#alltragediesmatter

I need to address some incredibly offensive, inaccurate, and racist comments by . . . some dude whose name is not even important to this discussion. His arrogant comments however need to be addressed. In several deluded comments he made in response to a piece I wrote explaining why white people cannot claim to be victims of racism, he made some statements that were patently untrue. He claims that there have been lots of other races of people who have been enslaved and had their histories, identities, religions, and names stolen from them and they aren’t whining and crying about it like us sniveling African Americans. Well, let me set the record straight.

First and foremost, there has never been another group of people kidnapped from their homeland, forced to give up their names, forced to give up their language, forced to give up their families, art, history, culture, and their entire identities to the same extent as Africans who were enslaved in America. Not the Irish, not the Jews, not Cambodians, no one on the planet has endured what the descendants of slaves suffered. Want to know how I know this? Because white people won’t let you forget about Jon Benet Ramsey 30 years later, they won’t let you forget about OJ Simpson, you know they would never let you forget about something as horrific as an event that robbed them of their humanity for generations. The racist troll stated that the Jewish people were enslaved and they pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and it’s only us lowly niggers who keep insisting that we are the victims of racism.

OK, so let me ask a few questions to see if the tragedy of the Jewish Holocaust compares to the tragedy of slavery in a game I like to call Oppression Olympics.

1. How long were the Jewish people enslaved during the Holocaust? Was it for generations? Were Jews taken into concentration camps and made to live there under German rule as inferiors for multiple generations without being able to read, write, or get any education? No, they weren’t. The individuals who entered the concentration camps knew freedom, autonomy, they knew independence before they were imprisoned. They were ripped from a world where they functioned as normal human beings. Those individuals who were fortunate enough to survive that hell, when they were freed, they knew how to live and function as a human being in a world that saw them as human beings.

Africans who were enslaved, those ripped from Africa, transported to the New World, they also knew what it meant to be free. Here’s the kicker, slaves born into the system of slavery, those who never knew freedom a day in their lives, those who never made an adult decision about their destinies, about their lives, never had the same luxury as Jews who were imprisoned in Nazi Germany. Slaves born into they system never learned to read, write, they never learned how to run a household on their own, they never learned how to properly raise their children. Not because they were inherently inferior but because those options were not available to them because of their skin color.

2. Were Jews robbed of their history and identity? Hmmm, excellent question. Jews . . . created history. The entire Old Testament bible is based on their supposed greatness. Jews have the very same religion they had since, as they claim, God created Earth. Do African Americans have the religion our ancestors practiced? Not only do we not know what religion our ancestors practiced, we have been beaten, brainwashed, and convinced that the religion our ancestors practiced was heathen. Jews have a language they can call their own. Jews have songs they can sing that go back millennia. Jews have the same surnames they have had since the beginning of time. Jews have art, food, and books that go back thousands of years. Want to know what African Americans have? We have negro spirituals we learned under the whip of the white slave master because it was illegal for Blacks to practice their own traditions or tell our own stories of greatness. It was illegal for Blacks to even beat a damn drum. What if Jews had bar/bat mitzvahs taken from them? If there were no Jewish holidays on the calendar THEN they might be able to claim equality in the Oppression Olympics.

3. Were Jews dehumanized for their appearance? Well, I’m sure some racist troll who thinks he can put me in my place is going to suggest that Jews’ unique hair texture was different and thus it made them easier to be identified as Jewish, thus, it’s the very same thing as Blacks who were enslaved because of our beautiful dark, smooth skin, our gorgeous thick, wooly, hair texture, our beautiful facial features like our wide noses and our thick lips. We were dehumanized because our women had bigger asses and our men had bigger dicks. It’s pretty easy to take off your yarmulke to hide your Jewish identity. It’s not so easy to take off your skin though. But, I’m sure, racist nudist troll is going to insist that it doesn’t matter, that those things are unimportant. Well, let me take your child, brand them with a burning hot iron, rename them, denigrate them daily for their stringy limp hair, their thin unkissable lips, their flat asses, their inferior genitalia, and their pink, pasty, sickly looking skin. Let me do it to their children for their entire lives. Let me do it to 15 generations of your offspring and then we can see if there is similar damage done to their psyches.

