Universally Speaking
Rahim Islam
Rahim Islam is a National Speaker and Writer, Convener of Philadelphia Community of Leaders, and President/CEO of Universal Companies, a community development and education management company headquartered in Philadelphia, PA. Follow Rahim Islam on FaceBook(Rahim Islam) & Twitter (@RahimIslamUC)
In the first part of this series I tried to make a few key points that lay the foundation for the title of my article “Black Culture is about Achievement, Greatness, and Excellence.” Specifically, I wrote about: the distinction between Black culture versus the assimilated Black and American culture; the massive diversity of the Black community (we’re represented by every demographic) however, the ultimate origin of Black America is Africa no matter how we came; Blacks worldwide, for nearly 600 years, have been conquered by Europeans with the ultimate colonialization of African language, education and religion that all promotes white supremacy.
The definition of culture is the characteristics of a group of people, defined by everything from language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music, arts, beliefs, and trust of themselves, life and economic expectations. Culture is the full range of all learned human behavior patterns. Culture is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society, as defined by anthropologist Edward Tylor “ Culture is a powerful human tool for survival, but it is a fragile phenomenon. Culture in essence is a groups’ external brand (how is the group viewed) and internal values (what is the group expectations).
It is very easy for white America to only see Black people and their current social and economic conditions as a true reflection and narrative of their group brand – this is wrong on so many levels. It is equally easy for many Black people to see their current social and economic conditions as a true reflection and narrative of their group value. While Blacks dominate every negative demographic and are nearly invisible for every positive demographic, these disparities didn’t happen yesterday.
These disparities are alarming and extremely damaging for so many Black people both now and for future generations of Black people.
The point is that they have their roots in slavery (where we must start) and now many of these conditions are structurally cemented and are systemically reinforce and supported throughout every American Institution (i.e. financial, education, religious, arts, cultural, media, housing, government, transportation, small businesses, corporations, professional and legal, etc.).
What’s being promoted about Black people today is void of our true history in this country and the damage that has been done to Black people.
The removal of the facts (history) serves the white supremacy and Black inferiority argument.
Let’s be honest and acknowledge that the opinions held by both whites and Blacks are extremely negative and most are passed down from generation to generation (in today’s political correctness we hide these discussions when we are in an uncomfortable environment alone).
It is further reinforced bya massive media propaganda machine (intentionally or unintentionally the results are the same); mis-education and the removal of Black achievement and excellence from the history books (very few history books actually create a context where Blacks are “change agents” versus passive watchers of history – this is damaging to both Blacks and whites); and the generational trauma and the nearly complete loss of Black peoples’ past, heritage, and culture (slave owners did everything they could to make sure that the enslaved Africans forgot their languages, cultures and religious beliefs) as part of the American institution of slavery.
In spite of these barbaric conditions, our ancestors forged and nurture culture: they formed and maintained kinships networks; established loving male and female relationships, raised and socialized children, maintained spirituality and religion, and created a rich expressive culture in which they articulated their feelings and hopes and dreams for a future where they would be a free people – this is the true culture and greatness of Black people. Contrary to mis-education and outright ignorance, our ancestors didn’t accept slavery and weren’t passive participants. Some have said that slavery was really good for Black people (what a joke).
Slavery was nothing but a real nightmare and traumatic experience for millions of Black people which punitively impact its descendants today. All of our ancestors wanted out of slavery and even though chances were null, they kept hope alive generation after generation.
It is estimated that there were tens of millions of Africans bought by European traders from Africa between 1450 and 1870 and taken across the Atlantic Ocean to work on the European-owned plantations and mines of the Americas.
W. E. Dubois has called this “the human rape of a continent to an extent never paralleled in ancient or modern history.”
For enslaved Africans taken by the Europeans there was no hope of ever returning home. Men, women and children were expected to work for their entire lives with no freedom or rights.
Under the most extreme and hostile environment in America for Black people – this is the backdrop that Black achievement, greatness and excellence should be measured.
Much information about African resistance to captivity and slavery came from written documents kept by European sailors.
There is enough information, including historical facts, examples of resistance, and dislike of the European slave trade, to establish that the enslavement of Africans was not accepted by the African people.
In many cases wars were fabricated and initiated by Europeans and African leaders were simply tricked.
