evo da vidite kako tu testovi izgledaju - jedan moj test na kojem sam dobila odlicnu ocjenu ;). I - just for the record - ova skola nije nimalo lagana, ali ne bih htjela biti nigdje drugdje jer je fenomenalna, velik izazov i na kraju - zabavna.
Choose four of the five questions below and write a thorough response which addresses all of the components of the question. You don’t have to have a fully developed thesis, but you should have a clear point of view when appropriate. Use specific evidence from the essays, documents and class discussions to support your responses.
1. Discuss the economic and social factors which drove the Atlantic Slave Trade.
Colonization of the New World made a huge demand for workers and labor supply. Slave traders didn’t see much of African culture so they noted the Africans as uncivilized, undeveloped people living in backward society. Slave capturers and traders didn’t go deep into the heart of Africa; they were mostly at the coast. They didn’t realize that Africa was “a continent of extraordinary variation in geography and culture”. This false belief allowed them to perform the cruelties over the slaves. Slavery itself was nothing new to the colonists or to the Africans. In Gary Nash’s Black People in a White People’s Country we read that “Slavery was not a new social phenomenon for either Europeans or Africans”. As the New World was being more and more colonized the demand for labor constantly grew. The reason people came to the New World was to achieve fortune and wealth. The best formula to achieve that wealth was to get as much workers as possible for the least amount of money. Africa was a new source of trade and so much cheaper than the Europeans indentured servants. Servants were also legally protected because they agreed to work for a certain amount of time, not for the life. Less white servants meant more need for slaves. Africa was the most available and the most logical source to exploit. The novelty in the slave trading in Africa and the one in Americas was the massiveness. The incredible number of slaves made them be less important as individuals, and seen as cargo. As Europeans demanded sugar from the tropics of the New World, the production of sugar grew and so did the production of coffee, tobacco, indigo, and cotton. Those kinds of plantations demand a lot of work, so workforce was desperately needed and it made a huge business out of slave trade.
Native Americans were not fit to be slaves because they could easily escape home. Blacks couldn’t escape that easily because they couldn’t go anywhere as we saw in the movie The Last Supper and getting to Africa wasn’t that easy. Unlike Native Americans, black people were more immune to diseases that made them more fit to exploit and perfect to fit into the huge business and madness of Atlantic slave trade.
2. Consider the connection between race, slavery and racism. We have suggested that slavery precedes racism. Why do we think that? If you don’t fully agree, what counter evidence can you amass to support you perspective? Do you think economic or social factors are more important? Why?
Race, being the group of people with similar genetic characteristics, is different than the idea of whiteness in colonial times. What happened in the time preceding slavery is that white people defined their whiteness socially. At the time, being white was synonymous with being an English protestant. Even Irish and German were not considered white, in which religion played the important role. Still, they were slowly assimilated into the society. But at the lowest bottom were Africans. They were the most different ones and the culture they had was not even perceived by white people. The way they looked was the most important one and it made it impossible for them to be completely assimilated into that kind of the society. The idea of racism is a human creation that squeezed every member of the population into a mold and strongly suggested that those same characteristics they have can never change.
Racism rose out of slavery and the proof that racism didn’t create slavery, but the other way around is the existence of slavery in Africa and Europe. Christians enslaved the Muslims, Muslims enslaved Christians, and African tribes enslaved each other. Nash emphasizes, “It is important to note that in all these regions slavery and serfdom had nothing to do with racial characteristics.”
“One became a slave by being an “outsider” or and “infidel”, by being captured in war, by voluntarily selling oneself into slavery to obtain money for one’s family, or by committing certain heinous crime.”
That kind of slavery still didn’t isolate the slave from the society nor did it take his humanity away from him. The labor need increased so much that huge amounts of slaves were transported to the New World. Millions of blacks were enslaved and slave traders saw them like cattle, livestock. They were inspected at the coast like animals, and white people had to develop an opinion about inferiority of blacks to do such humiliating things. Slave traders didn’t care for slaves, they brutalized them and treated them worse than cattle. One human being can’t do that to another and still feel self-righteous if he doesn’t believe that the one he is abusing is less than human. Therefore slavery produced racism in an attempt to justify the misery white people inflicted to the black people.
