I made it through 1/4 of the article and couldn’t take the reading experience. I’m on an iPhone and it was nonstop ads and odd breaks in content. Bummed!
Safari's Reader Mode is ideal for this scenario. You won't see the associated media (at least not on this particular page), but you can read the story in peace.
In school, I used to wonder how people survived this voyage if they were shackled below the whole trip (3 weeks). Wouldn’t the stores they were in, which were only a few feet high (couldn’t stand up), fill up with feces?
Apparently they were let up on deck for 2 hours a day.
If anyone has any clarification to add to this / that wasn’t in the article, please add.
>In school, I used to wonder how people survived this voyage if they were shackled below the whole trip
They didn't. You have to understand that African slaves were seen as cargo, not human beings. A good percentage would die every single time, and be thrown overboard. This was just accepted as part of the cost of doing business, the same way chicken breeders ship baby chickens in the mail today with the expectation that some will die in transit. The few that die off are more than made up for in profits by your ability to jam as many as possible into one shipment.
It's one of those facts that really makes the transatlantic slave trade stand out as perhaps the worst genocide in human history. It wasn't just killing. It was the industrial scale treatment of millions of human beings as cattle for over 300 years.
Your comment reminded me of the famous J.M.W. Turner painting[1] which depicts the throwing overboard of hundreds of slaves so the captain of the ship could collect insurance payments.
Yes, racial slavery was a terrible evil. But it wasn't genocide, which has a specific definition (intention to wipe out a specific people). Slave traders wanted enough people alive to sell at a profit.
The scope of the death toll was large, but spread over a long period.
From Wikipedia:
> Approximately 1.2 – 2.4 million Africans died during their transport to the New World. More died soon upon their arrival.[1]
Over 300 years.
Compare to other genocides[2], which murdered similar numbers (or much more) but happened over just a few years.
Maybe you meant "worst" in the sense of most injustice? It certainly stands out, but it doesn't hold a candle to the death inflicted on a colossal scale by the governments of the 20th century during both war and peace. Estimates place Stalin's body count between 3-9 million.[3] WWII civilian deaths are estimated at 50 million and included the genocide of the Halocaust.[4]
Thank you for well sourced minimization of the slave trade. It really helps to know that enslavement of millions of people shouldn't be thought of as all that bad.
It's not. Plenty of people read what you wrote and understood it for how you meant it and also understood that the person who responded to you wildly distorted your point. You're not going to find a good conversation there. Its very sad that this type of distortion happens so often, but we live in a world where some people don't appreciate subtle truths.
It's not, and the parent reply was uncharitable, yet I can understand why someone would feel revulsion at your post. It feels a bit like a parlor game with numbers. Not technically wrong, let's say—but so incongruent with what it's talking about as to leave one feeling chilled and dehumanized. In that way it does come across as minimizing.
but dang you can't put 'feeling chilled' and 'dehumanization' into rational numbers, and for a certain kind of person the inability to enumerate something or quantify its cost, is an automatic 'irrationality discount.' i.e. 'What can't be counted, can't count for much.'
Maybe that's part of why collating slavery vs. war goes wrong. Mixing even a little quality with all that quantity would change the mentality, it seems to me.
I don't read that in their comment? They said genocide has a specific definition, and the Atlantic slave trade does not match it. You are free to disagree on that point. I personally don't think it's a very good point to make here.
Instead you made some argument that they are trying to argue that it wasn't that bad, which is not based on a literal interpretation of their comment.
Can you believe white supremacists use the same kind of thinking? They also toss around the word genocide where it does not apply, assuming one against whites. If you were to say what the commenter said, they'd do the same: Instead of engaging the arguments based on merit, they'd accuse you of wrongthink.
Better to let people be honest and judge argument's on their merit rather than start accusing people of wrongthink so easily. Perhaps this is a pretty big problem in the politics right now.
If it becomes impossible to correct the definition of words without being branded as a wrongthinker, then what good is that going to do?
