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Most Americans say the legacy of slavery still affects black people in the U.S. today

A U.S. House of Representatives committee plans to hold a hearing this week on the topic of reparations for slavery, the first hearing on the topic in more than a decade. The legacy of slavery still resonates for many Americans, according to a Pew Research Center survey conducted earlier this year, with 63% believing it affects the position of black people in American society today either a great deal or a fair amount.

Black adults are particularly likely to say slavery continues to have an impact: More than eight-in-ten say this is the case, including 59% who say the legacy of slavery affects the situation of black people a great deal. By comparison, 26% of whites, 29% of Hispanics and 33% of Asians say slavery affects the position of black people in American society today a great deal, though majorities of each group say it does so at least a fair amount.

The survey also found that more than four-in-ten U.S. adults (45%) think the country hasn’t gone far enough in giving black people equal rights with whites, while 15% say it’s gone too far and 39% say it’s been about right. About eight-in-ten black adults (78%) say the country hasn’t made enough progress in this area, compared with 37% of whites and 48% of Hispanics. (Because this question was asked of a random half of the sample, the views of Asians can’t be analyzed separately; for more information, see “ A note about the Asian sample .”)

In addition to their bleak views about the country’s racial progress, black adults are also skeptical about the prospects for racial equality in the future. Among black Americans who say the country hasn’t gone far enough in giving black people equal rights with whites, 64% say it’s not too or not at all likely that the country will ever achieve racial equality. Whites who say the country still has work to do in this area are more optimistic: 80% say it’s very or somewhat likely that black people in our country will eventually have equal rights. Hispanics’ views are more mixed.

Democrats and those who lean to the Democratic Party (80%) are far more likely than Republicans and GOP leaners (43%) to say the legacy of slavery still affects the situation of black people in American society today. And while most Democrats (66%) say the country hasn’t gone far enough in giving black people equal rights with whites, just 18% of Republicans agree. About three-in-ten Republicans (28%) say the country has gone too far on this issue, while 53% say it’s been about right. These differences are virtually unchanged when looking only at white Democrats and Republicans.

For more on Americans’ views about the state of race relations and racial inequality in the U.S., see “ Race in America 2019 .”

• Black Americans
• Discrimination & Prejudice
• Economic Inequality
• Race & Ethnicity
• Racial Bias & Discrimination

Juliana Menasce Horowitz is a senior associate director of research at Pew Research Center .

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ABOUT PEW RESEARCH CENTER  Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of  The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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What Is a Legacy of Slavery?

An essay by david blight.

Because slavery is so central to the history of the United States—its origins, economic development, society, culture, politics, and law—it has left in its wake a wide array of legacies that seem ever-present yet ever-changing in our world. Sometimes the question of slavery’s legacy seems out-of-focus, inaccessible, or expressed in fuzzy language. Other times the legacy of slavery and emancipation may confront us when we least expect it. In 1961, in an essay in the  New York Times  titled “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” James Baldwin observed that when Americans reflect on their history, the “words are mostly used to cover the sleeper, not to wake him up.” Indeed, the living meanings, surviving challenges, and sometimes seemingly intractable problems born of great events or vast human practices and systems from the past are what make history matter. This is why legacies matter. And that is why the Council of Independent Colleges and the Gilder Lehrman Center have launched the Legacies of American Slavery project….

What then is a legacy? A historical legacy can be an idea or an eternally recurring question at the root of a dream—for example, “Why is human equality so hard to achieve?” A legacy can be emotional, manifesting itself in habits of thought, assumptions, behaviors, and lasting psychological patterns of struggle, action, or expectation. A legacy can be political, emerging in voting tendencies and recurring public policy issues. A legacy can be economic, evolving in patterns of growth and access or lack of access to material goods, services, human capital. A legacy can exist in law, in court decisions, in government policies that change when challenged or revert to older practices in times of reaction. Legacies can be laid down and commemorated in stone, in bronze, in musical traditions, in all manner of artistic forms. Legacies can be embodied in a very literal sense, as patterns of health and disease that can be traced to past experience through medical research. A legacy might be as local as a family story passed from generation to generation, or as big as a national origin narrative. Legacies can be institutional, growing as part of organizations that exist to educate, advocate, preserve, protest, or advance a set of ideas….

How slavery became America’s first big business

Historian and author Edward E. Baptist explains how slavery helped the US go from a “colonial economy to the second biggest industrial power in the world.”

by P.R. Lockhart

Of the many myths told about American slavery, one of the biggest is that it was an archaic practice that only enriched a small number of men.

The argument has often been used to diminish the scale of slavery, reducing it to a crime committed by a few Southern planters, one that did not touch the rest of the United States. Slavery, the argument goes, was an inefficient system, and the labor of the enslaved was considered less productive than that of a free worker being paid a wage. The use of enslaved labor has been presented as premodern, a practice that had no ties to the capitalism that allowed America to become — and remain — a leading global economy.

But as with so many stories about slavery, this is untrue . Slavery, particularly the cotton slavery that existed from the end of the 18th century to the beginning of the Civil War, was a thoroughly modern business, one that was continuously changing to maximize profits.

To grow the cotton that would clothe the world and fuel global industrialization, thousands of young enslaved men and women — the children of stolen ancestors legally treated as property — were transported from Maryland and Virginia hundreds of miles south, and forcibly retrained to become America’s most efficient laborers . As they were pushed into the expanding territories of Mississippi and Louisiana , sold and bid on at auctions, and resettled onto forced labor camps, they were given a task: to plant and pick thousands of pounds of cotton.

The bodies of the enslaved served as America’s largest financial asset , and they were forced to maintain America’s most exported commodity . In 60 years, from 1801 to 1862, the amount of cotton picked daily by an enslaved person increased 400 percent . The profits from cotton propelled the US into a position as one of the leading economies in the world, and made the South its most prosperous region. The ownership of enslaved people increased wealth for Southern planters so much that by the dawn of the Civil War, the Mississippi River Valley had more millionaires per capita than any other region.

In recent years, a growing field of scholarship has outlined how America — through the country’s geographic growth after the American Revolution and enslavers’ desire for increased cotton production — created a complex system aimed at monetizing and maximizing the labor of the enslaved. In the cotton fields of the Deep South, this system rested on the continuous threat of violence and a meticulous use of record-keeping. The labor of each person was tracked daily, and those who did not meet their assigned picking goals were beaten. The best workers were beaten as well, the whip and other assaults coercing them into doing even more work in even less time.

As overseers and plantation owners managed a forced-labor system aimed at maximizing efficiency, they interacted with a network of bankers and accountants, and took out lines of credit and mortgages, all to manage America’s empire of cotton. An entire industry, America’s first big business, revolved around slavery .

“The slavery economy of the US South is deeply tied financially to the North, to Britain, to the point that we can say that people who were buying financial products in these other places were in effect owning slaves, and were extracting money from the labor of enslaved people,” says Edward E. Baptist, a historian at Cornell University and the author of The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism .

Baptist’s book came out in 2014, the same year that essays like the Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “ The Case for Reparations ” and protests like the Ferguson Uprising would call attention to injustices in wealth and policing that continue to affect black communities — injustices that Baptist and other academics see as being closely connected to the deprivations of slavery. As America observes 400 years since the 1619 arrival of enslaved Africans to the colony of Virginia, these deprivations are seeing increased attention — and so are the ways America’s economic empire, built on the backs of the enslaved, connects to the present.

I recently spoke with Baptist about how cotton slavery transformed the American economy, how torture, violence, and family separations were used to maximize profits, and how understanding the economic power of slavery impacts current discussions of reparations . A transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

P.R. Lockhart

When you talk about the sort of myth-making that has been used to create specific narratives about slavery, one of the things you focus on most is the relationship between slavery and the American economy. What are some of the myths that get told when it comes to understanding how slavery is tied to American capitalism?

Edward E. Baptist

One of the myths is that slavery was not fuel for the growth of the American economy, that it actually the brakes put on US growth. There’s a story that claims slavery was less efficient, that wage labor and industrial production wasn’t significant for the massive transformation of the US economy that you see between the time of Independence and the time of the Civil War.

And yet that period is when you see the US go from being a colonial, primarily agricultural economy to being the second biggest industrial power in the world — and well on its way to becoming the largest industrial power in the world.

Another myth is that slavery, in and of itself as an economic system, was unchanging. We fetishize machine and machine production and see it as quintessentially modern — the kinds of improvements in production and efficiency that you see from hooking up a cotton spindle to a set of pulleys, which are in turn pulled by a water wheel or steam engine. That’s seen as more efficient than the old way of someone sitting there and doing it by hand.

But you can also get changes in efficiency if you change the pattern of production and you change the incentives of the labor and the labor process itself. And we still make these sorts of changes today in businesses — the kind of transformations that speed up work to a point where we say that it is modern and dynamic. And we see these types of changes in slavery as well, particularly during cotton slavery in the 19th-century US.

The difference, of course, is that this is not the work of wage workers or professional workers. It is the work of enslaved people. And the incentive is not “do this or you’ll get fired” or “you won’t get a raise.” The incentive is that if you don’t do this you’ll get whipped — or worse.

The third myth about this is that there was not a tight relationship between slavery in the South and what was happening in the North and other parts of the modern Western world in the 19th century. It was a very close relationship : Cotton was the No. 1 export from the US, which was largely an export-driven economy as it was modernizing and shifting into industrialization. And the slavery economy of the US South was deeply tied financially to the North, to Britain, to the point that we can say that people who were buying financial products in these other places were in effect owning slaves and were certainly extracting money from the labor of enslaved people.

So those are the three myths: that slavery did not cause in any significant way the development and transformation of the US economy, that slavery was not a modern or dynamic labor system, and that what was happening in the South was a separate thing from the rest of the US.

As you detail in your work, the focus on cotton production changes what slavery in the US looks like post-1800. But before we talk about those changes, can you discuss what slavery looks like before the true advent of cotton?

This is tied to the [aforementioned] myths, but something to remember is that slavery is everywhere in 1776. At the time of the Declaration of Independence, slavery is legal in every one of the newly created 13 states. And for the most part, slavery is associated with the sectors of the economy most closely connected to the Atlantic world: systems of exchanges and markets that linked the new US to Europe, to Africa, to the Caribbean, and to Latin America.

Whether we’re talking about enslaved people working in Virginia tobacco fields , where they produce significant amount of revenue for the British crown, or people in the rice fields in South Carolina and Georgia, or the enslaved people working as dock workers or servants in northern colonies like Boston, slavery is everywhere. But, over the next 20 years, as the US becomes independent and relationships in the Atlantic — transformed by revolutions in Haiti, the revolution in France, and imperial wars associated with those things — several shifts happen.

And largely due to the resistance of enslaved people and some changes in ideologies, you see the beginnings of the gradual end of slavery in the North.

So slavery, on one hand, shifts to become a Southern institution. At the same time, there’s no longer as strong of a market demand for the products made in the South. The food products made for Caribbean sugar colonies, where the enslaved aren’t really given time to make their own basic rations [create one market for goods from the South], but the end of slavery in Saint-Domingue , which becomes Haiti, cuts off that demand from one of those main markets. In rice, there are hits to the market as well. And so much tobacco gets made that it overwhelms the market and the price drops. These are threats to the market strength of products made by enslaved people in the US South.

But right at this same moment, Britain begins its process of industrialization and its focus on cotton textiles. And pretty quickly the price for cotton rises dramatically. Enslavers in the Southern US realize that they can plant particular kinds of cotton inland almost right at the same time that the US is ensuring its power of what will become Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama. There’s a vast new territory that is opening up when enslavers in South Carolina and Georgia are finding out that there is a new product that they can force people to grow and find a new market with.

And now that Southern enslavers have a new crop that they can force people to grow, how does cotton change what slavery looks like in the American South?

The first thing we need to do here is pivot from just talking about cotton as a matter of productive labor and think about reproductive labor as well. And reproductive labor is not just women bearing children, but all of the work that goes into raising a child into an adult. This is work largely done by women, but also by family networks, and communities in general.

In the US South, by the late 18th century — and in the case of Virginia and Maryland by the 1730s — what we see is that enslaved families and communities were raising children faster than adults died. So this means that the US, as it becomes independent, no longer relies on the African slave trade, which by the late 18th century is coming under more and more criticism.

Enslavers increasingly shift already enslaved people in the South and West into what would become the new cotton territories of the South. It’s a vast system for producing cotton that is ultimately fueled by the theft of children from their families and communities who created them. And those who defended the Southern slavery regime would say, “Look, these are legal processes — people are bought, they’re sold, that’s the nature of slavery.” But alongside the theft of physical labor, this marks a theft of reproductive labor from enslaved people, and it serves as the crucial engine of the expansion of US slavery.

It is a set of internal slave trades, created by enslavers, financed not just by buyers and sellers in the South but by flows of credit into the region, starting with the land speculation of the late 1790s. And to give a sense of the scale, in the 1780s, as the US becomes independent, there’s something like 800,000 enslaved Africans in the newly formed country.

Through the process of internal natural growth of the enslaved population — the reproductive labor if you will, and the additional importation of roughly 150,000 Africans decades before the international slave trade ended in 1807 — that 800,000 increases to 4 million people by 1860. Almost no enslaved African Americans lived in the Mississippi territory when it became a US territory in around 1800. But by 1860, the cotton regions have around 2 million enslaved people living in them.

The most important development in this shift, the making of this massive cotton-producing engine, is the internal slave trade . Estimates vary, but at least half a million people were directly moved, and they’re mostly young adults reaching the peak of their productive labor capacity who are still young enough to be retrained by force.

And they are retrained by force. In most cases, they seem to have gone through a very disorienting time in which they are forced to pick cotton and also do all the other operations of a slave labor camp. But picking cotton is especially important because it is the bottleneck of production. They are forced to do this kind of labor and learn this kind of labor and this all happens under the threat of violence and punishment if they don’t learn how to do it fast enough.

Staying with that last point about the threat of violent punishment, you write about how, as the desire to increase cotton profits grows, enslavers focus on how to wring more and more profit from the labor of the enslaved.

