BlackCommentator.com
- March 09, 2017 - Issue 689 Cover Story: Why Calling Enslaved Africans
‘Immigrants’ Delegitimizes the Horrors of Slavery - Color of Law By
David A. Love, JD, BC Executive Editor
Est. April
5, 2002
March 09, 2017 - Issue 689
Why Calling
Enslaved Africans ‘Immigrants’
Delegitimizes
the
Horrors of Slavery
"The fraudulent narrative of slavery as immigration
only serves to conceal the truth. If the nation cannot
come to terms with the reality of what has been done
to Black people, there will be no acknowledgment of
the debt owed. Watering down the atrocities is an
attempt to mark down the cost of Black suffering, a
dangerous, slippery slope that prevents us from getting
to the bottom of what went down these past 400 years."
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Fresh
off his Senate confirmation as Secretary of the Department of Housing
and Urban Development, Dr. Ben Carson addressed HUD employees on
Monday with remarks likening enslaved Africans to immigrants. In
making this statement, Carson perpetuates the false narrative of
America as a land of opportunity where everyone came of their own
free will.
The
so-called American Dream has been a nightmare for those who were
enslaved by this country and their descendants. The purpose of
statements such as this is to delegitimize the atrocities of slavery
and the horrors it represented, discount the suffering of Back people
and dilute the claims of the victims in their pursuit of reparations.
Carson knew exactly what he was saying.
“That’s
what America is about, a land of dreams and opportunity,”
Carson said in his remarks, as reported by USA Today.
“There were other immigrants who came here in the bottom of
slave ships, worked even longer, even harder for less. But they, too,
had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons,
granddaughters, great-grandsons, great-granddaughters, might pursue
prosperity and happiness in this land.”
Not
stopping there, Carson doubled down on his words when he appeared on
the Armstrong Williams Show on SiriusXM radio. “I think people
need to actually look up the word immigrant,” Carson said.
“Whether you’re voluntary or involuntary, if you come
from the outside to the inside, you’re an immigrant. Whether
you’re legal or illegal, you come from the outside to inside,
you’re an immigrant. Slaves came here as involuntary
immigrants, but they still had the strength to hold on.”
The
reactions on social media to Carson’s statements were
decisively critical:
On
his Facebook page, Carson attempted to clean up his words. “The
slave narrative and immigrant narrative are two entirely different
experiences. Slaves were ripped from their families and their homes
and forced against their will after being sold into slavery by slave
traders,” he wrote. “The immigrants made the choice to
come to America. They saw this country as a land of opportunity. In
contrast, slaves were forced here against their will and lost all
their opportunities. We continue to live with that legacy.”
Ben
Carson is by no means the first person to call enslaved Africans
“immigrants” or to neutralize the pain and suffering of
Black people. As NPR reported in 2015, in a McGraw-Hill textbook used
by the Texas Board of Education, a lesson on patterns of immigration
read that the Atlantic
slave trade
brought “millions of workers from Africa to the southern United
States to work on agricultural plantations.” While the
publisher and the board agreed the lesson was inappropriate, the
Texas education system is still known for its whitewashing and
outright falsification of history. Examples of what passes for
history in the Texas public school textbooks include a downplaying of
the role of slavery as the cause of the Civil War — making the
dreaded institution a “side issue” — rebranding the
Atlantic slave trade as the “Atlantic triangular trade”
and failing to mention Jim Crow or the Ku Klux Klan.
The
process of kidnapping and enslaving Black people was far more than an
institution of forced labor and economic exploitation. Rather, it was
an act of genocide.
As
the following video from Slate highlights, the trade in Black bodies
was an enterprise of staggering proportions. The interactive graphic
depicts more than 20,000 slave ship voyages cataloged by the
Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, representing half of the people
stolen from the African continent. In 315 years between the 16th
century and the 19th century, over
10 million Africans
were hauled in floating dungeons, like cargo, from Africa to the
Western Hemisphere. This included 4.8 million taken to Brazil, 4
million to the British, French, Dutch and Danish colonies in the
Caribbean, 1.3 million to Spanish Central America, and 388,747 to
North America.
There
was no Ellis Island to welcome African people. Rather, there was
Gor�e Island off the coast of Senegal, the largest
slave-trading center of its kind. Home of the “Door of No
Return,” Gor�e Island warehoused an estimated 20 million
men, women and children, according to the African American Registry,
shackling and chaining them in squalid, cramped conditions before
shipping them across the Atlantic through the Middle Passage.
Millions
of Black people were sent to a world of disease, forced labor,
torture and death. Upwards of 60 million Africans died or were
enslaved, according to the University of Houston’s digital
history on the Middle Passage. For every 100 Africans who made it to
the New World, another 40 died in the Middle Passage or during the
forced marches and confinement on the coast of Africa.
The
legacy of enslavement has taken an unspeakable psychic toll on Black
people in the form of post-traumatic
slave disorder and intergenerational trauma.
The physical and psychological damage of slavery has been passed
through the DNA to successive generations, afflicting us even today.
Coming to terms with the scale of the crimes committed would require
an assessment of the costs and amount of restitution owed to the
victims. Not only did the enslaved and their descendants suffer, but
their forced labor built America. Slavery created the economic
foundations of Wall Street and U.S. capitalism, and now the bill is
due. Estimates of what
the U.S. owes Black people in reparations
range from $6.4 trillion to $59.2 trillion.
This
is where Ben Carson comes in: The fraudulent narrative of slavery as
immigration only serves to conceal the truth. If the nation cannot
come to terms with the reality of what has been done to Black people,
there will be no acknowledgment of the debt owed. Watering down the
atrocities is an attempt to mark down the cost of Black suffering, a
dangerous, slippery slope that prevents us from getting to the bottom
of what went down these past 400 years. Slavery is at the heart of
what made America, which is why it is important that we never forget.