Contents

Fostering hatred in the African-American community

Here is a typical statement, this one from Priscilla Dass-Brailsford's book "A Practical Approach to Trauma: Empowering Interventions" pp10 under slavery:

"In 1619, African slaves were first sold as property or traded into bondage, then shipped to the United States."

This is a fact, but slanted. The British American Colonies and later the United States, received only 5% of the slaves.

My motivation for doing all of this is:

1. If the material leftist promote is easily discredited, it casts shadows on the rest of their material
2. As an American, anyone bashing America on unfounded information should be challenged
3. As a Domestic Violence Prevention Advocate, anyone promoting information that is slanted and promotes the victimization of African-Americans and leads to their feelings of frustration and oppressiveness, which leads to domestic violence, needs to be challenged

Fostering Hatred in the American Indians

How was the American Indian population dramatically reduced from the time Columbus discovered the Americas to the 1900's?

Typical "hate America" statements made on this question are best represented by Ward Churchill's book "A Little Matter of Genocide".

In his book, he uses the term "Native American Genocide". Also, "During the four centuries spanning the time between 1492, when Christopher Columbus first set foot on the 'New World' of a Caribbean beach and 1892, when the U.S. Census Bureau concluded that there were fewer than a quarter-million indigenous people surviving within the country's boundaries, a hemispheric population estimated to have been as great as 125 million was reduced by something over 90 percent. The people had died in their millions of being hacked apart with axes and swords, buried alive and trampled under horses, hunted as game and fed to dogs, shot, beaten, stabbed, scalped for bounty, hanged on meathooks and thrown over the sides of ships at sea, worked to death as slave labourers, intentionally starved and frozen to death during a multitude of forced marches and internments, and, in an unknown number of instances, deliberately infected with epidemic diseases". (Ref: A. Clare Brandabur's Review).

Ward's thesis cites Thomas Brown's work. Thomas Brown discredit’s Ward Churchill’s genocide claim. 2/8/05 – "nearly every element of Churchill’s story is a total invention".

To further weaken the "Genocide" idea, here is what Jared Diamond, in "Guns, Germs, and Steel", a Pulitzer Prize winning book p78 and a National Geographic Documentary movie, says:

Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population. The most populous and highly organized native societies of North America, the Mississippian chiefdoms, disappeared in that way between 1492 and the late 1600's, even before Europeans themselves made their first settlement on the Mississippi River.

Two controversial issues - Genocide & Holocaust
falsely presented as a History of Race Related Violence and Aggression in the U.S.

Concepts Contributing to Fostering hate in the African-American Community:

• 6/9/09
  The concepts presented here are all to often put forth in a mode of informative and helpful in understanding how African-Americans could feel depressed and the possible reasons behind it.  For example, reference Priscilla Dass-Brailsford's A Practical Approach to Trauma: Empowering Interventions where she presents these two concepts as fact.
• When Jerry Brown commented on the Oakland riot of 1/8/09, he reiterated the relationship of past African-American oppression and the feelings the rioters expressed.

As a Domestic Violence Prevention Advocate, I find these two concepts to be:

• divisive
• hateful
• inaccurate
• cause harm to the African-American well being
• limits a therapists' ability to better address African-American depression

The following is detail to back it up.
Note that I am not disputing numbers, but the inaccurate and slanted content of the concepts

The Native American Genocide:

• The issue as a whole is the mantra used by Ward Churchill over the last 15 years (refer to his book A Little Matter of Genocide 1997, pp 4).

The mantra is factually false because:

1. One of the bases for Ward’s mantra is reference to Thomas Brown’s work.  In response to Ward’s work, Thomas Brown wrote an essay using the phrase “nearly every element of Churchill’s story is a total invention”.  For a counter argument and Brown’s reply reference TeachersForDemocracy.org page.
2. The "Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct" at the University of Colorado at Boulder concluded that Ward Churchill’s claims were falsified.
3. Colorado University  regents fired Ward Churchill, a tenured professor, for publishing falsified historical information directly reflected in this issue.
4. There are sufficient sources like Gunther Lewy’s article that dispute the genocide notion of the Indians.

Conclusion:

• With so much facts and so many historians disputing the Genocide notion of Indians, it seems unreasonable to present this concept as if it is generally accepted in the academic community.

The African Holocaust:

• This concept is constructed to imply America (not the Americas or New World) is totally responsible for the middle crossing deaths and slave trade.