And that increased productivity, you note, is largely a response to the threat and actual use of torture and violence. Can you talk about the ways that violence gets used as a means of forcing increasingly productive labor?

The first form of violence is the violence of the domestic slave trade itself, where people are chained, and forced to march hundreds of miles or are shipped around the cape of Florida. But after that, the violence is really in two forms. One is really a sort of policing violence, something we’re sadly all too familiar with today, that focuses on constraining African American movement — you know, making sure that people don’t leave the labor camp to which they have been sold. And with that, you see patrols and a readiness from whites to question any African Americans they don’t recognize.

And once enslaved people are pretty much fixed in one place and are forced to go out into the cotton fields daily for work, what you see is during the day itself there is an increased level of supervision by whites.

In the South Carolina islands, and in a different way in the Chesapeake, enslaved Africans and African Americans often worked outside immediate white supervision, and often outside direct measurement of their labor output.

So while in South Carolina, there’s a daily task, in contrast to that, the people enslaved on the cotton fields of Mississippi and Alabama and Louisiana are forced to work all day; their work is measured and their labor output is increased over time. So we see that people are forced to work from dawn to dusk, often with direct white supervision, and those who stop working are yelled at to continue to work. At the end of the day, that output is weighed and recorded.

There’s a sort of quintessentially modern idea that “if we enumerate how much people work, we can evaluate that labor better, and then we can demand more labor from them,” and that’s what happens [during cotton slavery]. Quotas for daily cotton picking and minimums that you have to make, or else you will be whipped, clearly increase over time.

There’s a debate about whether or not if they increase because cotton seeds are better, or if because more labor is demanded and people are whipped for not producing enough, or see their quotas increase because they did produce enough. There’s a debate about what is the causal factor in this increase, and I am okay with saying it’s both. But you have a qualitatively different kind of labor which produces a quantifiable result — an increase of 400 percent in the average amount of cotton picked per day from 1800 to 1860.

I want to shift this conversation a bit, and move away from what’s in your book to the book itself — how it was received after it came out, and what it says about how America actually views and understands these kinds of histories.

One of the things you often highlight is the importance of centering the voices of enslaved men and women in the story of American slavery. And you’ve been criticized for doing that. At a time where the country is having more and more discussions about slavery and its impact on the present, why do you see centering the voices and lived experiences of the enslaved men and women as an important aspect of discussing this history?

I’ll focus on two reasons. First, those voices are truly the wellspring of a tradition of interpretation. They’ve always been the other half — the true half — of this history [when we talk about “half that has never been told,” mentioned in the title of Baptist’s book].

They’re a set of crucial voices that in the US go from survivors of slavery to people like W.E.B. Du Bois and Cedric Robinson, and moving to the present in the works of economists like Sandy Darity and Darrick Hamilton . But they’re a set of voices who are refusing to accept a story that says that what the survivors of slavery endured in the cotton fields has nothing to do with the wealth of the US today or the disproportion of the wealth between white people in the US on average and the wealth of black people in the US on average.

So on one hand, this is a tradition of people who make a very obvious point which seems clearly true to me. But on the other hand, this is a tradition that has been all too often ignored or downplayed or critiqued. It’s crucial to center the voices of the people talking about their own situation not only because they understood it best and understood the facts of it, they also understood the philosophy of it.

Frederick Douglass gets told after he escapes from slavery that he needs to be charismatic, not intellectual. A white abolitionist tells him “give us the facts, we’ll take care of the philosophy.” And he tells them no.

But I think centering those kinds of voices is crucial, and the interpretations that come from those voices, as a historian, that is the job. It’s also an important thing when we get to my second point: that a huge component of white American identity is a quest for historical innocence and historical exceptionalism. And this depends on having white voices telling the story.

As a white historian, the best thing I can do to disturb that is to bring nonwhite voices to the forefront in how I tell the story. Not just because these voices are correct, but because telling the story in this way helps — to a small extent — to do the work of helping a white reader be able to confront the history of their own identity formation, the history of their own wealth. I won’t say that one book or one historian is going to take care of it, but that’s the work that I can try to do.

You’re now five years removed from the publication of The Half Has Never Been Told. Going off of your point about doing the work to push their voices to the forefront, in 2019, a year where we’re commemorating 400 years since the arrival of roughly 20 enslaved men and women to what would become the United States (though not all scholars agree on this exact anniversary), do you think the country is more receptive to hearing these voices?

That’s a tough question in 2019. I wrote the book over a long period of time, and when I started, people were writing different things and in some cases asking different questions about slavery. But there were a number of folks who had started to ask the questions that mine were inspired by, and were pushing the conversation toward — the works of Du Bois, Angela Davis, and the Caribbean tradition of study. I don’t know where the conversation is going to go next.

But what I am happy to see is that because of the work of activists involved in the Movement for Black Lives, and activists in the different reparations movements, some of the questions and critiques that a few of us historians tried to amplify are being amplified far more broadly and effectively by these forces in society. The question of reparations , for instance, comes up every 15 years or so as something that the media engages with, and there’s predictably a backlash as you see a massive white resistance to the idea. And that backlash plays a role in burying these types of questions.

So I hope that whatever the policy outcomes might be, I hope that the conversations don’t get buried by that resistance. And I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that we’re talking about reparations in a moment where white nationalism is ascendant. And in the past, those kinds of phenomena have had the effect of not only producing violence, but they’ve also suppressed discussions about how we address a question of what is owed after slavery.

And the debt is so great that whites have little claim to say that something is too much to pay. They have no standing to argue that the wealth distribution should remain where it is today. There’s no justifiable way — in my opinion — to make that argument. So I am worried that the violence of our time may suppress any movement toward a better resolution of the arguments implied by calls for reparations.

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March 8th, 2019

The curse of slavery has left an intergenerational legacy of trauma and poor health for african americans.

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In his 1952 semi-autobiographical novel Go Tell it on the Mountain , the esteemed African American author James Baldwin asked the question “Could a curse come down so many ages? Did it live in time, or in the moment?” In my work, I argue that the curse of African American slavery cannot be underestimated; the trauma of enslavement has been carried by African Americans through the ages and generations and is currently shown in many of the health problems experienced by a significant proportion of the African American population in the US. My research focusses on how intergenerational trauma provides an important explanation for the persistence of health problems among African Americans; complementary to the more apparent negative impact of poverty and prejudice on health.

The success, wealth and notoriety of African Americans like Oprah, Obama, Beyonce and Michael Jordan masks the comparatively negative physical, psychological, and social health conditions of African Americans in general. For example, research shows the incidence of diabetes, high blood pressure, premature death from heart disease, and prostate cancer are generally double among adult African Americans compared to White Americans. African Americans experience significantly higher psychological stress and PTSD, and these are related to depressive symptoms, poor self-rated health, functional physical limitations and chronic illness. Similar comparisons of social health show homicide rates are higher, black men are 5 times more likely to be incarcerated than Whites (5 percent of the African American male population are incarcerated in many American states), and illicit drug use and rates of intimate partner violence are highest among African Americans.

Two valid explanations for theses outcomes have received significant focus in the research literature: poor economic circumstances and social prejudice. Indeed, the poverty and unemployment rate among Black Americans has been at least double that of Whites over the last 40 years despite an overall decline (see Figure 1) and Blacks represent only 1.4 percent of the top 1 percent of households by income even though they comprise 13.6 percent of the US population. At the same time, research also clearly shows implicit prejudice is widespread in the US and related to negative health outcomes among African Americans like psychiatric symptoms, stress and cigarette smoking and a greater risk of heart attacks.

Figure 1 – Percentage of the US population in poverty or unemployed

Source: US Census Bureau and US Department of Labor

In line with these explanations, policy initiatives by successive American governments have sought to alleviate poverty, yet with short-lived success; the economic status of Black Americans and the economic inequality between Black and White Americans has changed little in the past 50 years. Similarly, it appears anti-discrimination laws and policies have been at best a limited solution to prejudice. For example, Black Americans are currently over-represented in the lower-paid service sectors, with lower job security, wages and benefits. And, African Americans still feel victims of prejudicial and unequal treatment as highlighted by the contemporary Black Lives Matter social movement.

Contemporary policies directed to address poverty and prejudice may have limited impact as they primarily target the injustices of today and do little to consider the impact of past injustices on the current state of African American health. My research focuses on how intergenerational trauma can help to explain the poor current health of African Americans. I argue that the historical legacy of enslavement and transmission of the associated cultural trauma is an important sociocultural perspective to understand the present generations of African Americans.

The notion of traumatic effects of enslavement being transferred to successive generations starts with the idea that slavery was not only a dreadful individual ordeal but a cultural trauma to African American people; a syndrome which occurs when a group has been subject to an unbearable event or experience thereby undermining their sense of group identity, values, meaning and purpose, or their cultural worldviews and is manifest in symptoms of hopelessness, despair and anxiety (notably, among Indigenous people subject to colonization and genocide and Holocaust survivors). Indeed, there was little value or meaning to African American lives under slavery; they were callously tied to their capacity for labor or ability to reproduce. Moreover, their identity was literally supplied by whoever happened to own them as though there was “ not even a separate identity the ego can claim ”. As the eminent African American essayist W.E.B. Du Bois claimed, African Americans were effectively banned from any pursuit of a cultural life through laws to prevent reading, writing and most communal life.

“ slavery ” by  Bruno Casonato  is licensed under CC BY NC SA 2.0

At the same time, the symptoms of cultural trauma were evident during enslavement and found in many personal narratives from those times (e.g., Hannah Crafts, Frederick Douglas, Harriet Jacobs). Moreover, ongoing evidence of intergenerational trauma is then shown in the stories of many prevalent Black authors over subsequent years (e.g., Ernest Gaines, Zora Hurston, Richard Wright, Alice Walker). In Black Boy (1945), Richard Wright laments “My days and nights were one long, quiet, continuously contained dream of terror, tension, and anxiety. I wondered how long I could bear it”.

The contemporary situation of African American culture is viewed similarly and described as being practically on the edge of self-destruction; labelled as a collective pathology with respondents in a recent study claiming enslavement legacies impact on current-day African American psychological functioning. Research findings also shows high levels of accumulated trauma and hopelessness among African Americans are correlated with negative health outcomes (such as high blood pressure) and suicidal thoughts and behaviors.

The poor general state of African American physical, psychological and social health demands a comprehensive response from researchers, health practitioners, policy-makers and the community. The cultural trauma experienced by African Americans over the more than 300 years of their enslavement has been transmitted to the current generation and is related to their current general state of poor health. This perspective implies strategies to strengthen the resilience of African American cultural worldviews would remedy the negative impact of cultural trauma on their health. Indeed, interventions which harness cultural themes (e.g., racial, respect, cultural identity and values) act as a protective factor in the health of African Americans and significantly reduce anger and aggression in African American adolescent males.

Of course, the success of any strategy to alleviate intergenerational trauma and its effects needs to be considered in terms of the bigger picture of relations between Blacks and Whites in the US. The contemporary notions of collective responsibility for the past era of slavery and white privilege from the imposition racial inequality, however, is largely unacknowledged or resisted by most White Americans. As Martin Luther King put it: “When Negroes assertively moved on to ascend the second rung of the ladder, a firm resistance from the white community developed”. Nonetheless, research suggests one way out this dilemma is to emphasize a shared worldview and humanity between African and White Americans to reduce the impact of intergroup tensions. Martin Luther King advocated similarly when he argued for a human-rights approach to alleviating the poor social and economic conditions of African Americans. A human rights approach has the potential to heal the past Black and White relations in the US and nullify any resistance there may be to those who would seek to alleviate the negative effects of intergenerational trauma on the health and well-being of African Americans.

• This article is based on the paper ‘ African American Health and Posttraumatic Slave Syndrome: A Terror Management Theory Account’ , in the Journal of Black Studies.

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Note:  This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP – American Politics and Policy, nor the London School of Economics.

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About the author

All ethnic groups have experienced some type of trauma/enslavement.at some period in history. I believe the underlying trauma for blacks in the US is the realization that there is no self organized defense against the internally and external forces that it faces daily basis.

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The Slave Trade and Slavery: A Founding Tragedy of our Modern World

Among the major crimes that have marked human history, the slave trade and slavery are distinguished by their magnitude, their duration and the violence that accompanied them. It is difficult to understand how a tragedy of this scale could have been ignored for so long. Historians estimate that thirty million Africans were deported from different parts of Africa and enslaved in other regions of the world. If we add the number of those who died during capture, the arduous journey towards various ports, the holding camps, and the middle passage, there were, in fact, near a hundred of millions of lives that were taken from Africa.

This massive outward forced migration had resulted in a population decline for at least four centuries. Demographers have calculated that the total number of Africans at the end of the nineteenth century should have reached two hundred million, rather than an estimated hundred million. Imagine the potential that was lost across an entire continent and the vulnerabilities created and further exploited.

Denials of Dignity and Resistance:

The slave trade and slavery had another peculiar consequence. They left in their wake the tenacious poison of racism and discrimination that plagues people of African descent today. Throughout this history, black people across the world have had to confront three kinds of denials that have served to justify and legitimize the slave trade, slavery, colonization, segregation and apartheid since the 15th century. They are:

- The denial of their humanity and dignity through numerous attempts to reduce them to the status of beasts of burden, in view of dehumanizing them.

- The denial of their history and culture through pseudo-scientific discourses aiming at minimizing their role in human history.

- The denial of their rights and citizenship through all types of policies, laws, and strategies of discrimination.

It is to fight this legacy of racial prejudices, still disseminated through the media, cinema, television, textbooks that the United Nations has proclaimed in 2014 the International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024) to promote the fulfilment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms of people of African descent and a greater knowledge of their contribution to humankind.

Despite the extreme violence of this system of oppression, codified by the monstrous Black Codes, the enslaved Africans never ceased to resist. Using the full potential of their culture, they not only survived the conditions of dehumanization but also contributed to transforming slave societies through their social ingenuity and artistic creavity, which produced the extraordinary cultural diversity.

