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When I first watched a movie about the slavement of africans and their marine trade, I was just as flabbergasted as you seem to be about this story. I kept ask
by motoboi 10y ago
When I first watched a movie about the slavement of africans and their marine trade, I was just as flabbergasted as you seem to be about this story.
I kept asking myself: how could something like that (people being transported on the basement of a ship, chained to one another) possible?
For someone who was not part of that culture and time, seems impossible that so many people could act in such an evil way.
A community culture can shape peoples minds. A company is just a community.
Gender discrimination is real. Very real. What makes this story appear unbelievable is that very few women will risk their careers to speak up against it.
- mynameishere 10y agoJust out of curiosity, were you really "flabbergasted" by learning of a particular instance of a practice which had existed in almost every society since prehistory (as even a semi-educated person would have known)?
- pjc50 10y agoEverything is new to somebody at some time.
- dsp1234 10y agoNot the commenter above, but as a kid I knew about slavery, and about "people owning other people". I even knew about how long it had gone on for, and that slaves were transported in ships around the Mediterranean. That said, I was wholly unprepared for the brutality of the Atlantic slave trade. Due to the higher round trip times, and lack of mid-trip provisioning, there was a requirement to be more "efficient" than the slave trade across land or sea previously.
- r_smart 10y agoAt least speaking for myself, my compulsory education only really focused on slavery as an American institution and didn't really address it in a broader context. I obviously picked up a little here and there, particularly since I took Latin all through high school and learned a little bit about Roman culture, but it was only recently I learned how widespread slavery really was. As an example, it was news to me that slavery was still practiced in parts of the Middle East until the 60s, and probably still exists in a less obvious manner today. I was really horrified to learn that tons of slaves left Africa via the Eastern trade routes, and the brutality of those owners is why there's little to no visible evidence of slavery in those parts of the world. Evidence meaning descendants of said slaves.
- magic_beans 10y agoSlavery still exists in essence in India and East Asia, with domestic servants working for families as soon as they're old enough to wash dishes.
- sverige 10y agoThere's a world of difference between 1) being captured by your neighbors, sold to some tribe of slave traders, then resold to ship-owning slave traders, then resold at auction on a different continent, and finally landing on a plantation where the intentional and systematic removal of your human dignity is completed over years in squalid conditions, and 2) not having your company buy you a leather jacket while you're being paid a salary that puts you somewhere in the top 2% of all of humanity. It's this sort of hyperbole that makes the problem less likely to be solved, since it makes it all seem relatively trivial.
- magic_beans 10y agoYou weren't aware of the cruelties of African enslavement until... you first watched a movie? This is what's wrong with American education.