Welcome to another episode of Civic Cipher. I'm your host, Ramsy's job.
He is Rams' joh I am q Ward. You are listening to Civic Cipher, You should to stick around. We got a whole lot in store for you today. Kind of a heavy show, but something that is quite educational. We're going to be dealing a lot with what was, and then we're going to do our best to bring it to what is. And so we'll take some time and we'll talk about slavery and the implications of slavery.
I want to start off by making sure that we discuss how slavery in the United States was different than slavery around the world. This is something that comes up a lot in conversations, especially you know, these days, and you know, you may not know how to address that, how to approach that. You know, a lot of a lot of people use, you know, slavery as being so long ago, or they use slavery as being something of a global human phenomenon to distance themselves from the actual
implications of slavery. And we reject that general attitude. You know, around here, we like to fall on the sword if we need to. And so we're gonna give you everything that you need to know exactly how to deal with those conversations and you know, maybe your own prejudices in your own mind, because let's be honest, you know we still have those despite our best efforts and our best intentions. So we're gonna take some time to talk about slavery
and America. We're also going to take some time to talk about the Willie Lynch Letter, which is something that we have mentioned on this show comes up a lot in hip hop songs and so forth, so we're gonna actually delve into that a bit. And for our way black history fact, we're gonna discuss more slavery. So a heavy show, but again one that will be educational and one that we believe will certainly make a difference. But first and foremost, we will start off with EBNY Excellence.
Shall we shall we? S So this week ABNY Excellence is sponsored by bi Nnews dot com and the Black Information Network Daily Podcast. Be sure to check out both of those, hosted by yours Truly, We're going to shout out a special young lady. She goes by the name of a Piper McCoy, who is the VP of Communications for Buzzfreed and we actually had a chance to see her work and to see the results of her work.
And you know, one of the things that we do every year is we visit complex Con and obviously we have a very strong media relationship with you know, these companies, and we actually got to see some black girl magic in real life and it was very inspirational and just knowing where she stands in the world, and I'll read a bit more, you can certainly appreciate why we're shouting
her out so again. VP of Communications for BuzzFeed works with the PR team and has a slate of responsibilities overseeing all internal and external communications for Complex Networks state
slate of brands. First we Feast Pigeons and Playing Soul Collector and more responsible for the licensing, brand partnerships and experiential including complex Con, Complex Land in each your Feed festival colms all across the bud BuzzFeed Inc. Which includes Busfeed, Complex Networks, Huffington Post and Tasty and you can find her on ig at frost Tart that is FROs t t A r t E. Just an amazing person, someone who beams excellence and if we can shout her out
we got two microphones. We're going to do it right.
Yeah, magic is the key word in the Black Girl Magic with Piper and shout out to our boy Bread over a complex as well.
All Right, So slavery in America this comes from. So you may know this. I've mentioned this on the show before, but I don't talk about it quite a bit. I'm subscribed to quite a few white supremacist blogs on the Internet, and that's because I have to be I need to know what it is people are thinking, what it is people are saying, what it is people are hiding behind that is creating a distance between the uses and the
thems in these very important conversations. Well, one thing that I came across it was a little troubling recently, was that, you know, there's a group of people that really feel like black people are responsible for.
Slavery.
Something that Q and I have discussed quite a bit on our various media rounds is that we take issue with the narrative that slavery was a choice made by black people. And you know, for those familiar with you know, our conversations beyond just this show, you may know that that's something that especially for Q's it's a touchy it's a touchy subject because he and you know, me and
most of us wholeheartedly disagree with that statement. It's just a complete falsehood and it is extremely insensitive and unfair and unkind. However, there are groups of people, mostly white folks, in little pockets of the internet who are very, very racist, you know who. They need this to be true, and so they will do their best to try to build an argument that removes white people from the responsibilities of slavery and kind of put black people in the hot seat,
if you will. So, this idea that black people are responsible for slavery does exist. And if you start to feel that way, you and you're a white person, particularly an older white male, if you feel that black people are responsible for slavery, then you feel less connected with the results of slavery. You feel less connected with sort of the responsibility to address, you know, the issues, the
systemic issues, and so forth. It's very easy for you to hide behind a narrative that tells you that, you know, white people are the great conquerors of the world and deserve to be so, and black people are just born bad and they are all bad. And the reason they're bad now is because bad is the natural state of black people, and it turns a blind eye to the reality of the situation. Like, you know, where's the most
black people in Africa? If you go to Africa, you find that there are black people that are literally kings and queens and they're full complex societies all the way down to you know, some bad people, you know, and there's not nearly as many people in prison in Africa, but we have a whole separate, you know, prison problem
in this country. And to those people who say, you know, Africa is you know very poor, that Africa is, you know, on and on a lot that has to do with that is not any It doesn't have anything to do with anything other than guns. Who has the gunpowder? Who shows up when everyone has the spears with the guns? And then you know the snowball effect of that, you know, who owns these lands? Who can extract the resource? Is?
