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Fight Modern Day SlaveryMany of the products we buy and use daily were made with slave labor or involved slave labor during some part of their manufacturing. The chocolate industry has received considerable attention lately for its use of slave labor . A 2000 US State Department report concluded that in recent years approximately 15,000 children aged 9 to 12 have been sold into forced labor on cotton, coffee and cocoa plantations annually in the Ivory Coast alone.
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April 2: Read the article below Blood, Sweat & Shears and then have a go at the game.
Click here for an interesting little game.....about SWEATSHOPS. Hope you learn something from it. Be sure to click the button that says SweatSTOP and learn some facts.
Sweatshops don’t have a good reputation. This is probably due to the definition of a sweatshop (see below), or because they are a dismal place/condition. The average person likes to think that we've moved beyond this sort of thing and some countries have reduced the number of sweatshops significantly during the Twentieth Century.
We must still face the truth that our quality of life stems in large part from sweat shops around the world.
An excellent article which puts this in perspective is reprinted below from Rethinking Schools, Vol. 11, No. 4, [Rethinking Schools, 1001 E. Keefe Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53212; Tel:414-964-9646]. It makes for some interesting, factually based reading.
Blood, Sweat & Shears
By definition, a sweatshop is: Any workplace where the wages are inadequate, the hours too long, and the working conditions endanger safety or health - whether or not any laws are violated.
(Pharis Harvey, Executive Director, International Labor Rights Fund)
[For example:]
*Haitian workers earn only 6 cents for every pair of Disney “101 Dalmatians” outfit that Disney sells for $20 (124rmb). Disney says its workers in Haiti about 28 cents(1.7 yuan) an hour. A woman in Salvador working in a sweatshop makes 12 (7 jiao) cents sewing a GAP T-shirt that sells in the US for $20 (124rmb). (Sources: In These Times; National Labor Committee; Jobs with Justice)
*Almost half of all toys sold in the US are produced in China, Thailand, and other Asian countries. “China is the champ in the low wage sweepstakes. With minimum wages that hover around 80 cents (5 yuan) a day, China is forcing a further decline in the already hideous working conditions in neighboring countries. Naturally, Western executives are flocking to China to do business.” (Bob Herbert, The New York Times)
*In 1995, Mattel CEO John Amerman made $7 million and held an additional $23 million in stock options - more than the combined annual salary of the 11,000 Mattel workers making Barbie dolls in China. (Eyal Press, The Nation)
*There are sweatshops in the US, too. One worker at a Los Angeles garment factory making clothes for Guess was paid 40 cents (2.5 yuan) for his labor on a blouse that sold in a New York department store for $58 (360 rmb).
(Source: American Teacher)
*Myth: It’s OK to pay workers in poor countries lots less than workers are paid here because living expenses are so much less. Milk: in Haiti, 75 cents; in NY, 65 cents; eggs: in Haiti, $1.50, in NY, $1.39; cereal: in Haiti, $1.90, in NY, 1.69; gas: in Haiti, $2.20, in NY, $1.26. (Source: Newsday)
*In Indonesia, the minimum wage is $2.36(14.5 rmb) per day. The Suharto dictatorship admits that in Jakarta and other urban centers it takes $4 (25 rmb)a day to meet subsistence (enough to stay alive) needs. If Nike took just 1% of its annual advertising budget ($280 million)(1,735,720,000 rmb),it could raise the income of all its Indonesian workers above the poverty line.
*Almost all soccer balls used in the US are imported. Major soccer ball manufacturing countries: Pakistan, China, and Indonesia. Between 1985 and 1995, the soccer ball industry greatly increased production in countries where children make leather hand-stitched (sewn by hand) balls. In countries like Pakistan, children may work 12 hour days for very little pay. (Source: International Labor Rights Fund)
*Throughout the world, 250 million 5 to 14 year olds are employed; one half of these work full-time. Many children work in industries where they are exposed to harmful chemicals or other dangerous conditions. In Sri Lanka, more children die from pesticide (chemicals used to kill insects on plants) poisoning than from a combination of childhood diseases including malaria, tetanus, and whooping cough. (Source: International Labor Organization)
On the other hand...*75% of US consumers say that they would boycott (not buy from) stores selling goods from sweatshops, and 85% say they would be willing to pay 5% more for legally made products. (Source: Marymount University)
*The Bonded Labor Liberation Front in Pakistan has opened 240 free primary schools for poor children. Since 1980, the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude has freed over 29,000 children from forced labor.
