The Warp and Weft: Why Are We So Black and Blue?

Numbers transformed into a human context is the skill of the social scientist: the anthropologist, psychologist, sociologist, historian and economist. But from the artisan, we might use a metaphor from weaving in arguing that much of the wealth of the Western Hemisphere and Europe was built on the warp of African slavery. A double entendre if ever there was one; this warp laid the foundation for creating a detailed and Read More

Who Were They?

For the most part, it is not known from which specific communities enslaved Africans came. Over the years, scholars vary in defining their connection to specific ethnic groups on the Continent. Our best method eventually may be DNA testing throughout the Diaspora, undeniably they were from Africa – north, south, east, west, central, coast and interior. Predominantly they were adult males in their prime. In the beginning, before the demand Read More

How Sweet It Is

A few months ago, a television ad in promoting its product challenged the notion that high fructose was a bad thing. In our culture the origin of sweetening and our conditioning to it has its roots in transatlantic slavery. This is no stretch. If one crop could be targeted as providing the major impetus for the transatlantic slave trade it would be sugar. The demand for “free” labor under the Read More

Any Day Will Do

Recently someone asked why we selected August 23rd as the day the project will remember the transatlantic slave trade and its abolition. I could be flippant and state that it’s arbitrary, any day would do since enslavement occurred 365 days/year, but that is not quite true. We have adopted that day because the international community selected it in honor of the abolition of slavery in the British colonies in 1833. Read More

Human Wastage: The Price of Doing Business

In researching this project, I have started reading The Slave Ship: A Human History by Marcus Rediker (2008). He argues that the African transatlantic slave trade was the first rung in the ladder of global capitalism, or what we know now as a global economy that all governments, many businesses and people are attempting to understand, modify or control. One sentence in the introduction struck a chord because it directly relates to Read More

Brown Trucks

In many ways there are brown trucks everywhere. So many events around the world reinforce our efforts to remember ancestors who suffered the transatlantic slave trade. On August 23, 2011 (The International Day of Remembrance of the Slave Trade and Its Abolition) the UN made a final formal call for the design of the monument to be installed at the UN to memorialize the trade’s horrors, and Irina Bakova who Read More