Word: slaving
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...advertent, and morally organized. People invent stories to explore their own behavior and to imagine their own possibilities. Few moments in America's moral life have surpassed the soliloquy, product of Mark Twain's imagination, in which Huck Finn agonizes over what to do about turning over the runaway slave Jim to the white authorities. Huck ends by accepting the consequences of his decision not to do so: "All right, then, I'll go to hell...
...this is Washington, D.C., and it's supposed to be different. Isn't that why Congress banned the slave trade in the District long before the Civil War--to make the country look good? But the race/geography/income line is so sharp and clear that naive (but increasingly cynical) liberals such as myself can't stand...
...Goree Island, a rocky outcropping in the harbor of Dakar, Senegal, stands the Slave House, through which thousands of African captives passed on their way to the New World. I inspected the holding pens where terrified men and women were imprisoned until they could be loaded aboard a slave ship bound for America, and looked out across the Atlantic through what the guide called the Door of No Return. Like every other black American who has shared the experience, I wondered if some unknown ancestor of mine had walked through this very doorway, and I could not hold back...
Some months later, I visited the beach at Badagry, not far from Lagos, Nigeria, which was an important slave-trading port, a place where manacles and other purported relics of the commerce in human beings are on display. The proprietor, an aging woman, told some Nigerian friends of mine that she would charge them 50 kobo (about $1) to examine the artifacts. You, she said, pointing to me, pay two naira (about $4). I protested that if the chains were indeed genuine, which I doubted, they might have been used to bind one of my ancestors; therefore, I didn...
...trappings of African culture. Recently, a black lawyer in Washington refused a judge's order to remove a Kente cloth shawl while appearing in court because it might influence black members of the jury. Some of us, including one black member of Congress, have cast aside our "slave names" and adopted African ones. Many of us celebrate pseudo- African holidays like Kwanzaa, in addition to Christmas. Across the land, there is a push for "Afrocentric" education. Increasingly, we call ourselves African Americans, or even, like rap singer Sister Souljah, simply "Africans," dropping any connection to America from our definition...