I begin this new installment by apologizing in advance for the incomplete nature of the subject matter being presented. I seek only to give brief examples and not go too in depth into slavery or racism, but more so to discuss why we were once the victims of this and other Americans still hold onto the idea of race. I correlate this stubborn inability to let go with the very way in which slavery and racism became a part of this nation. Explaining the difference between the institution’s past, present and future will hopefully help us to understand how to fight it and overcome it, as it remains alive, not just in visible places like Jena, Louisiana, but all over the world as well. We are only given a glimpse of racism when looking at black and brown issues of inequality in America. Prejudice continues to flourish globally for a variety of reasons. But to further explain how racism, which is the institutionalized belief and law-backed ideology of racial superiority, came to outlast the very condition of slavery from which most people see it originate from, we must go back to the beginning. We must go back before the times of our own empire and subsequent Corporate Republic.
Slavery originated long before what we come to read about ever so quickly in the under-funded classrooms across America. It was already an established reality by the time the Hammurabi Code of Mesopotamia (approx. 1800 BC) was created. The Code’s principles related to the relief of debt, enslavement to facilitate compensation, and for the framework of a postwar societies caste system. But even before the Code and most certainly after the glory of Mesopotamia had subsided, it continued to manifest itself differently, but always with the same economic principle. Although present day conflicts are far removed from ancient times, the people themselves as well as their resources are still commonly seen as spoils of war. Phillip II of Macedon, who was Alexander the Great’s father, received 20,000 women and countless young boys as tribute for his conquest of the ancient empire of Scythia. Instead of destroying the kingdom itself though he left Ateus, it’s ruler in charge, and continued the slave trade to re-build the empire whose resources his son would then use to conquer a large part of the Asiatic world.
But the word “slave” actually originates from the Latin word “slav,” which described the people from the Slavic regions that were conquered and sold into bondage. It was these Eastern Europeans who were sacrificed on the altar of industry that were bought and sold to serve the Empires of Old. Whether it was in the Barbarian Kingdoms of Europe who reigned after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the Near Eastern Arab Lords or what was known then as the Imperium Romanus (Byzantine Empire), they toiled and were deprived of their lands, labor, and women for the pleasure of the strongest military forces of that era. And since it was the Latin and Arabic tongues that most of Europe and subsequently all of its colonies in the Americas adopted their language from, that created this synonymous concept of “slavs” being known as “slaves.”
During this example, I have to point out how the American version of slavery sought not only to redefine the institution, but achieved that by separating people from their history. I can remember as a teenager having had several arguments with people who most of them being white, claimed that since Africans sold their own people into slavery it wasn’t really as much the fault of the enslaver. While this is an understandable reaction to the guilt and the striving towards escapism from the actions of ones ancestors, it doesn’t lift the burden from their colonial masters. This nation and others still benefit from that and will continue to for years to come. It doesn’t make the purveyors of such malice, hatred, and deceit guilty of any less of a crime. As if me holding someone down while you rape them makes you any less guilty of what you did. I may have made your cold-blooded goal easier to attain, but I don’t carry any blame for you,