_ Perhaps one of the oddest fairy tales about Black people in the U.S. is that they largely “sold themselves into slavery.” Somehow, some teachers of all cultural groups are trained to believe that the “African kinds” sold their own people into slavery so that the kings could become rich. While it is true that in some regions African kings and queens were complicit during the enslavement period, the overwhelming majority of Africans were tricked and many were kidnapped and/or threatened into becoming chattel slaves throughout the Americas. What is most important, however, is that even those Africans who were complicit may not have had a way of knowing that their people would be exported and become chattel slaves.

No slavery is good slavery, but chattel slavery (such as U.S. slavery), where a person becomes the sole property of another person and has absolutely no rights, no voice, and their very body belongs to the master and his wife, was unheard of in Africa…There is an enormous difference between historical internal servitude and chattel slavery, which completely knocked the Africans off cultural balance. These two forms of slavery should not be discussed as if they were the same or even related.

 

Think about the Holocaust. Consider the magnitude of Hitler’s killings and his reach. There were certainly Jews who helped Hitler capture and kill other Jews (some authors even controversially point to the possibility of Jewish financing of Hitler’s campaign…). While a few Jewish people may have been complicit in the killing of six million people, no one says or believes that “the Jews” killed themselves; instead we all realize that Hitler was the culprit. In that same way a few Africans were complicit, but they were neither the culprits nor the beneficiaries of chattel slavery. No longer should anyone who teaches or reaches a Black child believe that s/he is in the U.S. because his/her own people were practicing slavery themselves and/or that Africans “sold themselves” into slavery.

 


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