You know, where is the infrastructure pointed? Is the infrastructure pointed toward the coastline so that the resources can be extracted and shipped up to Great Britain or to the Americas, Or is the infrastructure you know in these countries, has it developed along with the rest of the industrialized world. So again, these falsehoods allow these often very conservative white men to insulate themselves from the reality of the situation,
which is that we're not really conquerors. We're more often regarded as you know, thieves and plunderers and looters and liars and so forth. Right now, this show has never been the sort of show that tries to lay the blame of you know, these historical things at the feet of any person who's walking a path doing their best to be kind and to be a brother and a sister to black people and other people in this planet.
But we also have to recognize that some of us are in a better position to address these issues that continue to plague these poor communities, black communities than others. And oftentimes it's the people with the wealth. Oftentimes those people tend to be white. So now we can talk about slavery in America. My bad, that was a mouthful, but I needed to get that all out there, kind of framed the conversation today. So let's start. Slaves were
purchased from Africans, all right, that is true. That is something that you know, we have to acknowledge on all sides, and that's okay. I don't think that's the worst thing in the world, because when you have a full picture of exactly what that means, you understand it. Bear in mind that when you hear that you can go and buy slaves, and then you go and buy slaves, you in effect create an economy where slaves is your main export, right, and that was true for hundreds of years in Africa. Okay,
But I think I'm jumping the gun here. I want to reframe slavery in your mind, okay. And I want you to take this conversation. If you have conversations with other people you know in your household, holidays, birthdays, whatever, who maybe they feel distant, they feel like these problems aren't really theirs to have to deal with. This will allow you to kind of bring them into the conversation. So here's what I want you to do. Don't get mad at me, que because I know you tend to
get mad when I do this. But I want you to change the word slave. I want you to will not change it. I want you to add another word to it. Let's call it child slave, okay, and everything that implies. You know, there are some very awful people in the world who may purchase a child slave for everything disgusting that you might be thinking right now. Okay, and I'll refrain from using the real word that you know it's probably in your mind, but I don't want
to trigger anyone. So we'll go with child slave. Okay. So let's rethink the the economy of slavery, of buying and selling human beings. Okay. And because you may have been taught unintentionally to be racist, you know, even black people, we're taught racist stereotyp types. You know, we're not impervious to those things. Okay. So this doesn't make you a bad person. It makes you human and susceptible to propaganda,
to systemic influence. Okay, but I'm going to help you cut through that because you might think about black people a certain way, but human beings have a tendency to think of children saying. So let's again, instead of slavery, we'll go with child slaves.
Okay.
So we're going to read this again. Child slaves were purchased from Africa. Okay. Does that change a bit in your mind? Because it should, because then it be goes, then it should go well, whoa whoa, whoa. No one should be purchasing children, right, that's an awful thing to think about. What are they doing with these children? They're taking them from a home. They don't you know, what
is what's the point of this? But I'll continue near in child slaves it might grant you a direct line of empathy, human empathy where you know, maybe that has been calloused over years of you thinking of black people as criminal or black people as whatever. Right now, let me let me paint another picture for you. The slaves in Africa, we're off then conquered tribes. Okay, there were thieves or criminals that ended up slave in slavery or you know, folks that had committed some sort of offense.
Said there there was you couldn't go into Africa, You couldn't be an African and then go to you know, the country over and then buy a slave for yourself. That wasn't a thing. Slaves did not come about in that way. Slaves were again often the result of tribes that had been conquered, which is the thing, you know. But bear in mind that if a tribe is conquered, typically the tribe gets absorbed into the conquering tribe and
after a generation, they're all kind of one family. If you will, okay, if you're a criminal and you break the law or you murder someone or whatever, you know, and then your punishment is slavery. If you have children, those children didn't break the law. Those children are not slaves. Right. You found a lot more frequently that slaves would marry into families. You found more frequently that slavery wasn't a permanent condition. You were a slave for a time. You know,
this is what would happen in Africa. So again, when there are people in these chat rooms, these racist chat rooms, that say, well, black people of the Africans sold black people into slavery, well, the type of slavery in Africa was very different, a very different phenomenon from what we ended up with over here in the US. It was about economics, was about money. Slaves were not human beings in the way that they were in Africa's. It was a very different sort of thing for folks that say, oh,
slavery existed around the world. You know, the Jews are slaves, and this and that and the and all these things are very true, and we acknowledge all of those things. But if you're saying that in a way to distance yourself from the responsibility of slavery, I'm trying to help you,
you know, build that bridge. So we've discussed, you know, reframing slavery around child slavery, because again, if you have the human capacity to empathize and you have been made to be calloused when it comes to black people or affairs that affect black people, we're going to appeal to your human condition because black people, as you know, are
human beings. The first human beings ever. I move on slavery in the United States was based on race, meaning that it was something that followed you, the stench, the legacy followed you, even if you found freedom. You know, the handful of slave movies you may have seen, you know,
at the end the hero gets freedom or whatever. You can be talking about Django, Twelve Years of Slave, any of the slave movies we know them all, right, typically during that period, if the movie is from a black person's perspective, this is what the end goal is, to be free.
Right.