Words have meanings, terms have definitions. I'm with the pedants more and more. Otherwise people can simply say awful things and claim not to have meant it that way. That how lying becomes a bit ok.
genocide: the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group
genocide - systematic killing of a racial or cultural group
Kidnapping a single ethnic group from their homeland and accepting that some percentage of them will die while transporting them in cages sure sounds like genocide.
If we want to call it genocide, it would be more likely genocide of one African tribe towards another.
Note that this isn't to paint a picture of "look at these African savages killing each other", but only to highlight that historically members of the same ethnicity (at least the modern definition of "ethnicity") are rather eager to kill each other over resources (and moral differences to cover it up). Europeans, Asians, indigenous Americans etc were all quite successful in constant tribal warfare at various degrees of scale, there was nothing special about Africa here. In fact you could say that the Soviets were the most successful people in the history of the world at exterminating their own kind for one reason or another.
One Native American tribe killing another Native American tribe is still genocide. Africa is a continent, the slave trade was focused on nations / tribes within the continent. I think the appropriate application of ethnic group is applying it to the tribes / nations within the continent of Africa. Not the entire continent, which is made up of hundreds of ethnicities.
> It was the industrial scale treatment of millions of human beings as cattle for over 300 years.
Actually, in pretty much every developing society cattle are considered prized ownership and are treated well and cared for. Farmers with thousands of sheep or cows still try to avoid the loss of even one.
Slaves were treated far worse than that. Perhaps like some used trash you were selling to a junkyard.
A live slave is worth more than a dead one. These were business men. There is no reason to think that they would be happy to sail all across the ocean only to then throw their cargo overboard before collecting payment.
There is no reason to think these slave traders were acting against their own self-interest. Unless you have evidence to the contrary, I assume they simply worked out that providing better accommodations would cost more than the potential return in live slaves.
Those are incidents, and still show that the slave traders are acting in their own self-interest. It is not realistic to think that insurance companies would stand for this if it was standing practice.
Yeah, but those slaves are not the same sort of slave this article is about.
This article is about a specific set of rules enforced by a government, to single out one type of person, for the rest of their life. Indentured servitude should not be equivocated with slavery, which, by contrast, is for life, and was inescapable by law.
I would recommend James Michener's Chesapeake for a graphic account of how the slaves were treated right from the time they were shackled in chains in Africa and made to march hundreds of miles, dying along the way, dying on the voyage, and the lives -if you can call it that - they lived as slaves once they reached America. Although this is a work of fiction, it does a good job of portraying the horror.
I still wonder how anyone can do that to other human beings for three weeks. Even if you don't view them as the same status, they can clearly speak and think and come from societies with tools, clothing, art and shelter. Were the slave traders all sociopaths?
I also wouldn't want to do that to any animal, although apparently it's seen as acceptable with factory farming.
Contemporary Westerners constantly underestimate a human's ability to commit unthinkable atrocities under the right conditions. I don't know if it's our education's fault. Maybe we just don't bother to ever emphasize this point. Maybe it's too uncomfortable of a subject to deal with.
This last century has presented a rich buffet of historical options to choose from when looking for examples of ideologies that allowed otherwise perfectly normal, God-fearing, salt of the earth folk to turn into horror-machines of rape, mutilation and slaughter. Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, you name it. Maybe even a relative or a next door neighbor in our very own US of A, sent to the wrong Vietnamese village at the wrong time. That seed of pure horror is in all of us, and it's ready to rear its ugly head when the conditions are right.
I don't think as a species we've quite figured out how to suppress it.
Pinker’s “Better Angels of our Nature” is a masterwork on the subject. It’s also a terrific read and will change your view of history and make you happy to be alive in the present!
>This last century ... example of ideologies that allowed otherwise perfectly normal, God-fearing, salt of the earth folk to turn into horror-machines of rape, mutilation and slaughter.
well, just off the top of the head - today we have Yemen, Rahingya, Syria - the places where large number of innocent people/civilians suffer and die as direct result of other, reasonably normal, people just doing their job of inflicting that suffering and death in the name of the cause that is presented as a pretty good cause in all these cases - fighting terrorism.
