Thursday, May 6, 2010

Inheriting the Trade, the book

The Brockport Unitarian Universalist Fellowship Interfaith Book Discussion Group is reading Inheriting The Trade by Thomas Norman DeWolf. We will be discussing the book next Tuesday, May 11th, 2010 at the Lift Bridge Book Store in Brockport, NY from 6:30- 8:00 PM. Everyone is welcome.

Some of the interesting things I have learned so far is that most of the slave traders were working in the north not the south and half of the slave voyages originated in Rhode Island.

De Wolf mentions that in the late 1700s and early 1800s there were 14 million immigrants to the United States and 11 1/2 million of them were slaves.

Inheriting The Trade is not so much about a family's genealogy, and the slave trade, but rather about the structural aspects and legacy of slavery and how people still feel about it.

Perhaps it is not race that is the elephant in the living room that everyone feels anxious talking about but slavery. How is it that our country was founded on the idea that one race of people can exploit another race of people as property, as objects to buy and sell and enforce labor and degrading conditions upon? What kind of moral deficiency is this that justifies such behavior by human beings?

1 comment:

Print Friendly and PDF