IDENTITY & LANGUAGE ~ Why I Don't Call My Ancestors "Slaves" ~ Part 1

by W.E. Littlejohn

 “Words impose themselves, take root in our memory against our will.”

Bell Hooks

“The Words We Use Influence How We Think!” 

James W. Loewen

“Words matter!” 

First Lady Michelle Obama

 December 19, 2016 interview with Oprah Winfrey.

This is a common-sense, critical thinking discussion on slavery language (words, terms and phrases) and a critique of its impact on our identity with the intent to dramatically shift the historical and ongoing narrative that diminishes the value of African ancestry. 

Throughout my “Uncle Tom…A Traitor – Really???!” post, readers will note asterisks (*) at the end of words and phrases “slave,” “slave trade,” “belong to/owned by” and “master.”  Wherever these words and phrases are contained in the sources I quoted, I put my preferred corrections in brackets [  ] next to slavery terminology.  The corrections are what I’ve determined are more accurate descriptions of the horrific, terrifying and humiliating experiences of the hundreds of millions of Black men, women and children (my/our ancestors) swept into the abyss of the African holocaust or MAAFA (see Endnote[i]), reported to have began around 650 AD when Arabs invaded and raped Africa (see Endnote [ii]) – over 800 years before European invasion. 

“The Arabs and the Europeans were invaders, colonizers and enslavers, who imposed their alien religions on Africa.  Neither Islam nor Christianity is indigenous to Africa.”  And, “while the Arabs enslaved Africans in the north and east; Europeans enslaved Africans along the Atlantic [West],” Nobel Prize winner/playwright, and author of Of Africa, Wole Soyinka said.

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The lexicon of slavery words and phrases have been and are repeated over and over throughout our lives.  Slavery language/terminology is one of many examples of “biased ethnocentric euphemism[s] for conquest,” according to a Cambridge University article, Race and Language Teaching.  The word “slave,” for example, is in Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I have a Dream” speech.  Each year, new generations of school children repeat these words when they recite the speech while celebrating King’s holiday.  “The Texas declaration of secession in 1861 contains the word ‘slave’ 18 times,” stated a character in the satirical comic series, Doonesbury.  North Carolina’s Supreme Court defined a “slave” as one who is “…doomed in his own person, and his posterity, to live without knowledge, and without the capacity to make anything his own, and to toil that another may reap the fruits.”  This definition remained on the books until 1856. [See: Wheeler's Law of Slavery, 246, State v. Mann.]  The word "doomed" speaks volumes.  

 

The point is, when people are kidnapped and held against their will, as our Ancestors were during slavery, they are HOSTAGES.

.”

I Don't Wanna Know Nuthin' 'bout No Slaves!
Slavery terms and phrases that denigrate our African culture and spiritual roots have had and continue to exude profound impact on our identity as a people.  The generational sting of these words was made strikingly obvious when I encountered an African American youth who was resistant to learning Black History.  His disconnect was so intense, at first, I was baffled.  When I inquired: “What’s up?”  He declared, “I don’t wanna know nutin’ ‘bout no slaves.”   

Thus, began my quest to launch a common-sense, critical thinking discussion on slavery language and its impact on our identity. 

The implication that African people were "slaves" populates mass media and literature.  Even when information is provided about a real person, like Nancy Green, who was photographed for the Antebellum "Aunt Jemima" image seen on the pancake mix box for nearly six decades, the writer states that Green was "born a slave."    Nonsense.  She was born into a slavery environment and held hostage.  It would be outrages to say to a newborn baby:  “You are a slave.”  (In June 2021, amidst heightened racial unrest, after the murder of George Floyd and numerous African American men and women by police in the United States, the Aunt Jemima brand name was discontinued by its current owner, PepsiCo.)

The young man’s stiff resistance masked embarrassment, anger; a hint of shame.  For him, to be called a “descendant of slaves” is to have no value; a descendant of "nothing."  In perceiving a “slave” as having no value, and programmed to believe (aided by poverty, systemic poor education and generational trauma) that “we came from slaves,” subconsciously, he translated “no value” to himself and his people.  Consequently, if he chose, killing another person who reflects his image is done almost matter-of-factly, manifesting the same, deeply buried, unconscious "ain't nuthin' but a slave" venom he feels for himself. 

The point of our discussion was to help the youths understand that being born into a slavery situation makes a person(s) no more a slave  – genetically/organically - than a person(s) born into a poverty situation makes that person – genetically/organically - poor.  Would you look at a newborn baby and say:  “You are poor?”   

I encouraged the youths to call on the phenomenal strength of their Ancestors to focus on the person(s)/individual(s) beyond the condition or situation, just as youths are encouraged to focus on themselves as a person and not the poverty and/or violence that may surround them in their community.

To get youths fully engaged in the excitement of learning about Black African history,  I needed to do something that made sense; something they could work with; something they could feel – viscerally.  I wanted them to think about the nightmare our/their  ancestors - named and unnamed - faced when being abruptly thrust into a life-changing catastrophe/abyss; traumatized, terrorized, stigmatized, humiliated over 300 years.  No wonder we created the gospels and the blues and sing and play them with more passion than anyone.   

 

That "something" turned out to be simple.  The simple process of changing the narrative.  Change the narrative from "slave" to "hostage."  

When we say the word “slave,” it’s one thing, as it casts disdain that connotes the victim is at fault and often transfers to “shame,” instead of being framed as evidence of the devastating consequences of the kidnappers/enslavers’ greed.  When we say “hostage,” it’s another.  It emphasizes the person(s) is not in control; not at fault, and correctly points directly to the criminal kidnapper/enslaver.  Cathy O'Neil shows how “shame” is weaponized in The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation? 
Words carry vibrations/frequencies.  Just compare the difference in vibrations when we speak the words hate and love.  We also feel the contrasting vibrations between the words “slave” and “hostage.”  Saying our Ancestors were "hostages" motivates us to mentally and emotionally punish the enslaver instead of the victim.