Lessons from History:

Cognizant that ignoring such major historical events constitutes in itself an obstacle to peace, mutual understanding, and reconciliation, UNESCO launched in 1994 the Slave Route Project to contribute to this reflection. The ethical, political and cultural stakes of this project were clearly articulated from the very beginning. The barbarity that societies are capable of unleashing, especially those societies claiming the privilege of civilization are the stakes. Moreover, comprehension of this chapter in world history makes it possible to better grasp the genealogy that binds the slave trade to other historic crimes such as the extermination of indigenous peoples in the Americas, the Holocaust, Apartheid and more recent genocides.

The slave trade and slavery are therefore founders of our modern world. Through the capital accumulated during trade which contributed to the enrichment of Europe and America, the common heritage which is the main source of today's artistic creations, and through the combat against slavery which has profoundly redefined the very notion of liberty, dignity and universality, this history has participated in the emergence of modernity.

This tragedy concerns the whole of humanity and calls out to all of us, because of the universal silence that has surrounded it, the troubling light it sheds on the discourse used to justify it, and the psychological scars it has left in our souls.

It also challenges us to confront some of today's burning issues in post-slavery societies: cultural pluralism, mutual respect, reparations, and naonal reconciliation. It helps to better fight against new forms of servitude that continue to affect millions of people, in particular women and children, in different parts of our world.

The International Day of Remembrance of the Slave Trade and its Abolion initiated by UNESCO offers us an opportunity to reflect on the 23rd of August on this tragic history of humanity and on the persistence of its disastrous legacy in contemporary societies.

By Ali Moussa Coordinator of UNESCO's Slave Route Project

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• International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024)

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International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024) About the decade 5 July 2022

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Modern Slavery

Introduction

Slavery, long banned and universally condemned, persists in many corners of the world, victimizing tens of millions of people.

Slavery disproportionally affects women and girls while also victimizing men and boys of all backgrounds, and no country in the world is immune. Consumers buy slave-made goods and services for which victims toil in mines, farms, factories, or private homes. Ending slavery takes political will, moral courage, and the collaboration of governments, businesses, and consumers.

Discussion and Essay Questions

Discussion questions.

• What is slavery and what drives it? Is there a global consensus on the definition of slavery?
• Are there places in the world where slavery is more prevalent? What are the drivers of higher prevalence in different parts of the world?
• Is poverty a root cause of slavery? If so, would eliminating poverty eliminate slavery?
• Are slavery and human trafficking the same thing? Can they be used interchangeably?
• How does slavery impact women and children specifically?
• How many slaves are in the world today and where are they?
• Why is it difficult to eradicate slavery?
• What does “state-sponsored slavery” mean? How can governments be pushed to end “state-sponsored slavery”?
• How are people enslaved because they owe a debt to someone else?
• Does law enforcement do enough to eradicate slavery?
• Why is forced marriage considered a form of slavery?
• Whose responsibility is it to end slavery? What are some common tactics and strategies used to combat slavery?

Essay Questions

• The Walk Free Foundation and the International Labor Organization released a new estimate of modern day slavery in the world in 2017. Of the 40 million people living in slavery they found in the previous year, millions are said to be victims of forced marriage. What is forced marriage and why is it considered slavery? Should forced marriage be considered on par with sexual exploitation found in sex trafficking, or forced or child labor?
• Many goods that we consume today could be made by slaves. These goods can be found in common products and components that are sourced from countries around the world. This means that many of us are inadvertently supporting exploitative labor practices. What role can consumers play to ensure that we don’t support factories and production facilities that exploit workers? What can businesses do to support fair and ethical supply chains? Are consumers and businesses doing enough?
• Western definitions of slavery conflict with local and customary practices in some countries. For example, child marriage and even some forms of child labor are acceptable in some parts of the world, but considered human rights violations according to international standards. Is it fair to impose Western or international human rights norms on countries that conflict with their local customs and supersede local culture?
• There is some evidence that labor trafficking is more prevalent throughout the world than sex trafficking, however, law enforcement arrests and prosecutes more offenders for sex trafficking than labor trafficking. Why is this the case? Why does sex trafficking get more attention than labor trafficking by law enforcement?
• The U.S. government uses various foreign policy instruments to pressure other governments to uphold certain human rights standards. For example, the Trafficking in Persons Report issued annually by the U.S. State Department grades countries for their individual efforts to eradicate trafficking and slavery in their jurisdictions. Does this type of government-to-government advocacy and pressure have an effect? Is it important to integrate slavery concerns into U.S. foreign policy and for the U.S. government to hold other governments accountable?

Supplementary Materials

ILO/Walk Free Global Estimate

What is modern slavery?

You might think that slavery is a thing of the past. But right now, almost 50 million people are trapped in slavery worldwide.   

It’s a problem that affects every country on earth –  including yours .   

“We were only there to work. It felt like I was in jail.” Laboni, Nepal

In many ways, slavery may look different from the slavery of the Transatlantic slave trade, but modern slavery – as a term – encompasses many forms of slavery, including human trafficking and people being born into slavery.  

There are hundreds of definitions of modern slavery. All of these include aspects of control, involuntary actions and exploitation.  

At Anti-Slavery International, we define modern slavery as when an individual is exploited by others, for personal or commercial gain. Whether tricked, coerced, or forced, they lose their freedom . This includes but is not limited to human trafficking, forced labour and debt bondage.

Our mission is to stop slavery – to secure freedom for everyone, everywhere, always.

Unlock freedom

Stand up for human rights and fight modern slavery in 2024.

Modern slavery is all around us, often hidden in plain sight. People can become enslaved making our clothes, serving our food, picking our crops, working in factories, or working in houses as cooks, cleaners or nannies. Victims of modern slavery might face violence or threats, be forced into inescapable debt, or have their passport taken away and face being threatened with deportation.  

Many people have fallen into this trap because they were trying to escape poverty or insecurity, improve their lives and support their families. Now, they can’t leave.  

According to the latest Global Estimates of Modern Slavery (2022 ) from Walk Free, the International Labour Organization and the International Organization for Migration:  

• 49.6 million people live in modern slavery – in forced labour and forced marriage
• Roughly a quarter of all victims of modern slavery are children
• 22 million people are in forced marriages. Two out of five of these people were children
• Of the 27. 6 million people trapped in forced labour , 17.3 million are in forced labour exploitation in the private economy, 6.3 million are in commercial sexual exploitation , and nearly 4 million are in forced labour imposed by state authorities
• The Covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated the conditions that lead to modern slavery
• Migrant workers are particularly vulnerable to forced labour.

Source: Global Estimates of Modern Slavery: Forced Labour and Forced Marriage , Geneva, September 2022  

Types of slavery today 

Modern slavery takes many forms. The most common are:  

• Human trafficking . The use of violence, threats or coercion to transport, recruit or harbour people in order to exploit them for purposes such as forced prostitution, labour, criminality, marriage or organ removal
• Forced labour . Any work or services people are forced to do against their will, usually under threat of punishment
• Debt bondage/bonded labour . The world’s most widespread form of slavery. People trapped in poverty borrow money and are forced to work to pay off the debt, losing control over both their employment conditions and the debt
• Descent –based slavery (where people are born into slavery). A very old form of slavery, where people are treated as property, and their “slave” status has been passed down the maternal line.
• Child slavery . When a child is exploited for someone else’s gain. This can include child trafficking, child soldiers, child marriage and child domestic slavery
• Forced and early marriage . When someone is married against their will and cannot leave. Most child marriages can be considered slavery
• Domestic servitude . Domestic work and domestic servitude are not always slavery, and when properly regulated can be an important source of income for many people. However, when someone is working in another person’s home, they may be particularly vulnerable to abuses, exploitation, and slavery, as they might be hidden from sight and lack legal protection.

Why are people in slavery today? 

People may end up trapped in slavery because they’re vulnerable to being tricked, trapped and exploited, often as a result of poverty and exclusion and because laws do not properly protect them.  

People can be particularly vulnerable to modern slavery when external circumstances push them into taking risky decisions in search of opportunities to provide for their families, or when people find they are simply pushed into jobs in exploitative conditions. Anyone could be pressed into forced labour, but people in vulnerable situations – such as being in debt, or not having access to their passport – are most at risk. Crises like the Covid-19 pandemic and climate change can make people even more vulnerable to exploitation.  

Where do we find slavery? 

People are being exploited and pushed into slavery all around the world. While it may take different forms, we’re committed to ending slavery for everyone, everywhere.  

Slavery is a problem in the UK, where many people experience human trafficking, bonded labour and forced labour. Many products on our local shop shelves might have been made by people in forced labour, but the complex supply chains that businesses have created might make it harder for business to spot exploitation and abuses in their supply chains. In many cases they even hide behind this complexity to evade responsibility. That’s why we are pushing for new laws to protect workers and hold businesses accountable for exploitation occurring in their supply chains.  

Slavery may be hidden but it exists and it’s controlling the lives of millions of people .  

World must not accept slavery in 21st century: Guterres

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Commemorating the International Day for the Abolition of Slavery, the United Nations Secretary-General highlighted the impact of the contemporary forms of slavery, underscoring that such abhorrent practices have no space in the twenty-first century. 

António Guterres, UN Secretary-General December 2, 2020

In a message , Secretary-General António Guterres said that global protests this year against systemic racism brought renewed attention to a “legacy of injustices all over the world whose roots lie in the dark history of colonialism and slavery.” 

“But slavery is not simply a matter of history.” 

Globally, more than 40 million people are still victims of contemporary slavery, including about 25 million in forced labour and about 15 million in forced marriage, according to UN estimates. One in four victims are children, and women and girls account for 71 per cent of the victims. 

Inequality ‘further reinforces’ discrimination 

“Poor and marginalized groups, in particular racial and ethnic minorities, indigenous peoples and migrants, are disproportionally affected by contemporary forms of slavery,” Mr. Guterres said. 

“Gender inequality further reinforces patterns of discrimination,” he added. 

Slavery manifests itself through descent-based servitude, forced labour, child labour, domestic servitude, forced marriage, debt bondage, trafficking in persons for the purpose of exploitation, including sexual exploitation, and the forced recruitment of children in armed conflict. 

‘Flagrant violations’ of human rights  

The UN chief urged all sections of the society to strengthen their collective efforts to end the abhorrent practices. 

“I call for support to identify, protect and empower victims and survivors, including by contributing to the UN Voluntary Trust Fund on Contemporary Forms of Slavery ,” he added. 

In the message, the Secretary-General also recalled the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action , a comprehensive, action-oriented document that proposes concrete measures to combat racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. It also acknowledges that slavery and the slave trade are crimes against humanity, and should have always been so. 

“This milestone document defines slavery and slavery-like practices as flagrant violations of human rights … we cannot accept these violations in the twenty-first century,” Mr. Guterres stressed. 

The International Day 

The International Day for the Abolition of Slavery , commemorated each year on 2 December, marks the date of the adoption of the UN Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others . The Convention entered into force in 1951.  

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Slavery in America

By: History.com Editors

Published: April 25, 2024

Millions of enslaved Africans contributed to the establishment of colonies in the Americas and continued laboring in various regions of the Americas after their independence, including the United States. Many consider a significant starting point to slavery in America to be 1619 , when the privateer The White Lion brought 20 enslaved Africans ashore in the British colony of Jamestown , Virginia . The crew had seized the Africans from the Portuguese slave ship São João Bautista. Yet, enslaved Africans had been present in regions such as Florida, that are part of present-day United States nearly one century before.

Throughout the 17th century, European settlers in North America turned to enslaved Africans as a cheaper, more plentiful labor source than Indigenous populations and indentured servants, who were mostly poor Europeans.

Existing estimates establish that Europeans and American slave traders transported nearly 12.5 million enslaved Africans to the Americas. Of this number approximately 10.7 million disembarked alive in the Americas. During the 18th century alone, approximately 6.5 million enslaved persons were transported to the Americas. This forced migration deprived the African continent of some of its healthiest and ablest men and women.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern Atlantic coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia.

Slavery in Plantations and Cities

In the 17th and 18th centuries, enslaved Africans worked mainly on the tobacco, rice and indigo plantations of the southern coast, from the Chesapeake Bay colonies of Maryland and Virginia south to Georgia. Starting 1662, the colony of Virginia and then other English colonies established that the legal status of a slave was inherited through the mother. As a result, the children of enslaved women legally became slaves.

Before the rise of the American Revolution , the first debates to abolish slavery emerged. Black and white abolitionists contributed to the enactment of new legislation gradually abolishing slavery in some northern states such as Vermont and Pennsylvania. However, these laws emancipated only the newly born children of enslaved women.

Did you know? One of the first martyrs to the cause of American patriotism was Crispus Attucks, a former enslaved man who was killed by British soldiers during the Boston Massacre of 1770. Some 5,000 Black soldiers and sailors fought on the American side during the Revolutionary War.

But after the end of the American Revolutionary War , slavery was maintained in the new states. The new U.S. Constitution tacitly acknowledged the institution of slavery, when it determined that three out of every five enslaved people were counted when determining a state's total population for the purposes of taxation and representation in Congress.

Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, European and American slave merchants purchased enslaved Africans who were transported to the Americas and forced into slavery in the American colonies and exploited to work in the production of crops such as tobacco, wheat, indigo, rice, sugar, and cotton. Enslaved men and women also performed work in northern cities such as Boston and New York, and in southern cities such as Charleston, Richmond, and Baltimore.

By the mid-19th century, America’s westward expansion and the abolition movement provoked a great debate over slavery that would tear the nation apart in the bloody Civil War . Though the Union victory freed the nation’s four million enslaved people, the legacy of slavery continued to influence American history, from the Reconstruction to the civil rights movement that emerged a century after emancipation and beyond.

In the late 18th century, the mechanization of the textile industry in England led to a huge demand for American cotton, a southern crop planted and harvested by enslaved people, but whose production was limited by the difficulty of removing the seeds from raw cotton fibers by hand.

But in 1793, a U.S.-born  schoolteacher named Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin , a simple mechanized device that efficiently removed the seeds. His device was widely copied, and within a few years, the South transitioned from the large-scale production of tobacco to that of cotton, a switch that reinforced the region’s dependence on enslaved labor.