3. By calling slavery a “totalitarian system,” Blassingame is referring to the nearly total power difference between the owner and the owned. Yet, he suggests that even within this system slaves exercise some small degree of control over their lives. To what extent is this true? How does it work and why do owners allow it to happen?
In totalitarianism, slave’s fate was determined by his master. Still, slaves were able to exercise some amount of control. As Blassingame says “There was so much variation in plantations, overseers and masters, however that the slave had much more freedom from restraint and more independence and autonomy than his institutionally defined role allowed.”
Economically it wasn’t profitable for the master to kill his slaves, because that was same as destroying your possessions so the master had to tolerate some little things.
As every human being carries his own culture with him, so did the black people who were enslaved.
Slaves had some control, but not the one like we usually understand it. Of course, they couldn’t give orders to masters, but they had the control over the center of their being. They could rebel and they did it in variety of ways. They ran away, broke tools, goldbricked (intentionally slowed down the work) or, less often, they committed suicides, murders and armed revolt.
Other than that, to “keep going”, slaves had to create their own worlds to take their minds of off work, punishments and cruelties they were exposed to during the day. Once the master’s overseers weren’t present, they did what was natural and human to do – told stories, talked to each other, sang, made friends, nurtured their religion and interacted with their families or at least the people who became their families. Those were the things that couldn’t be taken away from them because they were at the core of their life and existence.
4. In the Document “Despotism in America”, Hildreth argues that slavery is responsible for the relative poverty of the South compared to the North. Assuming that he is right why then does slavery persist? Discuss the factors, other than economic ones, which drive the institution of slavery.
5. We have suggested that the nature of the experience of being a slave in the United States depends in very large measure on the character, personality and values of the master. Using the documents and essays we have read, either support this contention, or discuss the limitations and flaws of this contention.`
Masters varied from person to person, but they still worked constantly to show slaves how low they are and that they have to conform to any white man’s wish. ”The slave was flogged for disputing a white man’s word”. Even if plantation owners were sometimes good, they had a huge amount of power to exercise and that amount of power easily corrupted people.
The sole fact that those people even could hold slaves told something about their relationship with slaves. They had no respect for them, so they couldn’t treat them like human beings. Usually field workers “rose before dawn, prepared their meals, fed the livestock, and then rushed to the fields before sunrise.” Most of the slaves described their lives as Lewis Clark did in Life in Totalitarian System:”We were constantly exposed to the whims and passions of every member of the family: from the least to the greatest their anger was wreaked upon us”
“The slaves described masters […] as besotted, vicious, deceitful, coarse, licentious, bloodthirsty, heartless and hypocritical Christians.”
Some of the plantation owners seemed good like we see in Richard Corbin’s Plantation Management. He insisted that “none of them [slaves] suffer in time of sickness for want of proper care”. Still, it didn’t forbid any abuse when slaves were not sick or pregnant and those were only his orders to the overseers or black drivers. The overseers were described by slaves as “mean as devil” and in Life in a Totalitarian System we see that “the slaves complained instead of the driver’s sexual exploitation of black women, his alacrity in meting out punishment, and his favorism in giving rewards” which shows us the cruelty of the driver.
In order to achieve productiveness, planters preformed cruelty over their slaves. The usual way to motivate slaves was fear, not the expectation of an award. In Ads For Runaway Slaves we see that masters didn’t care how slaves were returned to them, and often they much rather wanted them dead then alive.
“The slaves often complained bitterly about what their masters described as adequate housing. Most of the autobiographers reported that they lived in crudely built one-room log cabins with dirt floors and too many cracks in them to permit much comfort during the winter months.” The same thing happened when it comes to clothing and food. Of course, there were exceptions: “few slaves were as fortunate as Sam Aleckson whose master’s slave cabins were not only neat and commodious, but also had flower gardens in front of them”. All these facts together show that it was possible for a slave to be fortunate enough to get a fair and honest master but the odds were very small. Therefore we can’t say that most of the slaves had a good chance of being treated well, because they were constantly told to be unfit for freedom, that they are things for white men to use and in addition to that they had to appear cheerful and content to the outside world. That is why most of the records inform us about the unspeakable cruelty that black people experienced and the suffering they went through on a daily basis, which limits the statement that slave’s fate depended largely on master’s character.