#World Manumission Defense

[beatsforbrothels]

Blackfist - Dark Soldier

[incorrectsmashbrosquotes]

Smashilton: My Shot

*There is a long moment of silence as Link, Roy, and Little Mac all crowd around Joker, but Joker quickly regains his confidence and breaks into song*

[Joker:] I am not throwing away my shot! I am not throwing away my shot! Hey yo, I'm just like my series I'm young, scrappy and hungry And I'm not throwing away my shot! *Jumps onto the table* I'm 'a get a scholarship to Peach's College I probably shouldn't brag, but dag, I amaze and astonish The problem is I got a lot of brains but no polish I gotta holler just to be heard With every word, I drop knowledge! *jumps off the table and onto a chair which tips off balance but Joker expertly uses the momentum to swing it around and face the others*       I'm a diamond in the rough, a shiny piece of coal Tryin' to reach my goal. My persona of speech: unimpeachable Only nineteen but my mind is older These New Donk City streets get colder, I shoulder Every burden, every disadvantage I have learned to manage, I don't have a console to brandish I walk these streets famished *Jumps off the chair and walks towards the group* The plan is to fan this spark into a flame But damn, it's getting dark, so let me spell out the name I am the [Joker/Link/Roy/Little Mac:] A-K-I-R-A, A-N-D—we are meant to be… [Joker:] A game company that runs independently Meanwhile, EA keeps shittin' on us endlessly *Shot of An EA logo with a body flipping off the audience* Essentially, they microtransaction us relentlessly Then King Dedede turns around, runs a spending spree *Shot of Dedede on a pile of gold* He ain't ever gonna set his descendants free *shot of Dedede suddenly surround by angry soldiers* So there will be a revolution in this century *Joker pushes the image a side so the present dominates the screen again*

Enter me!

[Link/Roy/Little Mac:] (He says in parentheses) [Joker:] Don't be shocked when your game journal mentions me! I will lay down my life if it sets us free Eventually, you'll see my ascendancy

*Joker and Roy start singing together* [Joker (Roy):] And I am not throwing away My shot (My shot) I am not throwing away My shot (My shot) Hey yo, I'm just like my series I'm young, scrappy and hungry And I'm not throwing away my shot (And I'm not throwing away my shot)

Joker and Roy stand at the table where Link and Little MAc join them, all three standing around it* [Joker/Roy/Link/LittleMac:] I am not throwing away my shot *Little Mac pulls out a bottle of whiskey* I am not throwing away my shot *Link puts down four shot glasses* Hey yo, I'm just like my series I'm young, scrappy and hungry And I'm not throwing away my shot *Little Mac fills the three shot glasses* It's time to take SHOT! *Roy expertly slides the shotglasses to each man at the table* [Link:] *quickly downs his shot* I dream of life without a monarchy Hyrule’s unrest will lead to 'onarchy? 'Onarchy? How you say, how you say, oh, 'Anarchy'! When I fight, I make the other side panicky With my [Joker/Little Mac/Roy:] SHOT! [Little Mac:] *downs his own shot* Yo, I'm a boxer's apprentice And I got y'all knuckleheads in loco parentis I'm joining the rebellion 'cause I know it's my chance To socially advance, instead of punchin’ some tramps! I'm gonna take a [Joker/Link/Roy:] SHOT! [Roy:] *quickly downs his shot and stands up* But we'll never be truly free Until those in bondage have the same rights as you and me (That's right!) You and I. Do or die. Wait 'til I sally in On a stallion with the first indie battalion Have another [Joker/Roy/Link/Little Mac:] SHOT!

*Dark Pit shows up and slams his hands on the table* [Dark Pit:] Geniuses! Lower your voices You keep out of trouble and you double your choices *Link, Roy, and Little Mac all advance on Dark Pit who throws up his hands defensively* I'm with you, but the situation is fraught You've got to be carefully taught: If you talk, you're gonna get *Joker pops up between his three new friends and Dark Pit* SHOT! [Joker:] DP, check what we got *Points at Link* Mister Chosen One, hard rock like Lancelot *Link preens* *Points at Little Mac* I think your pants look hot *Mac cries tears of joy* *Points at Roy* Roy, I like you a lot *Roy blushes* Let's hatch a plot blacker than the kettle callin' the pot... *Joker jumps up onto the table* What are the odds the gods would put us all in one spot Poppin' a squat on conventional wisdom, like it or not A bunch of revolutionary manumission abolitionists? Give me a position, show me where the ammunition is!