  This is distorted for the following reasons:

  1. The use of the word “Holocaust” to describe the “middle crossing” or the African slave trade during the 1500s to 1800s is not supported by the United Nations.
  2. Since it lists only America on the issue, it implies that America was responsible for the slave trade in total.  But in fact The Transatlantic Slave Trade to what is now America constituted 5% to 7% of the total trade.  The rest went to the Caribbean Islands, Brazil, and other South American countries, as well as 5% to Europe.
  3. Slavery existed throughout the world long before, during, and after Columbus.  In 1086, 10% of the population in England were slaves.  In 1841, 8 to 9 million slaves were in India.  Between 650 and 1905, 18 million Africans were delivered into the Islamic trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades.  Even before and after Columbus, the American Indians had their own slaves - capturing Indians from other tribes and turning them into slaves was part of their way of life.
• Thus the concept is inaccurate in its perception.  If the concept's intent is to show that slavery existed, there would be no debate.  But, it is distorted to imply that America was, at the time, the only country having slaves in the world, when in fact slavery was the norm for all countries.

The harmful effects on African-Americans:

Presenting the African Holocaust concept is hateful of America.  It adds no value to a message concerning African-American oppression.  But it does generate divisiveness between African-Americans and America because:

• In spite of racism and past slavery, America is the best place in the world to live for a Black person:
  1. France is much more racist than America – of their 570 member parliament, there is but 1 Black member.  In America, we have a black president.
  2. England is racist: Professor Modood said migrants often fare better in the United States than the UK
  3. Africa is no place anyone would wish to live – black or white.

     Africa is the poorest region in the world

     • 15% - 20% have AIDs
     • In the Congo over the last 10 years 5 million have died from war, starvation, or disease
     • Africa is full of corruption
     • there is real Genocide (Rwanda, Darfur, Zimbawe)
     • UNICEF estimates that 200,000 children from Africa’s West Coast are sold into slavery each year (I find this number hard to believe, but any number above zero is disgusting).
  4. Africans want to migrate to America.  In the last 25 years, 800,000 Africans  migrated to America – these obviously do not have an ancestry of American slavery.

Slavery was never universally accepted in the British Colonies or America

1. 90 years before the Declaration of Independence, the Quakers in Pennsylvania signed an anti-slavery resolution.
2. 20 years before the Declaration of Independence, Vermont abolished slavery
3. 12 years before the Civil War, Congress prohibits slavery in the Pacific Northwest.
4. Just before the Civil War, Only 5% of the white population in the South owned slaves.
5. Immediately after the Civil War, the 13th amendment prohibited slavery, freeing 4 million slaves.

America is the only nation in the world to have fought a war to abolish slavery. This fact speaks volumes about how concerned America was about the slavery issue

• The Union lost 360,000 soldiers, the Confederate lost about 260,000
• This is the highest percentage of casualties for the number in the military of any other war.
• Other than World War II, we lost more in the Civil War than all of our other wars combined.

Who is the Better Therapist?

• The main point of all of this is the question concerning us in the Domestic Violence  prevention and treatment community: Considering the experiment of two teachers, each given a class of average students, one teacher told the class is above average, the other below, the end of semester grades reflected what the teachers were told.  Now, given two therapists, which do you think can do better counseling to an African-American suffering from depression:
  1. The biased therapist who buys into your slide that America has a disgusting slavery history, and African-Americans are victims of American slavery and racism, or
  2. The optimistic therapist who knows America had a disgusting history of slavery and racism, but it was the norm.  But, in this century, America is not perfect, but America is the best place in the world for a black person to live. If a black person is going to have a chance in the world to be their best, America is it.  We even have a black president.

How to help the African-American community:

• Anyone in a position of interacting with the African-American community have the opportunity to provide optimism and hope instead of a down-trodden racist message. The January 1, 2009 Oakland killing of an African-American by a Police Officer who drew his pistol instead of his stun-gun, should not have sparked the outrage in the community that it has. All the violence and hate talk is felt justified because of messages given to the African-American community like the Holocaust concept.
• As a Domestic Violence Prevention Advocate, I wish people would consider not presenting these two damaging concepts because they don't help their message on African-American feelings of oppression but adds to the African-American perception of living in an oppressive country and thus fostering hate of America.
• As the great philosopher Rodney King said, "Can't we all just get along?"