Jews and Germans, for the most part, had the same hair, same skin color, same facial features, same body types. If you put a SS uniform on a Jew, the overwhelming majority of them would be able to pass as their oppressor. Here is a fun fact, slaves didn't have that same luxury. They couldn't pass as their oppressor, pretend to be one of their slave masters simply by putting on a different outfit.
4. Were Jews taken from their homeland? Ahhhh, here is where Jews can claim some competition in the Oppression Olympics. Exodus. Jews were driven from their home at one point in history. Were they kidnapped? Were they transported to another country thousands of miles away living in the piss and shit of strangers chained to them? Were they fed food infested with maggots and rat shit? Hmmmm. Were they chained to the hull of a ship with no water or fresh air? They walked for 40 years in the desert, united, together. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that is not the same thing as being captive on a slave ship.

There is another difference. Jews were given a little plot of land called Israel to do with as they pleased, including the systematic oppression of Palestinians at their discretion and pleasure. I’m going to also note here, and forgive my repetitiveness, but at no point in history were Jews robbed of their God, their names, their culture, their identities. It makes a difference. Want to know how I know? Because if it didn’t matter, Blacks and Jews would be in the same position today. If what happened to Jews was as tragic as what happened to Africans who were enslaved and their descendants then Jews were be in the same predicament as African Americans today. They aren’t. It’s not because they are more resilient, not because they were able to rebound better, not because they aren’t sniveling and whiny and playing the victim card. It’s because what has happened to them doesn’t compare to what happened to slaves. IF it was the same, if the impact of the horrors of American slavery were the exact same as what happened to any other race of people you would find the same outcome. Jews are not better at picking themselves up by their bootstraps. Jews are not better at rebounding from tragedy. Simply stated, what Jews endured in history does not even compare to what slaves endured.

Here’s where I need to empower the Black readers. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have read and understood the context of what I’m trying to teach you, if you can wrap your head around the fact that no other race of people have endured what we have, if you muster up the courage to confront white people with your understandings, inevitably, you are going to encounter the, “YOU”RE RACIST,” chants from whites who are going to be offended that you would even suggest that what Blacks endured was worse than any other crime against humanity. Here’s what I want you to ask them. First, ask them if every tragedy was equal, if every crime against humanity was the same, if there was no difference whatsoever, why is it that Blacks in America (and in colonized Africa) have suffered greater than any other race and seem to have such difficulty pulling ourselves up by our collective bootstraps like other races? Ahhhhh, not an easy question to answer if you are racist and think there there is something inherently inferior about Blacks in the first place. The ONLY reason Blacks occupy more ghettos, we are more disenfranchised, is because we have been systematically oppressed in ways that far surpass anything that any other race of people has ever endured.

Next, ask them why they are so offended that a Black person would suggest that slavery was the worst crime against humanity. You see, inherent in racism is this notion that if Blacks claim what happened to us was worse than what happened to other races, we are an arrogant, uppity nigger. White people have to have to have suffered more. They have to be the most maligned. They can’t stand to let anyone say that what happened to Africans who were enslaved and their descendants was worst than the Irish and the Jews or anyone else in history because we aren’t human to them. If this were a real competition, and Africans born in America won the Gold medal for being oppressed, white people would contest the results, they would fight and scream that they were the rightful winners. Why? Because they don’t give a damn that millions of Africans were thrown overboard ships. They don’t care that white slavers raped women to make a profit from their children. They don’t care about the horrors we endured because all that matters to them is trying to silence our voices. They only care about refuting facts with their distorted lies in order to claim superior status.

One has to wonder what points white people lose, what privilege they have to give up if they lose the Oppression Olympics. Whatever the cost to them it must be great because they refuse to acknowledge that the American slave trade was the greatest crime against humanity ever. The truly non-racist person would say, “Wow, thank you for opening my eyes to the horrors of slavery. I think what happened during slavery was reprehensible and I for one am willing to adjust my thinking to help eradicate the racism that exists today because of it.” The racist will read the first paragraph or two and then say that Blacks are whiny, that what happened to other races was worse, and that we are just making excuses for our inherently lazy, criminal, dysfunctional behavior. I’m here to tell you that not one unhealthy behavior exhibited by Blacks in America today is not the result of our collective enslavement and the horrors inflicted on us by evil, sadistic white people. Sad, but oh so true.