Even if, intellectually,we accept the toxic narrative “Black people came from slaves,” it still can harbor the power to, emotionally, affect our thinking, consequently negatively impact our identity, as well as how others view us.  For example, a white ABC executive was investigated for racism for covertly referencing the word "slave" when she told Robin Roberts (African American) of Good Morning America that it wasn't as if the network was asking her to "pick cotton," when Roberts requested more money during their contract renewal conference.   

Everyone, especially teens and young adults, act in harmony with our perception of ourselves or perception of others.  Again, if, unconsciously, teens/young adults, males and females perceive themselves as “nothing” vis–à–vis being “descendants of slaves” and, again, “slaves” being perceived as being nothing/valueless, then, through this internalized self-hate, it’s easy to commit senseless violence against anyone in their race; conversely, committing violence against themselves. (See Dr. Joy Degruy’s example of behavior reflective of Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome/PTSS.)

The famous, age-old adage, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will not hurt me,” is a lie!  Words (even letters) carry vibrations/energy that impact our personal energy, which is why words can heal or harm.  We see and hear evidence of how words harm from teens committing suicide after reading bullies’ word-weapons targeting them on social media.  (See cyberbullying.)  “Words…can destroy,” Reinhart Koselleck wrote in Linguistic Change and the History of Events.  Degrading labels – word weapons - are pervasive psychological slings and arrows that can violate our self-worth, and in some cases, erode people’s mental health, diminishing their quality of life.  (See how words hurt at ielanguages.)   

There is a “link between languages and domination” Bell Hooks enlightened us in her essay, Hooks on the Language of Power.  She adds “…it is not the English language that hurts me, but what the oppressors do with it, how they shape it to become a territory that limits and defines; how they make it a weapon that can shame, humiliate, colonize…,” such as the n-word.  So, the youths and I agreed to replace the word "slave" with "hostage."  

The population at which word-weapons is targeted, unconsciously/subconsciously, latch on to the definition of experiences that give colossal pain, especially when that population has been savagely torn from their home and family, and stripped of their original heritage/identity – name, language, religion/ritual practices and meanings, and specific geographical place of origin - as were our African ancestors.  Slavery language provokes and evokes in African people throughout the Diaspora a cacophony of  losses.  “We have not even dealt with slavery.  We are walking around still traumatized,” actress, Taraji P. Henson, said in an Essence Magazine interview on the subject of mental health and the African American community.

Africans throughout the Diaspora is the ONLY race of people (some scholars say 300 million) FORCIBLY stripped of their identity (name, language, etc.) under the threat of bloody bodily harm, as shown in the vicious "whipping" scene in Roots, the 1977 TV mini-series, where kidnapped Kunta Kinte is forced to call himself "Toby."  (It’s interesting to note that it was during the late 1960s that African Americans began naming their children with non-European-sounding names, such as Kanisha, Kadisah, Jamaal, Kalil, Akil, Imani, Jada, and so on.)

The long term and ongoing advocacy for words and phrases like “slave,” “slave trade,” “master,” and “belonged to/owned by” have negatively impacted generations of Black youths’ and adults’ minds and hearts, causing a silent, emotional undercurrent of embarrassment; consequently, disconnect, as with the aforementioned young man.  Slavery language/terminology is one of many examples of “biased ethnocentric euphemism[s] for conquest.”

 

The Word “slave.” 

Throughout my life, I’ve refused to call my enslaved ancestors “slaves.”  So, the young man’s statement – “I don’t wanna know nuthin’ ‘bout no slaves” - struck a nerve.  To him and millions of Africans living on this planet, the words “slave” and “African” are synonymous.  “Slaves were brought to America from Africa” is a statement I, like children of all races, grew up hearing.  Repeatedly, we’ve heard or read:  “They were already slaves” and “Blacks are descendants of slaves.”  Even filmmaker, Spike Lee, declared in an interview, “We came from slaves!”

Consequently and erroneously, the young man and millions of Black youths (as well as adults) feel their African ancestry is based solely on this noun.  For many, saying our Ancestors were "slaves" suggests an organic, innate, inborn, genetic/character flaw, inferring that enslavement is the victim’s fault; consequently, stigmatizing a terrorized, unwilling victim. 

The word evokes a psychological distancing that makes it easier to dehumanize the victims.  It also evokes grief.  Grief and love, it is believed, resides in the heart.  The tentacles of that dehumanization, that stigma, have burrowed into the minds and hearts of tens of millions of Black and non-Black people, around the globe.  In JASON PARHAM's in-depth essay, Tiktok and the Evolution of Digital Blackface, on the popular platform's racism, one of the white users responded to complaints of appropriating African Americans' creativity:  “Y'all don't even realize, if it wasn't for a certain amount of white people, y'all would still be slaves.”  Here’s incontrovertible evidence of the demeaning “slave” connotation that displaces a people’s humanity. 

In elementary school, I didn’t understand why I cringed each time I heard or read slavery language.  Some mystical energy inside me screamed:  THAT’S NOT TRUE!  Instinctively and emphatically, I knew that my Ancestors were NOT “already slaves.”  That knowing energy, possibly, was/is my African DNA and ancestors speaking; or, “blood memory” as playwright August Wilson stated in a PBS interview; others say “soul memory.”  Researchers call it cellular memory.  Scientific research in epigenetics and slavery, based on Dr. Joy DeGruy's scholarly work, credibly suggests that, through cellular memory, African Americans, generation after generation after generation, embodied and embody past horrors and traumas.
 

Too many of us, throughout the Diaspora, have accepted, even embraced the “slave” declarative as absolute, just as we’ve accepted that “America” was America at the time Europeans first kidnapped our Ancestors. 
 

