgrowth of a society in which our ordinary sensitivities to more extraordinary suffering were far removed.

The social impact of the slave trades is also evident in other parts of the world.

The Legitimization of Race and Color Prejudices

U. S. journalist Isabel Wilkerson explains in her book Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents (2020) that the modern socialization of Americans based on race is a product of American slavery.

The social environment that the slave trade produced in the Atlantic world was corruptive of both Black and White. White people taught other White people to celebrate the abuse of people who were Black. Black people were taught by White people to accept this abuse and to teach other Blacks to do likewise. Slavery, says Wilkerson, thus established a ‘ranking of human value that sets the presumed supremacy of one group against the presumed inferiority of other groups.’

The result was a society in which everything White was an object of envy and everything Black was an object of ridicule.

Black lives, Black histories, and Black cultures were degraded in favor of White lives, White histories, and White cultures.

To this very day, a cult of White Supremacy permeates all aspects of life on the six continents of the world (Africa, Antarctica, Australia, North and South America, and Eurasia).

History is a record of a people’s progress. In her analyses of the Black record, Sheffield Hallam University professor Barbara Bush has called attention to the fact that the manipulation of that history began when the first Africans were landed and sold as slaves in the Americas. They were taught to forget how to communicate with each other. They were given silly mock-African names like Yabba or Phibba; insignificant Biblical names like Stephen or Sarah; and mythical, satirical names inspired by ancient Greek and Roman literature like Hercules or Caesar to replace titles reflective of a rich and very personal heritage. Drawing inspiration from Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, Bush says, that these renaming processes were ‘important symbolic rituals of enslavement.’ In any sampling of African people from the mainland Americas or the Caribbean, we would find that they persist among the descendants of the enslaved.

The institutions most primed to impact a person’s self-esteem – the schools, the churches, and the studios – continue to serve as conduits of cultural conditioning. These have the power to mold the public mind into any particular perspective by means of education, religion, entertainment, and commentary.

A stunning 42% of the crimes reported on televised channels in the United States involve Black suspects and White victims even though such cases actually represent 10% of documented crimes. Homicides and missing persons cases in majority-Black communities are grossly underrepresented in news coverage in favor of those in majority-White communities. Blacks suspects go unnamed and are shown in physical restraints more often than White suspects in news stories. These stories of Black offenders are also shown more often than stories of Black victims and in stories about Black victims, there is usually some form of justification provided for their suffering. Even after committing acts of mass murder, White suspects are still humanized and singled out as lone actors as opposed to being classified as terrorists or as thugs. An analysis of these and other findings by the Sentencing Project, a group that advocates for criminal justice and social reforms, concludes that they indicate deliberate scripting by the news media. These practices are especially problematic for Black viewers. A lack of confidence from examples of positive outcomes, paired with an already pervasive lack of trust in investigators, can only lead to a lack of public interest and a lack of cooperation in the reporting process. All this has helped to create a situation in which cases involving Black victims are more likely to go unsolved, leaving Black communities more vulnerable to predators new and old.

Over the years, much critique has been leveled against the biggest brands in show business for a dearth of Black representation in positive lead roles for mainstream films and TV shows. A 2014 study by the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism found that out of 30,000 speaking characters in the 700 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2014, 21,930 or nearly three out of every four characters were White. White actors and actresses in this period secured 83% of lead and co-lead roles (9 Blacks were leads) and only three films contained female leads or co-leads who were not White. They also found that almost half of the top 100 films in the year 2016 did not feature a single Black woman or girl speaking on screen; in 2014, just 17 out of the 100 top films featured a lead or co-lead character who was not White; and in 2007, a mere 1% of these roles went to women of color who make up 20% of the general population. Another USC study of over 300 cable, broadcast, and streaming programs from 2014 to 2015 found that over 70% of speaking characters on these shows were White.

This should come as no surprise considering that despite recent gains, White men (who make up just under 30% of the U. S. population) continue to hold most of the high level positions in Hollywood (chief executives, company board members, management teams, etc) while Black men and Black women are concentrated at the lower levels. According to a 2020 report by the Writers Guild of America, about 16% of those responsible for writing content for programs that appear on network, cable, and streaming platforms are Black, but of those who write movies for the big screen, that number is only 7%. 86.5% of top film directors have been White; 95.2% male; 82.5% White and male. This is a ratio of 5 White directors for every non-White director and 171 White male directors to every Black female director. USC researchers identified that in a 13-year period from 2007 to 2019, 6.1% of all film directing jobs went to Black people (88 out of 1,447) and just eight of those Black directing jobs (less than 1%) involved Black women. Furthermore, only one of those women at a time was associated with any of the top films during the years 2008, 2014, and 2017. Four of them had top films in 2019. And none made the list for the other nine years studied. Meanwhile, White women, who make up 71% of casting directors, have the power to pick the actors for all of these films.

A 2020 survey by the Think Tank for Inclusion & Equity reveals that at least 35% of T. V. writing rooms have only White upper-level writers. They also found that the ratio of White creators to non-White creators is 8 to 1 for broadcast and digital shows and 6 to 1 for cable television. White people direct 90.4% of broadcast programs, 88.6% of streaming programs, and 83.2% of cable programs. It is these very conditions, they determined, that hinder authentic storytelling.

Productions with Black performers in lead roles are underfunded compared to those that feature protagonists of other racial/ethnic groups. Films starring women of color receive the smallest production budgets, the least distribution, the least marketing support, and the least franchise support (only one such sequel was released between 2007 and 2018). When Black stories do find an audience, Black actors, writers, and directors are less likely to be acknowledged and awarded for their work. And, after the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced new equity, diversity and inclusion (DEI) standards for the Oscars eligibility of blockbuster films, the academy itself is still, as one activist put it, overwhelming White (81%) and overwhelmingly male (67%).

Trends in the music industry are not so different. A 2020 USC study on the development behind the 800 most popular songs of the years 2012 to 2019 showed that Black artists are in high demand and consistently top the charts but White artists are more likely to receive Grammy nominations. Black people are also less likely to be represented as writers and producers. The prospects are even steeper when it comes to Black leadership. Researchers noted that ‘the very top is tilted towards White males.’ 86.1% of music company executives overall are White but 100% of the executive positions at the top nine companies are filled by White people and just one of these executives is a woman. The ten top non-White executives run their own independent firms and only three of them are Black. In some sectors, Blacks are doing better than in others. For example: there are no Black executives represented in music groups or in live music and concert promotion companies. But radio and streaming companies show a slight improvement with 2.1% Black representation. And record labels are significantly better at 16.7% representation. Just 3% of the executives at 119 major music companies are Black women, nine times less than the numbers for White women. Whites are also more likely than Blacks to serve as managers, agents, and publicists seeking to locate and to coach artists with talent. Their decisions have a considerable influence on what international audiences get to hear.