Once the end game of slavery was acknowledged, there were numerous efforts orchestrated by African leaders to shut it down.
Our ancestors resisted enslavement from the beginning – as one scholar has put it, “slaves ‘naturally’ resisted their enslavement because slavery was fundamentally unnatural.”
The Jews have mastered telling the numerous stories regarding their resistance and fight against Adolph Hitler and his Nazi regime.
The mis-education and outright lies, Blacks just didn’t accept enslavement nor did Africans accept this – there was massive resistance.
Africans fought against and resisted slavery in their homeland, on the seas, and in America.
Africans fought their captors frequently many times leading to their violent deaths.
When African men weren’t being violently killed because of their resistance, many jumped off the ships and committed suicide.
The enslaved Africans did all that they could to resist their enslavement. From the moment of capture and the journey across the Atlantic Ocean, to the plantations, enslaved Africans rebelled but little is documented.
Even in the knowledge that they would never get back to their countries or achieve freedom, they persisted in their resistance.
Resistance took many forms. The enslaved Africans would purposefully damage machinery, work slowly or openly rebel against their masters and their slave status.
Africans also resisted by keeping alive many of the African religious beliefs, names, language, music and stories.
The enslaved Africans resistance and rebellion eventually paid off, when the transatlantic slave trade was ended (in 1807 for Britain), many enslaved Africans were made free in 1838 for those on British-owned plantations.
Forms varied, but the common denominator in all acts of resistance was an attempt to claim some measure of freedom against an institution that defined enslaved Blacks as property.
Black greatness can be seen in the day-to-day resistance against the slave-owners and the American institution of slavery.
The most common form of resistance available to slaves was what is known as “day-to-day” resistance, or small acts of rebellion.
This form of resistance included sabotage, such as breaking tools or setting fire to buildings. Striking out at a slave owner’s property was a way to strike at the man himself, albeit indirectly.
Perhaps the most common forms of resistance were those that took place in the work environment. After all, slavery was ultimately about coerced labor, and the enslaved struggled daily to define the terms of their work.
Over the years, customary rights emerged in most fields of production.
Both men and women faked being ill to gain relief from their harsh working conditions.
These customs dictated work routines, distribution of rations, general rules of comportment, and so on. If slave masters increased workloads, provided meager rations, or punished too severely, slaves registered their displeasure by slowing work, feigning illness, breaking tools, or sabotaging production.
These everyday forms of resistance vexed slave masters, but there was little they could do to stop them without risking more widespread breaks in production.
In this way, the enslaved often negotiated the basic terms of their daily routines.
Another common form of slave resistance was theft. Slaves pilfered fruits, vegetables, livestock, tobacco, liquor, and money from their masters.
The theft of foodstuffs was especially common and was justified on several grounds.
First, slave rations were often woefully inadequate in providing the nutrition and calories necessary to support the daily exertions of plantation labor.
Hungry slaves reasoned that the master’s abundance should be shared with those who produced it.
Second, slaves recognized the inherent contradiction of the master’s “theft” accusations.
How could slaves, who were themselves the master’s property, “steal” anything that the master owned?
After all, the master’s ownership claims over the slave meant that he owned everything that the slave “owned.”
When a slave staked claim to a master’s chicken, he merely transferred it to his stomach, or as Frederick Douglass put it, the slave was simply “taking [the master’s] meat out of one tub and putting it in another.”
Women may have been able to feign illness more easily–they were expected to provide their owners with children, and at least some owners would have wanted to protect the childbearing capacity of their female slaves. Slaves could also play on their masters’ and mistresses’ prejudices by seeming to not understand instructions.
When possible, slaves could also decrease their pace of work. Women more often worked in the household and could sometimes use their position to undermine their masters.
Some historians describe how enslaved women poisoned their masters.
They also describe that women may have resisted against their special burden under slavery—having to provide slaveholders with more slaves by bearing children.
They speculate that women may have used birth control or abortion to keep their children out of slavery; while this cannot be known for certain; there is evidence that many slave owners were convinced that female slaves had ways of preventing pregnancy.
Throughout the history of American slavery, Africans and African Americans resisted whenever possible. The odds against slaves succeeding at a rebellion or in escaping permanently were so overwhelming that most slaves resisted the only way they could—through individual actions. But slaves also resisted the system of slavery through the formation of a distinctive culture and through their religious beliefs, which kept hope alive in the face of such severe persecution. In addition to everyday forms of resistance, slaves sometimes staked more direct and overt claims to freedom.