STOP Thinking Slaves were Inferior!

You have been brainwashed!  The common belief, the common perception across this racist nation is that Africans were inferior and that is why whites enslaved them.  We have been led to believe that white people had a responsibility to enslave Africans because they recognized that there was something inherently inferior in their beautiful black skin, their wide noses, thick lips, wooly hair, in the way they worshiped The Creator, and in their ease and comfort with their bodies and their sexuality.  That is the lie that has been perpetuated and that is maintained even until today.  In no way shape or form were Africans inferior.  Any race of people who would kidnap and murder tens of millions of people just because they were different from them is the very definition of inferior.  Any race of people who would transport tens of millions of people thousands of miles across an ocean, taking them from their families, murdering untold MILLIONS more people in the process, who thought so little of human life that they would house human beings in vile and disgusting conditions, piled on top of one another, laying in piss and shit, fed food not fit for humans, for financial gain, for MONEY, is the poster child for inferiority.  No facial feature, no hair type, no skin color can make a person inferior.  It’s not possible.  What makes a race of people inferior is their lack of humanity, their lack of empathy, their xenophobia, their intolerance, NOT the width of their nostrils or the amount of melanin in their skin. 

You have been bamboozled!  Everything in our society is based on the belief that slaves were inherently inferior and whites were inherently superior.  Ask yourself, is it superior to use a race of people to work for you, to profit from their labor, and to never pay those people a dime in their lifetimes?  Those sounds like the actions of a lazy, greedy, inherently inferior race of people, doesn’t it?  How on earth could that be considered superior?  Yet somehow, the common belief is that slave owners were superior, that they alone possessed a God-given right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  Is it superior to deny a race of people an education, to deny human beings the basic rights that are inherent to them?  Is it superior to beat a person’s religion out of them?  How much would have you have to beat a person to make them renounce their God and worship yours?  Systematically beating, raping, hanging, lynching, and murdering people just because of the color of their skin does not constitute superiority in any way, shape, or form.  Selling a newborn baby from a mother’s loving arms is heinous and reprehensible, not superior.  If one were TRULY inherently superior, they certainly would not have a need to oppress anyone.  A superior race of people would be one that could survive cultural annihilation, who could excel despite being generationally oppressed.   Black people are ashamed of being descended from slaves: hard-working, resilient, gifted, and innocent of any wrongdoing, and whites are proud of being descendants of slave owners: abusive, sadistic, greedy, and ego-maniacal.  Does that make sense to you? 

You have been hoodwinked!  Blacks are socio-economically, intellectually, and morally inferior because . . . well, just because.  It’s the natural order of things, we are inherently more stupid because of our skin color.  That’s what every single solitary thing in our society will tell you.  That’s what the vast and overwhelming majority of white people believe at their core.  It is impossible for them to believe that the actions of their oppression for hundreds of years have created a race of people who have been disadvantaged by their greed, by their inflated egos, by their distorted sense of superiority.  There is NOTHING, absolutely nothing about the genetic make-up, DNA, brains, or skin color of Black people that makes us inferior.  Every single, solitary unhealthy or dysfunctional trait we might possess as a people is directly related to white people’s efforts to psychologically, economically, and physically destroy us as a people for generations. The only think that makes us disadvantaged as a people is directly proportionate to the actions of white people denying us access to education, employment, housing, and equal justice.  Black people are not more criminal, lazy, or prone to violence in the least.  The violent race of people are the ones who murdered millions, tens of millions of Natives to steal their land, again for profit.  The violent race of people are the ones who burned down entire towns to keep Blacks from being self-sufficient and acquiring their own wealth.  The truly violent, inferior race of people are the ones who sent out postcards of lynchings where they were smiling and happy in front of dismembered, burning, dead Black bodies.  Who would do that?  Certainly not a superior people. 

Think about that! 

I AM Worthy

Deeply ingrained in the psyche of slaves was the belief, the unshakeable BELIEF that Black people were meant to suffer.  They grew to believe, shackled under the oppressive physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual chains of slavery, that their life was intended to be painful, that they had to sacrifice, that there were destined to accept second, third, and fourth best.  Slaves were beaten, raped, held captive, tortured, and worked like animals and told that their rewards would only come when they accepted white Jesus and got to heaven.  And with no hope for wealth and affluence, with no hope of dignity or justice, they held on to the notion that their pain would end when they were washed by the blood of their lily-white savior once they got to the pearly gates. 

