When we're talking about slavery... we're really talking about the web of relationships that exists between whites and blacks from 1619 to 1865 to now.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
You got to remember that slavery's very complex. It has a lot of levels to it.
Slavery exists. It is black in the South, and white in the North.
If you read the memoirs of slave-owning families, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of black people in the lives of the whites, even though for most of the time on the plantations black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of seven to one.
I can speak of slavery only so far as it came under my own observation - only so far as I have known and experienced it in my own person.
In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.
Slavery didn't break up the black families as much as liberal welfare rules.
Our concern, however, is with slavery as it is, and not with any theory of it.
There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
The breakdown of the black community, in order to maintain slavery, began with the breakdown of the black family. Men and women were not legally allowed to get married because you couldn't have that kind of love. It might get in the way of the economics of slavery. Your children could be taken from you and literally sold down the river.
I wasn't trying to work out my own ancestry. I was trying to get people to feel slavery. I was trying to get across the kind of emotional and psychological stones that slavery threw at people.
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