(Source: Sydney Schanberg, Life)
*Students from Monroe High School in Los Angeles organized to get a resolution passed by the school board committing the district not to buy soccer balls from countries that allow child labor. Students in LA have formed Students Against Kid Exploitation. (Source: LA Times)
*At the end of April 1997, 10,000 workers went on strike at a Nike factory in Indonesia, despite the fact that free trade unions (organizations meant to protect workers) are banned (not allowed) there. During the same week, 1,300 workers went on strike (refusing to work) at a Nike factory in Vietnam, and workers there have staged dozens of wildcat strikes protesting low pay and abusive working conditions over the last few years. (Source: Associated Press, Far Eastern Economic Review)
*On April 13, 1997, the largest, most diverse farm worker demonstration (protest) in history, including 20,000 people, was held in Watsonville, California. It was part of a United Farm workers union drive to organize strawberry workers who labor in “sweatshops in the fields” for an average of $8,000 (49,592 rmb) a year. (Source: The Nation)
*In February, North Olmsted, Ohio (pop. 35,000), a working class suburb of Cleveland, became the first US city to ban municipal (city) purchases of sweatshop made products. It also covers US sweatshops and allows no exceptions. The city is aggressively enforcing the new law. Says Mayor Ed Boyle, who thought up the law, “Government should not be party to the exploitation (treats someone unfairly) of children and adults anywhere in the world.” (Source: The Progressive)
We must still face the truth that our quality of life stems in large part from sweat shops around the world.
An excellent article which puts this in perspective is reprinted below from Rethinking Schools, Vol. 11, No. 4, [Rethinking Schools, 1001 E. Keefe Ave., Milwaukee, WI 53212; Tel:414-964-9646]. It makes for some interesting, factually based reading.
Blood, Sweat & Shears
By definition, a sweatshop is: Any workplace where the wages are inadequate, the hours too long, and the working conditions endanger safety or health - whether or not any laws are violated.
(Pharis Harvey, Executive Director, International Labor Rights Fund)
[For example:]
*Haitian workers earn only 6 cents for every pair of Disney “101 Dalmatians” outfit that Disney sells for $20 (124rmb). Disney says its workers in Haiti about 28 cents(1.7 yuan) an hour. A woman in Salvador working in a sweatshop makes 12 (7 jiao) cents sewing a GAP T-shirt that sells in the US for $20 (124rmb). (Sources: In These Times; National Labor Committee; Jobs with Justice)
*Almost half of all toys sold in the US are produced in China, Thailand, and other Asian countries. “China is the champ in the low wage sweepstakes. With minimum wages that hover around 80 cents (5 yuan) a day, China is forcing a further decline in the already hideous working conditions in neighboring countries. Naturally, Western executives are flocking to China to do business.” (Bob Herbert, The New York Times)
*In 1995, Mattel CEO John Amerman made $7 million and held an additional $23 million in stock options - more than the combined annual salary of the 11,000 Mattel workers making Barbie dolls in China. (Eyal Press, The Nation)
*There are sweatshops in the US, too. One worker at a Los Angeles garment factory making clothes for Guess was paid 40 cents (2.5 yuan) for his labor on a blouse that sold in a New York department store for $58 (360 rmb).
(Source: American Teacher)
*Myth: It’s OK to pay workers in poor countries lots less than workers are paid here because living expenses are so much less. Milk: in Haiti, 75 cents; in NY, 65 cents; eggs: in Haiti, $1.50, in NY, $1.39; cereal: in Haiti, $1.90, in NY, 1.69; gas: in Haiti, $2.20, in NY, $1.26. (Source: Newsday)
*In Indonesia, the minimum wage is $2.36(14.5 rmb) per day. The Suharto dictatorship admits that in Jakarta and other urban centers it takes $4 (25 rmb)a day to meet subsistence (enough to stay alive) needs. If Nike took just 1% of its annual advertising budget ($280 million)(1,735,720,000 rmb),it could raise the income of all its Indonesian workers above the poverty line.
