I finally have finish the first couple of pages, leaning about the first racist, and the puritan power in the young 13 colonies. And let me tell you, I am all into it! wait no, I mean I like the writting not, oh no.
Anyways, this book is really easy to understand and very strait forward. It tells the story of a person, what happened, and how it relates to the next thing. It all sounds like a story, and I really like it because I never notice the time skips, like I know they are there, but I don't notice them until I recap what I am reading.
The first couple of pages, as I said, talk about what racism means as well as Antiracists and Assimilationists. It also talks about the first racist, well the first recorded racist. This man was Prince Henry, who convinced his father to capture the Muslims in the tip of Morocco, Portugal. Why? well he was jealous of their riches and wanted them for himself.
This story, even though this was the first real slavery, it wasn't the first, first one, as it says it the book, it was not uncommon for people to get capture.
But here comes the twist, yes Prince Harry might've been bad, but Gomes Eanes de Zurara who was a writer and cheered Prince Henry, was even worst. Zurara wrote defending on the African slave trading, and tried to humiliate a lot of very educated Africans in Morocco, to make them fell like a minority to the others around them. The funny thing about this man, which really makes this more questionable, is that Zurara was African himself... Um, but he succeeded and Prince Harry was all in to getting slaves, and really, it wasn't bad for him at all. Getting workers who will do what they say and not have to worry about paying them, was a great way for Prince Henry to get all the riches he wanted.
You know, I wonder where Zurara got this ideology from. Maybe it was because he just wanted free workers who wouldn't complain so much (And this might've been the answer) But I just think that he was influenced by something else he'd seen, hating his own race and becoming the first racist African.
So, Zurara gets want he wanted, calls Africans savages, and now everyone is trying to come up with a why just so they can defend slavery more. These theories are a bit, um, weird, finding explanation to why some people are white and some people are black is a bit obvious, but in our time, these were written in what? 1577? HOLY COW, that's 443 years ago!
But now, stay with me. Bam! Time skip, Zurara is most likely dead (Maybe, perhaps?) and now we are in the early America, with the Puritan power, ah yes! when religion was the only thing that mattered, what some great times-Sarcasm-. So two men you need to pay attention to, Jhon Cotton and Richard Mather. Two Puritan men who believed in the holy color of white, and disapproved and hated he color black, two men who had great influence in the community, and two men who developed....Harvard? Unexpected, just kidding, a school that was made in the times where slavery was a thing, of course was developed by men who were racists.
These men had followers on Tiktok or something, and were able to influence other Puritans onto believing that they were better than Native Americans, English people who were not puritans, anyone who was not puritan, anything not related to puritan, any country that was not puritan, non-puritans, oh! and African Americans. Because of this, slavery became a big and normal thing in the colonies, millions of African lives were forced to be in the slave trading, from Europe to the colonies (because really, the United States was not a thing yet.)
In the end, moat whites had one feeling towards African Americans:
They were too barbaric to be converted.
They were savages,
and couldn't be loved even by god!
I finished in chapter 3, A different Adam, and even though I wanted to read more...it was 12 am.
A quick summary about this chapter is the same thing again, just getting stupider and stupider. Rich, white people trying to make excuses on to why slavery is good and African Americans shouldn't be treated equally, some excuses are "Slavery was helpful for the African Americans because they were voluntary slaves" Uh huh, or "the purest, perfect minds belonged to whites, and dirty mind belonged to Blacks" ok? Oh also "Africans were born different from Adam and they had a different story, like savages" Yeah, just use your imagination for that one.
Even though these thoughts were ridiculous, this didn't apply to all white people's opinion. Many white people were against slavery, one of them is my dear old friend Hamilton. These people who disagreed with slavery weren't going to sit around and wait for everything to be better, instead they fought to get people into equalizing Black lives and White lives. This lead to the first antiracist writting from 1688, pleading against slavery. Did it work? Uhh kind of, I mean it did let a lot of people know what was going on, but still, people who rose up and fought were shut down by slave-owners, slave-owners needed the slaves to make business and make money.
So, blah blah blah, Native war happens ending in the puritans killing a leader and cutting up his body to show off, blah blah blah white privilege is a thing that happened back then and sometimes even happens today. You know, all of the norm.
And that concludes the 3 first chapters!
So, in my opinion, the stories were really interesting, all being these people who don't know what they are doing to be honest. I really like history and this book makes me like it more, trying to give an explanation to why people who think other races are superior really was interesting, and I never really questioned it before this book, well I knew there was racism and white privilege, but I never knew as to why or where it started, and now I truly know.
It was also really interesting how just one simple man can give so much influence to other people, from Zurara to Jhon and Richard, to most of the colonies and most likely Europe, all of these influenced by a thought which is so wrong in every ingle way, treating another race as a minority and forcing them into work is disgusting and ridiculous, and still happens today in very poor countries and really powerful ones.
I can't wait to keep reading and talk more about the chapters, I am really engaged in everything that appends, and really it's a roller-coaster of madness and other feelings, but, history isn't always pretty after all!
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