Where do I begin this review and commentary on the troubling book, Inheriting The [Slave] Trade, 2008. I have been shaken to the core of my being as I have read it twice and spent two weeks reflecting on the profound issues that have been raised. Especially when I combine Inheriting the Trade with The New Jim Crow and Dear White Christians.
If this review seems rambling, it is because I am in turmoil with my train of thoughts going in many directions all at the same time. I know that conclusions are supposed to go at the end of an article, but I am going to begin with my conclusions after having read The New Jim Crow four times, Dear White Christians twice and most recently Inheriting the Trade twice.
My conclusion: People (white male Americans) who see themselves as chosen, exceptional and godly are not likely to see any need to repent of social evil; just the opposite, they see themselves as model citizens, as model Christians. At the same time these fine folks "neglect justice and the love of God." They deceive themselves by thinking their charity for the poor meets the demands of justice. Such self-righteous people see no need to repent. In the Bible, such people were called Pharisees; in America such people are called white evangelicals with the liberals not far behind.
A question: Does "releasing the oppressed" first require repentance by the oppressor?
Is the American South more evil, worse oppressors, than the American North. Most self-righteous Northerners think so. But I believe that the historical record refutes that assertion.
Case in point: The North was THE center of the slave trade. I would argue that the horror, the evil, of the slave trade, the Middle passage, was worse than slavery itself. And the North not only made a huge profit from the slave trade, but later also from the whole cotton economy. Northern greed was just as bad as Southern greed.
From Martin Frazer: "Wall Street and much of this city's renowned financial district were built on the burial ground of African slaves. New York's prosperity stems in large part from the grotesque profits of the African slave trade and African enslavement. . . . Each year thousands of students in the nation's largest school system study the history of New York with hardly a mention of slavery."
During colonial times, New England Puritans regarded Rhode Island as a "moral sewer." See Cynthia Johnson's 2014 book James Dewolf and the Rhode Island Slave Trade. Most Northerners see the South as a moral sewer as well. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Did you know that the revered Puritan theologian, Jonathan Edwards, personally went down to Providence, Rhode Island to pick out a slave; he owned at least two slaves for the rest of his life. Only later in life did Edwards condemn the slave trade, but never slavery. Talk about theological social evil hairsplitting! Jonathan Edwards would have been better off spending his time figuring out precisely how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
Shades of A. W. Tozer! This revered preacher/theologian and his church board voted to move their church out to the spiritual suburbs because poor blacks had moved into his community and "irreparably damaged" the community. Sound like Tozer's theology was irreparably Damaged because it included nothing on oppression and justice, nothing on "releasing the oppressed."
And did you know that over a 40 year period, 40 out of 44 Lutheran church moved out of Detroit? This is from a Lutheran pastor who wrote Faces of Poverty. I imagine many of the ex-Detroit Lutherans were talking about the moral decay of black Detroit; why didn't they stay and prevent the decay or were they themselves decayed? Were these Lutherans reading Edwards and Tozer on the sly? Or maybe they should have been reading more Bible and less Luther. Theological depravity! Hypocrisy!
Now that I have the Reformed, Lutheran and Baptists (by the way, the Reformed church also built a church on top of a slave dungeon)mad at me, who else wants to join in. If you don't believe what I have written, google Jonathan Edwards owned slaves, Puritans and the slave trade, Boston as a center of the slave trade, and Wall Street and the slave trade.
First a bit of Northern history from Heirs of Oppression. The premier Northern slave trader was James DeWolf whose nefarious business was headquartered in Bristol, Rhode Island. Slave trading drove the whole Bristol economy and much of the wider colonial economy. Stockholders often earned "a 25 percent return on their investments."
The entire Bristol "community supported the slave trade, and serves as a microcosm of how the U.S. generally supported it. It was the insurance companies that insured slaves, many banks that supplied loans to slave trade businesses, the ironworkers who produced the shackles of slavery, the coopers who manufactured the rum barrels, and the distillers who made the molasses into rum which was the primary currency of purchasing slaves in Africa. . . . Boston, Salem, New London, New Haven, and many rural areas. . . . In today's currency values it would equal billions. . . . And during most of the time that the Dewolf's practiced in the slave trade, it was illegal in the United States. . . . one local businessman requested that the slave whipping post be removed from the front of his building because of the blood splatterings on the windows."
