What Is a Myth About the Institution of the Family Quizlet
This article was published in 2017
People call back they know everything most slavery in the United States, but they don't. They call up the majority of African slaves came to the American colonies, simply they didn't. They talk about 400 years of slavery, but it wasn't. They claim all Southerners endemic slaves, but they didn't. Some debate information technology was all a long time agone, but it wasn't.
Slavery has been in the news a lot lately. From the discovery of the auction of 272 enslaved people that enabled Georgetown University to remain in operation to the McGraw-Hill textbook controversy over calling slaves "workers from Africa" and the slavery memorial being built at the Academy of Virginia, Americans are having conversations about this difficult period in American history. Some of these dialogues have been wrought with controversy and conflict, like the University of Tennessee pupil who challenged her professor's understanding of enslaved families.
As a scholar of slavery at the Academy of Texas at Austin, I welcome the public debates and connections the American people are making with history. Nonetheless, there are still many misconceptions about slavery, every bit evidenced by the disharmonize at the University of Tennessee.
I've spent my career dispelling myths about "the peculiar institution." The goal in my courses is not to victimize 1 group and gloat another. Instead, we trace the history of slavery in all its forms to make sense of the origins of wealth inequality and the roots of bigotry today. The history of slavery provides vital context to contemporary conversations and counters the distorted facts, cyberspace hoaxes and poor scholarship I caution my students against.
4 myths about slavery
Myth Ane: The majority of African captives came to what became the United States.
Truth: Merely a little more than 300,000 captives, or 4-6 percent, came to the United states of america. The majority of enslaved Africans went to Brazil, followed by the Caribbean. A significant number of enslaved Africans arrived in the American colonies by fashion of the Caribbean, where they were "seasoned" and mentored into slave life. They spent months or years recovering from the harsh realities of the Middle Passage. Once they were forcibly accepted to slave labor, many were then brought to plantations on American soil.
Myth Two: Slavery lasted for 400 years.
Popular culture is rich with references to 400 years of oppression. There seems to be confusion between the Transatlantic Slave Trade (1440-1888) and the institution of slavery, confusion merely reinforced past the Bible, Genesis 15:thirteen:
Then the Lord said to him, 'Know for certain that for four hundred years your descendants volition exist strangers in a state not their ain and that they will be enslaved and mistreated there.'
Listen to Lupe Fiasco – just one hip-hop artist to refer to the 400 years – in his 2011 imagining of America without slavery, "All Black Everything":
[Hook] You would never know If you could e'er be If y'all never try You would never run into Stayed in Africa We ain't never exit And then there were no slaves in our history Were no slave ships, were no misery, call me crazy, or isn't he See I fell comatose and I had a dream, information technology was all black everything [Poetry 1] Uh, and we ain't get exploited White man ain't feared so he did not destroy it We own't work for free, see they had to employ information technology Built it up together then we equally appointed First 400 years, see nosotros actually enjoyed it 
Truth: Slavery was non unique to the United states of america; information technology is a function of near every nation'south history, from Greek and Roman civilizations to contemporary forms of human being trafficking. The American function of the story lasted fewer than 400 years.
How, then, practise we calculate the timeline of slavery in America? Most historians employ 1619 as a starting signal: xx Africans referred to as "servants" arrived in Jamestown, Virginia on a Dutch ship. Information technology's of import to note, however, that they were not the first Africans on American soil. Africans first arrived in America in the late 16th century not as slaves but as explorers together with Spanish and Portuguese explorers.
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One of the best-known of these African "conquistadors" was Estevancio, who traveled throughout the Southeast from present-day Florida to Texas. As far as the establishment of chattel slavery – the treatment of slaves every bit property – in the United states, if we utilize 1619 as the commencement and the 1865 13th Amendment as its terminate, and then it lasted 246 years, not 400.
Myth Iii: All Southerners owned slaves.
Truth: Roughly 25 per centum of all Southerners owned slaves. The fact that one-quarter of the southern population were slaveholders is still shocking to many. This truth brings historical insight to modernistic conversations virtually inequality and reparations.
Take the case of Texas.