A 2019 analysis of popular music releases from 2006 to 2016 found that the songs which are most likely to communicate messages of misogyny (the objectification and degradation of women) are those in the hip hop/rap category, which is dominated by Black artists. This is also the category most likely to celebrate women in a more positive light as beautiful, affectionate, and supportive. However, it is the controversial aspects of the genre that are highlighted more often in research studies, which usually allude to a cause-and-effect relationship between consumption and crime, but have yet to provide definitive proof. The report also found that pop lyrics, which are performed mostly by White artists (65% of all pop artists), contain the same aggressive themes and the same level of violent content, but because the artists are more subtle in their presentation and because Black music receives more widespread scrutiny, this genre is not stigmatized or studied as much.

The world of sports follows a similar pattern of a predominantly Black workforce and a disproportionately White management. A 2013 report by the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport found that most of the owners, coaches, managers, and office staff in the three major sports leagues were White. Even though 76.3% of the basketball players in the NBA and 66% of the football players in the NFL were Black, there was only one Black majority team owner in the NBA (Michael Jordan) and none in the NFL or the MLB. Not much has changed since then. The most significant difference has been an increase in the Black-White disparity in NBA coaching. The statistics on racial representation are equally concerning for non-HBCU college sports, especially when it comes to coaching and directing positions.

There has been a recent increase in the number of Black editors, columnists, and reporters but White men are still the biggest players in sports media. Professor Cynthia M. Frisby of the Missouri School of Journalism has conducted numerous studies on how media messages contribute toward the creation and maintenance of stereotypes and biases against Black Americans and other population minorities. Her studies in sports media are the subject of her book Current Controversies in Sports, Media, and Society (2020). In the course of her research, Frisby found that a significantly greater volume of press reports is devoted to negative news and commentary about Black athletes compared to White athletes.

Through these avenues, anti-Black prejudices have contaminated both the physical and psychological health of African people in the diaspora.

Systemic racism, or the exercise of those prejudices though the power of institutions, has been linked in the healthcare industry to a higher prevalence of such conditions as malnutrition, obesity, asthma, hypertension (high blood pressure), diabetes, heart disease, kidney disease, HIV/AIDS, and tuberculosis in this group. Social neglect has lead to other long-term outcomes such as higher rates of death from prostate cancer for Black men and breast cancer for Black women. At the core of these disparities is a deep-seated hypothesis that Black suffering is invited and maintained through an inherent disposition towards self-destructive tendencies. Many who practice medicine believe that Black people are more tolerant to pain. It follows from this logic that Black bodies require more corrective stressors during treatment before they can heal. Consequently, Black patients, who are more likely than White patients to suffer severe pain and less likely to misuse opioids, are less likely to be prescribed medications for pain relief – even when they appropriately request them. The same is true for pediatric patients (children). From the whip to the hip, it seems the agonies expressed are “well deserved.”

The most concerning of Black health statistics are associated with childbirth and life expectancy. Black expectant mothers, who receive less prenatal care, die in childbirth at much higher rates than White women do in Brazil (80% higher), in the U. S. (450% higher) and in the U. K. (500% higher). With higher levels of stress, lower levels of access to nutritional foods, lower levels of access to recreational spaces, and lower levels of access to quality healthcare, Black people (even those with higher levels of wealth and education) live shorter lives on average than White people do. This is due, in large part, to the segregated environment – a relic of racial attitudes that were crafted in response to abolition.

Yet, we have enslaved African people to thank for many advances in modern medicine. As U. S. historians Harriet A. Washington and Jim Downs have detailed, the slave ships of the Middle Passage, the plantations of the Caribbean and the American South, and the Civil War battlefields of the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries were the ‘laboratories’ of surgeons and physicians. The professions of dentistry, gynecology, immunology, and anesthesiology were built on their experiments.

There is nothing as virulent in our society as ignorance expressed in hateful ways and White bodies have been the choice vessels through which racism has perpetuated itself.

80 percent of White Americans hold unconscious bias against Black Americans, bias so automatic that it kicks in before a person can process it, according to Harvard sociologist David R. Williams.

Isabel Wilkerson in her book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020)

Studies have shown that the White host is not untouched by the symptoms of mass ignorance.

They, too, are ensnared by the very traps they set for others, as U. S. political commentator Heather McGhee illustrates in her book The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (2021) and as U. S. historian John H. Bracey, Jr. articulated before her. McGhee contends that many who seek to segregate others ultimately end up isolating themselves. She further cautions that the regular denial of perspectives beyond their immediate circle leaves many Whites ‘ill-prepared to function or thrive in a diverse [and increasingly diversifying] society’ – one that not only demands, but requires a certain level of socialization and cultural competence.

Many Whites also suffer from a self-imposed disorientation of history. This fantasy, Bracey says, denies them a proper understanding of their role in producing and perpetuating the current state of affairs, causing some to believe they are more important in society and that others are less deserving of social opportunities. And, as sociologist Robin DiAngelo has pointed out in her book White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism (2018), most Whites are either unaware or in denial about the advantages of White identity.

Thanks to the legacy of slavery, being able to physically and culturally identify as White is a social privilege. It means that person is more likely to achieve social, political, and economic power.

By ‘privilege,’ many assume an active assertion of one’s race.

But as U. S. philosopher George Yancy puts it:

In a sociopolitical and cultural structure where Whiteness is privileged and normative, it is neither necessary nor sufficient that people designated as White cling to racist beliefs in order to benefit from Whiteness.

George Yancy in his book Black Bodies, White Gazes: The Continuing Significance of Race (2008)

White privilege is simply the privilege of belonging to a social group, which is fully recognized and respected as human. As such, White privilege is also the privilege of belonging to a group that is regarded as the standard from which the merit of other groups is decided. One does not need to claim their Whiteness to own it. Being born into Whiteness is a privilege in itself. One does not need to receive special treatment in order to experience White privilege. They only need to avoid all of the problems that “people of color” cannot escape.

How does an absence of White privilege translate for those who do achieve social, political and/or economic standing in this society?

Unless they can pass for phenotypic Caucasoids, Blacks in these positions, regardless of their wealth and prominence, are nothing but the reincarnations of old work-things and play-things in the minds of a multitude.

While in office, former U. S. president Barrack Obama spoke candidly about his experiences as a professional lawyer being mistaken for a waiter or valet. First Lady Michelle Obama has also described being seen as “The Help” even after the elections. As Patterson rightly states, the continued experiences of these and millions of other Black Americans, in spite of their political achievements, makes any notions that the election of a Black president marked the arrival of a post-racial America utter ‘nonsense.’

Obama has consistently warned of a need to address the anxieties of White people who struggle to adapt to a world in which power is more evenly distributed.

However, we have yet to adequately address the fact that racist psychology has poisoned the Black race more thoroughly than any other group on the planet.

You might be wondering: how is that? Black people were not the only group of people who experienced slavery.

Patterson himself has published a most impressive study of 66 tribal, classical, and modern societies that practiced it both internally and externally.

But as the renowned educator Joy DeGruy writes, the experience of slavery was not always the same.

Although slavery has long been a part of human history, American chattel slavery represents a case of human trauma incomparable in scope, duration and consequence to any other incidence of human enslavement.

Dr. Joy DeGruy in her book Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Injury and Healing (2005)

Slavery was practiced in different times, touched different places, and affected different people differently.

It was the treatment of different people under different forms of slavery that made all the difference.

