Yesterday was the alleged 400th “anniversary” of the first African slaves being brought to America and a fat idiot at The Grio wants to “educate” you about it. All I want to do is point out how full of shit she is.
400 Years Later: Why Aug 20,1619 is a date all Black Americans need to know
By Blue Talusma
Over the last few years there has been a movement on social media to reclaim dates that mean more to us than the whitewashed ones . . .
Oooh! Did you catch that? “WHITEwashed.” Nice undercover racism there.
. . . we were taught in school; specifically anniversaries like Juneteenth, which unlike the more commercialized 4th of July, was the real “Independence Day” for Black slaves living in America.
But this year a whole new date has made its way to the forefront of these conversations about re-imagining our history: the year 1619, specifically, August 20th, 1619.
For those of you who many be unaware, on this date (exactly 400 years from the date this was posted), Africans who had been taken from their homelands and taken to British North America, landed in Port Comfort, which is known today as Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia.
But please don’t let the name Port Comfort fool you, these two dozen or so Black people were brutally removed from their homeland by force, and their arrival to the New World quite decidedly marks the official onset of slavery in North America, an act of white supremacy which would destroy, and take the lives of countless Africans for another two and a half centuries with no interference from the government.
Wrong. Let’s use your figure of 1619 as the first arrival of slaves in America. Now let’s add your stated 250 years to that number. That yields a result of 1869. Yet in 1807 Congress passed an act to “prohibit the importation of slaves into any port or place within the jurisdiction of the United States…from any foreign kingdom, place, or country.” Is that not interference from the government?
Then when the Civil War broke out in 1861, the United states government sent 364,511 (although other sources claim this number was even higher) to their deaths to eradicate the “peculiar institution.” Add to that 281,881 wounded and we get 646,392 total casualties. That’s hardly “doing nothing.”
Shortly after, there was that little thing called the “Emancipation Proclamation.” Lincoln issued that in 1863. Was that also nothing?
Finally, there’s the “Juneteenth” thing you mentioned in your first paragraph. That is meant to celebrate the abolition of slavery in Texas. That happened in 1965.
So all these efforts occurred before your stated 1869. Your credibility as a historian is rapidly disintegrating, Blue.
Now let’s examine this other statement in the author’s above paragraph. She calls slavery in America “an act of white supremacy.” Well, partially. But who else had a hand in procuring slaves for the New World? That would be Africans themselves. And allow me to quote a liberal source just in case any libs reading this want to call it “fake news.” This is your own beloved CNN reporting:
“That crime is usually blamed entirely on the European outsiders who inflicted slavery on African victims. But new research by some African scholars supports a different view – – that Africans should share the blame for slavery.
“It was the Africans themselves who were enslaving their fellow Africans, sending them to the coast to be shipped outside,” says researcher Akosua Perbi of the University of Ghana.
Based on her studies, Perbi says that European slave traders, almost without exception, did not themselves capture slaves. They bought them from other Africans, usually kings or chiefs or wealthy merchants.”
Did you read that? This research wasn’t conducted by the white devil. It was done by actual Africans in Africa. So are you going to argue with them? The article continues . . .
” Sharing the guilt for slavery may be disturbing and painful for Africans, but researchers say their objective is clear.
“They’re trying to uncover the facts so that people will take a lesson from the evil of the past and say ‘no more,'” says Kwame Arhin of the Institute of African Affairs.
But no. Shitheads like Blue Talusma who wrote this article for ‘The Grio’ evidently slept through that lesson and missed out on this inconvenient truth.
To be fair, according to The Atlantic, “These 22 or 23 Africans who arrived this week 400 years ago were not the first to land in North America. Some Africans probably came before Christopher Columbus.”
But as with most displaced peoples, African Americans often find themselves yearning for a birth date.
“Displaced person: a person who is forced to leave their home country because of war, persecution, or natural disaster; a refugee.” Sorry, but last I checked this is 2019. You were not brought here against your will. You were born here. You are not a displaced person. If you somehow feel that you are, there is nothing stopping you from returning to what you feel is your true homeland. Go.
It is understandable why a community that if often maligned, dismissed and preyed upon . . .
By their own people, I might add. No one is preying upon the black community more than yourselves. Just take a look Heyjackass.com sometime if you need any evidence.
. . . would want a concrete and tangible marker of when their ancestors made the best of a heinous situation, and ended up building a country that never meant to claim them as its own.
First, you didn’t build this country entirely by yourselves. And second, how is has this country not “claimed you as its own?” Is slavery still around? Are you being deported? Are you not given numerous advantages to improve your lives? I’m talking “affirmative action” here, etc.