I think it has something to do with the classification of malignant pathological behavior as “illness” or “disease” which innures people to certain mindsets.
The idea that behavioral qualities can be represented as either “sick” or “healthy” provides for belief that individuals who commit atrocities might be identified by externalized qualities.
So we say: Mental Illness, but to ascribe that label is to claim that there is a recognizable state required, with externally verifiable traits exhibited, before a terrible act may be performed, and that really isn’t the case at all.
People really want to apply the full weight of psychological diagnostics to every misbehavior and deviation from healthy, wherever such misbehavior is willful, and that’s simply an incorrect notion.
A person might get up one day, having never abused an animal, and suddenly decide today’s the day that a bad thing happens, and then never repeat that episode. So, how do we rationalize the universe, if such a thing is possible? Well... as unpleasant as it may be, we find that the universe is quite happily irrational, and so too, human behavior.
While the crews of slave ships surely tended to be somewhat self-selecting, it seems highly unlikely that they were all or mostly sociopaths. The reality is that it's quite easy for a perfectly normal person to convince themselves that bad things that happen to a group of people of radically different physical appearance, culture, language and religion don't really count. When their society already has a cultural consensus to that effect, and when their job depends on it, it's ridiculously easy. The two universal and constant features of human nature are stupidity and evil. Radical evil is more or less always here now, but people always and everywhere choose to believe that it is only in the past or in the village over the next hill. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445240
Racism makes tyranny easier. Yes. But it is not necessary for tyranny.
If you ever find yourself in need, or on the wrong side of injustice, especially perpetrated be a greater authority, you will quickly realize how terrible really a lot of people out there are.
I agree: that is precisely my argument. It takes fairly little to turn people against you; and the African slaves sadly had a great deal going against them.
Most evil is done by ordinary people, who have great capacity for it. It is a critical error, I think, to suppose that evil is done by the 'bad guys' and that I and my group, whoever that is, are somehow invulnerable to it. Instead, we must realize there is nothing different or special about us, and be ever on guard for its symptoms and the things that lead to it (IMHO, ideology and intolerance, and anything that puts my power and my desires above those of others').
Germany was arguably the cultural and scientific heart of the world in the 1920s and 1930s. The Nazis murdered 11 million people. That isn't done by a few evil people; it requires the labors and cooperation of large numbers, and the passive acceptance of millions more.
No. Just people who were willing to tolerate things being done to other people that they didn't care about. Sometimes even people they did care about. People forget that the 45 year old Tom Jefferson took a 14 year old child, Sally Hemmings to France as his sex slave. He fathered 6 children with her and did not free them. That's right. He kept those 6 children as slaves. Was he sociopath? Or just a product of a toxic culture that enabled him to commit such actions and still sleep well?
I think you'll find that plenty of people are willing to not think so hard about such problems as long as it's in the course of a legal business. I'm sure it was also easy to find justification from commentators at the time when slavery was legal. You could just go about your slavery business and point at some guy's essay as to why you shouldn't feel guilty at all.
The popular opinion is that it was all evil white devils. The historical answer is that African tribes and kingdoms had been trading slaves for thousands of years. It was a nice source of income for them. When England abolished slavery there was a lot of resentment among the African elite.
One has to eat food to create feces, especially food with fiber in it. If you’re starved nothing comes out because nothing is going in. I doubt the unfortunate human ‘cargo’ were fed very much or even at all.
> As the world ignores the ignominious 500th anniversary of the buying and selling of slaves between Africa and the Americas, historians uncover its first horrific voyages
The word seems to ignore the Arab slave trade of Africans even more, despite it being twice as large. I wonder why.
Is that rhetorical or do you actually wonder why? If it is rhetorical, what's the real reason you think the history of the American slave trade receives coverage while the Arab slave trade doesn't?
This comment only makes sense in the context of ideological battles that HN is not the place for. Please don't post them here, and especially not with snarky flamebait like "Excuse me for not being able to care".
