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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsThis excerpt will haunt you, if you can get through it
This is from a Charles Blow op-ed in the NY Times a couple of days ago. I can't get the nightmare images described here out of my mind.
Want to know what the Republican Party and their racist voters stand for? This is the reality and ultimate outcome of their sick, malicious, purely evil ideology.
The ship had been at sea for 17 days. There were over 500 kidnapped Africans onboard. Fifty-five had already been thrown overboard.
The Africans were crowded below the main deck. Each deck was only 3 feet 3 inches high. They were packed so tight that they were sitting up between one anothers legs, everyone completely nude. As Walsh recounted, there was no possibility of their lying down or at all changing their position by night or day.
Each had been branded, burnt with the red-hot iron, on their breast or arm. Many were children, little girls and little boys.
Not only could light not reach down into the bowels of those ships, neither could fresh air. As Walsh recounted, The heat of these horrid places was so great and the odor so offensive that it was quite impossible to enter them, even had there been room.
These people, these human beings, sat in their own vomit, urine and feces, and that of others. If another person sat between your legs, their bowels emptied out on you.
These voyages regularly lasted over a month, meaning many women onboard experienced menstruation in these conditions.
Many of the enslaved, sick or driven mad, were thrown overboard. Others simply jumped. In fact, there was so much human flesh going over the side of those ships that sharks learned to trail them.
This voyage was so horrific that I can only surmise that the men, women and children who survived it were superhuman, the toughest and the most resilient our species has to offer.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/opinion/george-washington-confederate-statues.html
Ferrets are Cool
(21,110 posts)malaise
(269,157 posts)for the British slave trade in Jamaica - fucking monsters
forgotmylogin
(7,530 posts)The scene with the chain scarred me for life.
Dan
(3,579 posts)keithbvadu2
(36,906 posts)All sanctioned by mainstream Christianity.
gratuitous
(82,849 posts)Beginning in Britain, the Society of Friends (Quakers) were the first organized group to oppose the slave trade and brought pressure on society to recognize it as an ethical and moral wrong.
StarfishSaver
(18,486 posts)that we are descended from the people who SURVIVED this.
Knowing that I have in my veins the blood of those who made it through this horror and went on to live and thrive always gives me strength.
AwakeAtLast
(14,133 posts)PunkinPi
(4,878 posts)smirkymonkey
(63,221 posts)What posseses human beings to treat other human beings that way? Don't they have an ounce of compassion or empathy for the suffering of another? Obviously, I guess they didn't, but what makes people so cruel and heartless? I will never understand this kind of inhumanity as long as I live.
Cyrano
(15,057 posts)They have no problem with police beating, strangling and murdering black people. They have no problem with black people being locked up for life for carrying an ounce of drugs. They never give a thought to most black and brown people stuck in a cycle of poverty they can't escape. And many of them might even welcome the return of slavery.
IMO, the world would be a better and saner place without the Republican Party and those who endorse the evil for which they stand. Perhaps they have a missing gene of some kind. Nonetheless, the only miserable thing they have to offer is misery itself.
ecstatic
(32,731 posts)Yep. When you understand this, then you understand why some members of our government have continued to allow and encourage institutionally racist policies. They fear a 100% equal playing field. Look at the gains that have been made *without* an equal playing field. At least 60% of popular culture in this country and around the world is based on the skill and creativity of African American artists, athletes and entertainers. Yet we only make up 13% of the population (supposedly)?
Can you imagine where we'd be if there weren't Jim Crow laws or systematic lynchings or massacres or police brutality, etc following the abolition of slavery?