And the treatment of African people in the centuries of their enslavement was arguably the worst.

Due to the history of these humiliations, Black men and Black women continued to be seen as inferior to White men and White women after their enslavement and are still largely undesired as mentors, leaders, coworkers, and companions in many parts of the Americas.

Africans brought many innovations with them to the Americas in the way of artistic expressions which are now part of our common vocabulary, medical knowledge that helped to advance Western science, and ideas that their descendants developed into technological inventions – some of which we still use today.

But African people, as individuals, are still insulted all over the Americas in ways that echo the chattel experience.

Studies have demonstrated that without a silo of positive self-affirmations in the midst of a hostile environment, negative assessments of one’s value are internalized. The resulting anxieties produce widespread contempt for one’s own culture and community.

Thus, where Black relationships are overshadowed by racist perspectives, statistics show lower rates of intimacy and a higher prevalence of violence (a phenomenon framed by social scholar Daudi Ajani ya Azibo as ‘Black rage turned inward‘).

This holds surprisingly true even for Brazil – a nation which has the largest population of African people outside of Africa.

In Brazil, 75% of homicide victims are Black.

Even if this was more readily attributable to a racist government, which refuses adequate protection and support for majority-Black communities, rather than the people who happen to live in those communities (as critics of Dr. DeGruy’s theory like Ibram X. Kendi would argue), the fact remains that the rules of the system – one which has reproduced some of the very conditions that African people suffered under enslavement – are rooted in slavery.

There is another, more obvious link between slavery and the social dynamic of race in Brazil.

Due to the caste system that slave-holders established in colonial times, colorism remains a serious problem.

While interracial relationships have long been a feature of Brazilian society, interracial marriages were actually less popular prior to the year 1960, when 88% of marriages were between persons of the same race. By the year 2000, this figure was 69%. But that rise in interracial intimacy is not necessarily indicative of an increase in love and respect for Black people or for people of mixed ancestry. In spite of these numbers, Black Brazilian women are more likely to remain unmarried (as in the U. S.) and are less preferred in these arrangements. And, most interracial marriages are consummated among the poor. While 80% of the top 1% of income-earners are White, the bottom 10% is 76% Black or mixed-race.

The increase in population diversity, or the mochafication of Brazil is no guarantee of progress for children either.

One study has shown that in cases of siblings who were of different shades, the darker one typically dropped out of school earlier and earned a lower income than their White brothers and sisters.

U. S. sociologist Edward Telles, who wrote the book Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil (2004), attributed these findings to ‘persistent racial discrimination,’ which, in that study, was demonstrated in the attitudes of parents and teachers.

Due also to the preferential treatment that masters gave to their enslaved children and to other lighter-skinned slaves, colorism is an issue in Black communities of the United States, in the Caribbean, and in much of Latin America. This problem has been made worse by mass commercialization. Across these regions, pop culture has had a tendency to glorify celebrities from the Black community who are closest in appearance to White people. In recent decades, Western media, with all of its tropes and stereotypes, has been exported to Eastern nations such as India, South Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines, reinforcing values of Whiteness in language, culture, and aesthetics that were introduced in earlier times of American imperialism and colonial European rule. Eurocentric beautification practices have followed. Korea, in particular, is known as a global center for cosmetic surgery. The popularity of its creased eyelids has taken root in wealthier countries of the far east like China and Japan. Meanwhile, skin bleaching has become commonplace in nations of the Arab World like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, and in developing countries across Africa like Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, and Senegal. Now, they too struggle to overcome color prejudices at home and abroad.

The psychological impact of slavery is marked in many other ways.

In Brazil, journalist Eliane Alves Cruz has decried the great lack of Black dolls for Black girls and the persecution of adherents to the traditional African religions of Candomblé and Umbanda in recent years.

The severe limitation of cultural expression under slavery is evidenced by the fact that in this country, where the majority of the population consists of persons who identify as Black or mixed-race (around 56%), only 10% of published books are the work of Black authors. Meanwhile, the textbooks remain notoriously condescending in their illustrative and written representations of Black history, leaving students – Black and White – to enter society with a similarly condescending view of Black people.

The imprinting of the U. S. media and the conditioning of the social environment have produced a situation in which Afrotypic beauty (typical Negroid facial features, hair textures, and body shapes) is judged to be less appealing, less professional, and more threatening than the Eurocentric ideal. These views are reflected across the advertising, fashion, cosmetics, and sex work industries. In her book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (2019), medical sociologist Sabrina Strings traces them to the vilification of enslaved Africans, first in Europe then in the Americas. Yancy agrees.

Nowadays, just being Black can hinder self-acceptance and career success. But thanks to the counteractive work of Pan-African scholars and Black Nationalist organizers in reconstructing Black self-identity, African people everywhere have come to value racial unification as a necessary response to racist violence and systemic injustices. Further progress towards social equality is anticipated.

The Political Effects of The Maafa

The Partitioning of Powers

The European pursuit of slaves brought increased exposure to African flora and fauna. Spastic specimens were hunted and catalogued by a budding body of scientists who traveled with the traders. Their discoveries anticipated significant developments in botany, zoology, astronomy, and epidemiology. On these voyages between three worlds, the diets, rhythms, styles, and habits of African people were imported into European colonies and reproduced globally.

There was a sudden spread of ideas as people were displaced from one side of the planet to the other. Some information was mutually beneficial, including the knowledge of useful remedies and proven methods of strengthening the body’s immune system. Some exchanges were less intentional, but equally momentous such as the swaths of invasive pests and pestilences which wiped entire nations off the map.

The intersection of trade routes in Africa shaped domestic relations in Europe. Languages overlapped. Tensions escalated into conflicts. By forging alliances with their new partners in trade, Africans south of the Sahara were the recipients of new weapons and strategies of war. As borders shifted in Europe, boundaries surfaced in Africa.

The centuries prior to European contact were marked by the consolidation of migrant communities into large centralized states, namely Ghana, Mali, and Songhay in West Africa; Kanem in the north-central region; and Alodia in the east. But the constant pillaging of towns and villages resulted in a situation of widespread instability so that after those empires collapsed, African leaders struggled to attain the levels of regional unity, which were fundamental for that path of development. Instead, they were forced to flee from one region to another or to wall themselves into smaller polities from which they could organize raiding parties of their own.

Weaker governments were less able or less concerned with protecting the rights and property of individuals. The result, says Lovejoy, was a ‘spread of lawlessness’ and an ‘erosion of custom.’ U. K. professor Robin Law, who has conducted extensive studies on slavery in West Africa, agrees. Kidnapping became more and more common; enslavement became the choice punishment for crimes.

In the 16th century, there were only two large empires in Africa. By 1800, there were virtually none at all.

By 1900, the empire of enslavement was on its way out, but parallel structures of labor such as sharecropping (an offer of agricultural labor in exchange for a portion of the produce) and pawnship (an offer of labor to cover a debt) continued; these transitioned into other forms under European rule and ultimately expired in the era of independence.