Slavery was never widespread in the North as it was in the South, but many northern businessmen grew rich on the slave trade and investments in southern plantations. Although gradual abolition emancipated newborns since the late 18th century, slavery was only abolished in New York in 1827, and in Connecticut in 1848.

Though the U.S. Congress outlawed the African slave trade in 1808, the domestic trade flourished, and the enslaved population in the United States nearly tripled over the next 50 years. By 1860 it had reached nearly 4 million, with more than half living in the cotton-producing states of the South.

Living Conditions of Enslaved People

Enslaved people in the antebellum South constituted about one-third of the southern population. Most lived on large plantations or small farms; many enslavers owned fewer than 50 enslaved people.

Landowners sought to make their enslaved completely dependent on them through a system of restrictive codes. They were usually prohibited from learning to read and write, and their behavior and movement were restricted.

Many enslavers raped women they held in slavery, and rewarded obedient behavior with favors, while rebellious enslaved people were brutally punished. A strict hierarchy among the enslaved (from privileged house workers and skilled artisans down to lowly field hands) helped keep them divided and less likely to organize against their enslavers.

Marriages between enslaved men and women had no legal basis, but many did marry and raise large families. Most owners of enslaved workers encouraged this practice, but nonetheless did not usually hesitate to divide families by sale or removal.

Slave Rebellions

Enslaved people organized r ebellions as early as the 18th century. In 1739, enslaved people led the Stono Rebellion in South Carolina, the largest slave rebellion during the colonial era in North America.  Other rebellions followed, including the one led by  Gabriel Prosser in Richmond in 1800 and by Denmark Vesey in Charleston in 1822. These uprisings were brutally repressed.

The revolt that most terrified enslavers was that led by Nat Turner in Southampton County, Virginia, in August 1831. Turner’s group, which eventually numbered as many 50 Black men, murdered some 55 white people in two days before armed resistance from local white people and the arrival of state militia forces overwhelmed them.

Like with previous rebellions, in the aftermath of the Nat Turner’s Rebellion, slave owners feared similar insurrections and southern states further passed legislation prohibiting the movement and assembly of enslaved people.

Abolitionist Movement

As slavery expanded during the second half of the 18th century,  a growing abolitionist movement emerged in the North.

From the 1830s to the 1860s, the movement to abolish slavery in America gained strength, led by formerly enslaved people  such as Frederick Douglass and white supporters such as William Lloyd Garrison , founder of the radical newspaper The Liberator .

While many abolitionists based their activism on the belief that slaveholding was a sin, others were more inclined to the non-religious “free-labor” argument, which held that slaveholding was regressive, inefficient and made little economic sense.

Black abolitionists  and antislavery northerners led meetings and created newspapers. They also had begun helping enslaved people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as early as the 1780s. This practice, known as the Underground Railroad , gained real momentum in the 1830s.

Conductors like Harriet Tubman guided escapees on their journey North, and “ stationmasters ” included such prominent figures as Frederick Douglass, Secretary of State William H. Seward and Pennsylvania congressman Thaddeus Stevens. Although no one knows for sure how many men, women, and children escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad, it was in the thousands ( estimates range from 25,000 to 100,000).  

The success of the Underground Railroad helped spread abolitionist feelings in the North. It also undoubtedly increased sectional tensions, convincing pro-slavery southerners of their northern countrymen’s determination to defeat the institution that sustained them.

Missouri Compromise

America’s explosive growth—and its expansion westward in the first half of the 19th century—would provide a larger stage for the growing conflict over slavery in America and its future limitation or expansion.

In 1820, a bitter debate over the federal government’s right to restrict slavery over Missouri’s application for statehood ended in a compromise: Missouri was admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state and all western territories north of Missouri’s southern border were to be free soil.

Although the Missouri Compromise was designed to maintain an even balance between slave and free states, it was only temporarily able to help quell the forces of sectionalism.

Kansas-Nebraska Act

In 1850, another tenuous compromise was negotiated to resolve the question of slavery in territories won during the Mexican-American War .

Four years later, however, the Kansas-Nebraska Act opened all new territories to slavery by asserting the rule of popular sovereignty over congressional edict, leading pro- and anti-slavery forces to battle it out—with considerable bloodshed —in the new state of Kansas.

Outrage in the North over the Kansas-Nebraska Act spelled the downfall of the old Whig Party and the birth of a new, all-northern Republican Party . In 1857, the Dred Scott decision by the Supreme Court (involving an enslaved man who sued for his freedom on the grounds that his enslaver had taken him into free territory) effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise by ruling that all territories were open to slavery.

John Brown’s Raid on Harper’s Ferry

In 1859, two years after the Dred Scott decision, an event occurred that would ignite passions nationwide over the issue of slavery.

John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry , Virginia—in which the abolitionist and 22 men, including five Black men and three of Brown’s sons raided and occupied a federal arsenal—resulted in the deaths of 10 people and Brown’s hanging.

The insurrection exposed the growing national rift over slavery: Brown was hailed as a martyred hero by northern abolitionists but was vilified as a mass murderer in the South.

The South would reach the breaking point the following year, when Republican candidate Abraham Lincoln was elected as president. Within three months, seven southern states had seceded to form the Confederate States of America ; four more would follow after the Civil War began.

Though Lincoln’s anti-slavery views were well established, the central Union war aim at first was not to abolish slavery, but to preserve the United States as a nation.

Abolition became a goal only later, due to military necessity, growing anti-slavery sentiment in the North and the self-emancipation of many people who fled enslavement as Union troops swept through the South.

When Did Slavery End?

On September 22, 1862, Lincoln issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation, and on January 1, 1863, he made it official that “slaves within any State, or designated part of a State…in rebellion,…shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.”

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labor forces and put international public opinion strongly on the Union side.

Though the Emancipation Proclamation didn’t officially end all slavery in America—that would happen with the passage of the 13th Amendment after the Civil War’s end in 1865—some 186,000 Black soldiers would join the Union Army, and about 38,000 lost their lives.

The Legacy of Slavery

The 13th Amendment, adopted on December 18, 1865, officially abolished slavery, but freed Black peoples’ status in the post-war South remained precarious, and significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period.

Previously enslaved men and women received the rights of citizenship and the “equal protection” of the Constitution in the 14th Amendment and the right to vote in the 15th Amendment , but these provisions of the Constitution were often ignored or violated, and it was difficult for Black citizens to gain a foothold in the post-war economy thanks to restrictive Black codes and regressive contractual arrangements such as sharecropping .

Despite seeing an unprecedented degree of Black participation in American political life, Reconstruction was ultimately frustrating for African Americans, and the rebirth of white supremacy —including the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—had triumphed in the South by 1877.

Almost a century later, resistance to the lingering racism and discrimination in America that began during the slavery era led to the civil rights movement of the 1960s, which achieved the greatest political and social gains for Black Americans since Reconstruction.

Ana Lucia Araujo , a historian of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, edited and contributed to this article. Dr. Araujo is currently Professor of History at Howard University in Washington, D.C., and member of the International Scientific Committee of the UNESCO Routes of Enslaved Peoples Projects. Her three more recent books are Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade: A Transnational and Comparative History , The Gift: How Objects of Prestige Shaped the Atlantic Slave Trade and Colonialism , and Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery .

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slavery , condition in which one human being was owned by another. A slave was considered by law as property , or chattel , and was deprived of most of the rights ordinarily held by free persons.

There is no consensus on what a slave was or on how the institution of slavery should be defined. Nevertheless, there is general agreement among historians, anthropologists, economists, sociologists, and others who study slavery that most of the following characteristics should be present in order to term a person a slave. The slave was a species of property ; thus, he belonged to someone else. In some societies slaves were considered movable property, in others immovable property, like real estate. They were objects of the law, not its subjects. Thus, like an ox or an ax, the slave was not ordinarily held responsible for what he did. He was not personally liable for torts or contracts. The slave usually had few rights and always fewer than his owner, but there were not many societies in which he had absolutely none. As there are limits in most societies on the extent to which animals may be abused, so there were limits in most societies on how much a slave could be abused. The slave was removed from lines of natal descent. Legally, and often socially, he had no kin . No relatives could stand up for his rights or get vengeance for him. As an “outsider,” “marginal individual,” or “socially dead person” in the society where he was enslaved, his rights to participate in political decision making and other social activities were fewer than those enjoyed by his owner. The product of a slave’s labor could be claimed by someone else, who also frequently had the right to control his physical reproduction.

Slavery was a form of dependent labor performed by a nonfamily member. The slave was deprived of personal liberty and the right to move about geographically as he desired. There were likely to be limits on his capacity to make choices with regard to his occupation and sexual partners as well. Slavery was usually, but not always, involuntary. If not all of these characterizations in their most restrictive forms applied to a slave, the slave regime in that place is likely to be characterized as “mild”; if almost all of them did, then it ordinarily would be characterized as “severe.”

Slaves were generated in many ways. Probably the most frequent was capture in war , either by design, as a form of incentive to warriors, or as an accidental by-product, as a way of disposing of enemy troops or civilians. Others were kidnapped on slave-raiding or piracy expeditions. Many slaves were the offspring of slaves. Some people were enslaved as a punishment for crime or debt, others were sold into slavery by their parents, other relatives, or even spouses, sometimes to satisfy debts, sometimes to escape starvation. A variant on the selling of children was the exposure, either real or fictitious, of unwanted children, who were then rescued by others and made slaves. Another source of slavery was self-sale, undertaken sometimes to obtain an elite position, sometimes to escape destitution.

Slavery existed in a large number of past societies whose general characteristics are well known. It was rare among primitive peoples, such as the hunter-gatherer societies, because for slavery to flourish, social differentiation or stratification was essential. Also essential was an economic surplus, for slaves were often consumption goods who themselves had to be maintained rather than productive assets who generated income for their owner. Surplus was also essential in slave systems where the owners expected economic gain from slave ownership.

Ordinarily there had to be a perceived labor shortage, for otherwise it is unlikely that most people would bother to acquire or to keep slaves. Free land , and more generally, open resources, were often a prerequisite for slavery; in most cases where there were no open resources, non-slaves could be found who would fulfill the same social functions at lower cost. Last, some centralized governmental institutions willing to enforce slave laws had to exist, or else the property aspects of slavery were likely to be chimerical. Most of these conditions had to be present in order for slavery to exist in a society; if they all were, until the abolition movement of the 19th century swept throughout most of the world, it was almost certain that slavery would be present. Although slavery existed almost everywhere, it seems to have been especially important in the development of two of the world’s major civilizations, Western (including ancient Greece and Rome ) and Islamic.

There have been two basic types of slavery throughout recorded history. The most common has been what is called household, patriarchal, or domestic slavery. Although domestic slaves occasionally worked outside the household, for example, in haying or harvesting, their primary function was that of menials who served their owners in their homes or wherever else the owners might be, such as in military service . Slaves often were a consumption-oriented status symbol for their owners, who in many societies spent much of their surplus on slaves. Household slaves sometimes merged in varying degrees with the families of their owners, so that boys became adopted sons or women became concubines or wives who gave birth to heirs. Temple slavery, state slavery, and military slavery were relatively rare and distinct from domestic slavery, but in a very broad outline they can be categorized as the household slaves of a temple or the state.

The other major type of slavery was productive slavery. It was relatively infrequent and occurred primarily in Classical Athenian Greece and Rome and in the post-Columbian circum-Caribbean New World. It also was found in 9th-century Iraq , among the Kwakiutl Indians of the American Northwest, and in a few areas of sub-Saharan Africa in the 19th century. Although slaves also were employed in the household, slavery in all of those societies seems to have existed predominantly to produce marketable commodities in mines or on plantations.

A major theoretical issue is the relationship between productive slavery and the status of a society as a slave or a slave-owning society. In a slave society, slaves composed a significant portion (at least 20–30 percent) of the total population , and much of that society’s energies were mobilized toward getting and keeping slaves. In addition the institution of slavery had a significant impact on the society’s institutions, such as the family , and on its social thought, law, and economy. It seems clear that it was quite possible for a slave society to exist without productive slavery; the known historical examples were concentrated in Africa and Asia . It is also clear that most of the slave societies have been concentrated in Western (including Greece and Rome) and Islamic civilizations. In a slave-owning society, slaves were present but in smaller numbers, and they were much less the focus of the society’s energies.

Slavery was a species of dependent labor differentiated from other forms primarily by the fact that in any society it was the most degrading and most severe. Slavery was the prototype of a relationship defined by domination and power. But throughout the centuries man has invented other forms of dependent labor besides slavery, including serfdom , indentured labor , and peonage . The term serfdom is much overused, often where it is not appropriate (always as an appellation of opprobrium). In the past a serf usually was an agriculturalist, whereas, depending upon the society, a slave could be employed in almost any occupation. Canonically, serfdom was the dependent condition of much of the western and central European peasantry from the time of the decline of the Roman Empire until the era of the French Revolution . This included a “second enserfment” that swept over central and some of eastern Europe in the 15th and 16th centuries. Russia did not know the “first enserfment”; serfdom began there gradually in the mid-15th century, was completed by 1649, and lasted until 1906. Whether the term serfdom appropriately describes the condition of the peasantry in other contexts is a matter of vigorous contention . Be that as it may, the serf was also distinguished from the slave by the fact that he was usually the subject of the law—i.e., he had some rights, whereas the slave, the object of the law, had significantly fewer rights. The serf, moreover, was usually bound to the land (the most significant exception was the Russian serf between about 1700 and 1861), whereas the slave was always bound to his owner; i.e., he had to live where his owner told him to, and he often could be sold by his owner at any time. The serf usually owned his means of production (grain, livestock, implements) except the land, whereas the slave owned nothing, often not even the clothes on his back. The serf’s right to marry off his lord’s estate often was restricted, but the master’s interference in his reproductive and family life ordinarily was much less than was the case for the slave. Serfs could be called upon by the state to pay taxes, to perform corvée labor on roads, and to serve in the army, but slaves usually were exempt from all of those obligations.