Diseases that killed the American Indians

History of Race Related violence and Aggression in U.S.

• Claim: It is estimated that the population of indigenous people of
  America was at least 8 million when Columbus encountered America.
• Claim: The population was reduced by 95% to 99% by the beginning of the 19th Century

-->Dass-Brailsford, pp 6, references Stiffarm & Lane’s 1992 publication “The Demography of North America”, which uses the word ‘Genocide’, and on pp 32 references E. Wagner Stearn and Allen E. Stearn, “The Effects of Smallpox on the Destiny of the Amerindian”, pp 44-5, 1945: Stearn & Stearn conclude that there were many instances that Americans tried to help and inoculate the Indians from diseases, pp 139 therefore invalidating the Genocide argument.
-->This claim is wording used by Ward Churchill, except he uses the 90% figure.

-->Thomas Brown discredit’s Ward Churchill’s genocide claim. 2/8/05 – “nearly every element of Churchill’s story is a total invention”.

--> Jared Diamond “Guns, Germs, and Steel”, p78
Throughout the Americas, diseases introduced with Europeans spread from tribe to tribe far in advance of the Europeans themselves, killing an estimated 95 percent of the pre-Columbian Native American population. The most populous and highly organized native societies of North America, the Mississippian chiefdoms, disappeared in that way between 1492 and the late 1600’s, even before Europeans themselves made their first settlement on the Mississippi River. 

• Colonization destroyed the Indians' way of life and the survivors are forever changed

-->One of the important ways of Amerindians way of life was to have slaves.  “In the New World some of the best-documented slave-owning societies were the Klamath and Pawnee and the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, that lived along the coast from what is now Alaska to California. Life was easy in many of those societies, and slaves are known to have sometimes been consumption goods that were simply killed in potlatches.”

Were American Indians the Victims of Genocide?

By Guenter Lewy

No. This article points to the baseless claims by Ward Churchill. 11/22/04.

------------------

David E. Stannard,
" American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World", 1993
pp. 119, cites President Washington in 1779, instructed Major General John Sullivan to attack the Iroquois and "lay waste all the settlements around.. that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed,"

Stannard references Richard Drinnon, "Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and Empire-building"

----------------------------------------------------------
Ward Churchill's claims about the 1837 Mandan outbreak
Brown's essay Others who made the claim include Ann F. Ramenofsky in "Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact" [Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), p. 148. Churchill first published his disputed claims in Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994). For a critique of Churchill's claims, see here.

The Investigative Committee of the Standing Committee on Research Misconduct at the University of Colorado at Boulder reviewed a claim by Ward Churchill, comparing to the cited source his claim that in 1837 the United States Army deliberately infected Mandan Indians by distributing blankets that had been exposed to smallpox, and reported "Professor Churchill therefore misrepresents what Thornton says." Most other historians who have looked at the same event disagree with Churchill's interpretation of the historical evidence, and believe no deliberate introduction of smallpox occurred at the time and place Churchill claimed it had.
Others who made the claim include Ann F. Ramenofsky in "Vectors of Death: The Archaeology of European Contact" [Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1987), p. 148. Churchill first published his disputed claims in Indians Are Us? Culture and Genocide in Native North America (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1994). For a critique of Churchill's claims, see here

CU regents fire Ward Churchill

Berny Morson, Rocky Mountain News
Published July 25, 2007 at midnight

CU President Hank Brown had earlier recommended the dismissal. In the end, there really wasn’t much choice, Brown said.
Churchill "falsified history and fabricated history." And Churchill "did not express regret, apologize or agree to refrain from this behavior in the future," Brown said.
Some 25 faculty members on three committees had looked at the evidence against Churchill and found truth in the allegations he violated academic conduct standards, said Pat Hayes, regents’ chairwoman.
“It’s important to know Indian history, and it’s important to know factual Indian history, not just a bunch of B.S. that someone made up," said Russell Thornton, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

Did the Europeans or American government do Genocide against the Indians? Best reference.

Diseases have always wiped out large numbers of a population:
Cook, Noble David. Born To Die, p. 13
the Black Death of medieval Europe that killed up to one-third of the people in Europe between 1347 and 1351

Useful info links

John LaVelle discredits Ward's "Indians Are Us?", 1994

Is America solely responsible for the Africans being slaves and dying in the Middle Crossing?

History of Race Related violence and Aggression in U.S.