The most common form of overt resistance was flight.
As early as 1640, our enslaved ancestors in Maryland and Virginia absconded from their enslavement, a trend that would grow into the thousands, and, eventually, tens of thousands by the time of the Civil War.
During the early years of slavery, runaways tended to consist mostly of African-born males.
Since African-born men were in the numerical majority through much of the eighteenth century, this should not surprise us.
For the most part, these men did not speak English and were unfamiliar with the geographic terrain of North America.
Their attempts to escape slavery, despite these handicaps, are a testament to the rejection of their servile condition. If caught, runaways faced certain punishment—whipping, branding, and even the severing of the Achilles tendon.
In fact many attributed the formation of police today having its origin in organized bounty hunters who thrived off finding and returning runaways back to their owners.
Those lucky enough to evade detection sought sanctuary in a variety of safe havens—Native American communities, marshy lowlands like the Great Dismal Swamp along the Virginia/North Carolina coastal border, and, eventually, Canada and the free states of the American North.
By the nineteenth century, the North was a particularly attractive destination for acculturated, American-born slaves.
Networks of free blacks and sympathetic whites often helped ferry slaves to freedom via the so-called Underground Railroad, a chain of safe houses that stretched from the American South to free states in the North.
Men continued to be predominant among runaways, although women, and even entire families were increasingly likely to test their chances in the flight for freedom.
As the Civil War unfolded, many slaves abandoned their masters’ plantations, sometimes joining the Union army in what many perceived to be a war to end slavery forever.
The most spectacular, and perhaps best-known, forms of resistance were organized, armed rebellions. Between 1691 and 1865, at least nine slave revolts erupted in what would eventually become the United States.
The most prominent of these occurred in New York City (1712), Stono, South Carolina (1739), New Orleans (1811), and Southampton, Virginia (Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion). Numerous other conspiracies were thwarted before they could be fully realized, including Gabriel Prosser’s (Richmond, VA, 1800) and Denmark Vesey’s (Charleston, SC, 1822).
Slaves commandeered weapons, burned and looted properties, and even killed their masters and other whites, but whites were quick to exact a brutal revenge.
In the bloodiest American revolt, Nat Turner and several hundred comrades killed sixty whites.
The retribution for these rebellions was extreme and barbaric but it never stopped our Ancestors from fighting, with their lives, against this inhumane condition.
I contend that when America speaks about its economic dominance in the world today; it must acknowledge the tremendous and remarkable contribution that our ancestors made to make America what it is today.
Many historians acknowledge this fact and the disadvantage all other countries had because of the American Institution of slavery.
Legally owned throughout their lives, our ancestors created wealth that made economic growth possible in the US and further developed capitalist production.
The exploitation of our enslaved ancestor’s labor was the backbone for US economic activity and prosperity.
It was essential then for the US state apparatus to facilitate the expansion and entrenchment of institutional racism in both slave and non-slave holding states through the creation of slave codes, laws which defined the status of slave and the rights of slave owners.
In 1696, South Carolina passed laws reducing the status of enslaved Africans to that of chattel property and the owners have the no more emotional responsibility to them then to other animal property owned.
The enslaved went unrewarded for the work they were force to perform daily and for their entire lives.
The product of their labor was not owned by them but by slave-owners. This surplus and unpaid labor was both a source of wealth for both the slave owning South and the industrializing North.
One historian quoted a South Carolina delegate as saying “without niggers, this state would degenerate into one of the most contemptible in the Union…niggers are our wealth, our only natural resource.”
Once Blacks begin to tell their story of our ancestor’s, including our enslaved ancestor’s contribution to the ultimate (abolishing of slavery), you will conclude, like I have, that Black culture is about achievement, greatness, and excellence.
I’m a student of our history and it is very clear to me that Black culture is about achievement, greatness, and excellence.
In my next article I will expand this position by describing the greatness of Blacks in the 19th & 20th centuries even with Jim Crow Laws, KKK and organized terrorism, the denial of their human and civil rights, institutional and structural racism, discrimination and bigotry were all impediments to achieving “real” freedom for the children of our enslaved ancestors who are now supposed to be American citizens.