When our ancestors were snatched from their villages in the Motherland, shipped in despicable, pressed-in unsanitary conditions in the coffins of ships to Central and South “Americas” and, to what is now called the Caribbean, and brutally stripped of their identity (names, religious rituals and practices and language), “America” didn’t exist.  What existed were European territories, called “United Colonies,” that had been savagely stolen/taken from indigenous peoples, so-called Indians.  America became “America” on September 9, 1776, when the Continental Congress officially replaced the name “United Colonies” with “United States of America.”  In The Naming of  America: Fragments We’ve Shored Against Ourselves, Jonathan Cohen said:  “We tend not to question the factual history in the name.”  Similarly, we tend not to question the authenticity of the word “slave” and the other words and phrases in slavery terminology, as they apply to Africans who were kidnapped, then held against their will. 

Instead of questioning its authenticity, the majority of Africans, globally, have embraced the word “slave” (as well as the ‘n’ word) as our identity. With the exception of Africans who, rather than be enslaved, preferred to die or risk running away and savage beatings if caught, over time and with persistent and insidious programming, many African hostages began to see themselves only as “slaves,” which is the reason Harriet Tubman has been quoted saying:  “I could have freed more, if they hadn’t thought [sic] they were slaves.”   

Religion was among the tactics for much of that “shaping,” Wole Soyinka declared in his book, Of Africa.  “The chains placed around the mind through religious absolutism are far more constrictive, tenacious, and implacable, than corrupt, secular dictatorships," he wrote.  Consequently, the “slave” mentality is formed, especially since the Bible and other “sacred” books contain pro-slavery language, such as in Colossians 3:22-24.  On the other hand, African hostages, who didn't succumb to and embrace a “slave mentality,” experienced the conundrum of not wanting to abandon what was familiar, 

especially the precious, albeit precarious family/kinship/relationships they had formed, and escaping the unstable, inhumane and brutally demeaning environment, where love ones, including infants from their mothers, could be ruthlessly taken and sold away from them.  (While enslavers separated thousands of African families by selling relatives, there is the astonishing and rarely heard of case of a free African American who, in the early 1800s, sold himself into slavery to be with the woman he loved.  A man of some material means, as told in the first-person narrative in the book Bullwhip Days: The Slaves Remember: An Oral Histor, and referenced in Beverly Jenkin’s historical romance novel, Indigo, he offered to purchase the beauty, whose skin was kissed with an abundance of Mother Africa’s divine dark ebony.  The White enslaver rejected the overture.  So, he gave up his freedom.) 

The holistic truth is that the ANCESTORS OF NEARLY EVERYONE on this planet was enslaved at some point and time in history.  White peoples’ ancestors also were once kidnapped, enslaved and held hostage by other Europeans (see Slavery in Medieval Europe and Irish people’s enslavement).  Over a period of 300 years (A.D. 793 to 1066), Vikings from Scandinavian countries (the Netherlands - Norway, Denmark, and Sweden, etc., also called Norsemen), captured people as slaves and they looted whatever they could find. According to historians, they ravaged European communities in England, Scotland, Ireland, France (including Paris), Spain, Portugal, Italy, Central Europe and Russia.  

Whites, “from the Balkans and the Caucasus,” were also kidnapped, enslaved and castrated by Arabians/Muslims.  According to Quroa.com, "...in medieval times most slaves in Europe were white...."  The Greek historian, “Herodotus, mentions slaves repeatedly,” said Professor Nell Irvin Painter in her book The History of White People.  “Plato owned fifty [White] slaves, and households with ten or more bonds people were common,” she added.  Don Jordan’s and Michael Walsh’s WHITE CARGO: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America vigilantly debunks the myth that, unlike Africans, were never enslaved in the so-called “new world.”  In the authors’ Chapter One, readers learn hat Elizabethan authorities “dreamed of an American empire that would give hem gold and glory [while] others saw the [so-called] New World as a dumping ground for England’s unwanted poor.”  Chapter Two demonstrates where the Lord Chief Justice, who had been a “highwayman” (thief), “began to empty England’s gaols [jails]…,” and Chapter Three shows where Britain’s richest man “paved the way for the first white slaves.”

Interestingly, I learned about White-on-White and Islamic slavery in high school in the early 1960s (despite cutting history classes because nothing in the textbooks reflected my race in a positive light).  For the most part, this information has since been deleted from today’s American schools’ world history curriculum.  

The English word “slave” is rooted in the European word “slav,” from the Slavics, one of a group of peoples in eastern, southeastern, and central Europe, including the Russians and Ruthenians (Eastern Slavs); the Bulgars, Serbs, Croats, Slavonians, Slovenes (Southern Slavs), the Poles, Czechs, Moravians, and Slovaks (see Western Slavs).  But the word existed in other languages among diverse groups in Africa long before Arabs and Europeans invaded, pillaged and colonized the Continent.  For example, the word for slavery is ẹrú in Yoruba (Nigeria).   The coastal country hosts 371 ethnic groups, among which there are 525 languages).

That said, white-controlled education, literature and mass media are careful to never call their ancestors “slaves” or say “white people came from slaves.”  Neither do Asians and East Indians.  Yet, these groups also have a long history of their ancestors being enslaved by their own and by others.  Still, they do not broadcast, “we are descendants of slaves,” to each other and the world.

(See: Slavery in Asia 

Slavery in China

Slavery in Korea

Slavery in Japan  

Slavery in India) 
Slavery in the Ottoman Empire) 

Despite the absolute TRUTH that nearly ALL people on this planet are “descendants of slaves,” the word “slave” is generally branded on Black people exclusively.  And, as noted earlier, it carries a stigma.  Historiography typically correlates slavery - only - with Africa.  The late sociologist, Dr. Chancellor Williams, explained “how slavery came to be confined to Blacks” in his book, Destruction of A Black Civilization. 

