By this second decade of the 21st century, it remains an intellectual oddity that although scholars have spent an inordinate amount of research time and effort on the Transatlantic Slave Trade (aka, the Maafa), resulting in ever-increasing awareness of the range, depth and breadth of that process and important factual perspectives concerning its participants, by comparison regarding the antecedent and co-existing Arab slave trade in Africa, there has been barely an intellectual whisper.
This statement neither belies nor negates the high-quality publications that have surfaced on this issue, such as Eve Troutt Powell’s 2001 edited document, “The African Diaspora in the Mediterranean Lands of Islam,” Allan G.B. Fisher’s excellent work, “Slavery and Muslim Society in Africa (2003),” Bernard Lewis’ “Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (1990)” and Joseph E. Harris’ pioneering volume, “The African Presence in Asia: Consequences of the East African Slave Trade (1971),” to name a few. The beginning statement speaks to the stark difference in the sheer volume of work on both issues. At this point, the Maafa research can fill at least a medium-sized library, while the published research on the Arab Slave Trade in Africa would not yet fill a student dormitory room bookshelf.
To reparation activists, the issue is alive and needs to be addressed. Most of those who advocate reparations for African Americans say that no leading Arab personage, except Muammar Khadafi, ever formally apologized for and acknowledged that some Arabs certainly did engage in a slave trade of Africans, especially from East and Southern Africa into Northern Africa and the so-called Middle East. Consequently, since the African Union includes Tunisia, Algeria, Egypt, Libya and the like that will become the future Union of African States, there is something of a large outcry about their inclusion.
How can Arab-run states be truly African, reparationists ask, when those states never atoned for or even acknowledged their history of slave trading? And, they must be part of any future compensation due to African descendants, the argument goes.
By the way, to switch reels for a minute, the U.S.A. should be grateful to African Americans for saving the White population from its own perfidy. That is, the ‘one drop’ rule, which from the 19th century through more than half of the 20th century (legalized in Tennessee in 1910 and Virginia in 1924), with echoes continuing today, one’s social status and ethnic classification depended not just on how Black or White one looked, but whether any of one’s ancestors were indeed of African origin.
In today’s society, there are plenty of mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, creoles and other “mixed race” individuals; who have gone on to be very successful, and have not been held back at all because of their racial heritage, nor have they been outed and defeated by it. JET Magazine used to be well known for “outing” Blacks passing for Whites, but JET is essentially gone and no other media seems to bother. So, Wentworth Miller, Vin Diesel (who said himself his father is Black), Alicia Keyes, Maya Rudolph, Drake, Jennifer Beals, and a long, long list of celebrities and athletes (Derek Jeter and Blake Griffin included) do not have to be invisibly Black these days.
Nor does one’s hypodescent rating count for much anymore-that is, one’s social status comes from the lower-ranked ancestor. Thus one could look White, but if one had (or were accused of having) any Black ancestors, that changed one’s life chances.
America should be grateful for that. Race and racism are clearly not dead and gone, but some things have gotten much better.
Professor David L. Horne is founder and executive director of PAPPEI, the Pan African Public Policy and Ethical Institute, which is a new 501(c)(3) pending community-based organization or non-governmental organization (NGO). It is the stepparent organization for the California Black Think Tank which still operates and which meets every fourth Friday.
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