• Transatlantic African Holocaust
• The United Nations does not recognize “Holocaust” as an African event

Claim: In 1619 African people were taken into bondage, shipped to America, and sold as a commodity. Slavery officially ended in 1865

• By the 1530s, the Portuguese were also using African slaves in Brazil. From then until the abolition of the slave trade in 1870, at least 10 million Africans were forcibly brought to the Americas: about 47 percent of them to the Caribbean islands and the Guianas; 38 percent to Brazil; and 6 percent to mainland Spanish America. About 4.5 percent went to North America, roughly the same proportion that went to Europe.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade … The slave trade to what is now the United States constituted only about 7 percent of the total trade

• Over the course of four centuries, 1500 - 1800, the Atlantic slave trade was much larger – about 10 to 12 million black Africans were brought to the Americas.
• As an Atlantic maritime enterprise, however, the transatlantic slave trade is well documented: European governments taxed vessels clearing and entering customs, and many newspapers and colonial gazettes survive, as do general shipping documents such as muster rolls and ship registers. Moreover, slave vessels often were at sea for more than a year and were on the coast of Africa and harbors in the Americas for several months. These vessels were noticed.
• The large British trade is particularly well documented, and British navy officials kept extensive records of the illegal slave trade of the 19th century. Studies based on these numerous shipping and government documents, including Harvard University's W. E. B. Du Bois Institute's database of 27,500 slave voyages, compiled in 1993-1997, have supported an estimate of about 11 to 12 million slave exports and 9 to 10 million slave imports into the Americas.
• Slave importation was banned in 1808

Claim: It is estimated that between 15-60 million Africans died in the middle passage

• The impact of the slave trade on Africa, Then more than four centuries (from 1490’s to 1890’s) of a regular slave trade to build the Americas and the prosperity of the Christian states of Europe.4 million slaves exported via the Red Sea, another 4 million through the Swahili ports of the Indian Ocean, perhaps as many as 9 million along the trans-Saharan caravan route, and 11 - 20 million (depending on the author) across the Atlantic Ocean.

Claim: There are no official estimates of death related to harshness of life as a slave

• Claim: There are reports that the average lifespan of a slave was between 35 to 40 years old due to brutal work conditions.

Blacks prefer America:

• Overall, the number of foreign-born blacks rose from 125,000 in 1980 to 2,815,000 in 2005. About two-thirds of black foreign-born are from the Caribbean and Latin America, and 1/3 (nearly 1 million) from Africa.  But the African share is growing. More African-born blacks arrived between 2000 and 2005 than in the previous decade.

In England about 10 percent of the population entered in the Domesday Book in 1086 were slaves

Sarkozy vows to bring minorities into French elite
12/18/08
France is a racist country - no place a Black American would wish to go to.

The French government did not abolish slavery in French colonies until 1848. The French trade, however, had effectively ended by 1831 after a political revolution in the country.

Best overall reference on the Slave Trade by Stephen D. Behrendt, University of Northern Iowa

Congo’s Death Rate Unchanged Since War Ended
1/23/08
In the last 10 years, there have been 5 million Congolese deaths, due to disease, starvation, and war.

Unsupported numbers - These numbers are published with no supporting evidence:

-->In the mid-1400's, the first Africans were taken out of Sierra Leone on Africa's West Coast as a present for a Portuguese king. The capture and removal from the African Continent of these ten men marked the beginning of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and the wholesale exploitation and death of at least 200 million(conservatively estimated) African lives.

--> Same info repeated in this source

-->Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed– Non-Historian claims:
From the 16th to 19th centuries, the total death toll among African slaves being in transhipment to America alone was as high as 2 million. Although the many millions who died “in capture and in transit to the Orient or Middle East” is unknown, among the slaves “kept in Africa some 4,000,000 may have died.” Overall, in five centuries between nearly 17,000,000 - and by some calculations perhaps over 65,000,000 - Africans were killed in the transatlantic slave trade. [R. J. Rummel, Death by Government (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1994)].
R.J. Rummel is a Professor Emeritus of Political Science.

Useful Info

1. Total Population of the 13 colonies in 1780 was 2.8 million
2. Total Slaves in 1790 was 700,000, 19% of the population
3. Total U.S. population in 1860 was 31.1 million
4. Total Slaves in 1860 in U.S. was 4 million
5. John LaVelle discredits Ward's "Indians Are Us?", 1994