The word “slave” also has had chillingly profound effects on generations of non-Africans.  A white person’s subconscious/core thinking regarding Black people could be:  “Since you were ‘already slaves,’ you don’t deserve support/protection/ services/equality.”  With the exception of the compassionate among their race, (i.e., those who risked life, family and property to assist African hostages escaping from plantations through the Underground Railroad; those who joined the 1960s’ perilous Civil Rights Movement, Charlottesville, VA demonstrations; those participating in the global, multiracial Black Lives Matter protests in 2020), the word “slave” gives comfort to privileged Whites.  Their thinking might be:  "I will not risk my privileges for a 'slave'."  (See: Tim Wise on "White Privilege")  

The “They were already slaves” narrative could have been the core, implicit thinking of the murderer of 9 African Americans in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Carolina; the Neo-confederate police murders of Black men, women and children throughout the United States – from 12-year-old Tamir Rice to   Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Breonna Taylor,  Sandra Bland, Byron Williams, Ahmaud Arbery (the last words he heard, "Fuckin' nigger," which were also heard by over 10,000 lynched Black men, women and children before Arbery, their bodies hanging like “strange fruit” from tree branches), Justin Howell, George Floyd, Rayshard Brooks, and others listed in this profound YouTube video performance, and hundreds more.  (Also, see Say Her Name)  (The “10,000” number is cited in distinguished journalist’s, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, anti-lynching petition to President McKinley.^[1]  “Lynching bees,” Ms. Wells declared, “have become the favorite pastime of the South!”^[2])

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[1] Being on the “front lines,” so to speak, Ms. Wells’ “10,000 lynchings” assessment may be more accurate than current reports that range from 4,743 between Reconstruction and 1968, and 4,400 lynchings during the period between Reconstruction and World War II and 6,500 (to date) according to the Equal Justice Initiative.  Ms. Wells’s rise from schoolteacher to a powerful civil rights activist is artfully weaved into Alex Tresniowski’s historical suspense novel, The Rope:  A True Story of Murder, Heroism, and the Dawn of the NAACP (https://www.goodreads. com/en/book/show/54304237_.  In 2020, ninety years late, Ms. Wells-Barnett was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. 

[2]As a spectator sport, “lynching coordinators” distributed leaflets that shouted:  WHITE FOLKS INVITED TO A HANGING BEE!  Source: Guardian.com (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/apr/26/lynchings-memorial-us-south-montgomery-alabama).   

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The “already slaves” belief certainly may have been the mindset of hate-filled Whites who, routinely, raped Black women and girls (and possibly little boys) that John Grisham described in gut-wrenching, grizzly details in the first four pages of A Time to Kill. 

The “already slaves” narrative was most certainly in the minds of the White mob that committed unspeakable savagery on eight-month pregnant Mary Turner.  She had protested her husband’s lynching.  They hung her upside, thuggishly sliced open her belly and when her fetus tumble to the ground, the savages crushed the unborn with the heels of their boots.

 

Enslavers spread the “they were already slaves” narrative to camouflage their shameful and abhorrent act of forcing and holding people against their will, with the intent to minimize the barbaric act of kidnapping and brutalizing people and destroying their culture; to make it seem less despicable.  Even make it seem acceptable.    

Who knows who first thought it okay to kidnap and enslave people, much less see humans as property.  But one fact is true, any kidnapped individual is an unwilling participant!  A kidnapped individual, held against his or her will, and brutalized, is a HOSTAGE!

“Africans enslaved Africans then sold their [so-called] slaves to Europeans” is another perpetual and misleading narrative in media, textbooks, and literature.  Conveniently omitted from the “Africans sold Africans” indictment is that NOT ALL African Kings/Queens/Rulers/warriors were complicit in this MAAFA (holocaust).  Award winning historian, Sylviane A. Diouf  anthologized this purposely hidden fact in her revealing book, Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies.  The following partial list of Diouf ’s Table of Contents shows that more Africans fought against Arabian/European/American enslavement of their people than those who were complicit:

           Igboland, Slavery and the Drums of War and Heroism, by John N. Oriji 

A Devotion to the idea of Liberty at Any Price: Rebellion and Antislavery  
       in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century Upper Guinea Coast, by  
       Ismail Rashid. 

The Strategies of Small-Scale Societies: Defending Communities from     
       Slave  Raiders in Coastal Guinea-Bissau, 1450-1815, by Walter  
       Hawthorne.

“Even if no Africans had been sold by other Africans,” stated the, The Firm Voice, a character in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel, Americanah, “the [so-called] transatlantic slave trade would still have happened.  It was a European[global] enterprise.”

As for those African rulers who were complicit, greed is a non-discriminating spirit.   Green and traitors exist in all races.  Judas betrayed Christ, according to the Bible’s King James Version.  Reportedly, some Jews supported Hitler.  During the African MAAFA, for some African leaders, extenuating and complicated circumstances might have forced them between a rock and a hard place.  (Not that this ghastly transgression is an excuse.)  Queen Nzinga, for example, of what is now The Republic of Angola, “renowned for brilliant gorilla tactics…,” won numerous wars, with a fierce army, against the invading Portuguese, who, in their greedy quest, took tens of thousands of Africans to what is now Brazil and where the majority African population resides in the city of Bahia.  This African wonder woman “who led her warriors well into her sixties,” joined forces with other African tribal forces to fight against the Europeans.  On the other hand, she confessed to enslaving other Africans and selling them to enslavers to keep Europeans from kidnapping and enslaving her people.  African rulers that resisted were overcome by the invaders’ weapons of mass destruction (guns and cannons).  Still, others, like many of today’s leaders of governments and corporations, were just plain mean, selfish, gluttonous, even soul-less.

SLAVERY:  DIFFERENT SYSTEMS

With regard to slavery systems, scholars pinpoint vast distinctions between Arabian/European/American slavery and indigenous African slavery systems, which differed from country to country and tribe to tribe on the Continent.  Generally,

a) Children in African slavery were not systematically “born a slave,” 

b) African systems routinely allowed hostages to buy their freedom, 

c) Hostages weren’t stripped of their identity, and 

d) Hostages faced temporary enslavement.  Reportedly, Africans enslaved other Africans-

•          for punishment for a crime,
•          payment for a debt, or as
•          prisoners of war.