Corruption is still a buzzword even in places with relative stability; warlords and armed factions are still ravaging remote regions of Africa, abducting helpless boys and girls for recruitment, marriage or ransom; and men and women fleeing turmoil in the continental South are still abused and abandoned on their journey to the global North, following in the footsteps of their forebears.

It was the slave enterprise in the Caribbean during the 16th century, said the esteemed historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009), that financed the rapid colonization and economic development of the New World in the 17th century.

In this region, where both African and Indian slavery had their genesis, the dynamics of color, established by the enslavement of African people, continued to play out in the post-colonial landscape.

In the century after abolition, Central and South American countries implemented policies of European immigration to Whiten their population, while simultaneously denying basic human rights to their darker citizens.

The governments of these former colonies have only now begun to recognize the damages of their predecessors and to outline the steps that must be taken in order to equalize the playing field for all the races.

In November of 2019, Brazilian journalist Laurentino Gomes described his country as ‘one of the most segregated countries in the world.’

There are two Brazils: a majority, left to fend for itself, and a Brazil that has all the privileges.

Laurentino Gomes, as a guest on the televised talk show program Conversa Com Bial

In many Latin American countries, race is hardly understood to be a issue for the White majority as there were no fountains, restrooms or buses labeled “for Blacks” or “for Whites only,” But in Brazil, where Whites have always dominated the best neighborhoods while Blacks were ‘without public security’ and lived ‘in neighborhoods abandoned by the state,’ the gulf between the races is equally pronounced.

Gomes set the record straight.

Unlike the United States and even South Africa, Brazil is a segregated country that hasn’t had to create formal segregation laws, it is in fact segregated.

Telles noted the following in his research:

Non-White Brazilians were rarely found in the country’s top universities, until affirmative action began in 2001.

…

Largely as a result of insufficient anti-racist laws to redress persistent societal racism, and in response to Black social movement in a recently democratized society, several universities and other public institutions in Brazil have begun to implement racial quotas. Coming on the heels of the World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination Xenophobia and Related Intolerance, held in Durban, South Africa in 2001, many of the leading universities are now mandated to admit a fixed percentage of non-White students.

Though far from perfect, the implementation of these policies has led to a remarkable increase in Black enrollment at institutions of higher learning. Whereas 16.7% of Black and Brown students attended in 2004, 45.5% attended in 2014 (this is still less than the 47.2% of White students attending in 2004 and the 71.4% recorded ten years later).

Progress is forthcoming in other areas of life in Brazil.

Black Brazilians make up 18% of Congress.

‘Its power structure,’ Bloomberg noted last summer, ‘is almost entirely White.’

Nowhere has the impact of slavery been more closely scrutinized than in North America, and particularly, in the United States.

Modern disparities in wealth and education between Black and White Americans are rooted in government policies that assigned the income of Black slaves to White wallets and barred them from books that could improve their skills.

For years, policies of discrimination and segregation were enacted and enforced by the government, barring African Americans from access to fair housing, education, employment, and healthcare. Time after time – after the agitations of 19th century abolitionists, the reconstructive efforts of “Radical” Republicans in the aftermath of the Civil War, and the activism of Civil Rights workers in the 1960s – it seems that systemic racism has always found a way to reinvent itself. The continued denial of equal privileges for African Americans under the law has produced yet another legacy of slavery – mass incarceration.

The emancipation of a downtrodden people without any provisions of restitution or financial support left them to fend for themselves.

The renowned abolitionist Frederick Douglass (1818-1895) made the situation of Blacks in America very clear when he declared in 1883:

There are formidable obstacles and discouragements; that we have entered the race of civilization at an immense disadvantage is manifest to the candid judgement of all men. No people ever entered the portal of freedom under circumstances more unpropitious than the American freedmen.

Frederick Douglass, as quoted in the Washington Bee on January 6, 1883

Not all were freed from slavery the moment that the different governments of the Americas declared slavery illegal. Some were maintained as slaves in secret. Some were hauled off to other lands of bondage. Those who were free did not always have the faith to live independent of their former masters. Those who did were not always successful.

In his book Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II (2008), U. S. journalist Douglas A. Blackmon describes the conditions in which African Americans continued to struggle after they had already been declared free.

Many, he says, were taken to prison on petty offenses like changing employers without permission or talking loudly in the presence of White women and leased for harsh labor on plantations around the country. Stealing a pig or a goat (worth only a dollar each) in Mississippi was enough to warrant 5 years of peonage. Stealing a 5 cent fence post meant certain jail time in Tennessee. The result was that pretty soon, approximately 90% of persons arrested for a crime in any part of the U. S. South were Black. Whereas there were scarcely any prisons in the South prior to abolition, almost suddenly, a system of re-enslavement was instituted to maintain the inequalities that existed between paid plantation owners and unpaid plantation workers – the prison system.

A world in which the seizure and sale of a Black man—even a Black child—was viewed as neither criminal nor extraordinary had reemerged. Millions of Blacks lived in that shadow—as forced laborers [themselves] or their family members [did], or [other] African Americans in terror of the system’s caprice.

Douglass reiterates the point:

In all relations of life and death, we are met by the color line. It hunts us at midnight …denies us accommodation …excludes our children from schools …compels us to pursue only such labor as will bring us the least reward.

On what was supposed to be a joyous occasion – the 20th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation – Douglass warned the people that there was more work yet to be done before “the Negro” could truly celebrate.

Six years later, Douglass was even more poignant.

I here and now denounce his so-called emancipation as a stupendous fraud.

Sixty-six years later, on the 91st anniversary of England’s Emancipation Act, another leader of the race echoed these sentiments from Jamaica:

Although as British Negroes we were freed in 1838, and in America as Negroes, we were freed in 1865 from chattel slavery, unfortunately we have still remained slaves…

Marcus Garvey on August 1, 1929, as quoted in Marcus Garvey, Hero: A First Biography (1983) by Tony Martin

The researches of filmmaker Timothy A. Smith and genealogist Antoinette Harrell reveal that there were hundreds of thousands of Black people working as slaves in the state of Mississippi well into the middle of the 20th century.

Thus, the prejudices that justified the enslavement of African people on a massive scale continued to be used to justify the exploitation of Black people in other, more subtle ways.

But we cannot afford to forget that the development of the slave trade was the foundation for the political situation of our world today and the resulting inequalities along social and economic lines.

The Pan-American governments of our time are the outgrowths of the plantocracies that were established in colonial days by the British, the French, the Spanish, the Portuguese, and the Dutch.

The Collusion of the Masses in Order and Disorder

A 1967 U. S. government investigation into the causes of frequent riots in mostly African-American neighborhoods across the South found that structural racism was at the heart of the matter. The Kerner Commission Report, as the published findings were called, identified that it was discrimination which prevented Blacks from better housing outside the ghettoes, maintained unemployment and underemployment among the youth, and stoked the flames of resistance to authority when weaponized against Black communities through the police.

The authors concluded:

The causes of recent racial disorders are embedded in a tangle of issues and circumstances–social, economic, political and psychological which arise out of the historic pattern of Negro-White relations in America.

The double-standard of America’s approach to the improvement or discipline of its Black and White citizens, they insisted, was born out of this pattern and this pattern was established through the development of slavery.

