Video: Slave Trade USA: Interview with producers of Traces of the Trade

U.S. Slavery in the North - Inner Compass from Calvin College on Vimeo.
When Katrina Browne was 28 years old and in seminary, she learned that her ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. And, they were not from the South; they had lived in Rhode Island. Katrina wrote to 200 family members, inviting them to explore their family's past. The result: an award-winning documentary, Traces of the Trade, made with co-producer Juanita Brown, who helped plan a journey to Africa for the group and facilitate painful conversations about their discoveries. Karen Saupe hosts.


I'm not keen on the idea of reparations.  I'm white (w+t).  I feel no guilt whatsoever for slavery or special responsibliity shoud someone bother to accuse me of being a descendent of slave-traders or slave-owners. I'm not.  My ancestors were driven out of Lithuania at the turn from the 19th to the 20th centuries, driven out by economic conditions and Czarism.  Racism was not believed in, nor tawt in my family.  Perhaps with an exaggerated Marxist totality-analysis, one coud argue with me that I and m+ family were "complicit" in slavery, or Jim Crow, or the Lord knows what.  Of course, no sooner brawt up than the obvious requ+rment is to determine the precise degree of complicity.  I notice that some thinkers among American Jews now talk about "degrees of anti-Semitism."

But the guilty and the descendents of slaves in America shoud not construct the realities so that this becomes / is made a black versus w+t issue.  Some American blacks are not the descendents of slaves, at least not of slaves brawt to America or raised here.  We have a significant population now of Black Americans who are immigrants from Black Africa.  They shoudn't receive any reparations, were there such.  And some of them  perhaps were the descendents of Black slave-traders and Black owners of slavces in Africa's history (I certainly welcome the producers in limiting the discussion to slavery in the MidAtlantic trade triangle and in slavery in the USA, but m+ own interests embrace the African milieu which welcomed slave-traders from Western and Islamic civilizations).  Prez Barack Obama is not the descendent of American slaves, but his w+f apparently and their children are.

L+kw+z, some w+ts in America are not the descendents of slave-traders or slave-owners and were not "complicit" in any immiseration of Black people, here or abroad, except in the most trivial totalistic sense.  Except:  if you are using racist categories to begin with (w+t = slaver; black = innocent), or use Marxist-originated ideas of totality-systems of society, a grandiose metanarrative that turns out to be trivializing by including all sorts of w+t people, wrongly, among the "complicit." For instance.

It's a hard topic.  I deeply appreciate the Calvin College video interview, and will probably benefit much by and appreciate deeply the original work whose producers are the interviewees.  The documentary movie itself were shown at the Sundance Film Festival to great acclaim.

-- Politicarp, refWr+t frontpage columnist

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