*Almost all soccer balls used in the US are imported. Major soccer ball manufacturing countries: Pakistan, China, and Indonesia. Between 1985 and 1995, the soccer ball industry greatly increased production in countries where children make leather hand-stitched (sewn by hand) balls. In countries like Pakistan, children may work 12 hour days for very little pay. (Source: International Labor Rights Fund)
*Throughout the world, 250 million 5 to 14 year olds are employed; one half of these work full-time. Many children work in industries where they are exposed to harmful chemicals or other dangerous conditions. In Sri Lanka, more children die from pesticide (chemicals used to kill insects on plants) poisoning than from a combination of childhood diseases including malaria, tetanus, and whooping cough. (Source: International Labor Organization)
On the other hand...*75% of US consumers say that they would boycott (not buy from) stores selling goods from sweatshops, and 85% say they would be willing to pay 5% more for legally made products. (Source: Marymount University)
*The Bonded Labor Liberation Front in Pakistan has opened 240 free primary schools for poor children. Since 1980, the South Asian Coalition on Child Servitude has freed over 29,000 children from forced labor.
(Source: Sydney Schanberg, Life)
*Students from Monroe High School in Los Angeles organized to get a resolution passed by the school board committing the district not to buy soccer balls from countries that allow child labor. Students in LA have formed Students Against Kid Exploitation. (Source: LA Times)
*At the end of April 1997, 10,000 workers went on strike at a Nike factory in Indonesia, despite the fact that free trade unions (organizations meant to protect workers) are banned (not allowed) there. During the same week, 1,300 workers went on strike (refusing to work) at a Nike factory in Vietnam, and workers there have staged dozens of wildcat strikes protesting low pay and abusive working conditions over the last few years. (Source: Associated Press, Far Eastern Economic Review)
*On April 13, 1997, the largest, most diverse farm worker demonstration (protest) in history, including 20,000 people, was held in Watsonville, California. It was part of a United Farm workers union drive to organize strawberry workers who labor in “sweatshops in the fields” for an average of $8,000 (49,592 rmb) a year. (Source: The Nation)
*In February, North Olmsted, Ohio (pop. 35,000), a working class suburb of Cleveland, became the first US city to ban municipal (city) purchases of sweatshop made products. It also covers US sweatshops and allows no exceptions. The city is aggressively enforcing the new law. Says Mayor Ed Boyle, who thought up the law, “Government should not be party to the exploitation (treats someone unfairly) of children and adults anywhere in the world.” (Source: The Progressive)
Understanding the Atlantic Slave Trade
Slavery is as old as civilization itself, although it’s not as old as humanity.
The numbers involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade are truly staggering.
From 1500 to 1880, somewhere between 10 and 12 million African slaves were forcibly moved from Africa to the Americas.
About 15% of those people died during the journey. Those who didn't die became property, bought and sold like any commodity.
Where Africans came from, and went to, changed over time, but in all, 48% of slaves went to the Caribbean and 41% to Brazil—although few Americans recognize this, relatively few slaves were imported to the U.S.—only about 5% of the total.
By the time Europeans started importing Africans into the Americas, Europe had a long history of trading slaves. The first real “European” slave trade began after the fourth Crusade in 1204. Italian merchants imported thousands of Armenian, Circassian, and Georgian slaves to Italy. Most of them were women who worked as household servants, but many worked processing sugar.
Sugar is, of course, a crop that African slaves later cultivated in the Caribbean.
None of primary crops grown by slaves, sugar, tobacco, coffee, is necessary to sustain human life. So in a way, slavery was a very early byproduct of a consumer culture that revolves around the purchase of goods that bring us pleasure but not sustenance.
One of the big misconceptions about slavery was that Europeans somehow captured Africans, put them in chains, stuck them on boats, and then took them to the Americas.
The chains and ships bit is true, as is the America part if you define America as North, South and Central America.
But Africans were living in all kinds of conglomerations from small villages to city-states to empires, and they were much too powerful for the Europeans to just conquer.
In fact, Europeans obtained African slaves by trading for them.
Because trade is a two-way proposition, this meant that Africans were captured by other Africans and then traded to Europeans in exchange for goods, usually like metal tools, or fine textiles, or guns.
And for those Africans, slaves were a form of property and a very valuable one.
In many places, slaves were one of the only sources of private wealth because land was usually owned by the state.
And this gets to a really important point: If we’re going to understand the tragedy of slavery, we need to understand the economics of it. We have to see slaves both as they were—as human beings—and as they were viewed—as an economic commodity.
You probably know about the horrendous conditions aboard slave ships, which, at their largest could hold 400 people. But it’s worth underscoring that each slave had an average 0.37 square meters of space.
0.37 square meters!
As one eyewitness testified before Parliament in 1791, “They had not so much room as a man in his coffin.”