"Almost completely ignored by the modern world, this month marks the 500th anniversary of one of history’s most tragic and significant events – the birth of the Africa to America transatlantic slave trade."
A (relatively) small step in the right direction: The slave trade and its origins is one of the primary focuses of the incredible new museum in Washington DC: the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), steps away from the Washington Monument. This museum is a national treasure. I highly, highly recommend it to anyone who might have an opportunity to visit. The subject matter, the incredibly detailed and thorough exhibits, the culturally infused architecture, the underground memorial, and many other factors all combine to create one of the most engrossing and memorable museum experiences in the US. It's a must-see if you're in DC.
as a black person, it is hurtful and alarming to read these comments and see how people in our industry feel about the slavery of my people. the callous, cold minimizations lack humanity.
59 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 104 ms ] thread++ As in it's a "workaround" for an issue that should never have been allowed to exist in the first place - bloat, ads etc.
That aside, umatrix on firefox mobile has been the best improvement in mobile browsing.
Apparently they were let up on deck for 2 hours a day.
If anyone has any clarification to add to this / that wasn’t in the article, please add.
They didn't. You have to understand that African slaves were seen as cargo, not human beings. A good percentage would die every single time, and be thrown overboard. This was just accepted as part of the cost of doing business, the same way chicken breeders ship baby chickens in the mail today with the expectation that some will die in transit. The few that die off are more than made up for in profits by your ability to jam as many as possible into one shipment.
It's one of those facts that really makes the transatlantic slave trade stand out as perhaps the worst genocide in human history. It wasn't just killing. It was the industrial scale treatment of millions of human beings as cattle for over 300 years.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship
Yes, racial slavery was a terrible evil. But it wasn't genocide, which has a specific definition (intention to wipe out a specific people). Slave traders wanted enough people alive to sell at a profit.
The scope of the death toll was large, but spread over a long period.
From Wikipedia:
> Approximately 1.2 – 2.4 million Africans died during their transport to the New World. More died soon upon their arrival.[1]
Over 300 years.
Compare to other genocides[2], which murdered similar numbers (or much more) but happened over just a few years.
Maybe you meant "worst" in the sense of most injustice? It certainly stands out, but it doesn't hold a candle to the death inflicted on a colossal scale by the governments of the 20th century during both war and peace. Estimates place Stalin's body count between 3-9 million.[3] WWII civilian deaths are estimated at 50 million and included the genocide of the Halocaust.[4]
Slavery is evil, but war is so much worse.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlantic_slave_trade
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_genocides_by_death_tol...
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Number_of_deaths_in_the_Soviet...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
Instead you made some argument that they are trying to argue that it wasn't that bad, which is not based on a literal interpretation of their comment.
Can you believe white supremacists use the same kind of thinking? They also toss around the word genocide where it does not apply, assuming one against whites. If you were to say what the commenter said, they'd do the same: Instead of engaging the arguments based on merit, they'd accuse you of wrongthink.
Better to let people be honest and judge argument's on their merit rather than start accusing people of wrongthink so easily. Perhaps this is a pretty big problem in the politics right now.
If it becomes impossible to correct the definition of words without being branded as a wrongthinker, then what good is that going to do?
genocide - systematic killing of a racial or cultural group
Kidnapping a single ethnic group from their homeland and accepting that some percentage of them will die while transporting them in cages sure sounds like genocide.
If we want to call it genocide, it would be more likely genocide of one African tribe towards another.
Note that this isn't to paint a picture of "look at these African savages killing each other", but only to highlight that historically members of the same ethnicity (at least the modern definition of "ethnicity") are rather eager to kill each other over resources (and moral differences to cover it up). Europeans, Asians, indigenous Americans etc were all quite successful in constant tribal warfare at various degrees of scale, there was nothing special about Africa here. In fact you could say that the Soviets were the most successful people in the history of the world at exterminating their own kind for one reason or another.
Actually, in pretty much every developing society cattle are considered prized ownership and are treated well and cared for. Farmers with thousands of sheep or cows still try to avoid the loss of even one.