A person became an indentured servant by borrowing money and then voluntarily agreeing to work off the debt during a specified term. In some societies indentured servants probably differed little from debt slaves (i.e., persons who initially were unable to pay off obligations and thus were forced to work them off at an amount per year specified by law). Debt slaves, however, were regarded as criminals (essentially thieves) and thus liable to harsher treatment. Perhaps as many as half of all the white settlers in North America were indentured servants, who agreed to work for someone (the purchaser of the indenture) upon arrival to pay for their passage. Some indentured servants alleged that they were treated worse than slaves; the economic logic of the situation was that slave owners thought of their slaves as a long-term investment whose value would drop if maltreated, whereas the short-term (typically four years) indentured servants could be abused almost to death because their masters had only a brief interest in them. Practices varied, but indenture contracts sometimes specified that the servants were to be set free with a sum of money, sometimes a plot of land, perhaps even a spouse, whereas for manumitted slaves the terms usually depended more on the generosity of the owner.

Peons were either persons forced to work off debts or criminals. Peons , who were the Latin American variant of debt slaves, were forced to work for their creditors to pay off what they owed. They tended to merge with felons because people in both categories were considered criminals, and that was especially true in societies where money fines were the main sanction and form of restitution for crimes. Thus, the felon who could not pay his fine was an insolvent debtor. The debt peon had to work for his creditor, and the labor of the criminal peon was sold by the state to a third party. Peons had even less recourse to the law for bad treatment than did indentured servants, and the terms of manumission for the former typically were less favourable than for the latter.

Slavery Still Exists Today

Post by: Katrina Sumner

Slavery still exists today. It’s a painful reality. Global estimates indicate that there are as many as forty million people living in various forms of exploitation known as modern slavery. This includes victims of forced labor, debt bondage, domestic servitude, human trafficking, child labor, forced marriage, and descent-based slavery.

Given America’s history with descent-based or chattel slavery in which people were classified as slaves at birth, treated as property, and denied human rights, it is particularly difficult to know that there are still places in the world today where people are born into hereditary slavery. They are treated as property and subjected to sexual and physical abuse because their ancestors were and the same fate befalls their children.

While slavery has been legally abolished everywhere, it has yet to be eradicated according to the UN Special Rapporteur on Contemporary Forms of Slavery, Including its Causes and Consequences. For example, in September 2020, the Special Rapporteur called on Mali to finally end slavery after four men who were regarded as having been born as slaves were beaten to death. The situation in Mali illustrates the problem. The country outlawed slavery in 1905 and the Malian Penal Code lists slavery as a crime against humanity. Yet, over one hundred years later, people are still trapped in this system. This situation, which is not unique to Mali, demonstrates the need not only for additional legislation criminalizing slavery, but for a willingness to punish those who perpetrate it on others.

As another example, Mauritania was the last nation to abolish slavery, which it did in 1981. However, it did not pass a law criminalizing the practice until 2007. Though the Global Slavery Index for 2018 estimates that 90,000 people in Mauritania are living as slaves, there have only been a few prosecutions for the practice.

One Mauritanian woman who escaped slavery with the help of an anti-slavery organization reported how one of her children was killed. She had become pregnant with this child after being raped by her master. One day, she was not allowed to take her baby with her to the field. The master said that she would work faster without the child on her back. When she returned, she found that her baby girl had been left out in the hot sun where the child died and was being eaten by ants. The mother asked if she could take a break to bury her baby, but she was told to get back to work. Later that day, she dug a shallow grave and buried her. Two of her other girls are the children of the master’s oldest son who threatened to behead her if she told anyone they were his kids. When she was sent to work for another family, the new master forced her young daughter to marry him and raped her and her daughter at gunpoint. Thankfully, both she and her daughter are free today and she has been brave enough to tell her story to the world. This is the plight of many who continue to live in slavery.

Despite the fact that an estimated 10%-20% of the population lives in slavery, Mauritanian officials often deny that slavery still exists. Human rights defenders are arbitrarily jailed. There are even reports that some enslaved children who have escaped and gone to the police for help have been returned to their masters. Despite these abuses, Mauritania joined the UN Human Rights Council in February 2020. The issue of slavery is one that highlights the critical service provided by human rights and humanitarian organizations. These organizations are working to raise awareness about modern slavery around the world. They are helping people gain freedom and providing economic and educational assistance. They are pressing for additional legislation and seeking justice for victims. May their efforts hasten the eradication of descent-based slavery and help stem the tide of other modern forms of exploitation.

This post was written by a Center for Global Justice  Student Staff member . The views expressed in this post do not necessarily reflect those of Regent University, Regent Law School, or the Center for Global Justice.

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Slavery in the USA and Its Impact on Americans Essay

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Introduction

Impact on the modern society, works cited.

Slavery in the United States of America is a highly important topic to discuss even at the present moment. Although this regime and level of racial discrimination have been left in the past, people must still learn the history of American slaves who were owned by white citizens. Not only does this let one learn more about the country in which they reside, but it also shows its citizens how freedom was gained for all inhabitants. The following paper will present a discussion of slavery in the USA and an explanation of the tremendous impact it made on the lives of all Americans. It will also include a description of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and coverage of various Civil War events.

As mentioned in the introductory section, slavery existed in a period when the United States of America was not an attractive country for immigrants from Africa. Once a black person was noticed in towns or cities, he or she could be caught and sold to slaveholders, regardless of their free status (Berlin 26). Although these people could have families and jobs, their freedoms were disregarded by other citizens due to their skin color, which was the main basis for discrimination. It is a well-known fact that nowadays those with racist beliefs are disapproved of in the US. However, when the famous American Revolution was going on, people with black skin were treated as representatives of a lower racial caste (Thirty-Ninth Congress of the USA). It is necessary to mention that individuals of Arabic, Hispanic, or other non-white ethnic backgrounds were not enslaved and were regarded as free people of color (Berlin 54).

The majority of slaves transferred from Africa were forced to work on the cotton plantations of businessmen from the CSA (Confederative States of America). They also worked at farms, mills, and other places that required cheap human labor. As mentioned previously in the paper, black people were not paid for their hard work. In addition, their living conditions were inappropriate – they had no access to clean water for hygienic purposes, no beds, no private rooms, and so on (Berlin 27). It would be accurate to state that many black people could not bear living in such conditions. Their lives were short, with a majority of them dying because of fatigue and exhaustion (Berlin 32). Some of those who were enslaved might be treated better than others if their owner saw that a particular person worked hard and brought much profit to his or her slaveholder. The majority of people deprived of their rights had to work in fields under the burning sun for more than twelve hours every day. They were not allowed to have any days off or vacations.

The situation with slavery became critical, with white people disregarding the rights of individuals from Africa, and the government of the USA became seriously concerned with the idea of emancipation (Thirty-Ninth Congress of the USA). It appeared that almost all businesses situated in the territories of the CSA back then were powered by slaves. However, Afro-Americans’ civil rights were respected in the Northern part of the country when Abraham Lincoln was in rule. The president wanted to make all people in his country free and equal (Thirty-Ninth Congress of the USA). After he was elected in 1860, the politician started considering the emancipation of slaves (Lincoln). Nevertheless, his colleagues told him that giving freedom to the approximately four million black people from the Southern states of the country would have an adverse impact on its economy and the well-being of white citizens in the CSA.

Abraham Lincoln asked governors of several states in the South to support his emancipation strategy (Lincoln). All seven territories (South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, Georgia, and Texas) refused to free their slaves and become part of the Northern States. Although many governors refused to support Lincoln’s strategy, they had to stand against his army forces in the Civil War that started later. The main purpose of the multiple battles between the Union and the Confederates was to make all people in the country free and equal.

When the war was almost over, President Lincoln issued and signed the Emancipation Proclamation on the first day of 1863, ordering “That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free,” (Lincoln). Almost three million former slaves were freed. In response to this, some slave-owners took their workers and moved to the South or other territories outside of the country as they believed that their economic system would be destroyed according to the new laws of the United States of America (Berlin 71). Indeed, black people were fully freed even in the Southern states once the Civil War was over.

Unfortunately, the American economy was not as stable and prosperous as it has become in the present. Therefore, many black people preferred to stay and work for their previous masters after the war ended in 1865, as they could not find any other jobs (Berlin 63). Indeed, the Reconstruction Era was a hard time for all people who inhabited the former CSA. However, nowadays, American citizens cannot even think about going back to this regime of discrimination based on race. However, the thirteenth amendment that was issued at the end of the Civil War stated that every citizen of the USA could not be enslaved unless he or she was punished for breaking the law (General Records of the United States Government). It appears that this kind of racism is now both illegal and immoral. Although many other adverse political and economic situations happened in the USA after Emancipation, this event presents a border between the country’s past and the future (Lincoln).

Since the Emancipation Proclamation was issued, citizens of the United States of America have never faced slavery again (Lincoln). Nevertheless, this part of the country’s history made a tremendous impact on all people who live here because racism is considered to be immoral and remains a taboo topic. Discussions of these phenomena are inappropriate in the society of African Americans as well. There is no other country in the world that considers the topics of both racism and slavery as limited as they have become America. People are allowed to talk about slavery and discrimination against black individuals only at schools during history classes. Otherwise, it is considered to be offensive to people of color.

Slavery in the USA was one of the toughest periods in the country’s history. Slaves did not have appropriate living conditions, food, water, or other benefits of contemporary civilization. Thankfully, Abraham Lincoln signed and issued the Emancipation Proclamation that made all black people in the USA free since 1863. This event may be regarded as a critical moment in American history that promoted citizens’ rights and dignities. Nowadays, regular citizens are discouraged from mentioning racism and slavery in public places and cannot discriminate against people of color. Inhabitants of the USA must learn the history of slavery to understand how their nation became one of the greatest liberty symbols in the world.

Berlin, Ira. The Long Emancipation: The Demise of Slavery in the United States . Harvard University Press, 2015.

General Records of the United States Government. “ Proposed Thirteenth Amendment Regarding the Abolition of Slavery .” DocsTeach . 1861. Web.

Lincoln, Abraham. “ Emancipation Proclamation .” DocsTeach . 1863. Web.

Thirty-Ninth Congress of the USA. “ Civil Rights Act of 1866 .” DocsTeach . 1866. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2020, September 22). Slavery in the USA and Its Impact on Americans. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-in-the-usa-and-its-impact-on-americans/

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IvyPanda . 2020. "Slavery in the USA and Its Impact on Americans." September 22, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-in-the-usa-and-its-impact-on-americans/.

1. IvyPanda . "Slavery in the USA and Its Impact on Americans." September 22, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-in-the-usa-and-its-impact-on-americans/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Slavery in the USA and Its Impact on Americans." September 22, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/slavery-in-the-usa-and-its-impact-on-americans/.

Slavery Essay for Students and Children

500+ words essay on slavery.

Slavery is a term that signifies the injustice that is being carried out against humans since the 1600s. Whenever this word comes up, usually people picture rich white people ruling over black people. However, that is not the only case to exist. After a profound study, historians found evidence that suggested the presence of slavery in almost every culture. It was not essentially in the form of people working in the fields, but other forms. Slavery generally happens due to the division of levels amongst humans in a society. It still exists in various parts of the world. It may not necessarily be that hard-core, nonetheless, it happens.

Impact of Slavery

Slavery is one of the main causes behind racism in most of the cultures. It did severe damage to the race relations of America where a rift was formed between the whites and blacks.

The impact of Slavery has caused irreparable damage which can be seen to date. Even after the abolishment of slavery in the 1800s in America, racial tensions remained amongst the citizens.

In other words, this made them drift apart from each other instead of coming close. Slavery also gave birth to White supremacy which made people think they are inherently superior just because of their skin color and descendant.

Talking about the other forms of slavery, human trafficking did tremendous damage. It is a social evil which operates even today, ruining hundreds and thousands of innocent lives. Slavery is the sole cause which gave birth to all this.

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The Aftermath

Even though slavery was abolished over 150 years ago, the scars still remain. The enslaved still haven’t forgotten the struggles of their ancestors. It lives on in their hearts which has made them defensive more than usual. They resent the people whose ancestors brought it down on their lineage.

Even today many people of color are a victim of racism in the 21st century. For instance, black people face far more severe punishments than a white man. They are ridiculed for their skin color even today. There is a desperate need to overcome slavery and all its manifestations for the condition and security of all citizens irrespective of race, religion , social, and economic position .

In short, slavery never did any good to any human being, of the majority nor minority. It further divided us as humans and put tags on one another. Times are changing and so are people’s mindsets.

One needs to be socially aware of these evils lurking in our society in different forms. We must come together as one to fight it off. Every citizen has the duty to make the world a safer place for every human being to live in.

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Essay: The Slaves of Today

Posted by Elisa | May 10, 2012 | Human Trafficking , Seeking Justice , Women's Empowerment | 0 |

This guest post is by Kit, a blogger for Readingteen.net . Kit usually reviews young adult books, but attempted to tackle the subject of human trafficking for an assignment. I love Kit’s use of the stories of modern slaves in her essay. I might often write about human trafficking and sex trafficking , but I am guilty of rarely paying tribute to real people’s real stories.  You have to appreciate the candor as she begins!

Modern Day Slaves

“ Basically I have no idea how to lead up to this, so I just going to jump in. This is a paper I wrote this year for English on a topic that I feel needs to be addressed more often. Hope you agree. “

She was just supposed to be a maid.  She was smuggled across the border to America under false pretenses.  She was chained to a pole in the sweltering sun.  She was forced to eat dog excrement.  She was beaten over the back with a broom.  Her name is Maria, she was only twelve, and she is one of the less-than-one percent of trafficked people whose cases have been solved.  (Bales and Soodalter 3).

 Although human trafficking is often thought of as a “Third World Problem,” it is actually a major issue in the U.S.   In The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today , Kevin Bales and Ron Soodalter address the difficulty:

We know that slavery not only exists throughout the world today but flourishes.  With approximately twenty-seven million people in bondage, it is thought to be the third most profitable criminal enterprise of our time, following only drugs and guns.  In fact, more than twice as many people are in bondage in the world today than were taken from Africa during the entire three-hundred and fifty years of the Atlantic slave trade.  And we know that slavery is alive and more than well in the United States, thriving in the dark, and practiced in many forms where you’d least expect it. (3).

