White Privilege And Slavery

White Privilege and Slavery

Slavery is the state of one bound in servitude as the property of a slave holder or household. As there are many different definitions the most popular one is forced labor for little or no pay under threat and violence. (Britannica Encyclopedia) Slavery has existed on every continent. In the beginning of the sixteenth century eleven million people were taken from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade, by the nineteenth century the population has risen to more that four million in the United States. Men, Women and Children were captured and sold. Africans who were sent to the south worked on cotton or rice populations. The first recorded slaves in the United States, in 1619 twenty Africans were brought by a Dutch soldier and sold to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia as indentured servants. Many slaves were owned by plantation owners who lived in Britain. During the American Civil War slavery was abolished in the confederacy by the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. It declared that all slaves in the Southern secessionist states free. (Britannica Encyclopedia) Slaves in many parts of the south were freed by Union armies or when they simply left their former owners. Many joined the Union Army as workers or troops, and many more fled to Northern cities. Legally, slaves within the United States remained enslaved until the final ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution on December 6, 1865 Slave women and women and children were forced into prostitution or working hard labor in sweatshops. Slave culture developed in stages. During the eighteenth century the slave population stabilized and the majority of slaves became native born. Slavery was a result of debt and existed in early times and African people had the custom of putting up wives and children as hostages for an obligation and the hostages became permanent slaves. Supporters of reparations argue that African Americans continue to suffer from the trace of slavery and the discrimination that followed the emancipation. The end of the Civil War did not result in the integration of former slaves in American life. Although slavery has been illegal in the United States for nearly a century and a half, the United States Department of Labor occasionally prosecutes cases