When it established statehood, the Alone Star State had a shorter catamenia of Anglo-American chattel slavery than other southern states – merely 1845 to 1865 – because Spain and Mexico had occupied the region for almost one-half of the 19th century with policies that either abolished or limited slavery. Still, the number of people impacted past wealth and income inequality is staggering. Past 1860, the Texas enslaved population was 182,566, but slaveholders represented 27 percent of the population, and controlled 68 percent of the government positions and 73 pct of the wealth. These are astonishing figures, just today's income gap in Texas is arguably more than stark, with 10 percent of revenue enhancement filers taking home 50 per centum of the income.
Myth Four: Slavery was a long time ago.
Truth: African-Americans have been free in this land for less fourth dimension than they were enslaved. Do the math: Blacks take been free for 152 years, which means that most Americans are simply ii to 3 generations away from slavery. This is non that long ago.
Over this same period, however, former slaveholding families take congenital their legacies on the institution and generated wealth that African-Americans have not had access to considering enslaved labor was forced. Segregation maintained wealth disparities, and overt and covert discrimination express African-American recovery efforts.
The value of slaves
Economists and historians have examined detailed aspects of the enslaved experience for as long as slavery existed. My own work enters this conversation past looking at the value of individual slaves and the means enslaved people responded to being treated as a commodity.
They were bought and sold just like we sell cars and cattle today. They were gifted, deeded and mortgaged the same way we sell houses today. They were itemized and insured the same way nosotros manage our assets and protect our valuables.
Enslaved people were valued at every stage of their lives, from earlier nativity until after death. Slaveholders examined women for their fertility and projected the value of their "future increase." Equally the slaves grew up, enslavers assessed their value through a rating system that quantified their piece of work. An "A1 Prime number hand" represented 1 term used for a "start-rate" slave who could do the well-nigh work in a given solar day. Their values decreased on a quarter scale from iii-fourths hands to 1-quaternary hands, to a rate of zero, which was typically reserved for elderly or differently abled bondpeople (another term for slaves).
For example, Guy and Andrew, 2 prime males sold at the largest auction in U.S. history in 1859, commanded different prices. Although similar in "all marketable points in size, age, and skill," Guy was United states$1,280 while Andrew sold for $1,040 because "he had lost his correct center." A reporter from the New York Tribune noted "that the market value of the right heart in the Southern land is $240." Enslaved bodies were reduced to monetary values assessed from year to yr and sometimes from month to calendar month for their entire lifespan and across. Past today'south standards, Andrew and Guy would be worth virtually $33,000-$40,000.
Slavery was an extremely diverse economical institution, one that extracted unpaid labor out of people in a diverseness of settings – from pocket-size single-crop farms and plantations to urban universities. This diversity was likewise reflected in their prices. And enslaved people understood they were treated as bolt.
"I was sold away from mammy at three years old," recalled Harriett Hill of Georgia. "I remembers it! It lack selling a dogie from the moo-cow," she shared in a 1930s interview with the Works Progress Assistants. "We are human beings," she told her interviewer. Those in bondage understood their condition. Fifty-fifty though Harriet Hill was likewise little to think her price when she was three, she recalled being sold for $1,400 at age 9 or 10: "I never could forget it."
Slavery in popular culture
Slavery is part and bundle of American popular culture, only for 40 years the television miniseries Roots was the primary visual representation of the institution, except for a scattering of independent (and non widely known) films such as Haile Gerima'due south "Sankofa" or the Brazilian "Quilombo."
Today, from grassroots initiatives such as the interactive Slave Dwelling Project, where school-aged children spend the night in slave cabins, to comic skits on Saturday Nighttime Live, slavery is front end and center. In 2016 A&E and History released the reimagined miniseries "Roots: The Saga of an American Family," which reflected four decades of new scholarship. Steve McQueen's "12 Years a Slave" was a box office success in 2013, extra Azia Mira Dungey made headlines with the popular web serial called "Ask a Slave," and "The Cloak-and-dagger" – a serial virtually runaway slaves and abolitionists – was a hitting for its network WGN America. With less than one yr of operation, the Smithsonian'south National Museum of African American History, which devotes several galleries to the history of slavery, has had more than one million visitors.
The elephant that sits at the center of our history is coming into focus. American slavery happened – we are still living with its consequences. I believe we are finally set to face it, learn about it and acknowledge its significance to American history.
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Editor'due south note: This is an updated version of an article that originally appeared on Oct. 21, 2014.
Source: https://theconversation.com/american-slavery-separating-fact-from-myth-79620
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