*Joker suddenly realizes what he just said and collapses in on himself, terribly nervous, and his volume drops immensely* Oh, am I talkin' too loud? Sometimes I get over-excited, shoot off at the mouth I never had a group of friends before I promise that I'll make y'all proud [Roy:] Let's get this guy in front of a crowd!

*The new squad explode onto the streets out of the bar* [Joker/Link/Little Mac/Roy/Ensemble:] I am not throwing away my shot! *People begin to sing along* I am not throwing away my shot! *People begin to dance with them in rhythm* Hey yo, I'm just like my series I'm young, scrappy and hungry And I'm not throwing away my shot! I am not throwing away my shot! I am not throwing away my shot! Hey yo, I'm just like my series I'm young, scrappy and hungry And I'm not throwing away my shot! [Roy (Joker/Little Mac/Link):] *Roy jumps onto a large pile of crates* Everybody sing: Whoa, whoa, whoa (Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!) Hey! Whoa! (Whoa!) Wooh! Whoa! (Whoa!) Ay, let 'em hear ya! (Yeah!) Let's go! [Roy (Company):] (Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!) I said shout it to the rooftops! (Whoa!) Said, to the rooftops! (Whoa!) Come on! (Yeah!) Come on, let's go! [Roy:] *jumps down from the crates into the crowd* Rise up! When you're living on your knees, *helps the Ice Climbers rise from the ground where they fell* you rise up *points at Nana* Tell your brother that he's gotta rise up *points at Popo* Tell your sister that she's gotta rise up [Roy and Ensemble (Company):] *Roy rejoins his friends* When are these colonies gonna rise up? When are these colonies gonna rise up? (Whoa!) When are these colonies gonna rise up? (Whoa!) When are these colonies gonna rise up? (Whoa!) RISE UP!

*the scene suddenly freezes and goes black and white, everyone frozen in place. Only Joker remains in color as he begins to soliloquize through song* [Joker:] I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory *quick shot of Bayonetta, and little Joker dying in bed* When's it gonna get me? In my sleep? Seven feet ahead of me? *Quick shot of Dark Pit before going back to Joker* If I see it comin', do I run or do I let it be? Is it like a beat without a melody? See, I never thought I'd live past twenty *shot of Joker as a little kid* Where I come from some get half as many *shot of Joker and a bunch of other little kids who turn into headstones* Ask anybody why we livin' fast and we laugh, reach for a flask We have to make this moment last, that's plenty

*Joker swipes his hand, dispelling the memories* Scratch that This is not a moment, it's the movement Where all the hungriest brothers with something to prove went. *shot of Joker, Link, Roy, and Little Mac all standing together* Foes oppose us, we take an honest stand We roll like Reggie, claimin' our promised land And? If we win our independence? Is that a guarantee of freedom for our descendants? Or will the blood we shed begin an endless Cycle of vengeance and death with no defendants?

*color returns as the world resumes and Joker begins storming forward* I know the action in the street is excitin' But Jesus, between all the bleedin' 'n fightin' I've been readin' 'n writin' We need to handle our financial situation Are we a nation of states? What's the state of our nation?!

*Joker turns to face his friends, the sun at his back casting a golden glow around him* I'm past patiently waitin'! I'm passionately Smashin' every expectation Every action's an act of creation! I'm laughin' in the face of casualties and sorrow For the first time, I'm thinkin' past tomorrow. *pumps his right fist into the sky* [Joker and Company:] And I am not throwing away my shot! I am not throwing away my shot! Hey yo, I'm just like my series I'm young, scrappy and hungry And I'm not throwing away my shot

