By Eugene Veklerov
Monday, November 13, 2017
This article is a brief collection of published facts and
figures I decided to compile after a conversation with a recent graduate who
had studied racism and slavery in several college classes. The facts I cited contradicted
everything she had learned from her professors and the books and TV programs
they recommended. It sounded as if she and I had studied the histories of two
parallel universes.
Her classmates and many other Americans share her
beliefs. So I decided to chronicle these facts as a public service, as history
is being completely rewritten right before our eyes.
Slavery is an ugly part of our past. In this country, it
was inseparable from racism, as almost all U.S. slaves were from Sub-Saharan
Africa and almost all slaveholders were whites. Furthermore, many founders of
this country, such as George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were
slaveholders, which some refer to as the “original sin” of this country.
That original sin, they conclude, makes this country
uniquely repulsive among the countries in the world, and render its
institutions illegitimate. The purpose of this article is not to offer any
opinions on these issues, but to provide a few pertinent historical facts.
Some Basic Numbers
about Global Slavery
Historians estimate that the total number of African
slaves brought to the Americas was around 11 million. About 5 percent of them
ended up in the United States, mostly during the colonial period. A law banning
the importation of new slaves was passed during the Jefferson administration
and went into effect in 1808, although some illegal smuggling continued. The
largest number of the slaves in the transatlantic trade, close to 40 percent,
were brought to Brazil. These numbers are estimates, but Professor Henry Louis
Gates Jr., a prominent Harvard historian, cites similar numbers in an interview
with PBS.
The transatlantic voyages were not the only source of the
slave trade in the world. According to this BBC article, “Muslim traders also
exported as many as 17 million slaves to the coast of the Indian Ocean, the
Middle East, and North Africa.” Muslims also captured Europeans. In “Christian
Slaves, Muslim Masters,” Robert C. Davis estimates that Barbary pirates
captured and enslaved more than a million Europeans from Mediterranean
countries between 1500 and 1800. Some were kept for ransom; others were sold as
galley slaves or sex slaves.
Another source of slaves was Russia and its neighbors.
Long before Crimea became a bone of contention between Russia and Ukraine, it
was a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire called the Crimean Khanate, populated
mostly by the Crimean Tatars. They raided Russia and adjacent countries,
including Poland, and captured and enslaved 2 million people between 1500 and
1774, when Russia defeated Khanate and eventually annexed the entire Crimean
peninsula. Many of the captured slaves were exported to the Ottoman Empire.
A Timeline of
Abolition
1794. France abolishes slavery in France and its
colonies. It is reinstated in the Napoleonic era and finally abolished in 1848.
1833. Great Britain passes a law banning slavery
throughout the British Empire, including its colonies, with a few exceptions.
In 1843, the exceptions are eliminated.
1861. Russia frees its serfs. Serfdom and slavery had
some similarities and differences. Briefly, most serfs had to work on land
owned by nobles. Some were domestic serfs, who lived with their masters. Their
actual lifestyles depended on the owners. Some owners abused their serfs,
especially domestic serfs, both physically and sexually.
1865. The United States abolishes slavery.
1886. Cuba abolishes slavery.
1888. Brazil abolishes slavery.
1962. Saudi Arabia bans all slavery practice and slave
trafficking.
1981. Mauritania bans all slavery practice and slave
trafficking.
(This article does not cover modern-day sex slavery and
other similar illegal activities, which are a criminal matter, as opposed to
slavery codified into law.)
Racism in Numbers
How do the countries of the world rank by levels of
racism now? This question may not have a single answer, because any objective
cross-country comparison must be based on an explicitly defined metric or
metrics, and racism is a complex social issue with too many facets. On the
other hand, there is no shortage of publications on this subject that simply
bypass the tedious country-by-country comparisons altogether. Consider, for
example, a listing of “The Top 12 Most Racist Countries in the World.” Its
preamble states:
What follows is a list of what
various websites consider to be the most racist countries in the world. The
list is in no order of more to less, given that various researchers and indexes
have failed to agree. After researching various studies, the following nations
have consistently shown up in the top.
This listing includes the United States. It provides a
brief explanation of why each country is on the list, but the explanations for
different countries use different arguments, which defeats the idea of
cross-country comparison.
Only very few studies consistently apply the same
valuation methodologies across the countries. One was conducted by an
organization called the World Value Survey (WVS), a network of social
scientists coordinated by a central body located in Sweden. Part of its funding
comes from the U.S. National Science Foundation and its counterparts in other
countries and from other sources sponsoring reputable scholarly projects.
One of its surveys conducted in more than 80 countries
asked respondents if they would not
like to live next door to people belonging to certain categories, such as drug
addicts, people who have AIDS, immigrants, people of a different religion, and
so on. One of these categories was “people of a different race.” The
respondents had to select all undesirable groups of people that the respondents
did not want as neighbors.
The percentage of the people who selected the category
“people of a different race” is the metric used in a number of publications as
an indicator of the level of racism in different countries. The Washington Post presented the results of
the survey as a color-coded map in a publication titled “A fascinating map of
the world’s most and least racially tolerant countries” in 2013.
The most tolerant countries shown on the map, which
scored less than 5 percent, are the United States, Canada, Great Britain,
Australia, New Zealand, and many countries in South America and Scandinavian
countries. Venezuela got the worst score among the large countries in Latin
America. Globally, the least tolerant countries are Jordan with 51 percent and
India with 43 percent. Many Asian and African countries got low scores,
especially Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Indonesia, Vietnam, and South Korea.
Counterarguments
About This Survey
Some researchers have expressed reservations about the
WVS survey. A follow-up article in the Washington
Post lists the following reservations of professor Steve Saideman and
others:
One metric may not be sufficient to
‘gauge racial intolerance.’ [Saideman] believes that asking respondents this
question – would they be ‘okay with a member of a different race marrying into
their family’ – may yield different results.
Perhaps different people interpret
the question differently. Saideman conjectures that ‘perhaps the Vietnamese
think of the Chinese but not of other races. So it may not be that the people
are very racist in general — they just hate one group that is defined by race.’
Others expressed doubts about the truthfulness of the
responses. For example, the original Washington
Post article puts it this way:
[I]t’s entirely likely that some
people lied when answering this question; it would be surprising if they
hadn’t. But the operative question, unanswerable, is whether people in certain
countries were more or less likely to answer the question honestly. For
example, while the data suggest that Swedes are more racially tolerant than
Finns, it’s possible that the two groups are equally tolerant but that Finns
are just more honest. The willingness to state such a preference out loud,
though, might be an indicator of racial attitudes in itself.
These reservations are perfectly valid. No study of such
a complex social phenomenon will ever be complete, and it is always easier to
criticize a study for what it does not have than for what it does.
Also, racism in any country may be defined only within
the country’s context, so for the Vietnamese people this context is different
from what it is for the Russians. The truthfulness of the responses applies to
all public opinion surveys. Nevertheless, the WVS study is one of the few
serious studies, because it uses a clearly defined yardstick for racism that is
systematically applied across the countries.
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