Now to the book Inheriting the Trade: A Northern Family Confronts Its Legacy As The Largest Slave-Trading Dynasty in U.S. History. Katrina Browne, a DeWolf descendant, made the documentary film "Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. Katrina said: "It's hard and scary to know that one is connected to evil people. There was so much family pride. . . . I prided myself on being self-aware and self-reflective in thinking about issues of race and society. And yet I had managed to completely repress the fact that I was descended from slave traders." Repress and rationalize is also the theme of Heirs of Oppression and Dear White Christians. Will white Christians ever repent and repair?
Christians are supposed to be experts at confession and repentance of their sins. White American Christians excel at social evil amnesia; they conveniently or deliberately ignore or cover up the sins of ethnocentrism and oppression---sins that Jesus put front and center (Luke 4:18-30). Two books excel at uncovering white supremacy---American white ethnocentrism/oppression. Dear [socially evil, unrepentant] White Christians (2014) and Inheriting the Trade (2008); both should be read at the same time; together they make an incredibly powerful double whammy. Dear White Christians is a precise ethical/historical analysis of whiteness---white supremacy. Inheriting the Trade exposes evil in American history through the DeWolf family---a family history of church involvement and legitimation of the slave trade.
Each reader will be called to repent and repair, to repent and engage in Jubilee justice, to repent and incarnate kingdom of God justice.
In addition to the slave trade and slavery the U.S. was involved in, many European nations including even the Swedes practiced the slave trade. Before the Western Christians became involved, Muslims were doing the slave trade. Combined Christians and Muslims represent 1000 years of slave trading destroying countless families and communities. The holocaust of holocausts!
Now some quotations from Inheriting the Trade:
"I learned that slavery wasn't limited to the South: black people were enslaved in the North for over two hundred years, the vast majority of all U.S. slave trading was done by northerners, and, astonishingly, half of all those voyages originated in Rhode Island."
A 2000 year letter from Katrina:
"For all the progress that has been made in race relations and racial equality, the disparity in social opportunity and life prospects is still huge and the lack of trust still profound between blacks and whites."
Bristol: "Two hundred years ago, these pews were filled by ancestors of these same people; they were churchgoing folks who were involved in the slave trade."
During Communion, "I was consumed by thoughts about the church and its people, not only their role in the slave trade hundreds of years ago but their involvement or noninvolvement in injustice that exists today."
"Race matters in this country. How do I benefit from having white skin or from having this family ancestor?"
"Though Mark Antony DeWolf first sailed to Africa in 1769, it wasn't until after the Revolutionary War [after freedom!] that Bristolians, and the DeWolf family in particular, attained great wealth and influence through shipping, privateering, and the trading of rum for African people."
Through the generous use of bleach the evil slaving trading family was historically sanitized into "The Great Folks."
James Dewolf gave two black slave children to his wife as Christmas gifts in 1803.
What motivated the Dewolf slave trade? "Dear brother: Money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money. . . . "
Bristol has the longest running Fourth of July parade; they go all-out to celebrate; there is, of course, no hint of the slave trading past.
A quotation from Frederick Douglas, July 4, 1852:
"Your high independence only reveals the immeasurable distance between us. The blessings in which you, this day, rejoice, are not enjoyed in common. The rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you, not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth of July is yours, not mine."
President James Madison on Rhode Island:
"Nothing can exceed the wickedness and folly which continues to rule there. All sense of character as well of right [justice] have been obliterated." Correct, but this self-righteous statement was made by a person who owned 100 slaves when he died. From 1725 to 1807, Rhode Island was the center of the slave trade; the years of James DeWolf---1764-1837.
Are American Christians exceptionally skilled at rationalizing/excusing social evil---oppression? In Inheriting the Trade, there is a discussion between the author Tom, a lapsed Christian with a social conscience and a cousin who is a retired Episcopalian priest. They have spent a week in Ghana tracing the slave trade past; this included discovering an Episcopal church that was built on top of a slave dungeon. Tom writes: "listening to historians and scholar, we've heard "'You've got to place it in the context of the times. . . .' And I sit in that dungeon and I say bullshit. It was an evil thing and they knew it was an evil thing and they did it anyway." Tom and Katrina were the only ones of the group of ten that seemed to really get it. Maybe it was because Tom was writing a book on it and had to process and reprocess the slave trade over and over again as did Katrina who made the documentary film.
Every American needs to take a course on white supremacy. Here is a suggested course description: "Our revered founding fathers excelled in deistic, demonic double-talk. They talked freedom; they practiced slavery. The results of the Revolution: an ethnocentric, oppressive founding father elite replaced a British ethnocentric, oppressive elite; women, the poor, Native Americans and Afro Americans suffered then and now.
Would any red-blooded, patriotic American sign up for such a course?
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