The events of the summer of 1967 are in large part the culmination of 300 years of racial prejudice.

And the saga continues today.

A 2014 study by researchers at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government found that White Americans who currently live in areas where their predecessors were surrounded by larger populations of slaves consistently hold more conservative and more prejudiced views toward Black Americans than Whites who live in areas where slaves were less concentrated. With their support, prejudicial politicians continue to use some of the same “zero-sum” tactics that were employed in earlier days to prevent African people from securing the same rights as people of European heritage.

To this end, they now cast a wider net, exploiting public fears against Asians, Arabs, and Hispanics. Most notably, right-wing partisans like former U. S. president Donald Trump have encouraged hypervigilance for migrants from the Southern border.

The more that a society will assent to the dehumanization of a select group of people is the more easily that those people and anyone associated with them will be treated as severely as the law will allow.

It is no coincidence that in 2018, children in immigrant detention centers were forcibly separated from their parents and confined using methods that were compared to the treatment of animals. More recently, there was public outcry for the plight of Haitian refugees in Texas after international media organizations aired footage of mounted border patrol agents wielding their reins as whips – scenes, for many viewers, reminiscent of slavery, and for one Haitian-American official, the punishment of dogs.

The systematic policing of earlier stigmatized peoples (slaves and ex-slaves) set the pace for the policing of all marginalized groups.

As U. S. lawyer Michelle Alexander has so eloquently elucidated:

Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you’re labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination—employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service—are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a Black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

Michelle Alexander in her best-selling book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (2010)

While other minorities are now included in this scheme, Black people still bear the brunt of the onslaught. Alexander has rightly identified a psychological connection between the social and political constructions of Black identity in the United States.

Slavery defined what it meant to be Black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be Black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of Blackness in America: Black people, especially Black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be Black.

This ideal of Blackness has dominated pop culture, but is merely a reflection of what decades of political interventions have already produced in Black communities – the demonization of progressive thinkers by intelligence services, the dispossession of Black farmlands through court-sanctioned auctions by predatory property developers, the disproportionate denial of federal loans to Black farmers, the disproportionate denial of government-sponsored mortgages and home-improvement loans to competent applicants, the targeting of welfare recipients for government-insured mortgages only for speculators to profit on predictable foreclosures (after the Fair Housing Act of 1968 banned redlining), the underfunding of majority-Black school districts (from the 1930s to this day) and historically-Black colleges and universities, the segregation of the public and private sector industries, the stimulation of illicit drug trafficking, the utilization of criminal informants to stack cases against drug addicts, the requirement of high minimum prison sentences for non-violent crimes (ex: drug possession), the appointment of longer sentences to Black defendants for the same crimes as White defendants, the maintenance of private for-profit prisons, the construction of a school-to-prison pipeline, etc.

None of these policies were prompted by a single mind or promoted by any one body, but were established and enforced by a chosen cross section of a community. As such, these symptoms of a government which does not trust a particular segment of its citizens are also emblematic of a society committed to racism.

Americans in the time of slavery were convinced that African people did not understand what a civilization was. They were seen as creatures without a moral or intellectual compass, and therefore, were always in need of correction from bona fide authority figures. As a result, slave patrols were organized in every part of the Americas to police Black communities in colonial times and continued to operate for the same purpose as professional organizations post-independence. After slavery, there was a proliferation of terrorist networks under such names as the clandestine Ku Klux Klan (which was open to any ragtag rogue) and the sophisticated Citizens’ Councils (which had more of a middle and upper class appeal). Restless racists joined the ranks of more volatile factions like the White League of Louisiana and the Red Shirts of Mississippi and the Carolinas.

Over the years, there has been a waning support for extrajudicial defenses of White supremacy. That zeal has been replaced in recent times by campaigns in solidarity with racial interventions by national police agencies and international militaries, in spite of (and often in tandem with) their moral missteps. But ordinary Americans (mostly White men anxious for no reason about Black criminality), who account for over 98% of gun-ownership in the United States and own 5 guns on average, are more than capable of maintaining the status quo. Even the most law-abiding citizens are not entirely insulated from encounters with the occasional “Karen” (a popular euphemism for any self-entitled minutewoman).

For four centuries, slavery was a legal outlet for torture – for the regular exercise of depraved and destructive passions. The perpetrators of these acts went on to hang, rape, shoot, and burn free men and free women. When they weren’t dabbling in duels and dangerous shoot-outs, they were engaging in massacres and mob lynchings. The masses raided jails so often that the courts rushed to beat them to the kill.

An epidemic of violence continues to haunt the Southern states of America more than any other region of the country. This consistent state of affairs has baffled psychologists and sociologists for many decades. In the late 60s, criminologists Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Feracutti identified these trends with African-Americans and lower-income Whites. In his book The Rise and Fall of Violent Crime in America (2016), criminal justice professor Barry Latzer has gone even further, connecting what he describes as a common sub-culture of violence between these communities to the nature of plantation society, which constantly pitted poor Whites against Black slaves. Latzer acknowledges, like sociologist Elijah Anderson and social theorist Thomas Sowell before him, that White Southerners (especially those of Irish and Scottish heritage) were known for their hotblooded habit of acute, physical aggression against the slightest of threats to their personal honor; misguided Black youth, by association, adopted it. Thus, the lawlessness of one community inspired the lawlessness of another. Latzer continues to develop this theory in his latest work The Roots of Violent Crime in America (2021).

In the United States, which incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world (2 million), African Americans make up 12.1% of the general population (U.S. Census, 2020), but almost 40% of the prison population (Bureau of Prisons, September 2021). In 12 states, more than half of the prison population is Black and in another 7 states, the ratio of Blacks to Whites in prison is 9 to 1. Black motorists are stopped by police officers at 6.5 times the rate of White people and Black pedestrians are stopped at 4.5 times the rate of Whites. During these stops, White police officers are more likely to speak in a disrespectful manner. While Blacks are 20 times more likely to be searched than White people, these searches are half as likely to reveal activities leading to arrests (Urban League and the Center for Policing Equity, May 2018). But, as prison statistics show, Blacks are still arrested more than Whites because they are targeted more often by the police. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Black men are almost six times as likely to go to prison as White men and twice as likely as Latinos. And, while Black adults are actually incarcerated at a rate of nearly five times that of their White counterparts, Black youth are also just as likely to be detained or committed in juvenile facilities. In four states, they are at least 10 times as likely. In addition to a higher proportion of arrests, Black people are seven times more likely to be on parole supervision and five times more likely to be re-incarcerated for minor infractions while on parole.

In Brazilian states where racial demographics are measured, Blacks are typically overrepresented in the prison population. For example, in São Paulo, where non-mixed Blacks made up 3.6% of the population in 1991, they represented 16% of the prison population.

Race is a major factor in state-sanctioned punishments. Black men in the U. S. are two-and-a-half times as likely to be killed by police as White men. They are almost three times as likely to be shot to death when they are completely unarmed. The problem may be worse in Brazil. Whereas 25% of suspects killed by U. S. police officers in 2019 were Black, Brazilian police officers killed almost six times as many suspects, 75% of whom were Afro-descendants.

