notes common misnomers about slavery

8/6/2019 Notes Common Misnomers about Slavery

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A BFAP thaAnthropologist Assignment:Study these notes on the Common Misnomers on the Peculiar Institution of Slavery

HipHop Americans and Americans as a whole have some common misconceptions about

African chattel slavery in the Americas. These misconceptions blur the realities of historyand affect cultural understandings today. The following are some notes for you to ponder,

research and expound on. These notes are meant for you do your homework on and help

you look at this thing from a HipHop anthropological perspective. There are noreferences because this is a homework assignment, you have to read and study for

yourself as the Honorable Marcus Mosiah Garvey said, “Read and study for yourself or

you will be ignorant of the world and mankind.”

1. Africans Sold other Africans into Slavery: this is often the first thing that

people outside the African community bring up as a means to place blame on the

atrocities of slavery on Africans themselves.

a. Pre-Colonial African multiculturalism from the 13th

thru the 17th

centuries. b. Established trade routes in Central Africa and trade languages, such as

Kiswahilic. Pre-Colonial Africa was on the verge of an industrial revolution before

other areas of the world.

d. Wars and disputes over territories and trade routese. Christians, Muslims, Jews and Africans all played roles in the capture and

exportation of Africans into slavery.

2. The Middle Passage: this is often viewed in the light of people accepting the

realities of captivity.a. Varied linguistic systems of verbal and non-verbal communication had to

form together in order for people to communicate. b. Some Africans committed suicide by jumping overboard or swallowing

their tongues as rebellion against captivity.

c. There are numerous accounts of uprising and mutinies on board these

ships.d. The song and anthem of White American guilt, “Amazing Grace” was

actually inspired by the humming of the Africans onboard the slaveship

Greyhound by John Newton, an English poet and writer.e. The Maafa (African Holocaust) was essentially the first Trans-Atlantic

Drug Trade, Africans were traded for sugar, rum, molasses and tobacco;

all addictive stimulants for Europeans.

3. To be a “Slave” vs. “Being Enslaved: we were not happy to be slaves.a. Yes, some people openly rebelled, but some bowed their heads in order to

stay alive for future generations.

b. Although the body and mind was subjected to physical and psychologicalslavery, the spirit and culture of the people remained intact.

c. We were never slaves; we were captives and prisoners of war.

d. To be in ‘enslaved’ was a state of mind versus being a ‘slave’, which wasa state of the body’s subjugation to perpetual servitude.



4. Unskilled Labors & Cotton Pickers: It often assumed that we were brought here

as unskilled labors and was taught how to work the varied crops of production.

a. Africans were purposefully captured and imported from regions in Africawhere they had been cultivating rice, indigo, cotton, tobacco and other

materials for eons.

b. Cotton and tobacco were labor intensive and required strong men from theCentral regions of Africa.

c. Initially slave traffickers made the mistake of taking men from the warrior

classes, in turn these men saw the similar terrains and were able to rebelmore, this was a classic epidemic in the Caribbean, Central American

nations and parts of the Southern United States.

d. Alternatively crops such as rice, indigo and oysters required the entire

family, thus more cultural formations could be retained by theemployment of the entire family. People were predominantly imported

from the West African regions.

5. Regional Labor Systems of Work : Many people and scholars a like look at

slavery was the same through the United States and everyone experienced the“Can’t See in the Monin’ to the Can’t See in the Evenin’ type of slavery.

a. Gang System: primarily the most labor intensive crops, such as cotton,tobacco and lumber. Because of the intensity and the demands of the

market for these products, it required a system of 12 to 14 hour continuous

workdays. This was mainly in the southern regions of the US.

b. Task Systems: less intensive crops that required timing for planting,cultivating and harvesting, so the activities were conducted as tasks. Once

a task was completed, people moved on to the next task; once all the task

of the workday was done, so was the workday.6. Slavery Stoled African Culture and Language: this probably the most

destructive of all the misnomers, because even today people feel that Africans in

America don’t have a culture and language of our own.a. “We had to eat pork to survive!” in fact, Africans only used parts of the

pig to season foods. Africans never consider meat as the main portion of

the meal. Foods were prepared in soup like formats. People hunted and ateother small game that they could readily find in their immediate

surrounding. People still cook and prepare foods the same way, maybe just

in a more health conscious manner nowadays.

b. “They Stoled our language!” in fact, people communicated verbally andnon-verbally. Conversations were channeled through English words, but

never carried the same syntax, semantics, phonemics and tense. Word

play, allegory and code switching were essential tools. Many Africanwords remained intact and new utterances were created. The most

recognized and talked about are the “Negro Spirituals” which were coded

discussions for coping, rants, raves and plans for escape.c. “They Stoled our drum!” in fact people found other means to make

sound. First and foremost the voice is the first and most powerful musical

instrument of all. Africans utilized Juba Dance or Hambone techniques

and “Beat Boxin’ to keep produce the rhythmatic baselines necessary for



song and praise. Material items such as washboards, and sting instruments

were utilized and improved on to make music.

