The Atlantic Slave Trade Quotes

“Perhaps the most worrying legacy of African slavery in the New World is the persistent oppression of all people of African descent in the Americas. A recent quantitative study shows that up to about 1820, approximately five Africans were brought to the New World for each European migrant (Eltis 1983: 255; Engerman 1986: 318–22). But in the course of the nineteenth century all that changed, as the booming American economies attracted free migrants from Europe. This means that the African slaves did the back-breaking work, but as the fruits of this work began to mature others came in to reap the harvest, with the blacks continuing to be held back in bondage. Even after emancipation, legal and other forms of oppression still blocked black access to power and resources. Thus the process of capitalist accumulation passed them by, giving rise to a black population in the Americas generally characterized by poverty, extreme deprivation, lack of education, disease,”
― Joseph E. Inikori, The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe

“gave rise to a selection process in which the survivors were predominantly those with greater capacity to retain sodium in their system, while those with lower capacity perished. The selection mechanism was dehydration. Wilson and Grim hold that the black populations that grew out of the slave imports came to be dominated, through genetic inheritance, by people with extra capacity to retain salt in their system. And this, they conclude, is the main factor that explains the phenomenon in question. This explanation is disputed by other medical scientists. The conflicting views of the contending scientists were summarized recently by Daniel Goleman (1990). According to Goleman, Elijah Saunders, a cardiologist at the University of Maryland Medical School and coauthor of a leading textbook on the subject, Hypertension in Blacks, holds that anger against racism is the principal cause of hypertension among blacks in the United States. Shirley Brown of the University”
― Joseph E. Inikori, The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe

“The positive elements relate to the survival of Africans and their culture and to the contributions of African peoples to the cultural complexity of the Americas. The negative legacies have to do with ideological racism and the effects of the continued oppression of people of African origin in the Americas. When the full experiences and”
― Joseph E. Inikori, The Atlantic Slave Trade: Effects on Economies, Societies and Peoples in Africa, the Americas, and Europe