antabanta posted:seignet posted:Is it the so called curse of Ham that prevents American Blacks from moving out of the poverty line?
Is it White discrimination?
Eric Williams in his book, slavery was not based on ethnicity. It was sound economics to choose Africans-cheap labour. If that labour was on the moon, the slave traders would have gone there instead.
Before Columbus coming to the New World, Africans were enslaved on the Sugar Plantations of Maderia and the Islands off the African Coast. Long before America was founded.
What do you think keeps American blacks in poverty? Africa's cheap labor was not there for the choosing. An entire industry was created, dedicated to enslave an entire race of people, brutalizing them, and dehumanizing them to justify their enslavement. The Curse of Ham was applied to blacks to convince people like you that the bible supports the enslavement of blacks. Are you arguing that the Curse of Ham was not used as justification for the slave trade?
Systems of servitude and slavery were common in parts of Africa, as they were in much of the ancient world. In many African societies where slavery was prevalent, the enslaved people were not treated as chattel slaves and were given certain rights in a system similar to indentured servitude elsewhere in the world. When the Arab slave trade and Atlantic slave trade began, many of the local slave systems began supplying captives for slave markets outside Africa.
For over 200 years, powerful kings in what is now the country of Benin captured and sold slaves to Portuguese, French and British merchants. The slaves were usually men, women and children from rival tribes, gagged and jammed into boats bound for Brazil, Haiti and the US.