Once in the Americas, the surviving slaves were sold in a market very similar to the way cattle would be sold. After purchase, slave owners would often brand their new possession on the cheeks, again just as they would do with cattle.
The lives of slaves were dominated by work and terror, but mostly work. Slaves did all types of work, from housework to skilled crafts work, and some even worked as sailors, but the majority of them worked as agricultural laborers.
In the Caribbean and Brazil, most of them planted, harvested and processed sugar, working ten months out of the year, dawn until dusk. The worst part of this job, which was saying something because there were many bad parts, was fertilizing the sugar cane. This required slaves to carry 80 pound baskets of manure on their heads up and down hilly terrain.
When it came time to harvest and process the cane, speed was incredibly important because once cut, sugar sap can go sour within a day. This meant that slaves would often work 48 hours straight during harvest time, working without sleep in the sweltering sugar press houses where the cane would be crushed in hand rollers and then boiled. Slaves often caught their hands in the rollers, and their overseers kept a hatchet on hand for amputations.
Given these appalling conditions, it’s little wonder that the average life expectancy for a Brazilian slave on a sugar plantation in the late 18th century was 23 years.
Things were slightly better in British sugar colonies like Barbados, and in the U.S. living and working conditions were better still. So relatively good that in fact, slave populations began increasing naturally, meaning that more slaves were born than died.
This may sound like a good thing, but it is of course it’s own kind of evil because it meant that slave owners were calculating that if they kept their slaves healthy enough, they would reproduce and then the slave owners could steal and sell their children. Or use them to work their land.
This explains why even though the percentage of slaves imported from Africa to the United States was relatively small, slaves and other people of African descent, came to make up a significant portion of the US population.
The brutality of working conditions in Brazil, on the other hand, meant that slaves were never able to increase their population naturally, hence the continued need to import slaves into Brazil until slavery ended in the 1880s.
While slavery isn't new, it’s also a hard word to define. Like, Stalin forced million to work in Gulags, but we don’t usually consider those people slaves.
On the other hand, many slaves in history had lives of great power, wealth, and influence. Have you heard of Zheng He, the world’s greatest admiral? He was technically a slave. So were many of the most important advisers to Suleiman the Magnificent.
Atlantic World slavery was different, and more horrifying, because it was chattel slavery, a term historians use to indicate that the slaves were movable property.
So what exactly makes slavery so horrendous?
The definition of slavery proposed by sociologist Orlando Patterson: It is “the permanent, violent, and personal domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”
According to this definition, a slave is removed from the culture, land, and society of his or her birth and suffers what Patterson called “social death.” Ultimately then, what makes slavery slavery is that slaves are de-humanized. The Latin word that gave us chattel also gave us cattle.
In many ways, Atlantic slavery drew from a lot of previous models of slavery, and took everything that was terrible about each of them and combined them.
To understand, we need to look at some previous models of slavery.
The Greeks were among the first to consider “otherness” a characteristic of slaves. Most Greek slaves were “barbarians,” and their inability to speak Greek kept them from talking back to their masters and also indicated their slave status.
Aristotle, who was incredibly influential, believed some people were just naturally slaves, saying: “it is clear that there are certain people who are free and certain people who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their advantage, and just, for them to be slaves.”
This idea, despite being totally insane, remained popular for millennia.
The Greeks popularized the idea that slaves should be traded from far away, but the Romans took it to another level.
Slaves probably made up 30% of the total Roman population, similar to the percentage of slaves in America at slavery’s height. The Romans also invented the plantation, using mass numbers of slaves to work the land on giant farms called latifundia.
The Judeo-Christian world contributed as well, and the Bible was widely used to justify slavery and in particular the enslavement of Africans, because of the moment in Genesis when Noah curses Ham, saying: “Cursed be Canaan; The lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.”
This encapsulates two ideas vital to Atlantic slavery:
1. That slavery can be a hereditary status passed down through generations, and
2. That slavery is the result of human sin.
Both ideas serve as powerful justifications for holding an entire race in bondage.
But there were even more contributors to the idea that led to Atlantic slavery.
For instance, Muslim Arabs were the first to import large numbers of Bantu-speaking Africans into their territory as slaves.
The Muslims called these Africans zanj, and they were a distinct and despised group, distinguished from other North Africans by the color of their skin. The zanj in territory held by the Abbasid staged one of the first big slave revolts in 869. It may be that this revolt was so devastating that it convinced the Abbasid that large-scale plantation style agriculture on the Roman model just wasn't worth it. But by then, they’d connected the Aristotelian idea that some people are just naturally slaves with the appearance of sub-Saharan Africans.
