The Real Purpose of the 1619 Project

Originally posted on August 24, 2019 at DaTechGuy Blog.

Like always.

Title of the Project is wrong, not to mention the Premise 

From Lyman Stone at the Federalist on New York Times 1619 Project.

1619 is commonly cited as the date slavery first arrived in “America.” No matter that historians mostly consider the 1619 date a red herring. Enslaved people were working in English Bermuda in 1616. Spanish colonies and forts in today’s Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina had enslaved Africans throughout the mid-to-late 1500s: in fact, a slave rebellion in 1526 helped end the Spanish attempt at settling South Carolina.

The presence of Spanish power continued to inhibit English settlement of the deep south basically until the Revolutionary War. In some sense, the 1526 San Miguel de Guadeloupe rebellion cleared the way for English settlement of South Carolina.

(...)

But before 1526, slavery was already ongoing in the eventual United States. The earliest slave society in our present country, and our most recent slavery society, was in Puerto Rico. The island’s Spanish overlords were enslaving the Taino natives by 1500. By 1513, the Taino population had shrunk dramatically due to brutal violence and disease. Thus, Spain brought the first African slaves to Puerto Rico.

Chattel slavery in Puerto Rico continued, despite many “Royal Graces” easing life for free blacks and sometimes promising eventual emancipation, until 1873. Even then, slaves had to buy their own liberty. It’s not clear when the last slave was free in Puerto Rico, but it would still have been a fresh memory in 1898 when the United States gained control from Spain.

Slavery in America did not begin in 1619. It began in 1513. Any argument for a 1619 date implicitly suggests that the American project is an inherently Anglo project: that other regions, like Texas, California, Louisiana, and Puerto Rico, have subordinate histories that aren’t really, truly, equal as American origin stories.

But even if the title were correct, what's the true propose of this project? Stone gives the answer earlier in the piece.

It isn’t mostly about helping Americans understand the role played by plantation agriculture in American history. It’s mostly about convincing Americans that “America” and “slavery” are essentially synonyms.

Previously, I've discussed the Civil War and whether (or not) present-day black Americans should be grateful to our country and to those who fought on the Union side. A lot of people didn't like my conclusion.

True freedom fighters have the clean conscience of God. May that be enough for them.

And at the same time, however, this country has no need to pay for its past sins. This very same Civil War was America's trial by fire, its conviction, and its sentence -- something that American leaders chose.

But, it seems as if all too many are intent on keeping everyone angry about hardships none of them had to bear. All the New York Times wants to do is make itself the drum major of the anger and vengeance parade.

And what if America and slavery are synonymous? What then? Oh, yes, reparations.

Reparations, just like every other government program, will become just another cistern for politicians to wet their beaks. How do you think they all get rich?

Because that's the true purpose of all this -- to create another means for our money to become theirs.

By the way, what about those Spaniards?

UPDATE: For some strange reason, people seem to think I'm unaware of the world history of slavery. I am not.

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A Nigerian's Uncomfortable History

For the geographically deficient among us.

At the New Yorker, Nigerian novelist Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani writes about her great-grandfather Nwaubani Ogogo -- a prosperous and honored man who became so by being a slave-trader. (For the record, I am not Nigerian. People keep asking.)

Long before Europeans arrived, Igbos enslaved other Igbos as punishment for crimes, for the payment of debts, and as prisoners of war. The practice differed from slavery in the Americas: slaves were permitted to move freely in their communities and to own property, but they were also sometimes sacrificed in religious ceremonies or buried alive with their masters to serve them in the next life. When the transatlantic trade began, in the fifteenth century, the demand for slaves spiked. Igbo traders began kidnapping people from distant villages. Sometimes a family would sell off a disgraced relative, a practice that Ijoma Okoro, a professor of Igbo history at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, likens to the shipping of British convicts to the penal colonies in Australia: “People would say, ‘Let them go. I don’t want to see them again.’ ” Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, nearly one and a half million Igbo slaves were sent across the Middle Passage. (...)

My father succeeded in transmitting to me not just Nwaubani Ogogo’s stories but also pride in his life. During my school days, if a friend asked the meaning of my surname, I gave her a narrative instead of a translation. But, in the past decade, I’ve felt a growing sense of unease. African intellectuals tend to blame the West for the slave trade, but I knew that white traders couldn’t have loaded their ships without help from Africans like my great-grandfather.

The Igbo also used their slaves for human sacrifices to dark spiritual forces. In the last portion of the piece, Ms. Nwaubani gives accounts of the stigma still attached to Nigerians who are descendants of slaves and of her family's attempt to cleanse itself of the evil forces and their consequences.

It's a fascinating article and I make no judgment on the Igbo tribe or Ms. Nwaubani's great-grandfather. That's God's job.

The piece is just a reminder that, in the affairs of men and women, no nation or ethnic group is clean.

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That Time When Some Carcass-Worshiper Called Me A House Negro Because I Suspected the Motives of Muslims

The following is from 2010. I was reminded of it when a guest in this post pointed out that Americans were not the first to export black Africans as slaves. I share it every now and then, usually when someone assumes that I know nothing about the 1400-year-long sacking of my father's home continent. But, with past slaving and slave-holding being all the rage of late, this information has become pertinent once again. 