In an effort to fill this glaring void in the narrative, some scholarly African Americans got together, looked over any paperwork they could find, and agreed on August 20, 1619, based on the fact that this was the legitimately the first documented recognition of our arrival in Virginia.
For those who are a bit disappointed by this tedious and unglamorous origin story, just remember that many things we say we hold sacred, like the Constitution (and just about every religious text), came about in much the same way.
Since 2010, the city of Hampton, Virginia along with several organizations, including Project 1619, have observed August 20th as an annual African Landing Commemoration Day.
And while it may seen morbid to “celebrate” such an anniversary, much like someone who remembers the day they received a devastating health diagnosis, or the day they lost a loved one, there is power in commemorating moments that changed the course of your life or deeply affected your community.
Is that so? So please. pray tell, why people like you insist on tearing down statues of Confederate soldiers? I mean given what you said above, how hypocritical is that?
In the midst of what’s happening with the current Trump administration and across the globe in general . . .
You lost me there. What exactly is going on with the Trump administration? Since you can’t cite any examples, and I can’t think of anything, I’ll have to assume nothing.
. . . stopping to meditate on just how long our people have been going through this ish [SIC], . . .
If anyone reading this knows what an “ish” is, please fill me in. I’m at a loss.
. . . and the seemingly unsurmountable [SIC] odds we’ve had to beat to even get here, puts a lot of things in perspective.
Not to mention, as the Zinn Education project points out, ironically, “1619 also was the year that a semblance of democracy came to Virginia, as the colony held its first election for the inaugural House of Burgesses, the forerunner of today’s Virginia General Assembly.”
This not so fun fact illustrates how systemic oppression and a “semblance of democracy” go hand in hand like peanut butter and jelly in this country. None of this is new.
Oh, food analogies. Not surprising coming from someone as obese as yourself. Yes, you’re so oppressed. If you’re oppression is so great, how were you allowed to even write this drivel? Certainly the government would not tolerate blacks having freedom of speech. And they definitely wouldn’t allow you to consume as much food as you apparently do. If you were truly oppressed, you’d be locked away in a camp behind barbed wire somewhere in the desert eating bread crumbs and wasting away. So give me just a small break. Our government is not oppressing blacks. You just can’t stop playing the role of the victim.
And while this little history lesson may make for cool trivia to share at your next afro-centric dinner party . . .
History lesson, my ass. I’ve already perforated your factually incorrect statements above.
. . . I want to point out that the call to acknowledge 1619 and other forgotten parts of America’s history with Black people isn’t merely symbolic.
Who the hell has forgotten about slavery? I can’t think of anyone. So what’s this article really all about? You guessed it! Blue wants money! And by the looks of her, she’d blow it all on cake.
This year as we gear up for the 2020 elections, reparations has suddenly become a hot topic, with candidates of all races and genders being made to take a stance on whether they are for or against reparations. I will admit that I have heard some very compelling arguments both for and against giving reparations.
But when you start this backslide into our forgotten past, you quickly realize that when those first documented slaves arrived from the Portuguese colony of Angola in 1619, the American colonies were struggling and barely hanging on. In fact, the desperation born from those struggles is what incited many of them to resort to such barbaric measures in the first place.
To keep it all the way funky, in 1619, the first spark of what would later become our “great nation” was a hot mess.
Yet by 1860, not only was America no longer struggling, there were actually more millionaires living in the lower Mississippi Valley than anywhere else in the United States. And to be clear, every single one of those millionaires were slave owners.
In fact, according to James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, “In [1860], the nearly 4 million American slaves were worth some $3.5 billion, making them the largest single financial asset in the entire U.S. economy, worth more than all manufacturing and railroads combined.”
So yeah. As awkward as it may be for some people to acknowledge — particularly historically misinformed white people and the Black allies who defend them on social media — slavery, quite LITERALLY built this country.
Again, you didn’t do it alone. I’m pissed off now so I’ll go a bit further, so I’m going to get mean. As wrong as slavery was, and make no mistake, it was wrong, left without supervision said slaves would most likely have done nothing to build this country and would still be living in mud huts like many people do in Africa to this day.
For hundred of years, disempowered [SIC] and intentionally uneducated Black bodies were the greatest asset in America, and some would argue in many ways that remains the case.
Anyone who would argue that is a moron.
So is it really all that farfetched [SIC] to think that maybe, somebody (i.e the government) needs to cut the descendants of those slaves a check?
One could argue that 400 years is more than enough time to pay back a loan.
One could also argue that no one alive today was ever a slave and no one alive today ever owned any slaves. So yeah, it’s really THAT far-fetched.