It is well hidden, but slavery is still extremely abundant today, and awareness needs to be raised to end this heinous crime.

The U.S. Department of State became aware of the issue of human trafficking and began monitoring it in 1994.  At first, it seemed to only be a problem for women and girls for sexual purposes but, contrary to popular belief, human trafficking does not only include sex trafficking, it encompasses all forms of forced labor, and as time went on, they realized it was a much larger issue, affecting a much larger spectrum of people. (ABC 1)  Sex trafficking does account for the trade of about fifty-six percent of trafficking victims (according to a U.S. White House fact sheet on trafficking states), but the other forty-four percent includes other work such as: agriculture, domestic service, construction, sweat shop manufacturing, and hotel and restaurant work.  All of this, and more can be found in California, New York, Texas, and Florida, the states with the highest amount of human trafficking, accounting for forty-eight percent of trafficking cases.  Being largely populated states they all have “ …considerable immigrant communities, all of which serve as transit hubs for international travel. ” (Cullen-DuPont 45) Aside from these four, trafficking has been found in over half of the U.S. states and counting, with no end in sight.

Debbie is a fifteen-year-old middle child from Phoenix, Arizona.  On a day like any other she got a call from Bianca, an acquaintance asking if she could come by Debbie’s house.  In her Sponge Bob pajamas Debbie walked outside, Bianca pulled up in a Cadillac with two older guys, and they talked for a while until Bianca said they needed to go.  As Debbie went to give Bianca a hug, Bianca pushed her into the car.  Once inside, the men threatened Bianca and told her to tie Debbie up.  Debbie’s mom, who was right inside, was clueless to what was happening. They drove around the city for hours before bringing the girls to an apartment building only twenty-five miles from home.  Her captors threatened to shoot her and then, laughing, they drugged her and all seven of them gang raped her.  They tried to break her down by feeding her dog biscuits and stuffing her into a dog cage for days.  On her back in the small crate, her body went numb.  An ad was put up by her captors on Craig’s List, a website mostly used for buying and selling items, and she quickly became an unwilling prostitute.  She earned hundreds of dollars every single night, but her kidnappers took it all.  She endured this treatment for forty days.

Young girls are usually thought of as being most affected by human trafficking, but adult women are actually the most trafficked group of people.  Alternatively, the stereotype that females are significantly more at-risk than males, is true, with approximately six girls trafficked to every boy.  (Cullen-DuPont 44)  Whether males or females, victims are usually trafficked from less developed countries into countries with higher standards of living.  That’s not to say that Americans aren’t also trafficked, in The Slave Next Door, Bales and Soodalter note that, “Where the slaves in America were once primarily African and African American, today we have ‘equal opportunity’ slavery; modern-day slaves come in all races, all types, and all ethnicities .”  But slaves in 1850 would have been about $40,000 in today’s currency, and “modern-day slaves” can now be bought for a mere few hundred dollars. (6).

Slavery is not only more affordable than it used to be, it’s also much more hidden.  While owning slaves used to be flaunted and boasted about, it is now something that is not spoken of, making it that much harder to rescue victims.  Claudia Flores, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union elaborates:

“ Many times, they are forbidden to talk to people who come into the house… If there are two of them, they are often forbidden to talk to each other.  Their phone calls are monitored.  They are not allowed to go anywhere unaccompanied.”  (Cullen-DuPont 49).

Since many enslaved workers can’t speak English, they’re even more closed off.  Some have even been known to try to speak to the police but, most of the time, the policemen can’t understand the worker’s language, and he will look to the captor to translate.  After “translating,” the abductors will assure the police that everything is fine and it was merely a misunderstanding.  Even with everything they go through, the slaves of today hardly ever try to escape, being so afraid and unable to see beyond their prison, they will put up with all kinds of torture for many years; sometimes they even live their entire lives locked away.  In his article, “The Face of Modern Slavery,” Nicholas Kristof explains, “Most girls who have been trafficked, whether in New York or in Cambodia, eventually surrender. They are degraded and terrified, and they doubt their families or society will accept them again.”

Mostly trafficking victims are abducted by accepting job offers that are just too good to refuse.  Bribed with money or better paying jobs, such as modeling, show business, or acting, victims will follow these con-artists across the country, or even across the world in search of a better life.  Often times, foreign victims arrive in a new country to find that their documents have been destroyed and their entire families are being threatened by the very people that promised them everything they ever wanted.  Likewise, many times the cost of travel, visas, and lodging, which is paid by the captor, is so great that they find themselves bound by a debt that they won’t ever be able to repay.  Bales and Soodalter explain modern-day slave selling happening “ through ‘mom and pop’ operations, requiring only an outside consumer who is complicit in the crime .”  They continue to say that,

“Frequently, a woman becomes a domestic slave through legal channels, coming here on her own with a legitimate work visa.  Only once she is under the slaveholder’s roof does her life in bondage begin.  Coerced with dreams of a life they’ll never have, trafficking victims find themselves completely unable to return to the life they used to live.”  (Bales and Soodalter 18).

Miya, like so many other girls, was tempted.  She was working three jobs to pay for bills and college, and when a young man and woman approached her in the mall and told her she was beautiful, she couldn’t help but be flattered. He claimed to be a modeling agent and made her an offer she could not refuse.  He said that they were on their way back to California for a shoot, and, if she was not sure about modeling, she could just try it out for three days, and if she didn’t like it, she could go back home.  The idea of modeling and making more money took hold of her, and she decided to go with them.  Before they left, the couple took her to get her hair, make-up, and nails done under the pretense of getting ready for a photo shoot.  It wasn’t until they started taking pictures of her with a disposable camera, that she realized something was wrong, but they assured her that once they reached California there would be professional photographers and make-up artists.  Once they arrived, she found out that those pictures were put up on an escort service website, and her life was now out of her hands.   While her parents filed a missing persons report and her boss informed the police about the suspicious couple, Miya was forced to work as a prostitute.  The same people who abducted Miya were reported to have approached over fifty girls in the same area, but only Miya went with them.  Miya, far from home, was too afraid to attempt to escape.  Ernie Allen, the director of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, says that’s not uncommon for kids lured into the sex trade:

 “There are many of these kids who are seduced, thinking … that they’re gonna have economic opportunities, that they’re gonna be a model, that they’re gonna be in show business somehow,” Allen says, “and then, later, discover themselves in a situation in which they have no control, and they’re, they’re slaves. So … this is a problem that has many faces.”

The girls in these stories are all part of the one percent of human trafficking cases that have been solved.  For seven months Maria was a domestic slave, until one of her neighbors, who was working on his roof, saw her chained up in the backyard and called the police immediately. (Bales and Soodalter 5).  Forty days after Debbie was captured, the police searched the house where she was being held, but found nothing.  A few days later they broke down the doors of the same apartment and realized why they hadn’t been able to find her, she was crushed into a drawer under a bed.  After six days, Miya mustered up the courage to escape, she packed all of her things, waited for everyone to fall asleep, and ran for her life. Even though they were all reunited with their families, there is still a whopping ninety-nine percent of cases left unsolved. (ABC 4).

This original post can be seen  at www.readingteen.net from December 23, 2011.

Action Ideas To Help End Slavery:

Read this great easy-to-read book,  to learn more! Not for Sale: The Return of the Global Slave Trade–and How We Can Fight It is an excellent book briefing us on what modern day slavery looks like. Check out my Book Review: Not For Sale (By David Batstone) .

Choose two or three people to talk to, or forward this essay to, THIS WEEK in order to spread an awareness about human trafficking. Write their names on your hand with a sharpie to remind you!

References:

Bales, Kevin, and Ron Soodalter. The Slave Next Door: Human Trafficking and Slavery in America Today . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009. Print.

Cullen-DuPont, Kathryn. Human Trafficking. New York, NY: Facts On File, 2009. Print.

“ HumanTrafficking.org | United States of America.” HumanTrafficking.org: A Web Resource for Combating Human Trafficking in the East Asia Pacific Region. Academy for Educational, 2006. Web. 29 Nov. 2011.

Kristof, Nicholas D. “The Face of Modern Slavery.” The New York Times 17 Nov. 2011, The New York Edition ed.: A31. The New York Times. The New York Times, 16 Nov. 2011. Web. 29 Nov. 2011.

“Teen Girls’ Stories of Sex Trafficking in U.S. – ABC News.” ABCNews.com. ABC News, 9 Feb. 2006. Web. 29 Nov. 2011.

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History shows the choice of vice president matters

Vice presidential running mates then and now, from left, Andrew Johnson, George H. Pendleton, Tim Walz, and JD Vance. Credit: AP, Getty Images/Interim Archives, AP/Julia Nikhinson,The Washington Post/Tom Brenner

This guest essay reflects the views of Sol Wachtler, former chief judge of the New York State Court of Appeals and distinguished adjunct professor at Touro Law School.

Donald Trump has said that his pick of JD Vance as his running mate will have “no impact on the election.” He said the vice presidential candidate does not make a difference. Trump may be correct; however, history tells us that running mates can bring victory when defeat seems inevitable. The opposite is also true.

When then-President Donald Trump addressed the National Republican Congressional Committee in 2017, he referred to Abraham Lincoln as a “Great president. Most people don’t even know he was a Republican. Does anyone know? Lot of people don’t know that.” It must be assumed that most of those Republicans did “know that” — after all, their party had long been referred to as the “Party of Lincoln.”

However, what “most people don’t even know” is that when Lincoln ran for reelection in 1864, he did not run as a Republican. When Lincoln first ran, many who were opposed to slavery were reluctant to support the newly formed Republican Party. Although its platform provided that slavery should not be allowed to spread to other states, it also provided that slavery should be allowed to continue in the states where it existed.

In order to garner the support of Frederick Douglass and other abolitionists who wanted an immediate end to slavery, the Republicans chose Sen. Hannibal Hamlin, a strong abolitionist from Maine, as Lincoln’s running mate. Although the GOP only received 39% of the vote, it was a winner. The Republican base was held together by having Hamlin on the ticket.

It was through the efforts of Hamlin that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1862. However, the abolitionists and Republicans remained unhappy with Lincoln’s overriding concern of keeping the Union together instead of equality for enslaved black Americans. After three years of Civil War, with the morale of the Union army in decline, the Republicans abandoned Lincoln and along with the abolitionists, formed the new Radical Democracy Party.

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Lincoln, determined to be reelected to keep the Union together, created the National Union Party. Lincoln dropped Hamlin from the ticket and replaced him with Andrew Johnson, a slave-owning Southerner from Tennessee.

Lincoln’s opponents were the “War Democrats” who want to continue fighting to keep the Union together and the “Peace Democrats” who wanted to stop the war with the Confederate States and allow them to continue slavery. The Republicans branded the “Peace Democrats” as venomous snakes — “Copperheads” who wanted a return to the “Know Nothing” bigoted politics of the 1850s.

The “War Democrats” nominated General George McClellan, a West Point graduate who had led the Union army to several victories. McClellan wanted someone who was young and would help him win the large and populous border state of Ohio and chose a 39-year-old senator from Ohio named George H. Pendleton.

JD Vance, Trump’s vice presidential running mate, is also a 39-year-old senator from Ohio. It is too early to predict whether Vance’s newfound conservatism will help or hurt Trump’s candidacy, but the choice of Pendleton by McClellan turned out to be a fatal political error. Pendleton, as one of the leaders of the “Copperhead” movement, had voted against the 13th Amendment which ended slavery.

McClellan must have known all that but still thought that Pendleton’s presence on the ticket would help him win Ohio and thus the presidency. Instead, Pendleton became an easy target for the Lincoln campaign. The Democratic ticket lost in a landslide to Lincoln and Johnson. McClellan didn’t even carry Ohio.

Former President Trump has said that he could beat Abraham Lincoln in a hypothetical election. Perhaps that is true; however, I would be curious to know whom he would have chosen as his hypothetical running mate. It would make a difference.

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The Unshakeable Resilience of Lahaina, One Year After the Wildfires

A t the elder’s call of "Kani Ka Pū," the sound of the conch shell echoes across Hanakaʻōʻō Beach Park, summoning hundreds of surfers and outrigger canoe paddlers to the water. They paddle out, their silhouettes stark against the horizon, to honor the 102 lives lost to the Maui wildfires one year ago.

Onshore, the community gathers in shared purpose: groups that have emerged from the ashes lead lei-making workshops, screen print "LAHAINA STRONG" onto clothing, and provide free childcare for families still rebuilding their lives. Faith leaders, hotel workers, and small business owners join hands in prayer and song, their voices mingling with the ocean breeze, a testament to the enduring spirit of Lahaina.

A year ago, wildfires devastated my beloved Maui. Today, on the anniversary of those tragic events, I reflect on the remarkable resilience and unity that has blossomed from the charred remains.

Read More: The Climate Crisis and Colonialism Destroyed My Maui Home. Where We Must Go From Here In those first chaotic days, Maui rallied together, materializing over a dozen hubs of hope across beach parks, parking lots, and abandoned malls. These community resiliency hubs became lifelines, processing millions of food, clothing, and supply donations. World Central Kitchen flanked local culinary heroes like Sheldon Simeon and Mark Noguchi of Maui Chef Hui to provide thousands of hot meals to survivors at these hubs.

These hubs were beacons of hope while corporate landowners scurried for cover and FEMA's aid trickled in too slowly. But the community knew it needed more durable support. Indigenous and immigrant elders offered their blessings to a new generation of community leaders—service workers like Paʻele Kiakona , expectant mothers like Jordan Rudias and Courtney Lazo , and immigrants caseworkers like Veronica Mendoza Jachowski —who, despite their grief and losses, were already out tending to their neighbors: from coordinating clothing drives, to serving as pro-bono translators and repairing rooftops. They, and many other young leaders, were thrust into leadership to shepherd our island’s recovery.

They drew upon the enduring legacies of civil rights leaders, plantation labor organizers, the protectors of Mauna Kea, Ka Lāhui Hawaiʻi, and the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana, embodying their spirit of steadfast hoʻomana (a yearning for community power) and Aloha ʻĀina (a profound patriotism and connection to our land).