We'll talk about freedom a bit in the second half of the show, but freedom in the US from slavery didn't necessarily mean freedom. Freedom from slavery in Africa absolutely could mean that, you know, and again it's because the United States, slavery was based around race. These group of people who look like this, they are the slaves. That is, it is the permanent condition. If they have children, then their children will be slaves and they will work for us,
and this is what they do. And then they developed a whole range of reasons to justify these human rights violations. You know, they preached from the parts of the Bible that reflected to one degree or another their feelings about slavery. As you know, this country fought a civil war about slavery, which meant that approximately half of the people felt like, hey man, we're not giving up these slaves. Again, think child slaves.
Okay.
If you have a tough time empathizing, think child slaves, okay, just pop that in your head. Half of the country was like, no, we need to keep these childs. Everything that happened to a child slave happened to black men and black women in this country. We'll get to that in a second. But you know, slavery was very popular, very lucrative financially and otherwise, and it was based on race.
This is a very different phenomenon in the borders of Africa, which again, at that time, you don't have huge prison complexes. You don't have ways to punish people that assure that they will be confined or you know, relegated to a certain space for a certain amount of time. That's as sophisticated as what we have now. You know, so slavery as a way to work off your debt to society, slavery as a way to you know, whatever, that's your thing.
You can marry, you can have to you know, for the most part, you still were considered a human being with a degree of autonomy. Now, if you wanted to come back with certain examples, I may even allow them. I didn't find any, but you know, certain examples of outliers then sure. But for the most part, if we're talking about the institution of slavery, we're talking about a fundamental difference at the core of what took place in Africa versus what took place in the United States. Now,
I've been talking a lot. I know you've been over there, champion at the bit anything so far.
Sure, I mean, I'd like to really approach it from the perspective of a student, right, and you playing the teacher in this example. With the topic that we're speaking of, you spoke about conquered tribes. I want people to think warring tribes and one lost right, because we talk about colonization, and colonizers over the history of Earth have kind of fit a specific description. Conquered tribes in this sense is more about another thing that's not a that is not
a unique phenomenon, and that's war. War for land or resources or whatever throughout the history of Earth has happened, and once one of the tribes or one of the countries, or one of the group's wins, it was common for them to not murder or kill those who remained after the fighting was over, and those people became slaves or servants, and in some cases, I'm guessing we're able to work off or age out of being servants or slaves and once.
The reason why that's important is because that second, that next generation of people, they don't have that resentment or that desire to push back because there's no longer an enemy. Like you said, they've been absorbed into this tribe or and to this country and to this group of people. So I kind of want to just add some more color to that point where people can understand when you say conquered tribes, you know, think war or battle or whatever.
When you call it, one side loses, they surrender because after so much bloodshed or after so much death, Okay, it's clear we're not going to win here. We surrender. And now those people are not sentenced to death. They're sentenced to servitude essentially, and that is much different. These people are not our slave because they are beneath us, right, They're going to help us create more people and sustain
the land that we now share. And again, the next generation, they're not fighting anymore, so there's no need for those people to be slaves, which is much different than you were going to be a slave here forever if one group had it their way because of the color of your skin, by nature, you are beneath us. Your people
are slaves. That's what they're for, that's why you exist. Again, a much different set of circumstances with regards to people on the continent of Africa and their involvement with chattel slavery in the way that it led to people coming to the Americas. People making that same argument that Africans
sold slaves. I'm thinking in that instance. And again I was not around, and I am not a studied historian with regards to the slave trade beyond what we learned in school, which, as you can imagine, very little, well very little intentionally. Right, the history in some instances, in a lot of countries is a propaganda of the authors, who are the conquerors, who are the people who stand
to be the heroes in that story. So yeah, this existed, but you know, let's paint that picture with as little color as possible, selling off people who perhaps were conquered in those battles, and I think also not being given much in the way of choice, Right, we can purchase these slaves from you, or with our guns versus your more primitive weapons, we can take them. It's your choice.
I don't think this was people in Africa saying, hey, let's find as many Africans as we can to sell to the oppressors.
So watch this. So I mentioned that a bench it became that. So you're absolutely right. Initially when the British showed up found out that you could get some slaves in the British, of course they're expanding, you know, a couple of extra hands here and there, might make a difference.
Once they started to acquire slaves from Africa, the western coast of Africa, they ultimately created a demand to where the slave the slave trade, the industry in Africa was built around conquering tribes for the purposes of enslaving them and selling them to white merchants. And you see at this time in Africa this mass exodus of human beings, which coupled with you know, lands being conquered again because of these treaties, because of a lack of gunpowder, which
is a Chinese invention. I believe you realize that Africa lost so much of what was precious, the human capital and then of course the resources. And the crazy thing about what you mentioned is that, yeah, the history is
written by the people who conquer whatever. Right. So it's funny because we know that the British were the originals to start the slave trade or whatever America had were British colonies at the time, right, But then the British loves to say that they were the first to out lost slavery, and they conveniently leave out the fact that
they paid reparations to the slaveholders. The same thing that happened in the US so it's important for us to understand that this happens, so that we can understand the legacy of it and the weight that it still carries in our day to day lives. And we're going to touch on that in the second half of the show, so stick around for that