history essay

“Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.” Abraham Joshua Heschel

The European expeditions and boundary enlargement concluded in the colonization of weaker nations that brought suffering in the hands of imperialists. These expeditions have been indirectly hailed as having brought about economic growth in the affected areas while treating the landowners recklessly. The conflicts arose between the opposing groups and villages suffered greatly and swept to non-existence.

The book, The Slave Ship by Marcus Rediker, recounts the history of the modern slave ship. It follows the journey of African captives from where they were captured in the coast of Africa, until they are unloaded from the ship on the shores of a new continent, becoming slaves in the plantations of the American south and in the Caribbean. The book focuses on the vessels that were used in the slave trade in a racial perspective as it describes the bloodcurdling stories of agonies and tortures that these captives underwent in the ships. These include accounts of coerced cannibalism, hanging of innocent people by their toes, limb amputation, and speculum oris mode of feeding of the captives (Rediker 2007).

The major part of the book describes and accounts the resistance that was experienced in the ships where captives attempted suicide as others refused to eat for long periods of time. Some of the captured slaves threw themselves and were thrown into the mid-ocean to be mangled by sharks. One of the most intriguing stories in the book is the story of one man who tried to slash his throat using his fingernails. The captains and sailors of these ships conducted murders and tortures of these innocent captives for heavy sums of money; The slaves were in the international market as their vested interests and therefore worked to reduce the number of deaths during travel.

The author, Rediker, recreates a wooden world that the captured Africans, ship captains, and crews at the height of the slave trade business. The book which is based on maritime records and diaries to reconstruct these lives and deaths of African captives. It presents stories of four slave ship relationships, that is, captain and crew, sailors and slaves, captive interactions and merchant -abolitionist struggles (Rediker 2007). The book contributes to the discussion on the conduct of the white people in the slave-trade world today and creates space for the need for improvement. Rediker takes on the appraisal of the modern world and the changes in western world witnessed today; The ways they are inherently flawed and not able to generate change in the world that they aspire to bring in the world today.

The author claims that white citizens resort to political engagement in causing change in the world and trenchantly critiques their political ideologies. He portends that these ideologies in most cases worse, rather than improving the situation. This calls for the practice of ideals is aimed at completely eliminating both institutions and individual in their work and relationships in all of life’s spheres. He explains that faithful presence can be used to accomplish a lot offering examples both big and small. The book is significantly debunked on different people’s ideas on how the world can be made a better place and supports the idea of changing the world and terms it a noble endeavor. The author believes that mundane dominant thinking weighs on culture and cultural change come short since they are based on problematic theology and spacious social science. He defends this claim by arguing the most cultural changes happen top down rather than bottom-up. He gives the evidence from American civil rights struggles in which all the changes seem to be affected from the top to the bottom power. A closer review of the Dr. Martin King led African American civil rights movement which had no positional power in the society as a possible bottom-up change but refers to the initial support King received from top power like Lyndon B. Johnson as evidence that the change was top down.

Rediker looks at racism as a product of history, a system of immoral obligation which is intrinsically dialectical generated within networks and are not autonomous or coherent. The author is an idealist and does not concentrate on historical ideas. He is maxim in arguing that, ideas can influence cultural change under certain circumstances and conditions due to inherent truth and because they are embedded in institutions, interests, symbols, and networks. He makes observations in culture change as being effective top down rather than bottom up.

He also analyses modern social movements and discovers the political obsession and tunnel vision form. The white supremacist ideal right is uncovered as being a tea party threatening to down the economy of the United States and the world with brinkmanship. The movement is shown to engage in perilous racist politics by being nostalgic about racial equality and contributes to the distortion of the dominion mandate and aims to change this into theocratic domination. These Rediker views as necessary and obvious. The US's liberalist identifies with the poor, economic justice, and fear of the white supremacist dominance. The leftists attempt to maintain political neutrality.

The novel by Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart, mirrors the peaceful lives of Africans during the pre-colonial era and the interruption of their lives by the entry of colonialists during the late nineteenth century. The story revolves around the fine and peaceful life of a powerful Ibo leader, Okonkwo. The life of the leader changes when the Englishmen intrude the country and try to take control of the villages and have their values imposed upon the natives. This colonization takes an inherently racist shape in Nigeria as seen in other countries and novels around the world that show how racism is deeply entrenched in the human history such as ‘the slave ship a human history’ by Marcus Rediker.

From the accounts in the two novels, racism can be viewed as the belief in which one group considers itself superior to the other due to differences in skin color. Racism is Achebe’s novel is between the British and the Ibo people in whom the native Africans are considered inferior, primitive, and uncivilized by the British. The black community also mocks the Englishmen back based on their skin colors terming them as albinos and lepers. Therefore from these remarks the Ibo’s believe they are superior to the English. Racism is therefore characterized by exploitation of a group of people which informs the ideals of colonization and the scramble for and conquest of Africa.

For colonization to succeed, according to two mentioned novels, one group of people must have more advantages than those they intend to or are colonizing. The difference in simplicity or sophistication of people depends on the geography of their surroundings, where they live, how accessible materials are and how the community builds its immunity to diseases. The English come from a continent with a cold climate that requires the use of more tools to create shelter and defense, and enhance their hunting, fishing and animal domestication since their climate does not favor crop growing. The Africa climate, on the other hand, was warmer with evenly distributed rainfall throughout the year and therefore called for use of tools created for crop growing rather than hunting, and hence easily obtained their food. The differences in culture are therefore not skin-deep but due to geography.

According to the two readings, racism is mainly restricted to Africans and those with darker skins. The white description of the African continent is described by such terms as bestial, witchcraft, incest, gluttony, wild, musicality, cannibalism uncivil and violence (Achebe 2017). The colonialist presented themselves to African and the world as givers of sophistication and culture and looked down upon other groups else as inferior. They termed the customs and religions of Africa as unscientific and superstitious. Their writers and reporters gave a distorted and biased picture of Africa and branded theirs as being culturally superior, ignoring the clear insight into reality.

The British colonization of the African Ibo tribe as described by the novel by Achebe depicts racist stereotypes of Africans. The novel delves into negative stereotypes employed by both sides of the racial divide and complete ignorance of the voices of Africans. Achebe uniquely and personally looks into the lives of those oppressed in terms of their culture and have become victims of the interest of the western world. A clash of culture takes over from the forceful evictions from fertile native and strategic lands. Both novels portray racism as having been produced by history. The novel, throughout, gives agency to the Umuofia clan as a claim under a close watch of the western world.

There are a plethora of lessons that can be drawn from the two novels that deal with these outdating issues of race. These issues might not be very troubling to today's society but serve as reminders of the dark past that the world must work hard not to return to. The lessons can also serve as vivid reminders of the complexity and relevance of racism as a problem in modern society. The two readings serve as a powerful thematic complement to one another and this enables the upcoming generations and those to come to understand the significance of tackling these issues in a more informed way of the complexity of racism and the world around them. The two novels capture the European and African perspectives on colonial expansion, culture, racism, and religion (Achebe 2017). They respond to the colonial accounts of the African continent and the native people with their choices of language, political in their condemnation of racism. The two authors also seek to achieve cultural revitalization within and through the English language rather than the native African languages. The two books are designed to condemn racism and call for racial equality and appreciation of diversity in the modern world going forward into the future. Racism, together with calls oppression, is a scourge and further sustaining efforts must be added to the existing legal and social efforts to ensure the vice of racism does not creep back in the future.

References

Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007)

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Penguin, 2017).