When abducted by anyone - a foreigner/outsider, neighbor, or warring tribe of their own race, an individual, Black, White, Asian, Indian, etc. – organically - is NOT a slave.  Organically, that person(s) is a person/individual.  After being 

a) kidnapped and 

b) held against her/his will, that person is 

c) a hostage.  

 

Webster-Mirriam dictionary defines “slave” as: A person held in servitude as the chattel of another.  The active word/verb is “held,” inferring “against one’s will;” thus, confirming, again, a “hostage.”  

Kidnapped and enslaved individuals are just that individuals, HUMANS, who hold distinct and often unique qualities.  The cop who insidiously took his painstaking time to murder George Floyd did not see Floyd as a human.  The unknown evil persons who lynched Mary Turner in 1918.  Eight months pregnant, Mary Turner had the audacity to  protest Whites her lynching husband.  Then, like a pack of rabid wolves, faces twisted in hate and rage, a White mob hung Mary upside down by her ankles from a tree, doused her with gasoline, burned off her clothes and riddled her body with bullets.  No digital recording exists, as for Mr. Floyd and hundreds of Black men and women murdered by police, to haunt viewers, throughout time and space, of the evil incarnate, homicidal fiend that sliced open Mary Turner’s belly then stomped on and crushed the fetus when she or he fell to the ground.  Did Mary or any of the thousands of other lynched victims call for their mothers as George Floyd did….. eleven times?

 

Each kidnapped, then enslaved African was imbued with specific, innate qualities and relationships - gender, language, name, heritage; mother, father, daughter, son, sister, brother, grandparent, aunt, uncle, cousin, etc.  Each had names that embedded specific meaning and unique stories.  A Ugandian boy or man is called Kakuru or Wasswa, for example, to inform all that he is the elder of a twin.  The younger male twin is usually called Kato, telling the world that he is the youngest of twins.  Girls named Amahle means "the beautiful one," in the South African Zulu/Bantu language.  This meaningful and specific naming pattern existed and still exists throughout the many, many societies living on Africa’s vast Continent.  And, speaking of names, originally, before European invasions, Africa was called Alkebulan.  Europe divided the Continent into different regions “in earnest with the Berlin Conference of 1884-1885, which was the cause of most of Africa’s borders today.  This conference was called by German Chancellor Bismarck to settle how European countries would claim colonial land in Africa and to avoid a war among European nations over African territory.  All the major European States were invited to the conference. Germany, France, Great Britain, Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal, and Spain were all considered to have a future role in the imperial partition of Africa.  The United States was invited because of its interest in Liberia but did not attend because it had no desire to build a colonial empire in Africa.  Also invited were Austria-Hungary, Sweden-Norway, Denmark, Italy, Turkey, and Russia who all were considered minor players in the quest for colonizing Africa, though Italy would claim some colonial possessions in Northeast Africa.  Most notably there were no Africans present at this conference, nor were any Europeans present to ensure that native Africans had any say in the proceedings.”

 

Each kidnapped person had religious or spiritual rituals and customs.  Each adult had a profession - farmer, artist (painter, sculptor, etc), herbalist/healer, counselor/adviser, merchant, engineer (of houses, canoes, ships), historian (Griot), fisherman/diver, weaver of cloth, designer (of textiles, clothing, jewelry), hair stylist, who created braided intricate conversational designs that communicated which tribe he or she belonged, as described in Emma Dabiri ‘s enlightening Twisted: The Tangled History of Black Hair Culture, or even to map a village or location that Natasha Bowen demonstrated in her young adult African fantasy, Skin of the Sea, based on Yoruba deity tradition.  Each author, as well as other scholarly work describe Africans’ genius ability to communicate through intricate braiding art may be one of the reasons European enslavers ruthlessly shaved women’s heads before setting sail across the Atlantic.  Africans were also traders of jewelry, gems, food, perfumes, spices, etc.; cooks, hunters, scientists, musicians, instrument makers, comedians, Queens, Kings, Princesses, Princes.  , trader (of jewelry, gems, food, perfumes, spices, etc.), cook, hunter, scientist, musician, instrument maker, comedian, Queen, King, Princess, Prince.  Each stolen child had eyes of wonder and cries of fear.  So, to brand a particular race of people, solely, as "slaves" demeans their heritage, identity, intrinsic worth, and again, diminish (even erase) their humanity. 

Our African Ancestors knew they were humans first (as did individuals in other enslaved races), which is why Arabs and Europeans had to chain and imprison them in the holds/bowels of ships and on land in "pens," and hire armed guards to keep them from fighting back and escaping; even committing suicide.  Hence, the old spiritual “Before I be a slave, I’ll be buried in my grave…”  

Control of African male hostages in the Islamic and Ottoman Empires included castration;called "eunuchs." Eunuchs "would usually be [so-called]slaves that had been castrated so they would be reliable servants of a royal court." Pictures of a Eunuchs show them dressed in what looks like fine attire; a deception to disguise the de-humanizing horror the boys and men had experienced.  In the Ottoman Empire, "eunuchs were typically [so-called]slaves imported from outside their domains."  The brutal, bloody act was also practiced throughout Asia (including China) and the Middle East (including Saudia Arabia).  As noted on the SecularAfrican blog -
Eunuchs and Ghilman in The Islamic Empire, 

 

 "Eunuchs were plentiful in the Islamic Empire. Muslim rulers, who ruled under the authority of Caliphs, purchased and had [so-called] slaves from Persia, the Indian subcontinent, Europe, Africa and beyond, in vast quantities in their palaces. Ordinary Muslims outside the royal class also had male slaves [hostages] who were castrated specially for their service."  

