"Superintendent apologizes for canceling Lafayette mascot event"

Via Instapundit:  The Cumberland County school board likely will reconsider an environmental program that was cancelled because its mascot, the Marquis de Lafayette, owned slaves.

Fayetteville is named for Lafayette. Historians say he was an abolitionist who bought slaves with the intent to free them.

Interim Superintendent Tim Kinlaw apologized at the school board’s meeting Tuesday for causing division with the decision to cancel the program. He said he was trying to be sensitive to the minority population.

“It appears that by trying to be sensitive to part of the community, I was insensitive to another part,” Kinlaw said.

School board Chairman Greg West said after the meeting that the board likely will discuss the program at an upcoming committee meeting.

Kinlaw called off the “Flip-Tap-Stack!” program, which was going to be an initiative by the Sustainable Sandhills environmental organization. The program was meant to teach school children to empty trash from disposable cafeteria trays into trash cans and stack the trays for disposal.

Several speakers at the meeting talked about Lafayette’s positions against slavery.

(Link to more)

"Georgetown to Give Slave Descendants Priority for Admission"

"Georgetown University will give preference in admissions to the descendants of slaves owned by the Maryland Jesuits as part of its effort to atone for profiting from the sale of enslaved people."

Georgetown president John DeGioia told news outlets that the university in Washington will implement the admissions preferences. He says Georgetown will need to identify and reach out to descendants of slaves and recruit them to the university.

On Thursday morning, a university committee released a report that also called on its leaders to offer a formal apology for the university’s participation in the slave trade.

In 1838, two priests who served as president of the university orchestrated the sale of 272 people to pay off debts at the school. The slaves were sent from Maryland to plantations in Louisiana.

The university says it will give descendants of those slaves “the same consideration we give members of the Georgetown community” when they apply.

I wonder if I'm the descendent of slaves. What Am I missing out on here?

"Ben Affleck demanded..."

"...PBS program hide his slave-owning ancestor"

Ben Affleck insisted on censoring the fact that one of his ancestors owned slaves from PBS show “Finding Your Roots,” the Sony email hack has revealed.

In a hacked Sony email from July 22, 2014, now available on WikiLeaks, the show’s host, Henry Louis Gates Jr., writes to Sony USA chief Michael Lynton asking for advice: “One of our guests has asked us to edit out something about one of his ancestors–the fact that he owned slaves. Now, four or five of our guests this season descend from slave owners, including Ken Burns. We’ve never had anyone ever try to censor or edit what we found. He’s a megastar. What do we do?”

Twitter JeffB commented...

Hilarious not b/c this somehow makes him guilty of anything, rather b/c he obv'sly THOUGHT it did. White guilt taken to glorious absurdity.
— Jeff B@AoSHQDD (@EsotericCD) April 18, 2015

How Many Slaves Were Brought To America?

Monday's topic started me thinking about that question.   I thought the number would be in the millions.  We were taught that in high school, I believe.  Millions of slaves were brought to the United States from Africa in wooden ships.  Some of those millions died on the journey, but still, millions arrived here.  Yes, that was the history lesson.  Millions of Africans were brought to America as slaves.

Finding good information posed a challenge.  Finally I thought Henry Louis Gates, Jr. would be a good authority.  Here are his credentials.  Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University.

That works for me.  his research should be scholarly, and peer reviewed.  Here's what Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes in a blog called The Root.:

The most comprehensive analysis of shipping records over the course of the slave trade is the Trans-Atlantic Salve Trade Database, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson. (While the editors are careful to say that all of their figures are estimates, I believe that they are the best estimates that we have, the proverbial "gold standard" in the field of the study of the slave trade.)

Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America.

And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That's right: a tiny percentage.

In fact, the overwhelming percentage of the African slaves were shipped directly to the Caribbean and South America; Brazil received 4.86 million Africans alone! Some scholars estimate that another 60,000 to 70,000 Africans ended up in the United States after touching down in the Caribbean first, so that would bring the total to approximately 450,000 Africans who arrived in the United States over the course of the slave trade.

There's a solid number.  "Only" 450,000 Africans arrived in the United States over the course of the slave trade, not tens of millions of slaves as some of us may have been taught.

I emphasized the word only above because I want to be clear, one slave was one slave too many. Slavery was horrible then, and is horrible where it is practiced today.  I am not trying to minimize the evil of slavery.

In the comments section of Monday's topic someone mentioned Irish slaves.  That was also a horrible thing, although its history seems to have been given a back seat to African slavery.

From the book White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain's White Slaves in America:

They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.

Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.

And from The Centre for Research on Globalization comes this:

The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.

African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.

In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.

England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.

There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry. In 1839, Britain finally decided on it’s own to end it’s participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.

But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong.

None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.

While not in the same numbers as slaves brought to the United States from Africa, Irish slaves still were  a significant number in the US.

Are you still with me?  Or has this topic droned on far too long and you've gone into skimming mode.  I'm not sure what to do here, because I've got another really good read on the subject of Irish slavery.

What to do, what to do?  I need to go think about this.

Time passes.

I'm back.  A shot of Jameson has cleared me mind.   I'm going to post a brief excerpt from the article, which is from the Daily Kos, of all places, and is very interesting, and then I'll post a link to the entire thing and you can read (or not read) it as you wish.

“...the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period,” writes Martin. “It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.”

Colonel William Brayne wrote to English authorities in 1656 urging the importation of Negro slaves on the grounds that, "as the planters would have to pay much more for them, they would have an interest in preserving their lives, which was wanting in the case of (Irish)...." many of whom, he charged, were killed by overwork and cruel treatment. African Negroes cost generally about 20 to 50 pounds Sterling, compared to 900 pounds of cotton (about 5 pounds Sterling) for an Irish. They were also more durable in the hot climate, and caused fewer problems. The biggest bonus with the Africans though, was they were NOT Catholic, and any heathen pagan was better than an Irish Papist.

You can read the entire article here.

Random thought - I don't think anyone ever wrote a musical about Irish slavery.

There Are Thirty Million Slaves In The World; Including Sixty Thousand In The U.S.

So says this article in the Washington Post.  The article includes a world map of slavery showing the percentage of each country's population who are, according to the article, enslaved.

When you open the linked article the map is interactive and can be enlarged for easier viewing.

Before continuing, let's stipulate that slavery in any form is horrible. Slavery is immoral, it is illegal, and it is an outrage that all people should stand against. It should and must be abolished.

The linked article draws heavily from information provided by an organization called the Walk Free Foundation, a self-described organization dedicated to ending modern slavery. Data from Walk Free's 2014 Global Slavery Index, on which the map above was created was "developed through extensive consultations with an international and independent Expert Advisory Group" according to their website.

But it doesn't name the "Expert Advisory Group", nor does it describe the reasons for their expertise, nor the methods by which the data used in creating the 2014 Global Slavery Index were gathered, sorted, and verified.

We think of slavery as a practice of the past, an image from Roman colonies or 18th-century American plantations, but the practice of enslaving human beings as property still exists. There are 29.8 million people living as slaves right now, according to a comprehensive new report issued by the Australia-based Walk Free Foundation.

This is not some softened, by-modern-standards definition of slavery. These 30 million people are living as forced laborers, forced prostitutes, child soldiers, child brides in forced marriages and, in all ways that matter, as pieces of property, chattel in the servitude of absolute ownership.

I have questions.

Look at the interactive map. It seems to make sense, right? But where is North Korea? The North Korean government has enslaved its entire population, so shouldn't it be shown on the map in the darkest of colors? If North Korea isn't even shown, how can we have certainty that the rest of the data are correct, especially if the data source is unnamed? This is troublesome.

Why is there no breakout of numbers by type of slavery? Slavery of all types is lumped together. For example, that means that someone who has chosen to work as a prostitute is lumped together with someone who has been sold into prostitution, and with others who have been forced into military conscription, enslaved in diamond mines, agriculture, etc. The lack of specific data is cause to cast a leery eye on the story.

Slavery is bad, horrible. What the Washington Post has done is to create an article based entirely on information sourced from the Walk Free Foundation. And that information, while compelling, lacks detail that supports its conclusions. In doing that, the Washington Post published a compelling article, but also an article that appears to lack a factual basis.

And that is irresponsible, given the horror of slavery.

Oscar Wilde On The Future Of Machinery

[This post was inspired by Haz's blog post and discussion in the comments here]

Oscar Wilde wrote in his essay "The Soul of Man under Socialism:"

Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants. Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing. At present machinery competes against man. Under proper conditions machinery will serve man. There is no doubt at all that this is the future of machinery, and just as trees grow while the country gentleman is asleep, so while Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work. The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

Wilde was writing in 1891, at a time when slavery had been abolished in most of the Western world. Yet there certainly were "wage slaves" then and still are. The American Progressive movement really began to take off around that time (1892).  Make what you will of Wilde's thoughts on slavery -- it's been widely quoted -- I was more interested in his take on machinery ownership.