d. “They did not allow us to read and write!” in fact the people werealways about reading, writing and education, because these were

longstanding traditions of Pre-Colonial Africa. People taught themselves

to learn to read and write English, that does not mean that they did notknow how to write in their own language and writing systems. African

writing systems not only employed words and text but also iconic in

nature, meaning the symbols and glyphs were spiritually, mentally andverbally translated. People inscribed concepts and motifs on bowls,

spoons, buttons, pipes and anything else they could get their hands on to

redirect the utility of these items to channel their own spiritual, cultural

and linguistics perspectives.e. “They Stoled our culture!” in fact, the culture of over 4.5 millions years

of human history and understanding could not be wiped away in a span of

500 years. Africans maintained and reproduced cosmological worldviews,

cultural practices, spirituality, foodways, fashions and kinship patterns toname a few aspects of culture. Even African child naming traditions

remain intact, people created names, inherited names or added their own phonotypic frameworks to the naming of children and assigning ‘nick

names’ to people.

f. “We were forced to be Christians!” in fact, initially slave owners cared

very little about the spiritual and religion of their labor force, untiluprising began to take place. Feeling the need to resolve the manner by

providing the Negro with moral improvement, plantation and slave owners

began to set aside spaces and “Praise Houses” to allow the enslavedAfricans a space for emotional outlet.

i. Many Africans were already Christians before coming to America,

as Christianity was rooted in early antiquity in places like Ethiopia.ii. Many Africans were Muslims before coming to America as a result

of the “Golden Age of West Africa” in the 13th, 14th and 15th

centuries and the rise of the Ottoman Empire of the 16th and 17th

century.

iii. Many Africans maintained their traditional African religious

practices and deities and covertly transferred them into the saints

of Catholicism.iv. Many African refused to disguise their spirituality altogether and is

evident in traditions such as Santeria, Hoodoo and Voodun

(Voodoo).v. Many HipHop plantation communities had their Herbalists,

Conjure Women and Men, as well as their Griots or storytellers.

g. “We were not allowed to be Africans!” in fact there was plenty of timeto maintain and reproduce culture overtly and covertly. Understand that

slavery was about work, Europeans and Africans worked in the same place

but lived separately. Just like today, when people get off work, they go

home and do their own thing. Prepared food the way they wanted,



organized their homes the way they wanted and carried on ritual and

customs the way they wanted. This is evident in many recent

archaeological studies on plantations sites and in the bioarchaeologicaldata collected from cemeteries and burial ground studies. We even buried

people in the same manners, and kept the burial grounds relatively

untouched because they were sacred grounds.7. Segregation vs. Integration: many people tend to think that the end of

segregation only affected the educational and public domains, but what actually

came out of the end of segregation were some things that were not notice before.a. Keep in mind that before there was cultural integration, there was cultural

separation. People lived in separate communities. The difference did not

become apparent to African and Europeans until the integrations of the

schools took place. b. It was white teachers who were the first to note the differences in African

students. They often said that the children could not learn, spoke broken

English, were rowdy, wrote on the desks, and played games the teachers

could not understand.c. In many respects this was more or less Culture Shock.8. Language and Rap

a. In the dictionary, Rap means to talk or to escape punishment. Rap is what

we do, it is how we talk.

b. Africans never spoke English. Africans use English as a medium, but that

was is all it is, a means to speak or to use a better word, a means to Rap toone another. Europeans made a mockery of the language they could not

understand; they could not and still do not understand how the words are

put together, their surface and deep level meanings and the since of tenseand time. The spoken word is dynamic and fluid, it is always changing. In

order to keep pace, you must be “Hip, you be “in the know” to overstand

the conversations taking place, otherwise you will be lost in what“sounds” like English, but is actually Rap.

c. Ebonics was the result of white teachers in the Oakland school districts in

1995 that need to be taught the HipHop linguistics sounds and style inorder to reach the students. It is not a definition of HipHop language.

d. African American English Vernacular, Slang and Dialects are pejorative

terms, utilized with the intent of downplaying the richness of African

HipHop language.e. Colored People Time or CPT was and is not about being on time, rather

about being in time. Africans the world over, know that the event does not

start until all the factors are in play, not by the time the event is scheduledto start. African and other non-European people live and work off social

time. From their cultural framework, students were never late for class or

workers were never late for work, because they operated and operate ontheir own time and not that of Europeans.

notes common misnomers about slavery

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