The United States imposes harsher sentencing punishments for violent crimes than any other nation. Yet, crimes involving Black victims are punished with shorter sentences than crimes involving White victims.

As the Equal Justice Initiative’s (EJI) Bryan Stevenson has pointed out, race is the greatest predictor for who gets executed in America. From the early 20th century – when lynchings were at their peak – to today, Blacks have consistently been more likely to be prosecuted, sentenced, and executed for capital murder. Executions are still being carried out in cases where the evidence is inconclusive (especially when the defendant is Black and the victim is White) even while cases of official misconduct are being exposed and overturned. As they did in the time of slavery, Southern lawmakers continue to use the premise of “states’ rights” to defeat anti-discrimination proposals, which aim to amend a broken system.

Slavery is at the root of racial attitudes and inequities.

In a recent interview, Patterson rightly acknowledged that what was abolished after slavery was ‘the personal individual enslavement of one person by another.’ But the general collective degradation of one race by another did not end then and there.

What persisted was the culture of slavery, and central to this culture was the sense that the White population felt it was their duty to control and suppress Black freedom.

Professor Orlando Patterson in a June 2020 interview for the Harvard Gazette

The Economic Effects of The Maafa

Global Disparities in Wealth

In 1978, the United Nations sponsored a conference, which summoned scholars from around the world to Haiti for a discussion on the history of the slave trades in Africa from the 15th to the 19th centuries. The summary report from that conference contained the following statement:

None of the experts present disputed the idea that the slave trade was responsible for the economic backwardness of Africa.

Indeed, it is generally understood that over 100 million Africans died in the course of the resulting conflicts, which effected the enslavement of over 30 million from different parts of the continent in different parts of the world.

Citing the work of British scholars Rowland Moss and Richard Rathbone, along with that of American economic historian Philip Curtin (1922-2009), Professor David Northrup of Boston College posited in 1982 that ‘the continent was already economically backward relative to its trading partners’ before the beginnings of their parlay with Europeans.

But many authors have since argued that the societies of Africa were well developed at that time, an idea advanced by Howard historian Chancellor Williams in his classic work The Destruction of African Civilization (1971) and affirmed by Walter Rodney (1942-1980) of Guyana in his magnum opus How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972).

U. K. historian Hakim Adi has most aptly disputed such claims in saying this:

Africa’s economic and social development before 1500 may arguably have been [it was] ahead of Europe’s. It was gold from the great empires of West Africa, Ghana, Mali, and Songhay that provided the means for the economic take-off of Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries.

In the 14th century, the West African empire of Mali was larger than western Europe and reputed to be one of the richest and most powerful states in the world.

As trade has done for countless economies, trade diversified African markets.

The trading of people, in particular, brought a transmogrification.

Constant contact with outsiders – Europeans in the West and Arabs in the East – transformed the cultures and economies of Africans on both sides of the continent. In towns near the coasts like Anomabo in modern Ghana and Lamu in modern Kenya, Africans discovered strange new ideas and practices, which they carried to the interior. This included interior decoration using imported porcelain and exterior architectural techniques that were part of their training in the construction of the forts and castles (ex: stone-cutting and brick-baking). They fashioned Indian textile designs into their kente clothing, they sprinkled foreign flavors into their culinary creations, and they borrowed from alien syntax to forge patterns of expression that were out of this world.

While participating royals were entrenched in the accumulation of wealth and power, the elites of Africa were concerned by all possible means with protecting their own hides. To this end, the flair of exotic garments, jewelry, and trinkets became an expendable means of affirming one’s noble or merchant status. Africans of high standing donned the latest of European wares (essentially cultural hand-me-downs) so as to avoid being mistaken for the common peasants they bartered. All of this served to strengthen class distinctions as never before.

Still, African societies suffered tremendously. If not a terrible loss of manpower, the constant drainage of their best and brightest had set them on a path to economic recession.

As Adi rightly stated:

From the middle of the 15th century, Africa entered into a unique relationship with Europe that led to the devastation and depopulation of Africa, but contributed to the wealth and development of Europe.

Africans had been engaging in slavery for various reasons including the punishment of crimes and the settling of debts. However, the politics of slavery in Africa soon underwent a drastic change due to the conditions of their trade with Europeans.

By the mid-17th century the European demand for captives, particularly for the sugar plantations in the Americas, became so great that they could ONLY be acquired through initiating raiding and warfare.

The forced removal of up to [or over] 25 million people from the continent obviously had a major effect on the growth of the population in Africa. It is now estimated that in the period from 1500 to 1900, the population of Africa remained stagnant or declined.

Africa was the ONLY continent to be affected in this way, and this loss of population and potential population was a major factor leading to its economic underdevelopment.

One administrator with the Dutch West India company noted at the beginning of the 18th century that as a result of slaves replacing gold as the prized commodity in West Africa, the “Gold Coast” had literally become the “Slave Coast.”

Avaricious monarchs were so comfortable with the technological advances of their militaries that they often neglected the very traditions that would sustain them – animal husbandry and agriculture. An overwhelming emphasis on hunting and warring for short-term trade left the masses of Africa struggling with securing land and resources for long-term production.

They paid a heavy price when the powers of Europe revisited the continent in the latter part of the 20th century. Although Africa still had a number of strong sovereignties like Dahomey and Benin, these were few and far between. In this crippled constitution, it was conspicuously conceivable that the continent capitulate to their concerted crusades of carnage. This time around, Africans were not simply being captured and commodified as individuals. Entire communities were eradicated left, right, and center.

As Adi tells it, not only did had the slave trade ‘created the conditions’ for the ‘subsequent’ colonization, but the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade laid the groundwork for ‘the unequal relationship that still exists between Africa and the world’s big powers today.’

Africa was impoverished by its relationship with Europe while the human and other resources that were taken from Africa contributed to the capitalist development and wealth of Europe and other parts of the world.”

A review of the combined works of Oxford intellectual Eric Williams (1911-1981) and Cornell scholar Edward Baptist on the role of African enslavement in the enrichment of Europe and America have culminated in this profound statement by history professor Julia Ott of the New School for Social Research:

Racialized chattel slaves were the capital that made capitalism.

Julia Ott in an article for the Public Seminar Publishing Initiative

Ott opines that the goods produced by hard working slaves motivated free citizens to work harder.

Increased supply increased demand and increased demand increased supply. Cravings in both Europe and the Americas for “drug foods” like tobacco, tea, coffee, chocolate, and sugar stimulated an “industrious revolution” among consumers, which in turn financed an industrial revolution among producers. Baptist adds that when unpaid labor was finally declared illegal, some of the profits were passed on and some were used to fund other enterprises.

Modern corporations, which now provide banking services, health insurance, real estate, shipping, and transportation, can trace their origins to a series of slave investments. Modern institutions, which have established themselves as centers for education and religion, did so at the expense of African suffering.

