Additional thoughts on Dr. Gates' Op-Ed

His explanation runs unfortunately close to one of boys will be boys. "You know how those Europeans are. That's just what they do."

Assigning equal responsibility would require the people in Africa who sold other people to place conditions on their sale, i.e. "You must treat them lower than animals," "Please whip and rape them," "Do not allow them to practice their cultural traditions," "Do your best to keep them as uneducated as possible, and make sure that they die young." No, Europeans created that system all on their own. Ridiculous.

Were there not a single native slave trader in Africa, Europeans would have gotten their slaves anyway. It likely would have taken longer and perhaps the numbers would have been lower, but European kingdoms and nations and militaries, especially around that time, were not ones to take no for an answer. They simply found an easier way to do it - they got other people to do much of the dirty work. Taking all those people by force would have been such a messy venture and cost many European lives. They would have been facing the military resistance of whole societies. When they employed some African people to do it for them, they saved themselves a whole lot of work. Those are some cunning people, aren't they? And they promised riches, technology and power in return. Who could resist?

There was no equal footing here. The mere fact that Dr. Gates mentions European "military outposts" on African soil should tell us something about what was going on.

Also, the European slave trade in the Atlantic world was a streamlined, well-devised, state-run scheme. The profits from it were obscene. Those profits built up Europe and the settler societies in the Americas (both North and South) and Caribbean. Of course, slaves also literally built the settler societies in these places. And this slave trade and its effects, including the physical colonialism that eventually came to Africa from Europe fucked the African continent into right now. So many people stolen (well over ten million, perhaps upwards of thirty million, whether by Europeans or Africans) from their societies, systematically, over hundreds of years, will have an indefinite effect.

"Complicit alike," he says. How?

Irresponsible assigning of responsibility

Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the esteemed and much accomplished literary analyst and pseudo-historian (see his several televisions specials centered on Oprah Winfrey), published a fucked-up Op-Ed piece in the New York Times today. He ostensibly wrote to discuss reparations related to slavery, but all he really did was provide a slightly more sophisticated recapitulation of the argument to which white people love to cling, "I never owned any slaves, and besides, they sold their own people into slavery." Fuck.

Reparations aside, this is just a bunch of bullshit. Whose work is he doing? I guess you gotta be of a particular mindset for Harvard to have you.

It's really hard to get into in a blog, but I really can't stress enough just how off-base he is with all of this. Did Africans sell other Africans into slavery? Yes.

Consider this - "African" is not an ethnicity. It is an identifier of the continent from which you come. It's like telling the Chinese and Indian governments that they should get along better, as they are the same people. No, no one would ever say that. But they both are countries in Asia. Also, Africa is not a country.

There are (were) so, so many ethnicities in the African continent. Gates mentions that "the victims of the slave trade were predominantly members of as few as 50 ethnic groups." If fifty is a few, then there were obviously a lot more. And, keep in mind, that African slaves in the Atlantic world tended to come from West Africa, leaving so many more ethnicities unaccounted for. So if there are presumably hundreds of ethnicities on the continent, there is no selling of "their" or "your" people into slavery. They were selling other people into slavery, people to whom they had no more connection than Germans do with the French. Did people say that Europeans were slaughtering each other during WWI and WWII? No, of course they distinguished between them. It was not viewed as a civil war, nor is it today.

Was selling people into slavery fucked? Yup. The people who did it were garbage.

At the same time, as much as Gates tries to stealthily scuttle these arguments, it is a fact that the people running this trade in Africa were not aware of what slavery in the New World looked like, as there was nothing resembling it in Africa. "Slaves" in Africa had rights, were allowed families, did not have their status permanently, hopelessly inscribed upon them and often times would be integrated into the family/clan that had enslaved them. They also tended to be part of the spoils of war, not a commodity purchased at an auction house. Finally, slaves in African societies did not form the basis for the social and economic structures of those societies, like they did here.