White people, not only just slave owners but all white people, had no such debilitating belief beat into them.  They believed, just as they do now, that the world is their oyster, that they can do and say anything without repercussions.  They have never known the concept of pain and suffering being intrinsic to their identity.  Sure, they have known pain, but it’s not tied to their identity, it’s not because of their whiteness.  They believe that they are the best, that they deserve the best, that they don’t have to do a damn thing to deserve the best, that they are entitled to their hearts’ desires simply ‘cuz. 

Black people today, in 2015, still largely believe that we must suffer, that pain is part and parcel of our identity.  The messages passed down, the lessons taught to us from our parents and grandparents who brutally beat us, who silenced us, who stifled our creativity, who tried their best to protect us from disappointment and injustice, is that we have to be long-suffering, that we have to settle, that we are inherently undeserving of fairness, wealth, respect, and just plain ole happiness because of our skin color.  We are conditioned to believe that we have to accept second best, that we must swallow our anger, we must not offend the white man, that we aren’t worthy of luxury or wealth, joy; we overwhelmingly belief that we are undeserving of something as basic as love. 

Some of us in the last few decades have broken the chains, we have changed our beliefs and we are beginning to believe, deep down in our souls, that we are deserving of wealth and abundance, that we are not inherently unworthy creatures like our forefathers and mothers were forced to believe.  Regrettably, we have also acquired a gross materialism and capitalistic narcissism, a replication of the pathologies of the greed and the obliviousness of white people who think the universe owes them, that they are deserving for no other reason than having breath in their lungs.  I’m working diligently on changing my own core beliefs, I’m determined to see myself as worthy of the best that life has to offer.  The psychological chains of slavery are still not broken, they are heavy and burdensome and suffocating.  Most of us still are imprisoned by the chains that we are only as good as the crumbs that have been thrown to us, that we will only know peace and joy when we die.  WE MUST CHANGE OUR CORE BELIEFS.  We must FEEL worthy deep down in our hearts and souls.  We must start to believe that we are inherently deserving of wonderful things, of success and peace and abundant and over-flowing blessings. 

And so it is. 

The Middle Passage

  

Question: Describe the Middle Passage as extensively as possible, speaking of diseases, philosophies of packing, day-to-day maintenance of the ship, etc.  Then discuss the psychological ramifications of this historical moment on the construction of a distinctly African-American identity.

The term “Middle Passage” is an emotionally benign and sanitized term that relates to the transportation of millions upon millions of African captives across the Atlantic.  Termed thusly for the second leg of the journey for vile, European slave “traders” on their expeditions of carnage and psychic destruction across the seas, it was the middle portion of their triangular, transatlantic journey.  For the captive African, it was their passage to the very depths of hell and evil. In many ways, for the enslaved African, it signified not a middle passage but the beginning of the end.   An end to freedom, dignity, self-sufficiency and the cultural legacy of a rich and varied homeland and signified a passage to the “sacrifice of living Africans on the altar of capitalist accumulation.” (Munford, Black Ordeal, p. 274)  The ideological origin of the term Middle Passage is disrespectful to the Africans that died and those that amazingly survived. The Malevolent Voyage, as it should be more aptly termed to reflect the egregious, inhumane nature of that fateful passage not only of time and distance but also of life, was an indelible marker in the destruction of African peoples.

Facing towards the setting sun, emerging from the dungeons of carnage in West Africa, the captive Africans faced their sea-bound destinies guilty of absolutely no wrongdoing, save that of being born with beautiful, black skin.  Clarence J. Munford brilliantly articulates the essence of the impact of the Middle Passage on the captive African:

For its victims, the Middle Passage meant an end finally to the trauma

of initial capture and the nightmare of coffles, barracoons and the first, flesh-searing branding, only to embark anew on a journey beyond hope, a voyage of fiendish torture and death that enabled the sadist among the white seadogs to realize some of their most fevered yearnings. (Munford, The Black Ordeal of Slavery . . . , p.273) 

The true tales of horror and destruction of the Middle Passage will never be known.  One can only imagine, pieced together from the recounted tales of emotionally bereft and pathological European seamen, what the experience was truly like for the captive African.  This author’s contemporary mind cannot fathom the conditions under which Africans had to survive to ensure the perpetuation of generations of African people throughout the Diaspora.  Ripped from their families and homes, their movements restricted under heavy chains, subjected to physical abuse, rape and torture, captive Africans survived aboard those floating coffins amidst the smell of urine, feces, sweat, blood, vomit, and probably the most paralyzing, the smell of fear. 

