That’s called genocide. The erasing of ethnic culture, language and religion, the very structure and foundation of a society that gave a certain group of people strength and moral code in their daily lives—- all wiped out by slavery, sometimes with barely a trace left behind. That type of depravity waged on blacks over hundreds of years was far more destructive culturally than the holocaust was to the Jews. That may sound a bit harsh, and anyone Jewish may react strongly to that statement, but I’m not talking about the difference in the scale and mechanized killing process of Jews in Nazi Germany. That suddenness and scale of that horror approaches an incalculable travesty.
But this isn’t a competition of the most horror. It is a question of length of time. First of all, the Holocaust in my mind refers to the “Final Solution” that killed 5.4 million of the Jews from 1942 when it devised until 1945. Before that, the concentration camps were about slavery. Jewish slaves—as well as other non-Aryan ethnicities—built much of the German war machine on the most basic and brutal level—pouring the molten steel, building the roads. By 1945 there were 6 million dead Jews but 7.2 million slaves still in concentration camps. So this to was about slavery, too.
The remaining Jews though could remember their “roots” and fortunately could “return” to their homeland, Israel as set up after WWII. This was not so for black American descendant of slaves. The length of the genocide, lasting in centuries instead of decades, wiped away their languages, their religions, their ethnic and government ties to their home countries. The rich variety of backgrounds was wiped away and replaced with in America a monolithic background of “black” with a one common language and one new white religion, Christianity. The profound tragedy and brutality of this hundreds year genocide should not be underplayed nor forgotten. The effects of it are long lasting, and the habits of the enslavers and their sense of supremacy were never destroyed and with live today their incessant need to degrade black Americans instead of praise them.
Indeed, it was not “no long ago.” We are living it now.
Thanks much for your voice and truth.