There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the brutal history of slavery, highlighting both the role of European traders and the complicity of some Africans.
Henry Louis Gates emphasizes the haunting legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, where the cruelty of European traders is paralleled by the troubling reality of some Africans participating in the enslavement of their own people. This acknowledgment of both external oppression and internal complicity serves as a poignant reminder of the complex history of slavery and its enduring effects on cultural memory and identity.
In practice
In a history class discussing the impact of the transatlantic slave trade.
It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.
In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.
In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence.
The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.
The only people who live in a post-black world are four people who live in a little white house on Pennsylvania Avenue. The idea that America is post-racial or post-black because a man I admire, Barack Obama, is president of the United States, is a joke. And I hope no one will even wonder about this crazy fiction again.
Very few, if any, first-generation black or white or Asian kids will pursue a Ph.D. They'll pursue the professions for economic security. Many will go to law school and/or business school.
They didn't incarcerate the Japanese-Americans in Hawaii. That's the place that was bombed. But the Japanese-American population was about 45 percent of the island of Hawaii. And if they extracted those Japanese-Americans, the economy would have collapsed. But on the mainland, we were thinly spread out up and down the West Coast.
History is about great forces, yes, but also about contingency.
I grew up in the shadow of the Trujillato, saw how the regime had ravaged so many families.
I am speaking to you from the Cabinet Room at 10 Downing Street. This morning the British Ambassador in Berlin handed the German Government an official note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven o'clock, that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and consequently this country is at war with Germany.
Stern accuracy in inquiring, bold imagination in describing, these are the cogs on which history soars or flutters and wobbles.
The American Revolution was carried out in the name of the people, and it was supposedly 'We, the people,' who created the government that Americans still live under.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.