‘Thank God’ – American Author Honestly Confronts Ancestors Taken as Slaves

Personally, I’ve managed to trace my family tree back to the late 1400s (depending on which branch I go down). Yet the ones that fascinate me the most are those brave souls who left Europe for the United States anywhere from 170 to 200 years back.

From my research, my Weithmann and Matthes ancestors from Unterfranken, Bavaria, as well as my Swaney and McBride ancestors originating out of County Donegal, Ireland… they all left shit circumstances for the possibility of life in a different part of the world that would also be shit circumstances.

But wait, the shit circumstances in the USA did hold a glimmer of hope that life for their kids and grandkids would certainly be a damn sight better than living life as a dirt farmer where starvation, war and pestilence were always just one failed crop, one failed government, or one runaway virus away from the front door to the family hovel.

Stop, wait a sec. Europeans don’t have a monopoly on ancestors sucking it up for future generations. I’m pretty sure that Japanese, Korean, Mexican and Cuban families came here with nothing, but built a life at least somewhat better than things were back in Japan, Korea, Mexico or Cuba.

While most black-Americans don’t literally thank God that their ancestors were taken as slaves, at least one black man has given it some though.

In a review of the 1997 book Out of America : A Black Man Confronts Africa by Keith Richburg at the BrothersJudd.com website, Orrin Judd cites a few specifics, but first, just a bit of Richburg’s background;

He was the Africa bureau chief for the Washington Post from 1991 until 1994. Richburg was also pretty straightforward when it comes to how cheap life really is in Africa, complete with piles of human corpses on the streets of the run-of-the-mill African cities, as well as days and nights worth of dead bodies floating down river to Lake Victoria.

But here is a certain few passages from his book… just me, but it would be nice if stuff like this was actually mandatory reading in American tax-payer funded schools (emphasis mine);

Sometime, maybe four hundred years ago, one of my ancestors was taken from his village, probably by a local chieftain. He was shackled in leg irons, kept in a holding pen or a dark pit, possibly at Goree Island off the coast of Senegal. And then he was put in the crowded, filthy, hold of a ship for the long and treacherous voyage across the Atlantic to the New World.

Many slaves died on that voyage. But not my ancestor. Maybe it was because he was strong, maybe just stubborn, or maybe he had an irrepressible will to live. But he survived, and ended up in forced slavery working on plantations in the Caribbean. Generations on down the line, one of his descendants was taken to South Carolina. Finally, a more recent descendant, my father, moved to Detroit to find a job in an auto plant during the Second World War.

And so it was that I came to be born in Detroit and that 35 years later, a black man born in white America, I was in Africa, birthplace of my ancestors, standing at the edge of a river not as an African but as an American journalist – a mere spectator – watching the bloated bodies of black Africans cascading over a waterfall. And that’s when I thought about how, if things had been different, I might have been one of them -or might have met some similarly anonymous fate in one of the countless ongoing civil wars or tribal clashes on this brutal continent. And so I thank God my ancestor survived that voyage.

Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them.

In short, thank God that I am an American.

Note, not once did Keith Richburg blame those evil white European males for his ancestor being taken slave in the first place.

Note to Neo-Marxist, self-hating white folks — slavery was alive and well in Africa well before the Europeans blew into town.

By the way, as seen in the video below, Arabs are still taking Sub-Saharan (black) Africans as slaves. Proving that slavery is alive and well in the 21st Century.