 

White enslavers in America also castrated the men they enslaved.  David Hackett Fischer documented this, yet another more barbaric act against Black people, in AFRICAN FOUNDERS – How Enslaved People Expanded American Freedom.  Hackett wrote that, in Virginia, a trafficking hub at the time, castration was ordered by the Middlesex County Court for a broad range of offenses.  He tells readers that enslaver, Christopher Robinson, castrated “George” for running away.  Enslaver, John Parke Custis committed the same savage act on “Peter.”  While White men could, and did, rape Black girls and women with impunity, many times viciously so, a Black man, if not killed, was castrated for raping a White woman, even if the White woman initiated and/or consented to the act.  In 1730, a Virginia law mandated that, “if caught alive,” castration was the punishment.  

European and Euro-American enslavers also marketed Africans as "non-human/beasts/savages," understanding that the African "human" factor would elicit sympathy, even outrage from a right-minded, compassionate populace.  The French inhumanely and grossly displayed the African sista Saartjie Baartman ((see Saartjie “Sarah” Baartman (Hottentot Venus)) as a “freak of nature” with her voluptuous derrière (for which less endowed White women and some Black women have been shown to invest thousands of dollars, even endure life-threatening surgeries, to get silicone implants in their butt cheeks to replicate African women’s blessed bottoms.  Europe's Victorian era “bustle” fashion  imitated African women’s tempting bottoms.  The European “fashion” demanded women strap various types of tortuous wooden, cloth or wired structure around their waist to effect an ample backside under their clothing.  Today, thousands of women, Black and White subject themselves to what is now called the “Brazilian Butt Lift.”  Of course those indulging in this fetish disclaim, publicly, maybe even privately, admiration for (even jealousy of) African women’s shapeliness.)).  Brotha Ota Benga, like Hottentot Venus, was equally humiliated and terrified when Whites exhibited him in side shows “...at the 1904 St. Louis World Fair…,” then further dehumanized him by  encaging him alongside monkeys at the New York Zoological Park [now known as the Bronx Zoo]…..”  Pamela Newkirk told Benga’s agonizing journey in her “gripping and painstaking narrative” Spectacle: The Astonishing Life of Ota Benga.  These two humans represent numerous un-named kidnapped Africans who experienced pornographic violence as “oddities” in circus side shows, including the famous, now defunct, Barnum Bailey Circus.

In modern history, de-humanizing African people through the presentation of vile, demonic images is seen in the degrading caricatures of President Obama and First Lady, Michelle Obama (see Racism Is Alive And Well: 35 Incredibly Racist Anti-Obama Images).  The white cop who murdered Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, described Brown as looking “like a demon.” Again, Derek Michael Chauvin,  the now imprisoned ex-police officer, who showed no compassion while he insidiously suffocated George Floyd in 2020, may, subconsciously thought Floyd as nonhuman.  Chavin was stabbed while in prison in 2023.

The Phrase “slave trade"                                           

 

This benign phrase is misleading in that it masks the moral, ethical, legal and spiritual - most definitively spiritual – reality that humans cannot be “traded.”  This phrase creates the illusion that there was a fair and equal exchange; a valid, legitimate deal, and that kidnapping, brutalizing and enslaving people, was/is justified.  Human hubris, often claiming that slavery was “necessary,” embraces and perpetuates the “slave trade” phrase in an abundance of scholarly and pop literature and mass media - past and present.  I submit that, with the exception of trading, say, a political prisoner for another or parents "trading" ransom money for a kidnapped family member, no individual can TRADE another.    

A stone carved relief near the roof/apex of the Federal Trade Commission building in Washington, DC shows an African giving a European an elephant’s ivory tusk (a despicable act then and especially in today’s animal rights awareness environment; although, in the past, an elephant’s carcass might have been used as food and clothing, not left for vultures by today's greedy poachers).  The Caucasian male in the stone carved relief is seen giving the African male a small sack of who knows what.  Onlookers might speculate the bag holds something of equal value. 

Exceedingly unlikely. 

Europeans’ centuries-old quests of stealing and amassing gold from indigenous people and destroying their cultures is documented in mountains of scholarly research and literature.  Around the planet, European and American owners of corporations continue to plunder and pillage nearly all nations of color and plunge them into poverty (e.g., Haiti and corporate land grabs).  The masses of people who believe Western countries (e.g., France, Italy, England, Belgium, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Canada, U.S. etc.) are “better” than other countries, are ignorant or blind to the history and knowledge that these countries grew to be “better” by crushing other nations, through unspeakable violence, and stealing/destroying their wealth in human resources and mineral-infused land. 

 

So, if a “legal” so-called “trade” did occur, Africans got the raw deal, as two scholars, Chancellor Williams, author of The Destruction of a Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race From 4500 B.C. To 2000 A.D  and Walter Rodney, author of How Europe Underdeveloped Africa, documented.  Hence, despite literary and media covenants, a genuine “slave trade” never existed, since, as stated, a) the people were not “slaves,” they were unwilling participants/hostages to be enslaved, and b) morally, no one has the right to “trade” another human being.

The Phrases “belong to" and owned by"                    This demoralizing phrase is seen and heard throughout all textbooks, literature and media. In a 2015 exhibit, that featured portraits of known and unknown musicians, at Washington, DC’s National Portrait Gallery, the written description under a lithograph of the musical savant and genius, Thomas Greene Wiggins, reminded visitors that he was “owned by” Colonel James Bethune, for whom he “made a fortune.”

Standing before the exhibit and reading that this man was “owned by” an enslaver, sent a mix message of overt pride (he was a genius) and covert embarrassment (he was “owned by”) through the African American onlookers, including me.  One lady commented to a friend:  “I hate that ‘owned by’ comment.  It disgusts me!”  