Lovejoy noted that subject peoples, Africa’s chief export for two-and-a-half centuries, tended to move from areas of desolation to ‘areas of more extensive economic and political development’ inside and, to a greater extent, outside the continent. Any measurable return on the products that Africans received for these slaves paled in comparison to European profits on their labor. Over time, foreign aid and foreign trade became increasingly essential for the survival of African economies. Africa’s labor and material resources continue to serve the interests of others at the expense of its indigenous people, who scramble to catch the crumbs under the table. A 2014 investigative report, published by over a dozen NGOs, found that although Africans still export more than they import, a significantly larger amount of economic value ($192 billion) is lost than is gained ($134 billion) every year. Most of this loss (at least $81.6 billion) is attributable to exploitative trade practices by multinational corporations.

The evidence is clearly demonstrated through an examination of present disparities in the global economy.

The gross domestic product of Europe (a measure of its economic performance) is roughly 8 times higher than that of Africa. The GDP for the U. S. alone is 8.3 times as high. Europe claims 23% of the world’s total GDP. Africa holds just under 3%, which is half as much as the Asian islands of Japan and about a third of the GDP of Latin America and the Caribbean combined. This makes Africa undoubtedly the most impoverished continent on the planet.

Local Disparities in Wealth

Africans in the diaspora, have also felt the sting of poverty.

Slavery stole both time and talent from the Afro-American entrepreneur.

Many a freedman had not a shilling to their name. ‘They were compelled,’ as one Black writer noted at the end of the century, ‘to begin at the bottom.’

They had little choice but to enter into predatory work arrangements which would enable them to live on the land their masters or neighbors owned. Over time, some of these workers found themselves saddled with heavy debts and no way out.

Blackmon writes that while Black sharecroppers and prisoners were being deprived of their own work potential and the fruits of their labor, the work they did to satisfy their leases brought in tens of millions in profits for their landlords, the state governments, and the companies that contracted them.

Conditions in convict camps, which numbered in the hundreds, were described as worse than slavery itself.

The work schedule was the same and so were the punishments.

Just as they did in slavery, Black convicts cleared forests; they dug mines; and they built roads, bridges, railroads, canals, and houses, many of which are still around today.

Fast forward to the present and we find that there are still prisons today in which people making $0 to $1.15 a day, are leased to corporations for the purposes of making billions through the production and packaging of food, clothing, and hardware. They work in dairies, farms, labs, and factories. There are no vacations or sick days. But there are overseers and punishments for work refusal. Banks and Wall Street giants alike invest in these prisons. Many of their 4,100 business partners are household names. As such, virtually everyone uses the products and services of their suppliers.

Meanwhile, race remains a determining factor in differences of wealth and household income between U. S. citizens.

Federal Reserve data shows that in 1990, Whites, who made up 75.6% of the population, owned 90.7% of the nation’s wealth while Blacks, who made up 12.1% of the population, owned 3.8%. As of 2020, Whites, who make up 60% of the population, own 84% of the wealth, while Blacks, who make up 12.1% of the population, own 4.3% of the wealth.

A 2015 report by the Haas Institute for a Fair and Inclusive Society at UC Berkeley found that, due to a history of discriminatory governance and racial terrorism, Black farmlands dissipated by 98% between 1920 and 1997 so that in the 21st century, White people own 98% of all farmland in the United States and generate 98% of all farm-related income. Blacks own less than 1%.

This data is reflective of racial disparities for the ownership of general acreage. Data from multiple government sources shows that White people own over 98% of all land in America; Blacks own less than 1%.

A 2020 report by the Congressional Joint Economic Committee identified a number of other striking statistics on the “Economic State of Black America” in the present day, some of which are outlined below.

• The median Black household earns 40% less than the median White household.
• The median net worth for White families is nearly 10 times greater than for Black families.
• The Black unemployment rate is twice as high as that of White Americans.
• Fewer than half of Black families own their home (42%) compared to nearly three-fourths of White families (73%). Furthermore, over half of Black households (58%) rent their homes, while only 28% of White households
  rent.
• Twenty years after starting college, the typical Black borrower still owes 95% of his or her original balance, while the typical White borrower owes only 6%.
• Homes in majority-Black neighborhoods are valued $48,000 less on average than homes in neighborhoods with little or no Black residents, even after controlling for home quality and neighborhood amenities.
• Black Americans overall pay higher mortgage interest rates than White Americans even when adjusting for age, credit score, and employment history.

The wealthiest Blacks (most of whom are entertainers) are significantly poorer than the wealthiest Whites and the poorest of White communities still fare considerably better than average Black communities. Policies intended to reduce Blacks to poverty find their strongest support among poor Whites, keeping them both in abject conditions.

Telles summarizes the economic situation of Black Brazil as follows:

On average, Black and Brown (Mulatto or mixed race) Brazilians earn half of the income of the White population. Most notably, the middle class and the elite are almost entirely White, so that Brazil’s well-known melting pot only exists among the working class and the poor.

The people who worked the hardest to build Western societies are now the most underpaid and underemployed.

The problem is felt at the top where Black people make up less than 5% of executives in the 500 largest companies (just like they do in the U. S.) and at the bottom, as mentioned before.

There are over 1 million Blacks in Brazil but not one Black-owned bank.

The presence of Blacks in leadership roles at existing banks is still quite small. There has not been one Black CEO or board member at any of the nation’s financial institutions. Bloomberg columnists Cristiane Lucchesi and Felipe Marques found a similar scarcity of Blacks in upper management at major banks in the U. S.

These economic disparities between people of African and European heritage are no coincidence given that both the United States and Brazil were involved in the forced enslavement of African people several decades after the abolition of the slave trade.

The evidence demonstrates that Black people have been and continue to be undervalued.

In the United States, where they were once considered to be worth 3/5ths (or 60%) of a White person by law, Black people today are paid on average 72.1% of what White people get for their work.

This is close to the overall equality index measured by the National Urban League five years ago, which indicates that in the areas of economics, health, education, social justice, and civic engagement, Black America is 72.2% equal to White America. For Hispanics, the index was 77.7%. The present (2020) equality index stands at 73.8% for Blacks and 78.8% for Hispanics.

Colorism deepens the divide. Darker-skinned Blacks and Hispanics earn less income and face lower prospects in education, housing, marriage, and employment than their lighter-skinned counterparts. They also experience more frequent interpersonal episodes of racism, are less likely to hold public office, and are punished more severely by the criminal justice system. The same is true in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Final Thoughts

We must acknowledge the effects of the slave trade and slavery in our world today.

Acknowledgement is the first step towards progress.

Black people are well aware of the problems that slavery created for them.

They are far more likely than White people to acknowledge that racial disparities do, in fact, exist in access to health care, insurance, and affordable housing; in levels of medical treatment; and in environmental exposure to toxic pollutants. They are also more likely than Whites and Hispanics to express feelings of distrust in the healthcare and criminal justice systems. The problem of race is felt as far as New Zealand and Australia, where the “Blackfulla” (the aboriginal population) report episodes of racism as much as seven times more than the White population. These encounters only increase for those who accumulate more wealth and education. Like Blacks in America, racism threatens their health and security. For these reasons, Blacks in both nations have reported a fear of the outside world.

