¶ … learn about historical atrocities that were committed in the name of progress, moral righteousness, or simple commerce, but it is quite another to be confronted with a personal account of the horrors as they were committed and the people that committed them. Although the slavers that caused so much suffering for the slaves during the "middle passage" -- the journey across the Atlantic from Africa to the New World -- are not really prominently featured in this portion of the text, I found myself thinking more about these people than the slaves they practiced their atrocities and cruelties upon. It is not that the description of the slaves' conditions and level of despair was not gripping and emotionally powerful, and in fact quite the opposite is true, but I found that my emotional reaction to the filth, depravity, and deaths of the enslaved occupants of the lower portion of the ship kept coming back to the fact that this was something some human beings consciously and willingly did to other human beings. This led to many different intellectual and emotional epiphanies that continued to fire off even after the reading. I knew previously, of course, that most individuals involved in the slave trade and even many other (perhaps most other) citizens of the Western world considered Africans and other tribe peoples as not fully...

What this judgment of a subhuman status meant for the people actually involved -- both those who were judged to be subhuman and those that did the judging -- was something I had never really thought about too much, though, and was certainly not ever a concrete or detailed concept of mine. This brief text made it clear just what the subhuman designation meant, and how deeply and profoundly it was applied in directly practical ways. It is hard to imagine that the people running the slave ship could have stomached the conditions they inflicted upon the large populations of Africans captured if they actually thought of them as fellow human beings, and it is even difficult to imagine that herds of animals would have been treated to the same conditions the captured Africans were forced to endure. The subhuman designation with which these people had been designated apparently enabled their captors to discount any pain, discomfort, or outright anguish that the slaves displayed and allowed their torture to continue. That is, because the captors thought of the Africans as some sort of bastardized version of "true" men, they were worth less than common livestock in terms of ethical value and the need for proper treatment, and thus even when the slaves gave evidence…