Greene (a.k.a. “Blind Tom”), the first African American to perform at the White House in 1860, sang in multiple languages, composed more than 100 piano and vocal compositions, including Oliver Galop and Virginia Polka, published in 1860.  In an astonishingly unusual occurrence during slavery, he earned, for the enslaver, $50,000 annually in concert tours. (See Endnote [v])

Literature and media are not replete with statements that Native Americans or indigenous people anywhere “belonged to” some white enslaver, even though, in 1492, Columbus kidnapped and forcibly took half a dozen Arawak people across the Atlantic to Spain.  And, even though European invaders enslaved indigenous people, few indigenous people carry European surnames, unlike Africans in the Diaspora.  African people shouldered with European surnames broadcasts the "ownership" aspect of slavery (which is why Malcolm X renounced his surname.  The "X" stood for his unknown African name and refusal to carry forward the name of his family's enslaver/hostage holder.).  (Thankfully, my surname, Littlejohn, is rooted in my mother’s Seminole heritage.  Her father, Harrison Littlejohn, was African and Seminole.)

In the case where Native Americans enslaved Africans, and only a few are known to indulge in this inhumane practice, we rarely read or hear descendants of those enslaved Africans carrying Native American enslavers’ surnames.  (See:  5 Native American Communities Who [that]  Enslaved Africans)

Furthermore, I've never heard or read where whites are tagged with the “owned by” label, despite the fact, as addressed earlier, whites enslaved and sold other whites, as did the Arabs/ Moors/Muslims.  This tragic term is also unheard of in Asian slavery descriptions.

Never having to be burdened with being identified as being "owned" by anyone, may be why Ethiopians have a rarefied sense of pride.  Ethiopia is the only country in Africa that was never "conquered" by Arabians nor Europeans; its people never were colonized/enslaved or "owned."

Again, the point is that technically, ethically, legally, morally, philosophically, biologically - and again, spiritually - no one BELONGS to another person regardless of fabricated/ manufactured “laws” designed to support this ungodly deed of "possession."  As the character, Moses, in the movie Free State of Jones emphatically said:  Nobody can own a child of God!  Consequently, the youths and I agreed to delete “belonged to” and “owned by” when referencing slavery and instead say, “held hostage by.”

The Word “master"  
as another “biased ethnocentric euphemism for conquest,” infers supremacy in general and white supremacy, in particular, when framed within the context of the enslavement of Africans.   Kidnappers/enslavers - Black, White, Arabian or Asian - are not “masters!”  A person may be a master of a skill or craft, but is not master of a person, despite the plethora of secular and religious literature that emphatically sanction this falsehood.  

In the practice of white supremacists’ micro aggression racism, “master,” subliminally, is read and heard in the 300-year-old children’s British nursery rhyme, Baa, Baa, Black Sheep: 

Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?

Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full!

One for the master,

One for the dame,

And one for the little boy

Who lives down the lane.

The rhyme’s third line, in the American version, has been “revised” to “One for my master.”  Although the sheep is an animal - hence, property - the thought-bubble subliminal message emanates from the “black sheep” referencing “my master;” surreptitiously implying the “master” is white.  The allusion is supported through the accompanying images/illustrations seen in most children's books, as recent as 10 years ago, where the herd contentedly grazing in the pasture in the background, is white.  The lone black sheep is giving his/her wool to “the” or “my master.”  The verse has received international political correctness headlines for its white supremacist tone.  This racist metaphor/language extends to family members who (today) speak unfavorably about a relative being the “black sheep” in the family.   

One youth pointed out that too many Black people around the world (wherever Europeans enslaved/colonized people of color and destroyed cultures), consciously or subconsciously, still see white people as “masters,” and, that many whites still see themselves as “masters;” an ongoing residual effect of psychological and emotional chains of slavery.  Case in point:  The 2014 article - Black teen says teacher told him to say“Yes sir, master.”  Scholars that addressed this mental and emotional aftershock, termed the psychological chains of slavery, are Dr. Joy DeGruy-Leary’s Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome: America’s Legacy of Enduring Inquiry and Healing, Alvin Morrow’s book Breaking the Curse of Willie Lynch/The Science of Slave Psychology and Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery, by Na'im Akbar. 



These now invisible “chains” have placed Africans throughout the Diaspora between an emotional rock and a hard place.  “There is a great existential difficulty in attempting to count oneself a human being equal with all others after having suffered through the experience of centuries of slavery.  It is the trauma of slavery that haunts African Americans in the deepest recesses of our souls.  Indeed, its suppression and denial only hurt us more deeply by causing us to accept a limiting, disparaging, and at times even repugnant view of ourselves,” wrote Jan Willis, the author of Dreaming Me. 

Outcome   
Changing slavery terminology (vibration/frequency) can change our mindset, a fact white decision makers understood when they stopped broadcasting (if they ever did) “white people were slaves” to saying they were “indentured servants."  A change or upgrade in slavery terminology can aid us in breaking the chains of psychological and emotional chains of slavery.  

Motivational speakers understand the power of word vibrations, which is why they tell audiences to say “when” something they desire will happen, not “if.”  The vibrations, frequency/energy from “when” is more definitive, positive/active-focused than the vibrations/energy from the passive/inactive word “if.”  

Changing slavery language changes vibrations - hence, our mindset - thus raising youths’ interest in initiating a desire for clarity about and engagement in Black African History.

Changing slavery language also makes a stronger case for reparations.  Since kidnapped African people were not “already slaves” and weren’t “owned” by anyone, but were hostages, their descendants deserve reparations.  (The D.C. Compensation Emancipation Act, not surprisingly, compensated the enslavers with $300 per hostage.) 

One youth, who grasped the spirit of the discussion, concluded:  “So, Abraham Lincoln didn’t free ‘slaves.’  The Proclamation Emancipation  just gave African hostages the right to escape slavery without being kidnapped again.”  Bingo!

Youths, male and female, especially those who embrace the violent, black-on-black culture, need to feel that they are a part of something bigger than their hormonal egos; learn that had the stronger of their African Ancestors not survived, they wouldn’t be here today.  They need to fall in love with themselves by reclaiming the fierce spirit of their strong, creative and diligent ancestors and take themselves seriously enough to study the phenomenal power they embody.  Some still might not care even if they know, but, they CAN’T care if they don’t know.