Gates talking about "elite Africans" visiting Europe is a complete distraction from the discussion at hand. Firstly, the slavery we are discussing did not take place in Europe. African slaves, primarily, went to Brazil, the Caribbean, and America. Any talk about reparations, the supposed base for his article, doesn't have a fucking thing to do with slavery in Europe. It's about here, in the United States. It's about African slaves building the country, for free. It's about providing an otherwise impossible agricultural foundation for the country that allowed it to grow and prosper in bounds. It's about all that plantation labor down south and sending all those raw materials up north to be processed in those factories and sent all over the place for immense profits. The slave trade was European, but slavery, primarily, was not. And the slavery that did exist in Europe was decidedly not on the scale, ever, that it was in America. It was not the same thing. There are no rice plantations in England. Portugal does not have a long history as a cotton producing wonder.

And even if his claim is true, that Africans had witnessed slavery first-hand, so what? So what if a few Africans saw slavery first-hand. We are talking about hundreds of years and a whole lot of people being in charge of selling to Europeans. A few Africans seeing it is a piss in the ocean. What were they going to do, put it on Facebook?

There are a bunch of other things, like how Europeans played off different ethnicities against one another and provided some with guns, which allowed them to easily overpower and dominate nearby peoples of different ethnicities. As a result, the people under attack then had to acquire guns, which were only realistically available through Europeans, who were only really interested in slaves, not whatever things those particular people may have valued. As you can see, this would create a quickly worsening state of affairs that is a combination arms race/ransom/extortion situation. Europeans are good at that, provoking wars. And then they made sure that there were people in power in these societies who were very amenable to selling them people.

Finally, this discussion on culpability is fucking absurd for one reason - it rests on the premise that Europeans had no choice but to buy people and force them to work for free. Think about that.

If the Europeans who showed up looking to take slaves away weren't so fucking greedy and heartless, then those people in Africa who wished to sell other people into slavery wouldn't have been able to sell off a single person across the ocean in that middle passage hell. As though they created a market. As if, for countless centuries, there was just this teeming slave market on the western shores of the African continent waiting for buyers, until one day, the magnanimous Europeans came and saved their failed economic dream. Like they flew planes over Europe towing banners that said "AFRICAN SLAVES 2NITE - ALL U CAN BUY." No, Europeans came to them. And came, and came, and came, and came. For fuck's sake, this position almost pities the Europeans, like they were naive heroin addicts or something, victims of the African pusher.

Yes, some African people had responsibility for selling other African people into slavery. That's obvious. To act like their blame is equitable to that of European traders and buyers is truly insane and is nothing but a lie.

"Whale that killed its trainer won't be isolated"

Good thing to see that common sense never steps in to get of the way of profit and "fun":

Trainers will continue working with a killer whale that grabbed one of their colleagues and dragged her underwater, killing her, but SeaWorld said Thursday it is reviewing its procedures.

Sea World. What a fucked place. Who can justify something like this? Good fucking god. However pretty they dress it up, it's a place of misery and confinement. I don't care how big the pool is. They exploit these animals (who are probably smarter than we are) in whatever ways they see fit. They "own" them.

Honestly, I don't feel bad for these people at all, any of them. Anyone who takes on such a job, "training" a large animal, especially a carnivore, whether it be a tiger, bear or killer whale, is a fool. You are also an asshole, but that is completely besides the point; it really is. The only surprise is that these people don't die more often. There is no tragedy here. We're not talking about someone getting hit by a car or trapped in a fire caused by a faulty appliance. Or, to put it in a most relevant context, hitting a wall at ninety miles an hour in their Toyota.

Nope. This is someone (or a host of "scientists", a corporation, or an industry) thinking she/they/it can subdue a wild animal and force it to interact with other people as a person. Ridiculous.

"We like to think we know 99.9 percent of the time what an animal is doing," he [Chuck Tompkins, who is in charge of training at all SeaWorld parks] told The Associated Press on Thursday. "But this is one of those times we just don't know."

YOU FUCKING MORON. You have NO IDEA.

Raising animals for human consumption is the largest generator of greenhouse gases

Not so green. In case you missed hearing about this when it came out, here is a report from the United Nations detailing just how destructive, above any other cause, raising animals so that humans may consume them is. Oh, and they forgot a remedy - cease/severely curtail your consumption of animals.

Livestock a major threat to environment

Remedies urgently needed

29 November 2006, Rome - Which causes more greenhouse gas emissions, rearing cattle or driving cars?

Surprise!

