Book Review: Inheriting the [Slave] Trade

The following is my book review of the 2008 book titled Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy as the Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. There is a companion documentary film Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. I have drawn three fundamental conclusions from my reading of Inheriting the Trade.

1. Widespread American historical amnesia is a dangerous convenience, past and present, because our historical past, unconfronted, haunts our sociological present. The Dewolf family clan slave-trading dynasty was closely tied to the Episcopal Church; they were an "evil people," but the DeWolf's are remembered today in Bristol, Rhode Island as "The Great Folks".

2. The American church, past and present, has failed to oppose oppression and do justice. So systems of oppression such as slavery are not really ended, only redesigned.

3. American Christian colleges and seminaries have failed to address widespread social evils such as ethnocentrism and oppression, past and present; there is no biblical theology of oppression.

When ten DeWolf descendants visited Ghana, they found an Episcopal Church built on top of a slave dungeon. In 1790, half of the ministers in Connecticut owned slaves; Puritan theologian/preacher Jonathan Edwards owned a slave. The North, not the South, was the center of slave trading. Both the North and the South were and still are deeply racist. Religious piety sanctified evil. Were the DeWolfs American Pharisees posing as Christians?

The Dewolf clan committed sins of commission (ethnocentrism and oppression, Luke 4:18-30) and sins of omission (neglect of justice and the love of God, Luke 11).

What drives the oppression of blacks in the U.S.? A perverse and exceedingly complex mixture of economic greed, Anglo cultural superiority, corrupted religion, and erroneous concepts of race. Which factor is most important? No one really knows, not even the best scholars. If I had to choose, I would vote for economic greed; the DeWolf's testified that it was "Money, money, money, money, money, money" that drove their nefarious business. But their arrogant cultural superiority also played an important part. Religious piety seemed to sanctify the oppression. Skin color soon became a quick and convenient way to identify the inferior, second class citizens. And probably male dominance played an important part. And a highly self-righteous refusal to repent of social evil so whites blindly or deliberately repeated the same sins generation after generation.

I do not know of a single white American theologian who has addressed adequately this complex set of social evils.

We must give abolitionists and civil rights activists honor and respect for all they accomplished. But even Martin Luther King said in a December, 1967 speech (after the civil right and voting rights bills had been passed, after Medicare and Medicaid) that he saw his dream turn into a nightmare because so many blacks were living on an island of poverty in vast ocean of prosperity; they still lacked economic justice.

In 2015, a large racial wealth gap exists as well the unjust mass incarceration of young black and Latino males.

Watch for more commentary on Inheriting the Trade in a future blog.