It's my intent that the young man who said “I don’t wanna know nuthin’ ‘bout no slaves,” and youths like him, gain a sense of identity and worthiness that translates to exploring and knowing their purpose.  A sense of identity and purpose translates to minimizing, maybe even eliminating, the violence that many Black youths (male and female) commit against each other.  So, again, changing the lexicon of slavery language can help them want to know, thus change their mindset about their value of themselves and our value as a people.  

“Words impose themselves, take root in our memory against our will.”

Bell Hooks

http://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-7/hooks-on-the-language-of-power

“I am grounded in my history and my ancestry as anybody I know.

I walk with them.  I live with them.”  Oprah Winfrey.

  Answering the Call:  A Conversation with Oprah Winfrey. 

The Washington Post Magazine.  September 18, 2016.

  

 MU KALA KINTWADI YA TUBU I MU ZINGA (Swahili)- "He or she who is in touch with heritage or origins remains alive"

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[i] MAAFAin Kiswahili - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swahili_language, means disaster, calamity or terrible occurrence,” and describes the history and ongoing effects of atrocities and other forms of oppression inflicted on African people by Arabs and Europeans/Americans.  Scholars, such as Marimba Ani and Maulana Karenga, replaces the phrase “slave trade,” for example, with the terms “Maafa,” "African Holocaust" or "Holocaust of Enslavement"  (See African Holocaust - http://www.africanholocaust.net/html_ah/holocaustspecial.htm, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maafa, and MAAFA website http://www.maafasfbayarea.com/.)

[ii] 10 Facts about the Arab Enslavement of Black People Not Taught in Schools and Islam's Black Slaves [hostages]: A History of Africa's Other Black Diaspora.  The word for “Slave” in Arabic  is Adb.

Much is written and dramatized in media about European/American atrocities in kidnapping and enslaving African, such as Belgium’s cruel King Leopold who committed unspeakable carnage on the Congolese people (see documentary White King, Red Rubber), but documentation of the Arabs’ (Islamic Empire) devastating abuse against the Africans they kidnapped,  including cutting off the male’s genitals, turning them into eunuchs, is mute in U.S. and world history education systems and media.  "Black Africans were transported to the Islamic empire across the Sahara to Morocco and Tunisia from West Africa, from Chad to Libya, along the Nile from East Africa, and up the coast of East Africa to the Persian Gulf. This trade had been well entrenched for over 600 years before Europeans arrived, and had driven the rapid expansion of Islam across North Africa.  By the time of the Ottoman Empire, the majority of slaves were obtained by raiding in Africa."  Source:  The Role of Islam in African Slavery and Bernard Lewis Race and Slavery in the Middle East: ​An Historical Enquiry, Chapter 1 -- Slavery, Oxford Univ Press 1994.

The Other African Diaspora:  Islam's Black Slaves [Hostages]   

Slavery in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire was a multinational, multilingual empire controlling much of Southeast Europe, parts of Central Europe, Western Asia, the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.^[13]

[iii] Kidnapping - Began When? Michael Hoffman reported in Kingdom of Kidnappers — The Hidden History of Impressment: The British Naval Enslavement of Whites, that the word “kidnapping” derives from the fact that British children—kids—were regularly “nabbed’ off of the streets of England and sold into slavery in America (http://www.revisionisthistory.org/page1/page3/page3.html). 

[v]  Blind Tom, The Black Pianist-Composer:  Continually Enslaved, by Geneva Handy Southall. (http://chevalierdesaintgeorges.homestead.com/wiggins.html)

California Native American Destruction. 

Australia's boom is anything but for its Aboriginal people

History of destruction of Aboriginies – www.aboriginalheritage.org/history/history. 

Aboriginal children imprisoned at high rates.  Washington Post.  2016

Slavery in the Pacific Islands

Hawaii’s hidden history—slave labor, profit, and the taking of Waikiki, by Larry Geller (http://www.disappearednews.com/2011/06/hawaiis-hidden-historyslave-labor.html)

New Zealand - Deforestation (http://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/science/plants-animals-fungi/ecosystems/prehistoric-settlement/deforestation)  

Destruction of Eskimos in Alaska  (http://www.uaa.alaska.edu/cafe/upload/Boarding-School-Historical-Trauma-among-Alaska-s-Native-People.pdf).

Destruction of indigenous people throughout the Caribbean (i.e., Taino and Arawak people)    (https://abagond.wordpress.com/2013/09/20/the-taino-genocide/);  Randall Robinson (http://www.randallrobinson.com/quitting.html) wrote about Taino people’s destruction in his book, Quitting America……..; 

A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies” (http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/amerbegin/contact/text7/casas_destruction.pdf) (1542) by Bartolome de Las Casas (http://www.lascasas.org/manissues.htm) .

The Conquest of America, by Tzvetan Todorov.  Regarding the near extermination of Mesoamerica’s “Indian” population.

Mary Turner - In 1934, sixteen years later,“Mr. W.B. Chambers, who was a teenager when Mrs. Turner was killed, wrote a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt about the lynching.  His letter was later forwarded to the Department of Justice. ”  Nothing was done.  “The Department of Justice continued to receive letters from the public, decades after the lynching.”  Source:  National Archives – Rediscovering Black History (https://rediscovering-black-history.blogs.archives.gov/2018/05/16/ lynching-of-women-in-united-states-blog-series-the-lynching-of-mrs-mary-turner-and-her-family/).  In 2022, Vice president, Kamala Harris, referenced Mary Turner during President Joe Biden’s official signing of the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Bill H.R. 55 (https://www.pbs.org/newshour/ politics/watch-live-president-biden-signs-the-emmett-till-anti-lynching-bill-into-law), now a federal hate-crime law.

 

References 
Before the Mayflower - A History of Black America, by Lerone Bennett, Jr, former editor and writer for Ebony Magazine.

They Came Before Columbus - The African Presence in Ancient America, by Dr. Ivan Van Sertima

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