Slaves were treated far worse than that. Perhaps like some used trash you were selling to a junkyard.
How can you know that? Do you have book references or something?
There is no reason to think these slave traders were acting against their own self-interest. Unless you have evidence to the contrary, I assume they simply worked out that providing better accommodations would cost more than the potential return in live slaves.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zong_massacre
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Slave_Ship
This article is about a specific set of rules enforced by a government, to single out one type of person, for the rest of their life. Indentured servitude should not be equivocated with slavery, which, by contrast, is for life, and was inescapable by law.
I also wouldn't want to do that to any animal, although apparently it's seen as acceptable with factory farming.
This last century has presented a rich buffet of historical options to choose from when looking for examples of ideologies that allowed otherwise perfectly normal, God-fearing, salt of the earth folk to turn into horror-machines of rape, mutilation and slaughter. Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, you name it. Maybe even a relative or a next door neighbor in our very own US of A, sent to the wrong Vietnamese village at the wrong time. That seed of pure horror is in all of us, and it's ready to rear its ugly head when the conditions are right.
I don't think as a species we've quite figured out how to suppress it.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nat...
Is there anything conclusive about how cherry-picked the numbers in the book are?
well, just off the top of the head - today we have Yemen, Rahingya, Syria - the places where large number of innocent people/civilians suffer and die as direct result of other, reasonably normal, people just doing their job of inflicting that suffering and death in the name of the cause that is presented as a pretty good cause in all these cases - fighting terrorism.
The idea that behavioral qualities can be represented as either “sick” or “healthy” provides for belief that individuals who commit atrocities might be identified by externalized qualities.
So we say: Mental Illness, but to ascribe that label is to claim that there is a recognizable state required, with externally verifiable traits exhibited, before a terrible act may be performed, and that really isn’t the case at all.
People really want to apply the full weight of psychological diagnostics to every misbehavior and deviation from healthy, wherever such misbehavior is willful, and that’s simply an incorrect notion.
A person might get up one day, having never abused an animal, and suddenly decide today’s the day that a bad thing happens, and then never repeat that episode. So, how do we rationalize the universe, if such a thing is possible? Well... as unpleasant as it may be, we find that the universe is quite happily irrational, and so too, human behavior.
If you ever find yourself in need, or on the wrong side of injustice, especially perpetrated be a greater authority, you will quickly realize how terrible really a lot of people out there are.
Germany was arguably the cultural and scientific heart of the world in the 1920s and 1930s. The Nazis murdered 11 million people. That isn't done by a few evil people; it requires the labors and cooperation of large numbers, and the passive acceptance of millions more.
No. Just people who were willing to tolerate things being done to other people that they didn't care about. Sometimes even people they did care about. People forget that the 45 year old Tom Jefferson took a 14 year old child, Sally Hemmings to France as his sex slave. He fathered 6 children with her and did not free them. That's right. He kept those 6 children as slaves. Was he sociopath? Or just a product of a toxic culture that enabled him to commit such actions and still sleep well?
I'm not defending it, not at all. But mankind has been beating on his fellow man since the dawn of time. We truly are a horrific species.
The word seems to ignore the Arab slave trade of Africans even more, despite it being twice as large. I wonder why.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The slave trade in Africa was continuous for thousands of years until mostly stopped by western countries.
Kingdom of Dahomey (now known as Benin) : slavery was integral to their economy, well before contact with European traders.
Mansa Musa, often billed as the richest man in history : dealt in slaves and gold. Died 1337, well before contact with European traders.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A (relatively) small step in the right direction: The slave trade and its origins is one of the primary focuses of the incredible new museum in Washington DC: the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), steps away from the Washington Monument. This museum is a national treasure. I highly, highly recommend it to anyone who might have an opportunity to visit. The subject matter, the incredibly detailed and thorough exhibits, the culturally infused architecture, the underground memorial, and many other factors all combine to create one of the most engrossing and memorable museum experiences in the US. It's a must-see if you're in DC.