As a young African man who is proud of my heritage I am often embarrassed that my people were brought to America and the West starting from Portugal in slave ships and tortured and forced to work for nothing and oppressed.
So when Ben Carson made the statement that compared black slaves to immigrants, I was wondering if he is not the recipient of the most coonish, lunatic statement of the 21st century. And I totally get why the black community is triggered.
We Africans identify with our brothers who are oppressed around the world because our skin colour makes us naturally empathize.
As I crucified Carson in my mind, I thought a bit deeper and remembered some anecdotes from the past about the slave trade which I learned in middle school in Africa.
When the slave traders came to Africa, there was no such sentiment around the word slavery as there is today. People from time immemorial have and had always traded in persons. Even in Africa till this day there is legalized slavery. Only yesterday in Ghana a Lebanese man, Jihad Thaaabn, took the face of one of his workers, a young dark skinned Ghanaian girl by name of Evelyn Boakye, and rubbed it in a pot of hot African peppers for ten minutes. Her crime according to local news reports was that she had been fidgeting with the blender and working too slowly. The minimum wage of a Nigerian employee is less than $100 a month.
When you look at it in that context, do the Housing Secretary’s words begin to make sense?
I doubt you will agree, however perhaps I can intimate you with more facts and figures in the form of generally accepted statements or events that may engage you for a while longer over this controversial debate.
Do you know that it has been said that ancient West African kings like the Oba of Benin could trade a few hundred of his African subjects for small treasures from the Caucasians who were flush with technological treasures like a hand mirror, whiskey, guns? In those days there were obviously no iPhones or Google or Twitter for people to vent over political statements.
You know what else you couldn’t do back then if you were a new ‘African immigrant’ to North America?
Send the King an email about how you were really a slave and life was a bitch. Nope you wouldn’t be able to post about anything on Facebook and the slave masters certainly got away with murder. But let’s just say I doubt the traders were in Africa telling the locals anything but “America is the land of opportunity”. Which is the same record the settlers in this country have been selling since they settled in order to get the rest of the world here to make it the greatest country on earth.
Perhaps Secretary Carson did not gaffe after all. It is obvious slaves thought they were coming to America to have a better life but they were duped. Sometimes dialogue can be as intertwined as neurosurgery but if we as a people get triggered by the first thing we disagree with based on face value and sentiment then at what time do we intend to utilize deep thought to progress. If Secretary Carson was to talk to Trump about reparations, now that would be a better position.
The very idea that we are anything but slaves even today is a joke, after all blacks have not been paid reparations. Furthermore we are confined to one condition or another by default, it is part of life. From the woman who sells her goods on the strip pole in order to make a living, to the man who sacrifices time he could have spent with his family in order to make a good living are all still seemingly forever engaged in one form of slavery or the other.