Time to Act Forward

The issue of RACE that has come up increasingly in our politics this election year is intimately connected to the issue of what has been called our “great American sin”. Slavery, however, in all its various forms, is as old as history itself. In experiencing this great crime against humanity America is not unique. From the early bronze age centers of civilization that formed along the great rivers of the world—The Nile (Egypt), The Tigris and Euphrates (Sumer)—where the wheel was invented 3000 years ago, The Indus River valley in Pakistan and India, and the Yellow River Valley in what is today China, slavery flourished and was accepted as a way of life. In the Western hemisphere the culture that grew from The Olmecs and Hopewell’s—what we now call our NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURE, all practiced slavery, sometimes very brutally. As civilizations evolved slavery continued. When God spoke to Moses saying, “I am the lord your god who has brought you out of the house of bondage” (Exod 20:2) slavery was practiced by the Egyptian Pharaohs and later Babylonian and Persian Kings against the Hebrews. In later years throughout the Mediterranean The Minoans (Crete), Mycenaeans (Greece), Anatola (Turkey) practiced several forms of slavery. Again, in more modern times the Native American descendants of earlier cultures practiced slavery.

The point of all this is to state that in my opinion our current discussion of slavery in our country is myopic. The context of Western culture and most of all the Judeo-Christian context is lacking in this discussion. We need to understand that God’s own people were enslaved many times. In The Christian Church at least two former Popes were slaves. An understanding of the Christian position of slavery can be better appreciated by reading Paul’s Letter to Philemon where the slave Onessius is a central figure.

Today as we recognize the great evil that slavery was, we must also recognize that it is still in existence in the world and is being practiced at a very sophisticated level in our own country by businessmen who head up cartels whose business model is centered on human and drug trafficking. Worldwide there are estimated to be over 200 million slaves in the world if one counts political prisoners who are imprisoned and those living under totalitarian rule. In 1926 the League of Nations defined slavery this way:

“The status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised.” The U.N. broadened this definition in 1956 to include forced marriage and more protections for women’s rights.

This definition is still used today by the United Nations, and it certainly underestimates the number of people that are living under conditions where their individual sovereignty has been taken away from them. That number would approach 1 billion people.

Taking the broader view of slavery, America is unique not for having had slavery, but for abolishing slavery by fighting a great Civil War where over 500,000 souls lost their lives.

Many people who are “down for the struggle” and who are using race as a wedge to drive people in our country away from each other—people of all races and ethnicities and cultures and religious beliefs have allowed themselves to be caught up in this process—hence the terms “white privilege” and “white guilt”, have become commonplace. Henry Louis Gates on his PBS TV show FINDING YOUR ROOTS has shown us how complex this issue really is. On more than one occasion, guests on the show who are Black find out that they are descendent from white slave holders. A guest who was white, found out in one case that she was the descendent from a Black slave owner! The point is that the issue of slavery is complex and complicated. In history slavery was ubiquitous, practiced amongst all peoples and cultures, and in trying to understand this issue in a modern context we must tread carefully.

Barak Hussein Obama and Kamala Harris have interesting connections to slavery. Barak through his White mother Kansas born Stanley Ann Durham whose ancestry goes back to slave owners in Colonial Virginia. Ancestory.com, who stands by its research has published their findings:

Research confirms Obama descended from one of America’s first slaves.

“That man, John Punch, was an indentured servant in Colonial Virginia who tried to run off in 1640. After he was caught, he was punished by enslavement for life. Punch’s is the first documented case of slavery for life in the Colonies, occurring decades before Virginia even enacted its slavery laws. Through a combination of genealogical records and DNA testing, family historians at Ancestry determined that he had children with a white woman who then passed her free status on to their offspring. Punch’s descendants went on to be free, successful landowners and slave owners in a Virginia entrenched in slavery. Among these descendants were Dunham and her son, the president. Ancestry has even collected and displayed the key documents connecting Obama to Punch”.

In 2019 Kamal Harris’ Father a well-known and respected Keynesian Economist from Stanford published an Article in Jamaica Global, a web site for the Jamaican dysphoria. Having himself been born in Jamaica he wanted to carefully document his own family’s history in that country:

“My roots go back, within my lifetime, to my paternal grandmother Miss Chrishy (née Christiana Brown, descendant of Hamilton Brown who is on record as plantation and slave owner and founder of Brown’s Town) and to my maternal grandmother Miss Iris (née Iris Finegan, farmer and educator, from Aenon Town and Inverness, ancestry unknown to me). The Harris name comes from my paternal grandfather Joseph Alexander Harris, landowner and agricultural ‘produce’ exporter (mostly pimento or all-spice), who died in 1939 one year after I was born and is buried in the church yard of the magnificent Anglican Church which Hamilton Brown built in Brown’s Town (and where, as a child, I learned the catechism, was baptized and confirmed, and served as an acolyte).” [Emphasis is added].

There is no doubt that Hamilton Brown was a prominent plantation owner in Jamaica during the first half of the 19th century, owned slaves, and also advocated against the abolition of slavery and sought to downplay the difficult working and living conditions of slaves in Jamaica.”

This line of descent has been disputed by members of the Harris family—but not by Prof. Harris himself.

According to Pew Foundation research: When it comes to knowledge of their family’s history with slavery, nearly six-in-ten Black adults (57%) say their ancestors were enslaved. About four-in-ten (41%) report they were enslaved in the United States. Only 5% say their ancestors were solely enslaved outside the United States.

By pointing this all out I simply want to show that the issues of slavery and race are complex. They in fact are connected to all of us in ways that the politicians and media have conflated in order to create a political narrative that only serves to divide us if not given a proper context. It does not show us a way to move forward together. Many people claim a “false valor” of slavery and claim for themselves a victimhood that only slows down their own upward mobility. Or they claim a “faux white guilt” and ask for forgiveness of sins they never committed, and most of the time from people whose ancestors also committed the same sins.

Are racism and all the “isms’ real—Yes. Is “systemic racism’) real, in all its forms—yes. Have we been making progress over the lifetime of our country on all these issues—yes. Is there more work to be done—yes.

Before casting blames and guilts on each other, we should all look “to the logs in our own eyes”.. Since the beginning of recorded history, we have all been part of this great sin—in ways many of us have no idea about and moving forward we can be all part of the solution”.

The challenge for today is to stop looking backward and start acting forward.