Reaction to Judgment Day: Africans in America series part 4

¶ … English 2nd Lang)

My reaction to the documentary is probably very similar to that of most people who watch it: I feel a sense of solidarity with the black African slaves and considerable anger at those who somehow believed that it was their right to exploit human beings like animals. The narrator mentioned the extreme contradiction between the growing international image of the American Union as a land of freedom, but there was no mention of another obvious contradiction that Zinn actually refers to in connection with the European explores.

Those who were responsible for creating American slavery were also Christians who considered themselves to be the more civilized race of people, largely because of their religious beliefs. Unfortunately, the Americans of the 17th century apparently shared the same beliefs about their Christian superiority as did the European explorers like Columbus and Cortez. Frankly, it is offensive the values that we say we believe in today that we still celebrate Columbus Day with parades and that we name towns and waterways to remember other European explorers all of whom brutalized, murdered, and enslaved the native populations of the Americas. In every instance, the Christians considered the native peoples to be "uncivilized" "savages" and then they "civilized" Christians began raping, pillaging, and plundering without any moral concerns or doubts at all. This was obviously the same spirit of superiority that Americans believed they deserved when they began shipping African slaves across the oceans chained together in the hulls of ships the way fishing and crabbing boats stock and transport fish and crabs from the open ocean to port for sale.

One cannot help but side with the revolutionary African slaves and the northern abolitionists because there was apparently no other choice. Local laws and even the original United States Constitution had provisions that protected the "rights" of slave owners; the Fugitive Slave Clause actually guaranteed their right to reclaim escaped slaves who had made it to free states. Given the choice between abiding by unjust laws and freedom, any person would have chosen freedom; given the choice between being killed for learning how to read or being killed for escaping to freedom, anyone would have been morally justified in killing another to prevent that. It would have been nothing less than self-defense in a period of time when even the most advanced government and legal system available could not recognize obviously immoral laws.