Under the banner of "Lahaina Strong," volunteers carried out extensive needs assessment surveys, coordinated essential services like childcare and mental health support, and established networks of mutual aid. Having gained their communities' trust and consolidated their influence, they then aimed for the throes of power.

Past disasters demonstrate that true recovery requires sustained effort at all levels—regulatory, legislative, and communal. Although grassroots fundraising for Maui was significant, the staggering $5.5 billion needed for full recovery was met with governmental intervention. Recognizing this disparity, Lahaina mobilized against the colonial institutions that historically controlled our island's resources.

Their movement, embodied by hundreds in "Lahaina Strong" shirts testifying at public forums, gained unanimous Maui County Council support and directed state legislation.

The months-long occupation at Kaʻanapali Beach became a focal point of their movement, symbolizing their right to the land and their determination to reclaim our community spaces. Here, amidst the throngs of tourists, they set up camp to "fish for housing," a nod to the cultural renaissance of the 1970’s when Native Hawaiian leaders secured constitutional rights to access public resources for traditional gathering practices.

This served not only as a media flashpoint to draw attention to the thousands of families still unhoused but also as an educational hub. Handcrafted Lahaina Strong ornaments were sold for $100 each, raising tens of thousands of dollars in direct aid over the holidays and increasing awareness among visitors, transforming their understanding of Maui’s plight.

The results have shocked Hawaii’s power structure. The Lahaina community's efforts have so far yielded over a billion dollars in government aid, as well as rectifying a wrongful dismissal of a Native Hawaiian government worker, and reclaiming tens of thousands of illegal vacation rentals by fire survivors and other local families.

Lahaina has pioneered a new model for disaster recovery that shifts focus from charity to change, setting a precedent as climate disasters become more frequent globally. This model has sparked one of the most impactful responses to disaster seen in modern times by not just aiding, but empowering impacted people to lead their own recovery efforts.

However, their work is far from finished. The utility that sparked the devastating blaze has no mandate to improve its infrastructure, and the invasive grasses that fueled the fires remain. Meanwhile, local streams, once lifeblood for Lahaina, are still controlled by colonial interests, and unchecked pollution continues to exacerbate global climate change.

Read More: Maui Wildfires Had Severe Health and Economic Consequences on Residents, Study Finds Lahaina still requires federal investments to rebuild more resilient infrastructure and accelerate the transition to clean energy globally. Corporate polluters and land owners must be held accountable for environmental and social damages. More land, both locally and nationwide, should be designated for conservation and entrusted to its indigenous inhabitants. Their stewardship is crucial for fostering resilient communities and reversing biodiversity loss. But the momentum is on Maui’s side. With a blank slate and newfound power, Lahaina is poised to reinvent itself as a world leader in nature-based, modern solutions—like community solar, regenerative farming, agro-energy, and ecotourism—and a new crop of leaders have emerged to steer us home.

As the ceremony concludes, a single 45-foot outrigger canoe glides back to shore, its paddlers moving in tune with the ocean's currents. Guided by their ancestors and propelled by the power of Kanaloa, the guardian of the ocean, they embody the strength of generations past and present. Their paddles dip rhythmically into the water—"hut, hut, ho"—in such perfect synchrony that the crowns of their heads remain steady on the horizon.

This unity, a rareness in today’s polarized society, is what sustained the original inhabitants of Malu ʻUlu o Lele, the ancient name of Lahaina Town, for centuries. It is the same unity that will heal this island and nourish its people to flourish anew.

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• Bangladesh has ousted an autocrat. Now for the hard part

A caretaker leader, Muhammad Yunus, must try to rebuild democracy

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A s exits GO , it was dramatic. On August 5th Sheikh Hasina, the prime minister of Bangladesh, fled the country she has ruled with an increasingly harsh grip since 2009. She was driven out by a vast display of people power on the streets of Dhaka, the capital, and will be replaced by a caretaker government, backed by the army and led by Muhammad Yunus , a Nobel peace laureate. Like him, many Bangladeshis are calling it a “second liberation”, half a century after independence.

Yet to meet the promise of the moment, Bangladesh must do more than oust an ageing autocrat: it must also clean up a rotten political system. The good news is that the economy is resilient and civil society is robust. The problems are venal political dynasties and the enfeebled institutions that have failed to stand up to them. Mr Yunus has a short time to set the country on a democratic path. His success or failure will shape the lives of 173m Bangladeshis, and influence the rivalry between China , India, Russia and the West.

Bangladesh has been in turmoil for some time. A rigged election in January confirmed the country had descended into thuggish one-party rule. In July mass student protests erupted against the reimposition of reservations of 30% of government jobs for descendants of veterans of the war of liberation in the 1970s, which protesters saw as patronage for supporters of Sheikh Hasina’s party, the Awami League ( al ). The unrest became a broader uprising and the government responded with a shoot-to-kill curfew. Over 450 people have died.

After the army withdrew its support for Sheikh Hasina rather than spill more blood, mobs ransacked her palace. They vandalised statues of her father, who led Bangladesh to independence, and around whom Sheikh Hasina had built a personality cult. Mr Yunus, 84, a revered microfinance pioneer, finds himself in charge. It is not yet clear who will be in his administration, how it will work or for how long.

For much of the time since Bangladesh broke off from Pakistan in 1971, it has endured either military rule or a messy form of democracy, in which power has alternated between two dynasties, the al and its rival, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party ( bnp ). Things looked up in 2008, when Sheikh Hasina won a free election. Economic growth, already robust, approached 7% a year for the next decade, fuelled by garment manufacturing. Rising incomes and feisty ngo s helped cut poverty, boost literacy and get more women into jobs. Bangladesh was a star among emerging markets. Diplomatically, Sheikh Hasina had close ties to India but also forged military and commercial links with China and sought cordial relations with the West.

However, at home she grew ever more oppressive. Many opposition politicians were locked up before January’s farcical election; the BNP boycotted it. Bangladesh’s economic model began to show strain. Two-fifths of young people lack regular employment. The al exercises control over the allocation of everything from teachers’ jobs to graduate openings in business. Since 2020 inflation and capital flight have undermined stability. The country’s foreign reserves have fallen by more than half since 2021, to $19bn. In 2023 it took out a $4.7bn loan from the imf to stabilise its balance of payments. From the street corner to the boardroom, disillusion has spread.

Mr Yunus faces an immensely difficult task. His priority should be to restore order and prevent waves of retributive violence, which have blighted Bangladeshi politics in the past. This means ensuring that the caretaker government, while run by technocrats, also includes representatives of the protesting students and of all political parties, including the AL .

Even harder will be to avoid some pressing dangers. The country could fall prey to Islamist extremism, as Pakistan has. If the financial squeeze worsens, Bangladesh could become dependent on China for cheap loans and arms. That would destabilise relations with neighbouring India and could erode democracy even further. And a fresh election might restore an unreformed bnP to power. Having suffered persecution under Sheikh Hasina, its leaders are eager to take charge again. Yet their party also has a record of thuggery and cronyism.

Mr Yunus needs to work fast. The unelected caretaker government must not remain in office for too long lest it lose legitimacy or, worse, its military backers are tempted to cling to power indefinitely. Mr Yunus should therefore aim to hold proper elections on a reasonable timescale, but first he will have to clean up institutions that Sheikh Hasina captured, such as the electoral authority and the courts. When it comes to the economy, the government should raise more external funding to lower the risk of a balance-of-payments panic, and press for a crucial new trade deal with the European Union. The existing generous terms under which Bangladesh exports its garments will expire in 2029. In the coming years, the country will lose its broader status as one of the least developed countries, which grants it various trade and financing privileges.

Most important, Mr Yunus must urge the political system to open itself to new ideas and leaders, reflecting the aspirations of the country’s young, growing and increasingly urban population. This requires it to ensure that new parties can form and campaign without harassment. It also means asking the al and bnp to install new leaders who are not part of the founding dynasties. Sclerosis at the top has poisoned politics.

A tall order in Bengal

Despite its daunting problems, which also include a severe vulnerability to climate change, Bangladesh has advantages. Unlike most troubled countries, it has an economy capable of rapid growth. And in Mr Yunus it now has a leader with moral authority. Western powers should help him, especially if his military backers try to meddle. America, Europe and Japan are Bangladesh’s biggest markets and big sources of finance, so they have influence. India, which has often backed strongman rule, needs to do its bit: if it wants a stable neighbourhood it should urge democratic renewal and offer financial support. Bangladesh matters; it must not be allowed to fail. ■

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This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “Bangladesh begins again”

Leaders August 10th 2024

How to respond to the riots in britain, will america’s economy swing the election, is tim walz the right vice-presidential running-mate for kamala harris, banning the opposition won’t save thailand’s unpopular regime, why ethiopia and nigeria must press on with reforms.

From the August 10th 2024 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

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Opinion Writer

Harris’s Economic Plans: The Good, the Bad and the Unnecessary

I understand why Vice President Kamala Harris is going hard against inflation. Politically, it’s the right thing to do. Economically, though, she’s like a general fighting the last war.

Prices are rising much more slowly, mostly because economic growth is cooling. On Wednesday the government announced that consumer prices rose just 2.9 percent in the 12 months through July, the lowest annual increase since 2021.

Inflation is headed lower even if the White House does nothing: Economists surveyed by Blue Chip Economic Indicators this month predicted the Consumer Price Index would rise just 2.3 percent in 2025 from 2024.

Better yet, the economists predicted that the personal consumption expenditures price index — the one targeted by the Federal Reserve — will rise just 2.1 percent next year. That’s a mere tenth of a point above the Fed’s target.

In other words, inflation is more or less a solved problem. Harris, the Democratic presidential candidate, could do nothing more than stand at a podium and declare that high inflation is history, and she would be right — already now, and even more in the future.

But political considerations won’t allow Harris to be nearly so calm. Voters are still angry about the inflationary burst of 2022 and 2023.

The problem is that some of the things that Harris wants to do to protect voters could end up being counterproductive. We will hear more about her ideas in a speech planned for Friday in Raleigh, N.C., but what she has spoken about so far is a mix of pretty good and pretty bad ideas.

On the good side, I’d list an expanded child tax credit, which, depending on how it’s structured, could lift 400,000 children above the poverty line. She may also call for incentives to get state and local governments to build more affordable housing, which is badly needed.

I’m much less enthusiastic about Harris’s agreement with Donald Trump that tip income for service and hospitality workers should be exempted from federal income tax. It wouldn’t help lower-income workers who don’t get tips or tipped workers who already don’t pay federal income tax. And it would encourage employers to shift more workers into getting paid partly with tips, which is unsteady compared with a fixed wage.

I also think Harris’s campaign against “price gouging” is misplaced. Not every price increase, even one that increases a company’s profit, should be regarded as potentially criminal. The best fix for high prices is promoting competition, not prosecution. I hope that will be a big focus of Harris’s speech on Friday.

Zeynep Tufekci

Opinion Columnist

Wealthy Nations Must Prioritize the Global Fight Against Mpox

The W.H.O. has declared a new global public health emergency for an outbreak of deadly mpox, primarily in the Democratic Republic of Congo. In response, wealthy nations must do everything possible to stop the disease’s spread.

Mpox, formerly known as the monkeypox virus, made the news in 2022 when a global outbreak, including in the United States, prompted a public health emergency. But by May 2023, cases in wealthy nations had receded, largely because of vaccination drives and behavior change among those most at risk of contracting the virus. The W.H.O. ended that mpox emergency.

But the virus hadn’t disappeared, and it’s now back on the rise, potentially with a vengeance.

The mpox virus has two types : a much deadlier Clade I and a less severe Clade II. In 2022, the United States experienced an outbreak of Clade II. But lacking support for eradication efforts, including vaccination drives, Clade II simmered in African countries. Worse, Clade I — estimated to have a 3 percent to 6 percent fatality rate — also spread, though it was confined to the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo. Despite all the global attention heaped on this disease at the time, African countries never received enough vaccines or sufficient support to eradicate the virus.

Now, Clade I cases are sharply on the rise in Congo, where the disease has claimed the lives more than a thousand people, most of them children . It has reached more urban areas . Cases have begun to pop up in other African countries, including Burundi, Kenya and Uganda.

So far, wealthy nations have failed to send enough vaccines to counter the disease’s quick spread. The African Union’s health agency Africa C.D.C. has said it has only about 200,000 mpox vaccine doses available out of the 10 million needed. The global vaccine alliance GAVI told Reuters it needs $84 million to respond in areas at most risk, but it has raised only $8 million.

But providing vaccines alone is not enough. In Congo, stigma, regulatory obstacles and other crises — including measles and cholera outbreaks — have made a coordinated response difficult. The country finally approved two mpox vaccines just a few weeks ago, Reuters reported , but it has only about 65,000 vaccines available in the short term (for a population of about 100 million people) and vaccination campaigns appear unlikely to begin before October. Comprehensive international support may be the only thing that could beat back the disease.

Will we get it right this time around? If not, the United States and the rest of the world may get an unfortunate shot at a Round 2 of the virus too, perhaps in its much deadlier form.

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Jonathan Alter

Contributing Opinion Writer

Harris Shouldn’t Forget That Democracy Is Still on the Ballot

Kamala Harris is running an artful campaign so far, thanks in part to her upbeat, hopeful message. She has shrewdly positioned herself as the change candidate — no small feat for a sitting vice president — and has tagged Donald Trump as representing the weird past we should leave behind.

In her often joyful stump speech, Harris talks more about freedom than about threats to democracy. That makes strategic sense. Polls show that voters are more concerned with specific issues than about the specter of authoritarian government. But going too far in this direction risks letting some of the terrifying stakes move to the periphery of the campaign. Defending democracy was a potent issue for Democrats in avoiding a red wave in 2022, and it should remain a critical part of their argument.

It’s smart to make fun of Trump and treat him like a loser, which gets inside his head and causes more unforced errors. But jibes about his Willie Brown helicopter fantasies and crowd size nonsense should be matched with reminders that Trump inspires violence (including the attack on Paul Pelosi and Trump’s vile jokes about it), has promised to be “a dictator” on his first day and proposed the “termination” of the Constitution.

