Racism – Part 1

I feel totally unqualified to discuss the subject in relations to black people. I grew up in Omaha and in Cedar Rapids. I’m almost 60 years old and I have never really known any Blacks or been friends. My mom passed away when I was 10 and we had a black nanny for a short time. Mrs. Spells. This was my only real experience with the African-American culture. It didn’t last for long because my sister was 11 and it was decided the cost outweighed the benefit. My sister took care of my infant brother while my dad was at work.

In my junior high school there was one black person. He was a grade behind me and I never knew him. In high school I don’t recall any black people. So when I see some of these protests and riots I can’t say I understand their frustration. All I have is history books that I’ve read. Some of the books that have affected me were “Black Like Me”, “the Chanceyville incident” and recently a book called “The Black Count” I also watched the series “Roots”and the movie 12 years a slave.

I just finished the book “the Black Count”. It was a history book about the father of the author Alexandre Dumas. Dumas wrote “the Count of Monte Christo” and the Three Musketeers series. It was fascinating to learn that Dumas’s father was born of a slave and a French person on the island of Santa Domingo. It was one of the islands in the Caribbean that the French used to grow sugarcane. The sugarcane plantations used African slaves to plant, harvest and process the sugarcane into my glasses and white sugar.

I was amazed to find out from this book that the French slaveholders in the Caribbean preceded American slavery by quite a number of decades. There were even worse conditions for the sugarcane French slaves than the cotton slaves America used. The sugarcane slaves were basically starved. They were not allowed to eat the sugarcane. If they were caught eating it they were shot. If they tried escaping they were shot. Some are even made to wear metal masks to prevent them from eating the sugarcane while harvesting it in 100° heat. When they died which was frequently they were just replaced with a new one. After reading the horrors of slavery in this book, other books in the series and Roots it is hard to fathom the awful ways the Blacks were treated.

One of the saddest things the Africans were sold by other Africans who would conquer another tribe in a war. On the East Coast of Africa Muslim slave traders ruled the day. The horror of slavery has had many many awful components even before American slavery.