French, Dutch, Portuguese, British and Spanish in origin, slave ships traveled to the shores of Africa to gather their human cargo for transportation to the “New World.” Traded, sold, and kidnapped into captivity, the enslaved African was branded with a hot iron and renamed a European name and logged onto the ship’s manifest like sundry, inanimate provisions for the trip.  Coasting, or the process whereby slave ships lay anchor off the African coast to collect captives for a most profitable journey, averaged four to eight months in duration.  Able to see their beloved homeland and unaware of their fate, chained Africans were held beneath the decks, growing more anxious and more sick with each passing hour-- minute.  It was there, within swimming distance of Africa, that mutiny was most likely to occur.  Once out at sea, the hope for salvation, for freedom, faded like the distant horizon of their beloved motherland.

The ships themselves ranged in size from fifty to two hundred tons.  Commonly, a ship of standard proportions held anywhere between four hundred and six hundred captives. Generally, crewmen would be proportioned one man to three tons, with higher ratios occurring when the fear of mutiny was greater.  The more greedy captains were known as “tight packers,” forcing as many Africans on board with complete disregard to even the most remote concept of humanity, in an effort to reach the Americas with sufficient Africans for which they could make private transactions.  The concept was rooted in the belief that the more Africans that were on board, the more Africans that would make it to the final destination, thus greater profits.  They would simply pile bodies on top on one another with no respect for the human beings that they kidnapped and traded like cattle.  “Loose packers” were the individuals that felt that fewer Africans per square foot meant less disease, rebellion and death among the captives.  It was not out of concern for their “passengers” that loose packers based their philosophy but simply an effort to decrease the mortality rate and potential danger to crewmembers and increase the profits for the surviving Africans that fostered their practices. 

The conditions onboard were the most deplorable and contemptible conditions conceivable.  As to the space allotted for captives, Munford describes the common dimensions, “A ship of common dimensions had a battery or a between-deck.  This was a space between the spare deck and the first bridge, about 5 feet 8 inches high.  A platform, 6 feet wide, ran the length of the ship.  The space between it and the upper bridge was two and a half feet.  Captives lay stretched on the bridge platform and between-decks,” (p.281).  That meant that captives lay chained arm to arm, leg to leg, for the duration of a trip that averaged five to nine weeks, in a space where they could barely lift their heads.  In order to relieve themselves, chained captives had to crawl over the dead and dying to reach a barrel for elimination.  Dragging with them their fellow cellmates, for it was certainly a prison of sorts, the effort was most often futile and resulted in captives eliminating where they lay.  Pools of excrement and waste dripped into the eyes, mouths and open sores of anyone lying beneath or around someone too weak or physically unable to make that degrading sojourn.  Many times, small children lost their lives, suffocated at the bottoms of the vats of filth.  The excrement pails were emptied once a day, if at all, and occasionally the decks would be washed down with seawater and vinegar. 

The age of the captives ranged from preteen to early twenties, with only the most healthy and the strongest Africans being “selected” to make the journey.  It seems rather peculiar that any human being could be deemed strong and/or healthy after being subjected to the atrocities of the enslavement process.  If one were reasonably healthy upon boarding the ship, the voyage most certainly ensured that they would not be healthy at the end of the trip.  Unconscionable conditions existed not only to eat away at the bodies of the captives but also to consume their very souls.  The list of ailments attributed to enslaved Africans reads like a medical school journal of fatal, if not surreal, diseases; flux, dysentery, scurvy, typhoid fever, small pox, yellow fever, tuberculosis, leprosy et al. were common occurrences aboard the slave ships.  Yaws, a venereal disease that would cause its victims to itch themselves into a state of insanity and opthamalia, a condition that caused temporary blindness, were just a few or the exotic maladies to which African captives were exposed.  Plagued with parasites and rodents, housed in quarters with insufficient ventilation, and unlikely to receive any medical attention, each and every captive aboard the slave ships was exposed to unthinkable infection.  The medical “treatment” for captives oft times amounted to nothing more than being throw overboard, inconsequential fodder for predatory sharks. 