Democrats shouldn’t forget to emphasize that Trump said Russia could “ do whatever the hell they want ” to NATO countries that displeased him, a position that, as his own former aides say, could cause a world war.

While these arguments will not sway hard-core MAGA supporters, there are still plenty of undecided voters and Trump leaners who might yet be persuaded to consider Harris or at least stay home instead of reluctantly voting for Trump and JD Vance. Many have a little Liz Cheney in them that can be brought to the surface with a reasonable conversation.

So ask your uncle Bob: Would you like to see violent Jan. 6 protesters pardoned and the Jan. 6 Choir perform at Trump’s inauguration? Do you think the three living former Republican vice presidents — Dan Quayle, Dick Cheney and Mike Pence — were wrong to stay away from the Republican convention?

Meanwhile, a little naming and shaming wouldn’t hurt, including making sure the members of the Georgia Election Board who advocate Election Day chaos — and the more than 70 other election officials around the country who have said they would not certify the results if Harris won — hear from the other side. While almost no Fortune 500 chief executives are endorsing the Republican nominee (a big change from the past), Elon Musk and Steve Schwarzman are among those backing Trump. As they and too many others fail the character test of their generation, it’s up to the rest of us to call them out on it.

Parker Richards

Opinion Staff Editor

Why Democrats Should Sing the Union’s Civil War Anthems

The Kamala Harris campaign has adopted a song by the recording artist Beyoncé (who has recently seen some mainstream success ) as its main musical anthem. But it shouldn’t stop there. The campaign could also go back in time and fully embrace a previous century’s patriotic musical heritage in a way that could unite progressives.

The right has recently seemed almost averse to a pre-eminent American flag, preferring corruptions like the so-called thin blue line flag. That provides an opportunity for liberals and progressives to reclaim the country’s iconography, and the next step is to remold and proudly sing the songs of the Civil War-era Union.

Crushing the breakaway slaveholding terror state known as the Confederacy — a nightmare built on America’s worst impulses — is among this country’s proudest moments. The music celebrating that victory is beautiful and patriotic — and already known to many Americans.

“ While We Were Marching Through Georgia ” and “ Union Dixie ” might be a stretch too far for the Harris campaign (though what could be more unifying, really, than bringing traitors back into the fold?), but “ The Battle Cry of Freedom ” and “ The Battle Hymn of the Republic ” are surely fitting.

“The Battle Hymn” is particularly evocative. Its lyrics, written by Julia Ward Howe in the midst of the Civil War, evoke peace and war alongside each other. The goal of a peaceful country, embracing equality as its purpose, goes hand in hand with its willingness to fight for that outcome: The “righteous sentence” can be enacted only by willingness to fight for it and to “make men free”; to that end, America’s musicians must “never call retreat.”

The song expresses a martial Christianity, an understanding that slavery was a sin and that it must be cleansed, by flame and sword and through a war comparable in its moral scope to the Crucifixion itself. It presents a redemptive, just vision of Christianity, one that — unlike the exclusionary narrative advanced by Christian nationalists — seeks to use one faith tradition as a way to uplift rather than to repress.

And the Harris campaign seems to know this: At a rally in Eau Claire, Wis., this month, the folk band Bon Iver performed “ The Battle Cry of Freedom .” Surrounded by red, white and blue bunting, flags flying above, it presented an unabashedly patriotic vision of American liberalism writ large. It’s an image with appeal across party lines, like Abraham Lincoln’s 1864 “National Union” electoral alliance, which combined Republicans, Democrats and Unconditional Unionists into one bloc to support the continued war against slavery and secessionism.

Music has power. It can convey ideological messages, appeal to a mass audience and carry through lines in politics across decades or even centuries better than any other form. As the Jacobite movement of the 18th century used its songcraft to carry a proscribed ideology to a mass audience, Harris and her party have a unique opportunity to use America’s auditory history to build the iconography of a 21st-century political movement. They should seize it — as they trample out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.

Liriel Higa

Opinion Audience Director

Let Jordan Chiles Keep Her Bronze Medal

What has become the most notable epic fail of the Paris Olympics began with heartbreak. Ana Barbosu, a Romanian gymnast, appeared to place third in the floor event finals of the artistic gymnastics competition and prematurely celebrated her victory. Moments later, she wept as another gymnast moved into bronze medal position.

Jordan Chiles, Barbosu’s American competitor, initially appeared to place fifth in the competition. But after an inquiry by her coach, the judges agreed that Chiles deserved full credit for a leap they hadn’t scored and bumped her up to third place, above Barbosu and another Romanian gymnast, Sabrina Maneca-Voinea. The two Romanians had, in fact, received the same overall score, but in a tiebreaker, Barbosu was ranked higher based on her higher execution score.

The online backlash against Chiles’s bronze medal win was immediate, intense and unwarranted. But the slipshod nature of what has become a seemingly endless saga of inquiries and international rulings has cast a shadow over what should have been the sporting career highlight for three tremendous gymnasts.

The Romanian Gymnastics Federation appealed to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, an international body that settles disputes in international sporting competitions. It ruled that Chiles’s coach’s inquiry had come four seconds too late, voiding her appeal and revised score. The panel then ruled that the International Gymnastics Federation should determine the final ranking of the gymnasts. The federation subsequently passed the decision on to the International Olympic Committee, which has stripped Chiles of her bronze.

There are additional complicating factors in this murky moral mess, including whether Chiles’s coach had in fact submitted the inquiry too late or whether Maneca-Voinea, the other Romanian, should not have received an out-of-bounds deduction that lowered her score. (Video replays showed that she did not step out of bounds.) If the judges had awarded Chiles full credit for her leap and more accurately scored Maneca-Voinea, then Maneca-Voinea would have finished third, Chiles fourth and Barbosu fifth.

There’s also a timeliness factor: If the Chiles inquiry was indeed too late, then it should not have been accepted. But it was accepted, and now the International Olympic Committee has decided to take back a bronze medal days after it was awarded, a dishonor usually reserved for athletes who have doped.

The Romanian Gymnastics Federation has proposed a solution that would ameliorate the mistakes made by officials that make sense: rank all three gymnasts third and give them all bronze medals. There is precedent for awarding duplicate medals (albeit in figure skating ), and such a move would duly acknowledge that these three gymnasts were failed more by their judges than their own skill.

For sports like gymnastics, which are arbitrated by judges instead of, say, the click of a finish line camera, crediting gymnasts with the appropriate difficulty levels and accurately determining whether they stayed in bounds is crucial for the sport to function fairly. Given the incompetence of these officials, awarding each of these athletes a medal would be the most just outcome.

Paul Krugman

Inflation: Put a Pork in It

The data keep telling us that inflation is basically over as a problem.

On Tuesday morning we got the latest report on producer prices , and it was “soft.” That’s a good indicator for the much more widely watched Consumer Price Index, which we’ll get Wednesday. More important, the details in the report were especially encouraging for yet another price index, personal consumption expenditures, which won’t be released until later this month but which the Federal Reserve prefers as a basis for monetary policy.

This report follows some good news about inflation expectations.

Economists generally believe that the stagflation of the 1970s was so hard to end, requiring years of high unemployment, because expectations of continuing high inflation had become entrenched among businesses and consumers. Two years ago, when inflation was near its recent peak, I argued that disinflation would be much easier this time because it wasn’t similarly entrenched.

I was right. In fact, on Monday the widely followed New York Fed survey of consumer expectations found that expected inflation over the next three years has fallen to its lowest level since the survey began in 2013:

Still, some people are having a hard time letting go of the narrative that America is suffering from runaway inflation. Among those people, of course, is Donald Trump, who ranted about consumer prices in Monday night’s conversation with Elon Musk .

I continue to be especially struck by Trump’s odd obsession with the price of bacon, which he insists costs “four or five times more than it did a few years ago.” This simply isn’t true. Indeed, while bacon prices are up, most workers’ wages are up considerably more:

Honestly, I find Trump’s delusions about smoked pork harder to understand than his conspiracy theories about crowd sizes. After all, grocery prices are part of everyday experience, and easy to check. Why haven’t some big, strong men with tears in their eyes come up to him to say, “Sir, you’re wrong about bacon”?

The Problem Is Not A.I. It’s the Disbelief Created by Trump.

Current artificial intelligence technologies have become surprisingly good at creating realistic images and video, unleashing fears that fake images can be used for political and election manipulation.

Well, yes and no.

Fake A.I. imagery is a challenging problem, and not simply because it looks realistic. The key issue is that these images muddy the waters of credibility for everyone while providing a handy excuse for political operatives willing to lie to their supporters already eager to believe the lie.

Take Donald Trump’s social media post on Sunday in which he accused Kamala Harris’s campaign of manipulating an image to make her crowd seem bigger at a Detroit airplane hangar last week.

“Has anyone noticed that Kamala CHEATED at the airport?” he wrote. “There was nobody at the plane, and she ‘A.I.’d’ it, and showed a massive ‘crowd’ of so-called followers, BUT THEY DIDN’T EXIST!”

How do we know an image is real in this day and age? An average person can no longer be certain of the authenticity of images or, increasingly, even videos through individual sleuthing. The A.I. is that good and is getting better. (That’s why the classic media literacy advice — do your own research — doesn’t work anymore.)

This makes it difficult to know what to believe, except through a key mechanism: trusting sources and trusting that they have either taken the image or video themselves or carefully vetted it as authentic.

That’s how we know that the crowd waiting for Harris was real, because there are pictures from photo agencies like Getty, as well as images and reports from multiple other news organizations that were on the tarmac, that match the circulating social media photos that caught Trump’s ire. We know that credible news organizations and photo agencies have very strict rules about images and videos. But that, in turn, requires trusting the photo agency or other media source furnishing the image or video.

While this made-up falsity by Trump & other right-wing provocateurs are posted/viewed by millions, here is video taken by @NnamEgwuon of the Michigan rally — not that this needs to be proven true: pic.twitter.com/Ul1IdyJ0RW https://t.co/MhJYG4As9e — Vaughn Hillyard (@VaughnHillyard) August 11, 2024

It’s no accident that Trump has made it a habit to portray credible news organizations as untrustworthy liars, and many of his supporters seem to have internalized that message they were open to in the first place.

Once trust is lost and all credibility is questioned, the lie doesn’t have to be high quality. It doesn’t have to be supported by highly realistic fake A.I. It doesn’t have to be so easily disprovable. To work, the lie just needs a willing purveyor and an eager audience. The A.I., then, is but a fig leaf.

The U.S. Wasn’t the Most Successful Country at the Olympics

China and the United States tied for gold medals at 40 apiece, and the United States had more medals overall, but the most successful nation at the Paris Olympics was Australia. France was second, followed by Britain and the Netherlands, with the United States coming in fifth and China 89th.

That’s according to a new ranking method that I wrote about ahead of the Games. Its inventors, Robert Duncan and Andrew Parece, wanted a method that wouldn’t overly favor the most-populous nations, but also wouldn’t give the top ranking every four years to a small country that gets a medal or two. (This year Grenada, with two medals, had the most per capita, followed by Dominica and St. Lucia.)

Australia tends to do well by their method. It also came out on top in the Tokyo Games. (It bears repeating, of course, that there is no official national winner, because the Games are a competition among athletes, not countries.)

The Duncan-Parece method ranks countries according to how improbable their medal counts are, on the assumption that all medal-winning nations have an equal propensity per capita for winning medals.

As they wrote in their paper on the subject: “We simply ask: how probable is it, in this idealization, for a given high-performing country (with a given population) to have won as many medals as it actually did, or more medals?”

Their measure of improbability is the one you would use to calculate the likelihood of flipping heads, say, 10 times in a row.

There seems to be growing interest in the subject. Duncan emailed me on Sunday to say that people from 153 countries had visited their website, olympicnationalrankings.com .

Katherine Miller

Opinion Writer and Editor

The Race Is On to Define Kamala Harris

Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:

Where the candidates physically are and what they’re up to: On Wednesday, Donald Trump is expected to hold a rally in Asheville, N.C., and JD Vance plans to campaign near Grand Rapids, Mich. Kamala Harris has not yet released information about upcoming events but did say over the weekend that her campaign would release an economic policy proposal this week.

Everything changes so fast right now that taking stock of the race can feel like an ephemeral pursuit, but in a series of polls, including the New York Times/Siena poll, Harris has either pulled even with Trump or has moved ahead in some places.

At the very least, the campaign has been reset to a toss-up, compared with the anemic state of President Biden’s polling against Trump. Nate Cohn of The Times observed in a sharp thread on Twitter over the weekend that people’s perception of Harris wasn’t totally stable — it’s changed in the last few weeks as she’s become more popular, and could change again. But, he added, “at least for now, we’re getting a reminder of what happens when the Democrats nominate a broadly acceptable candidate against Trump and his allies: They do pretty well.”

Harris is known to people, but is also totally new as a candidate. One place that the idea of Harris is being shaped for people, especially in battlegrounds, is on TV and in digital advertising. The first weekend of the Olympics, I was in A Battleground State for the weekend, and could see it in real time: It felt as if each commercial break alternated between “Kamala Harris is good” and “Kamala Harris is bad.”

The emphasis in the negative advertising was on the border especially .

Pro-Trump group MAGA Inc. is up on TV with this spot -- Features clip of Harris: "I am radical, I do believe that we need to get radical" pic.twitter.com/fqCXnE5MNt — Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) August 7, 2024

The emphasis in the positive advertising was on reintroducing Harris and her bio, including her time as a prosecutor . The Trump campaign and allies have also tried out more of a San Francisco radical theme .

And the Harris campaign is also up with this spot -- pic.twitter.com/fr8iR52uOf — Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) August 9, 2024

As more of Harris’s campaign gets locked in, it has expanded the portfolio of ads running: There are multiple versions of a bio ad that foregrounds her upbringing and middle-class economics (a big focus of the campaign so far) and an ad where she promises, as president, to hire more border agents . Next up in reintroducing Harris and her priorities will be the Democratic convention, which begins next week.