Isn’t it time that we all as a society begin to acknowledge the role that the dynamics of slavery continue to play in the present day and age? Isn’t it time that we confront our implicit biases of what constitutes good skin, good hair, and good people? The more that we acknowledge that they exist, the more we will recognize the manifestations of racial hatred and oppression in our everyday lives. With patience and sincerity, we can foster more trustworthy relationships and we can build a more equitable society.

The persistence of racism in digital communications (text messaging, social networking, video conferencing, video gaming, etc) and in the algorithms used to develop artificial intelligence models for law enforcement demonstrates that despite our technological advances, we cannot hope to achieve real progress until we confront our racial dilemma.

What the next step should be is still a subject of contentious debate.

Conservative commentators like Jason L. Riley advocate for a hardline business approach as the solution for a people who have long exceeded political expectations but have consolidated very little power.

Leading liberals continue to defend their traditional stance of “vote, vote, vote” while shying away from policies that are specifically tailored to address historical slights against African Americans.

More progressive voices, like The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates, have argued that Black entrepreneurship can only go so far, pushing instead for reparations and for long-term government programs that will more ably address the problems that politics created in the first place such as the resurgence of a racial-wealth gap and the shrinkage of social services which might have insulated against inner-city crime and recidivism (in other words, organizations that help ex-convicts to successfully navigate their return to society and encourage the youth to live their best lives through workforce training and recreational activities). Intergenerational transfers of Black wealth are not enough, they say, to make a substantial impact on the current trajectory. Such an impact is extraordinarily difficult to accomplish within even a few lifetimes without an equitable re-distribution of general wealth and the financial literacy (knowledge and understanding of how to budget and build more wealth) that is necessary to secure it.

After all, as law professor Mehrsa Baradaran writes in her book The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap (2019), White Americans did not get where they are today through entrepreneurship alone. The government helped them to secure land, homes, farms, businesses, jobs, and college degrees through the Federal Homestead Acts beginning in 1862 and the G. I. Bill of 1944. At the same time, Black people could not submit applications for government-sponsored funding until the 14th Amendment confirmed them as U. S. citizens by birth in 1868. When they did apply, they were viscously discriminated against by banks, corporations, and homeowners associations. It did not matter that they were veterans. They were Black and that meant they had been slaves longer than they had been anything else in this country.

The U. S. government under the Nixon administration further promoted programs they promised would subsidize Black banks and bankroll Black-owned businesses, but these were all for show and were intended to detract and distract from the efforts of Civil Rights leaders who were calling for more radical reforms like full-scale integration and – you guessed it: racial reparations.

The construct of race is as real as the construct of money. And White racism is not a problem for Blacks to dismantle themselves.

To this day, racial prejudice runs deep in the real estate industry. Property appraisers typically value houses in majority Black neighborhoods at less than half the price of houses in neighborhoods without a Black presence. In one case, a homeowner sold their house for more than twice the value of the first two assessments when they had a White friend introduce themselves as a family member during the third appraisal.

In considering the weight of this history, Baradaran concluded in a 2020 PBS interview:

We can keep talking about entrepreneurship…but we have to look at the structures of how capitalism works…and the laws of capitalism are that capital grows onto itself…If you don’t have capital, it’s really hard to get capital if the structure of capitalism is just going to keep perpetuating [that].

So far, only two cities in the United States have declared their support for reparations to the descendants of Black slaves including Evanston, Illinois (to rectify housing discrimination) and Ashville, North Carolina (with a more comprehensive plan). But the results that might legitimize such an undertaking on a larger scale remain to be seen.

Rather than extending a hand to a community in need, some in positions of power and privilege choose instead to lambast the descendants of the enslaved as the past and present causes of their own suffering. They want to “Make America Great Again,” but issues that continue to plague the descendants of great Americans are too far removed from their historical hindsight to bear any relevance today.

There is still hope for a future in which a disdain for present prejudices will overcome the pursuance of past pride.

That will be the day when all God’s children will be able to join hands and sing together, in the words of that old American spiritual: “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

– Omri Coke, Black Researchers United Admin Team

I would like to thank BRU Facebook group member Kave Lee for reminding me to mention that the resources of Africa’s natural environment and the resourcefulness of Africa’s people reached the world by means of the slave trade.

For more on the involvement of U. S. colleges and universities in the enslavement of African people, read the book Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (2013) by Craig Steven Wilder.

For more on the effects of slavery on African culture, read the books The Slave Coast of West Africa 1550–1750: The Impact of the Atlantic Slave Trade on an African Society (1991) by Robin Law, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa (2000) by Paul Lovejoy, Swahili Port Cities: The Architecture of Elsewhere (2016) by Prita Meier, and Kakaamotobe: Fancy Dress Carnival in Ghana (2021) by Courtnay Micots.

For more on the effects of slavery on both African and European cultures, read Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (1998) by Philip D. Morgan.

For more on the social effects of slavery in the United States, read the books Rituals Of Blood: The Consequences Of Slavery In Two American Centuries (1998) by Orlando Patterson, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (2014) by Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Stamped From the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016) by Ibram X. Kendi, and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) by Isabel Wilkerson.

For more on the effects of slavery on the field of medicine, read Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present (2007) by Harriet A. Washington and Maladies of Empire: How Colonialism, Slavery, and War Transformed Medicine (2021) by Jim Downs.

For more on the effects of slavery in education and religion, read Institutional Slavery: Slaveholding Churches, Schools, Colleges, and Businesses in Virginia, 1680–1860 (2016) by Jennifer Oast.

For more on the political effects of slavery in the United States, read the books Lethal Punishment: Lynchings and Legal Executions in the South (2005) by Margaret Vandiver, Dispossession: Discrimination against African American Farmers in the Age of Civil Rights (2013) by Pete Daniel, Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership (2021) by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and Race Against Time: The Politics of a Darkening America (2021) by Keith Boykin.

For more on the political effects and the economic impact of slavery in Africa, read the book Africa 101: The Wake-up Call (2020) by Arikana Chihombori-Quao.

For more on the economic impact of slavery in the United States, read the books Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (2013) edited by Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman and The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (2014).

For more on the economic impact of slavery in Europe, read Christopher Columbus and the Afrikan Holocaust: Slavery and the Rise of European Capitalism (2002) by John Henrik Clarke and The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (2008) by Jan de Vries.

For more on the economic impact of slavery in the Caribbean, read the book Capitalism and Slavery (1994) by Eric Williams, first published in 1944.

For Patterson’s research on slavery in different societies, read his book Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (2018), first published in 1982.

You can watch the 2009 documentary directed by Timothy A. Smith, The Cotton Pickin Truth Still On The Plantation, now available through Amazon Prime here.

You can watch the 2010 documentary produced by Antoinette Harrell, The Untold Story: Slavery in the 20th Century courtesy of the studio here:

You can watch the 2012 PBS documentary Slavery By Another Name, based on the award-winning book by Douglas A. Blackmon here.

More recently, Ava DuVernay’s 2016 film 13th: A Lesson on Race, Justice, and Mass Incarceration has connected Blackmon’s research on 19th and 20th century history with Michelle Alexander’s studies on the racial realities of the American criminal justice system in the 20th and 21st centuries. You can watch the full documentary on Netflix’s YouTube channel here.