Mortality rates going as high as an estimated twenty five percent, crewmen learned that physical activity lead to a greater chance of African survival.  Weather permitting, slaves were led on deck to “dance” in small groups.  Forced to move to the beat of a drum, the captives had the chance to stretch their limb and feel sunshine on their skin.  Africans were not allowed the dignity of choosing a watery grave over the indignation of enslavement and certain precautions were made to ensure that no one jumped overboard.  Nets on the sides of the boats were in place to ensure that voluntary drowning was not an option.  Mothers, however, would occasionally manage to fling their newborns African babies beyond the nets and send their children to death, their bodies far from the reaches of their pale-faced captors, their souls forever free. 

Nutrition, or more aptly the lack thereof, contributed greatly to the horrific conditions of the African captives.  More than lack of food, lack of water was responsible for deaths of innumerous enslaved Africans.  Subsisting on a diet not fit for even the most vile of beasts, captive Africans suffered from dehydration and starvation.  Many times, in an act of defiance, captured Africans would refuse to eat the slop given them as a suicidal act.  The crewmen would threaten the Africans with burning, hot coals about their lips and force them to swallow it as an example to others that might consider death by starvation.  A mixture of horse beans and flour was not much incentive to eat in addition to the fact that it might be crawling with maggots and vermin.  Provisions were made for each African to have one barrel of fresh water per voyage.  If inclement weather or extenuating circumstances led to a miscalculation of supplies, crewmembers apportioned whatever water was drinkable for themselves, leaving the captive Africans to die or throwing them overboard so as not to have to hear their incessant moans. During the Middle Passage, the strongest may not have been the ones to survive the voyage; it might simply have been a matter of the ones closest to the food being able to survive.

Exactly how many Africans died during the Middle Passage will never be known.  Estimates including those that survived, those lost at sea, and those that were slaughtered and died before ever reaching the slave ships range from fifteen to one hundred million. There was little, if any, incentive to keep accurate records of accurate counts of the ships’ human cargo, allotting for extra profit from private sales between captains and eager buyers. Perhaps an even more elusive figure is the amount of money made from the trade of African lives for currency.  It can be considered trade only under the superficial guise of trading a human being for money.  On those vessels where the “cargo” was ensured, a captain could conceivably claim that all of the Africans contracted a fatal disease and that he had to throw them overboard, thus receiving the money owed on the policy on their heads and the money received from their “illegal” sale.  Piracy accounted for much of the loss of captives within striking distance of the final destination.  Sea-faring thieves could come along after the most arduous portion of the journey and commandeer the captive Africans for their own ill-gotten gains. 

Mutiny aboard the slave ships was not uncommon.  Armed with nothing more than the sheer will to live and the determination of survival, captive Africans often organized rebellions without the benefit of a common language among them and no hope for escape other than death.  Even the stories of the mutinies that have survived the passage of time are flavored by the storytellers themselves, white crewmen who were able to cease and desist the efforts of the enraged and willful Africans.  Buried at sea are the stories of the Africans who overcame their captors only to slaughter them and remain unable to navigate their way back home.  Plentiful are the stories of Africans who allegedly sold their brethren off to the European slave traders, but rare is the story of how Africans patrolled the coast of Africa in small boats, liberating captives on ships docked at port.  Sea captains had good reason to not report accounts of uprisings because it would jeopardize their future expeditions, and future income. 

One of the only first-hand accounts of the Middle Passage from the vantage point of the captive African is illustrated in the book, The Interesting Narrative of Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African: an Authoritative Text/Written by Himself.  Written in the vernacular of the enslaver, Equiano speaks of his experiences of capture as a child of eleven years old.  He recounts the belief upon being brought upon the ship that he was going to be put in one of the large pots and eaten by the savagely brutal white men. He laments about the sensation of “death spirits” on the ship, and his desire for death as an escape to the abysmal conditions that surrounded him.  Tales of the captives’ experience written in the native tongues of Africa may not exist, and if they do, they have remained hidden or have been destroyed. 

