There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the brutal history of slavery, highlighting both the role of European traders and the complicity of some Africans.
Henry Louis Gates emphasizes the haunting legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, where the cruelty of European traders is paralleled by the troubling reality of some Africans participating in the enslavement of their own people. This acknowledgment of both external oppression and internal complicity serves as a poignant reminder of the complex history of slavery and its enduring effects on cultural memory and identity.
In practice
In a history class discussing the impact of the transatlantic slave trade.
It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.
In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.
In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.
The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.
The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.
Very few, if any, first-generation black or white or Asian kids will pursue a Ph.D. They'll pursue the professions for economic security. Many will go to law school and/or business school.
In Brazil, the history of the interaction between blancos and indios - whites and Indians - often reads like an extended epitaph. Tribes were wiped out by disease and massacres; languages and songs were obliterated.
This was the first Memorial Day [Monday, May 1st, 1865]. African Americans invented Memorial Day in Charleston, South Carolina. What you have there is Black Americans recently freed from slavery announcing to the world with their flowers, their feet, and their songs what the war had been about. What they basically were creating was the Independence Day of a Second American Revolution.
The Civil War is not ended: I question whether any serious civil war ever does end.
When the early Europeans first met Africans, at the crossroads of history, it was a respectful meeting and the Africans were not slaves. Their nations were old before Europe was born.
Racial inequity in how the immense benefits of the original G.I. Bill were disbursed are well-documented, and we've all seen how these inequities have trickled down over time, leaving Black World War II veterans and their families without the benefits they earned through service and sacrifice.
History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.
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