As for the shame-monger who referred to me as a House Negro because I gave the public side-eye to  the Ground Zero Mosque -- which never got built -- it turns out that he is Philadelphia Family Court Judge Wayne Bennett. Bennett runs a blog called Field Negro.

 A lawyer calls a veteran with a two-year degree a House Negro. Don't you just love the irony?

Slightly edited; several links have been fixed.

*****

In 2008, I posted a YouTube video that had been part of a series exposing the truth about the Islamic Civilization with special emphasis on the horrors of the Trans-Saharan Slave Trade.  My intent was to counter the exhortations of Barack Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and the like-minded who continue to excoriate America and the rest of Western Civilization for past sins against black African Slaves and Americans of African descent.

The owners of YouTube, however, have blocked the account of John Alembillah Azumah -- the man interviewed in the series and the author of the book, The Legacy of Arab-Islam in Africa: A Quest for Inter-religious Dialogue. One can guess that some people were offended by the series -- a state of affairs which often occurs when the truth is told. [UPDATE 2022: video story available here.]

This particular copy of the video, entitled "Muslim Black Slavery - Islam Slave History of Black Africa," is now posted at MetaCafe by a third party.

Here's Azumah's preamble:

The success of Mohammedan Islam in deceiving, misinforming, deforming and contorting both history and reality over a period of almost fourteen hundred years has been astounding--that is, until now.

The greatest tragedy about this particular subject is that most of the descendants of African slavery--the black people in the Americas, around the world, as well as among the African blacks--are totally ignorant of the actual facts.

Before we lose the concentration of our visitors, I would like to make the following statement and then prove it: that the worst, most inhumane and most diabolical of the black African Slave Trade was initiated, refined, perpetrated and implemented by the Mohammedan Arabs and, later, aided and abetted by the black converts to Mohammedan Islam. 

I predict that, as usual, the two subcultures--those of denial of facts and of Political Correctness--will attack us without once disproving a single statement and/or conclusion that we make.

And here are some pertinent excerpts:

While the European involvement in the African Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade to the Americas lasted for just over three centuries, the Arab involvement in the African Slave Trade has lasted fourteen centuries and, in some parts of the Mohammedan world, is still continuing to this day. 

(...) 

It should also be noted that black slaves were castrated based on the assumption that the blacks had an ungovernable sexual appetite. 

(...) 

A comparison of the Islamic Slave Trade to the American Slave Trade reveals some extremely interesting contrasts. 

While two out of every three slaves shipped across the Atlantic were men, the proportions were reversed in the Islamic Slave Trade: two women for every man were enslaved by the Muslims. 

While the mortality rate of slaves being transported across the Atlantic was as high as ten percent, the percentage of slaves dying in transit in the Trans-Sahara[n] and East African Slave market was a staggering eighty to ninety percent. 

(...) 

While many children were born to slaves in the Americas--the millions of their descendants are citizens in Brazil and the United States of today--very few descendants of the slaves that ended up in the Middle East survived.
While most slaves who went to the Americas could marry and have families, most of the male slaves destined for the Middle East were castrated and most of the children born to the women were killed at birth.

Azumah pronounces the denial of the facts concerning the on-going Islamic Slave Trade as 'obscene.'

To those whose male ancestors survived American Slavery long enough to ensure that the former would be alive in the twenty-first century and, therefore, be able to refer to me as a House Negro for suspecting the motives of the putative builders of the "Ground Zero" Mosque, I feel pity.

That pity is mixed with a sense of astonishment, however, at this conclusion: that so many black people are so well indoctrinated with perpetual anger at the sins of America's past, that they would ignore the more egregious sins of Islam's present and desired future.  Hurling epithets and pretending that the opponents of the "Ground Zero" Mosque want to stifle freedom of religion is a lot easier than gathering the pertinent facts, connecting them, analyzing them and coming to a cogent conclusion, it seems.

On the other hand, perhaps such people have indeed concluded that Islam would like to expand its near destruction of those of African descent--with black men being the special and specified targets for annihilation.  Perhaps the slinging of epithets, etc. is merely a smokescreen--an insurance for the future.  Such people will be able to say to their future masters, "see? I stood up for the Ummah against that infidel, Ochieng."

Maybe such people are merely trying to protect their own testicles--such as they are.

Enslave a man's mind and the rest of him--including his testicles -- will follow; no more need for physical chains.

UPDATE 2017: John Alembillah Azumah's bonafides: he was the Director of the Centre for Islamic Studies at the London School of Theology. He is a convert from Islam to Christianity. From his Wikipedia profile:

He identifies five faces of Islam as: “the missional face (the face that seeks to convert the world to Islam), the mystical face (the face that focuses more on spiritual things), the ideological or political face (the face that seeks to occupy the public sphere by implementing sharia or Islamic law), the militant face (this is the face of Islam that seeks to achieve its ends by the use of violence), and the progressive face (this face is usually self-critical and seek to reread the Koran in light of present realities).” He believes that many Christians only see Islam through one of these faces and urges them to see Islam instead as an amalgamation of them all.

It appears that Azumah may have returned to his native Ghana, but I imagine that he stays on the move.

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