The ramifications and psychological inheritance of the Middle Passage have never fully been examined.  S.E. Anderson suggests that the individuals that survived the Middle Passage possessed a different genetic makeup than those that remained on the shores of Africa.  For example, excessive sodium loss was common during transportation across the ocean.  He goes on to suggest that sodium-conserving descendents of Africans who were enslaved may be more susceptible to “salt-sensitive” hypertension than other people have a tendency to be (Anderson, Black Holocaust for Beginners, p. 101). Certainly, extensive physiological studies need to be conducted to ascertain the genetic damage to the immune systems of the African captives and their descendants and the role it plays on the health of African Americans.  Psychologically, the origins of distrust, self-hatred, and competitiveness all had some foundation in the experience of the Middle Passage. The forced competition for something as simple as fresh air among people that shared the same bonds but different ethnicities may very well be the origin of turf wars and gang allegiances that exist today. 

If one can speculate as to the origins of the breakdown of the Black male/female relationship in contemporary society, the genesis may very well lie in the bowels of the slave ships.  The ratio of men to women averaged two to one. Women and children frequently went unchained but were always housed separately from the male captives. Forced gender segregation, unhealthy ratios, and a barbarous, competitive climate certainly created a communication rift the likes of which may not have been transcended to this very day.  Certainly, it is in the interpretation of the instances of rape of the women aboard the ship that a misogynist slant lay. 

As Vincent Harding recounts in his work entitled, There is a River, “many Black women resisted the most personal of white invasions and instead, turned the situation to the purposes of their people’s fight for freedom (p. 12).  This sort of sentiment makes light of the psychological and emotional devastation of the act of rape and places the responsibility of resistance within the loins of captive African women. Harding speaks of the women who chose the struggle for black freedom over a privileged [emphasis added] bondage among white men, as if to say that repeated rape and defilement was in some way a meritorious benefit of those that did not slay their violators.  From such a statement, the assumption must certainly be made that the weak women submitted to such tortures to make things easy on themselves and because they were not committed to the act of revolution.  That is an absolutely absurd and insane presupposition that reduces women to a sexual object rather than human being and forms the foundation for the gold-digger stereotype commonly associated with Black women. 

Nowhere in his work does Harding mention the male victims of rape onboard the ship neither does he accuse the men of the being the benefactors of sex in exchange for comfort nor does he imply that they were responsible for mounting insurrections.  If the captive African male slaves believed as Harding does, that sex and rape are synonymous, that mindset essentially set the stage for the objectification of Black women and the concept of sex in exchange for goods and services that plagues the African-American community.  Perhaps, the African male captive simply died inside, seeing his sister, mother and wife, repeatedly abused, unable to protect her from such abuses.  Profoundly ashamed of the fact that he could not defend her, he turned his back on her, creating a chasm between Black men and women that has yet to be healed. Whatever the scenario, the blood that runs through the collective veins of Black people on this side of the Atlantic is the blood of those indefatigable spirits, those courageous women that somehow managed to survive repeated rape and degradation to live to see another day.  In essence, our existence is owed to the African women that did not stage rebellion and die at the bottom of the sea, but to those that internalized the pain and found a way to survive.

The end of the journey meant a new life of hell.  It was on reaching the New World that the captive Africans assumed their new title, that of slave.  John Hope Franklin discloses:

Perhaps not more than half the slaves shipped from Africa ever became effective workers in the New World.  Many of those that had not died of disease or committed suicide by jumping overboard were permanently disabled by the ravages of some dread disease or by maiming which often resulted from the struggle against the chains (Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, p. 57).

The death and disfiguration toll of the Middle Passage is astronomical when multiplied by the hundreds of years that the transatlantic transportation of kidnapped Africans occurred.  There was no turning back, there was no going home. 

The Middle Passage was not an historical moment but rather an historical era of the most devastating dimensions.  It was the birthplace of disease, dysfunction, and destruction for Africans around the globe.  The Black Holocaust was nothing less than centuries of oppression and genocide perpetuated by Europeans on innocent, African victims that endured to live on in body and in spirit.  The Middle Passage is not over.  Dispersed Africans will forever be tethered and bound to the vessels of ruination, drowning in the sea of abandon, until the proper homage is paid to those that perished and those that dared to live on.  

Scottie Lowe 2003