The Spanish and the Portuguese were the Europeans with the closest ties to the Muslim world, because there were Muslims living in the Iberian Peninsula until 1492. So it makes sense that Iberians would be the first to absorb these racist attitude toward blacks.
As the first colonizers of the Americas and the dominant importers of slaves, the Portuguese and the Spanish helped define the attitudes that characterized Atlantic slavery, beliefs they’d inherited from a complicated nexus of all the slaveholders who came before them.
In short, Atlantic Slavery was a monstrous tragedy— but it was a tragedy in which the whole world participated. And it was the culmination of millennia of imagining the “Other” as inherently Lesser.
It’s tempting to pin all the blame for Atlantic slavery on one particular group, but to blame one group is to exonerate all the others, and by extension ourselves.
The truth that we must grapple with is that a vast array of our ancestors— including those we think of as ours, whoever they may be— believed that it was possible for their fellow human beings to be mere property.
The numbers involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade are truly staggering.
From 1500 to 1880, somewhere between 10 and 12 million African slaves were forcibly moved from Africa to the Americas.
About 15% of those people died during the journey. Those who didn't die became property, bought and sold like any commodity.
Where Africans came from, and went to, changed over time, but in all, 48% of slaves went to the Caribbean and 41% to Brazil—although few Americans recognize this, relatively few slaves were imported to the U.S.—only about 5% of the total.
By the time Europeans started importing Africans into the Americas, Europe had a long history of trading slaves. The first real “European” slave trade began after the fourth Crusade in 1204. Italian merchants imported thousands of Armenian, Circassian, and Georgian slaves to Italy. Most of them were women who worked as household servants, but many worked processing sugar.
Sugar is, of course, a crop that African slaves later cultivated in the Caribbean.
None of primary crops grown by slaves, sugar, tobacco, coffee, is necessary to sustain human life. So in a way, slavery was a very early byproduct of a consumer culture that revolves around the purchase of goods that bring us pleasure but not sustenance.
One of the big misconceptions about slavery was that Europeans somehow captured Africans, put them in chains, stuck them on boats, and then took them to the Americas.
The chains and ships bit is true, as is the America part if you define America as North, South and Central America.
But Africans were living in all kinds of conglomerations from small villages to city-states to empires, and they were much too powerful for the Europeans to just conquer.
In fact, Europeans obtained African slaves by trading for them.
Because trade is a two-way proposition, this meant that Africans were captured by other Africans and then traded to Europeans in exchange for goods, usually like metal tools, or fine textiles, or guns.
And for those Africans, slaves were a form of property and a very valuable one.
In many places, slaves were one of the only sources of private wealth because land was usually owned by the state.
And this gets to a really important point: If we’re going to understand the tragedy of slavery, we need to understand the economics of it. We have to see slaves both as they were—as human beings—and as they were viewed—as an economic commodity.
You probably know about the horrendous conditions aboard slave ships, which, at their largest could hold 400 people. But it’s worth underscoring that each slave had an average 0.37 square meters of space.
0.37 square meters!
As one eyewitness testified before Parliament in 1791, “They had not so much room as a man in his coffin.”
Once in the Americas, the surviving slaves were sold in a market very similar to the way cattle would be sold. After purchase, slave owners would often brand their new possession on the cheeks, again just as they would do with cattle.
The lives of slaves were dominated by work and terror, but mostly work. Slaves did all types of work, from housework to skilled crafts work, and some even worked as sailors, but the majority of them worked as agricultural laborers.
In the Caribbean and Brazil, most of them planted, harvested and processed sugar, working ten months out of the year, dawn until dusk. The worst part of this job, which was saying something because there were many bad parts, was fertilizing the sugar cane. This required slaves to carry 80 pound baskets of manure on their heads up and down hilly terrain.
When it came time to harvest and process the cane, speed was incredibly important because once cut, sugar sap can go sour within a day. This meant that slaves would often work 48 hours straight during harvest time, working without sleep in the sweltering sugar press houses where the cane would be crushed in hand rollers and then boiled. Slaves often caught their hands in the rollers, and their overseers kept a hatchet on hand for amputations.
Given these appalling conditions, it’s little wonder that the average life expectancy for a Brazilian slave on a sugar plantation in the late 18th century was 23 years.