According to a new report published by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, the livestock sector generates more greenhouse gas emissions as measured in CO2 equivalent – 18 percent – than transport. It is also a major source of land and water degradation.

Says Henning Steinfeld, Chief of FAO’s Livestock Information and Policy Branch and senior author of the report: “Livestock are one of the most significant contributors to today’s most serious environmental problems. Urgent action is required to remedy the situation.”

With increased prosperity, people are consuming more meat and dairy products every year. Global meat production is projected to more than double from 229 million tonnes in 1999/2001 to 465 million tonnes in 2050, while milk output is set to climb from 580 to 1043 million tonnes.

Long shadow

The global livestock sector is growing faster than any other agricultural sub-sector. It provides livelihoods to about 1.3 billion people and contributes about 40 percent to global agricultural output. For many poor farmers in developing countries livestock are also a source of renewable energy for draft and an essential source of organic fertilizer for their crops.

But such rapid growth exacts a steep environmental price, according to the FAO report, Livestock’s Long Shadow –Environmental Issues and Options. “The environmental costs per unit of livestock production must be cut by one half, just to avoid the level of damage worsening beyond its present level,” it warns.

When emissions from land use and land use change are included, the livestock sector accounts for 9 percent of CO2 deriving from human-related activities, but produces a much larger share of even more harmful greenhouse gases. It generates 65 percent of human-related nitrous oxide, which has 296 times the Global Warming Potential (GWP) of CO2. Most of this comes from manure.

And it accounts for respectively 37 percent of all human-induced methane (23 times as warming as CO2), which is largely produced by the digestive system of ruminants, and 64 percent of ammonia, which contributes significantly to acid rain.

Livestock now use 30 percent of the earth’s entire land surface, mostly permanent pasture but also including 33 percent of the global arable land used to producing feed for livestock, the report notes. As forests are cleared to create new pastures, it is a major driver of deforestation, especially in Latin America where, for example, some 70 percent of former forests in the Amazon have been turned over to grazing.

Land and water

At the same time herds cause wide-scale land degradation, with about 20 percent of pastures considered as degraded through overgrazing, compaction and erosion. This figure is even higher in the drylands where inappropriate policies and inadequate livestock management contribute to advancing desertification.

The livestock business is among the most damaging sectors to the earth’s increasingly scarce water resources, contributing among other things to water pollution, euthropication and the degeneration of coral reefs. The major polluting agents are animal wastes, antibiotics and hormones, chemicals from tanneries, fertilizers and the pesticides used to spray feed crops. Widespread overgrazing disturbs water cycles, reducing replenishment of above and below ground water resources. Significant amounts of water are withdrawn for the production of feed.

Livestock are estimated to be the main inland source of phosphorous and nitrogen contamination of the South China Sea, contributing to biodiversity loss in marine ecosystems.

Meat and dairy animals now account for about 20 percent of all terrestrial animal biomass. Livestock’s presence in vast tracts of land and its demand for feed crops also contribute to biodiversity loss; 15 out of 24 important ecosystem services are assessed as in decline, with livestock identified as a culprit.

Remedies

The report, which was produced with the support of the multi-institutional Livestock, Environment and Development (LEAD) Initiative, proposes explicitly to consider these environmental costs and suggests a number of ways of remedying the situation, including:

Land degradation – controlling access and removing obstacles to mobility on common pastures. Use of soil conservation methods and silvopastoralism, together with controlled livestock exclusion from sensitive areas; payment schemes for environmental services in livestock-based land use to help reduce and reverse land degradation.

Atmosphere and climate – increasing the efficiency of livestock production and feed crop agriculture. Improving animals’ diets to reduce enteric fermentation and consequent methane emissions, and setting up biogas plant initiatives to recycle manure.

Water – improving the efficiency of irrigation systems. Introducing full-cost pricing for water together with taxes to discourage large-scale livestock concentration close to cities.

These and related questions are the focus of discussions between FAO and its partners meeting to chart the way forward for livestock production at global consultations in Bangkok this week. These discussions also include the substantial public health risks related to the rapid livestock sector growth as, increasingly, animal diseases also affect humans; rapid livestock sector growth can also lead to the exclusion of smallholders from growing markets.