Things were slightly better in British sugar colonies like Barbados, and in the U.S. living and working conditions were better still. So relatively good that in fact, slave populations began increasing naturally, meaning that more slaves were born than died.
This may sound like a good thing, but it is of course it’s own kind of evil because it meant that slave owners were calculating that if they kept their slaves healthy enough, they would reproduce and then the slave owners could steal and sell their children. Or use them to work their land.
This explains why even though the percentage of slaves imported from Africa to the United States was relatively small, slaves and other people of African descent, came to make up a significant portion of the US population.
The brutality of working conditions in Brazil, on the other hand, meant that slaves were never able to increase their population naturally, hence the continued need to import slaves into Brazil until slavery ended in the 1880s.
While slavery isn't new, it’s also a hard word to define. Like, Stalin forced million to work in Gulags, but we don’t usually consider those people slaves.
On the other hand, many slaves in history had lives of great power, wealth, and influence. Have you heard of Zheng He, the world’s greatest admiral? He was technically a slave. So were many of the most important advisers to Suleiman the Magnificent.
Atlantic World slavery was different, and more horrifying, because it was chattel slavery, a term historians use to indicate that the slaves were movable property.
So what exactly makes slavery so horrendous?
The definition of slavery proposed by sociologist Orlando Patterson: It is “the permanent, violent, and personal domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons.”
According to this definition, a slave is removed from the culture, land, and society of his or her birth and suffers what Patterson called “social death.” Ultimately then, what makes slavery slavery is that slaves are de-humanized. The Latin word that gave us chattel also gave us cattle.
In many ways, Atlantic slavery drew from a lot of previous models of slavery, and took everything that was terrible about each of them and combined them.
To understand, we need to look at some previous models of slavery.
The Greeks were among the first to consider “otherness” a characteristic of slaves. Most Greek slaves were “barbarians,” and their inability to speak Greek kept them from talking back to their masters and also indicated their slave status.
Aristotle, who was incredibly influential, believed some people were just naturally slaves, saying: “it is clear that there are certain people who are free and certain people who are slaves by nature, and it is both to their advantage, and just, for them to be slaves.”
This idea, despite being totally insane, remained popular for millennia.
The Greeks popularized the idea that slaves should be traded from far away, but the Romans took it to another level.
Slaves probably made up 30% of the total Roman population, similar to the percentage of slaves in America at slavery’s height. The Romans also invented the plantation, using mass numbers of slaves to work the land on giant farms called latifundia.
The Judeo-Christian world contributed as well, and the Bible was widely used to justify slavery and in particular the enslavement of Africans, because of the moment in Genesis when Noah curses Ham, saying: “Cursed be Canaan; The lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers.”
This encapsulates two ideas vital to Atlantic slavery:
1. That slavery can be a hereditary status passed down through generations, and
2. That slavery is the result of human sin.
Both ideas serve as powerful justifications for holding an entire race in bondage.
But there were even more contributors to the idea that led to Atlantic slavery.
For instance, Muslim Arabs were the first to import large numbers of Bantu-speaking Africans into their territory as slaves.
The Muslims called these Africans zanj, and they were a distinct and despised group, distinguished from other North Africans by the color of their skin. The zanj in territory held by the Abbasid staged one of the first big slave revolts in 869. It may be that this revolt was so devastating that it convinced the Abbasid that large-scale plantation style agriculture on the Roman model just wasn't worth it. But by then, they’d connected the Aristotelian idea that some people are just naturally slaves with the appearance of sub-Saharan Africans.
The Spanish and the Portuguese were the Europeans with the closest ties to the Muslim world, because there were Muslims living in the Iberian Peninsula until 1492. So it makes sense that Iberians would be the first to absorb these racist attitude toward blacks.
As the first colonizers of the Americas and the dominant importers of slaves, the Portuguese and the Spanish helped define the attitudes that characterized Atlantic slavery, beliefs they’d inherited from a complicated nexus of all the slaveholders who came before them.
In short, Atlantic Slavery was a monstrous tragedy— but it was a tragedy in which the whole world participated. And it was the culmination of millennia of imagining the “Other” as inherently Lesser.
It’s tempting to pin all the blame for Atlantic slavery on one particular group, but to blame one group is to exonerate all the others, and by extension ourselves.
The truth that we must grapple with is that a vast array of our ancestors— including those we think of as ours, whoever they may be— believed that it was possible for their fellow human beings to be mere property.