Joker leads the company forward, back into the bar* [Joker/Roy/Link/Little Mac (Ensemble):] We're gonna rise up! (Not throwing away my shot) Time to take a shot! *Little Mac grabs a bottle of whiskey* We're gonna rise up! (Not throwing away my shot) Time to take a shot! *Roy grabs four shotglasses* We're gonna (Rise up! Rise up!) It's time to take a shot! (Rise up! Rise up!) *Roy slams the glasses on the table* It's time to take a shot! (Rise up!) It's time to take a shot! (Rise up!) Take a shot! Shot! Shot! A-yo it's time to take a shot! *Little Mac quickly fills them* Time to take a shot! *All four grab their respective glasses And I am not throwing away my [Company:] NOT THROWING AWAY MY SHOT! *all four drink at the same time*

[freeworldimmigration]

I do not want to equate the evil of chattel slavery with the evil of immigration restrictions. They may or may not be equal in one person’s experience or another’s, but I am not out to make a claim one way or another. I want to avoid at all costs what Elizabeth Martinez terms an “oppression Olympics,”1 referring to the weighing of which group is more or less oppressed than another such that the comparison succeeds in turning oppressed people against each other, which is of course a win for the oppressor. All I want to do here is re-frame the moral context of immigration law practice by way of analogy to the practice of manumission law in centuries past.

I. Manumission Law and Immigration Law

During the centuries that chattel slavery persisted in the Americas, there existed also in many jurisdictions the law of “manumission,” or the emancipation of a person from status as a slave through legal means, such as by purchasing or contracting for their freedom from their owner, or having it granted to them by their owner’s will and testament, making them a “free person.”2 Sometimes this involved slave owners asking a tribunal to manumit the human beings they themselves owned,3 but in other contexts it involved enslaved people directly asking the court to allow themselves to be manumitted,4 sometimes with representation by counsel.5 It is this latter scenario of self-manumission through an advocate that we’re referring to here – where an advocate argued on behalf of an enslaved person for their freedom.

The practice of immigration law6 is the lawful application for enhanced liberty or rights for individuals without U.S. Citizenship, before and against a government agency designed to restrict their liberty and their right to have rights, as Hannah Arendt put it.7 The immigration law practitioner petitions a government officer or judge for their recognition of a human being’s right to move, work and survive. This is to say, the non-citizen, through their immigration lawyer, asks the government officer or judge for permission to be treated as a full human being; put even more simply, a non-citizens asks the government, through counsel, to recognize their humanity.

The same law that affords the non-citizen the ability to petition for this recognition and permission is the same law that endows that officer or judge with the unchallenged power to dismember families, crush freedom and sentence deportees to death. Just as the enslaved person asked for their freedom on the authority of their owner’s will or contract – the same owner with the power to end their family, their freedom or their life. But, without comparing the degree of dehumanization or the frequency of torture and murder visited upon human beings within either of these institutions, what other aspects of them appear comparable?

In both instances the law afforded a narrow route of escape (albeit with limited rights to the escapee) from the institution. In both instances a legal advocate, a lawyer, had to work within the laws of the time and make arguments based on those laws and the assumptions that undergird them – seeking relief from the same power that presumed the authority to destroy their client. In both instances, engaging in this kind of advocacy against the institution did not actually challenge the institution’s authority or legitimacy, but rather reinforced them.8 Certainly it failed/fails to challenge but reinforces the artifice of white supremacy. In both cases the advocacy nonetheless enhanced the liberty of individual people on a case-by-case basis

One author describes manumission this way: “Slaves used the law designed essentially to keep them as slaves to win their freedom, and free people of color used the law to maintain and often to fight vigorously to safeguard their liberty.”9 Replace “slaves” with “undocumented people” and the former part of this explanation could easily describe removal defense and bond hearings while the latter could just as easily describe applications for legal permanent residence or naturalization.

II. Moral Tension

Another way in which the practice of manumission is comparable to the practice of immigration law is that neither was/is devoid of moral ambiguity. In each case well-meaning people were working within an institution they may have fundamentally disagreed with or even hated. In doing so they obeyed the rules of that institution and called upon the authority of the slave owner’s ownership to manumit, and thus arguably kowtowed to its authority, thereby legitimizing and reinforcing it. In this sense they were to some degree complicit in the crimes of the institution itself. When we ask the government today to give a person relief from deportation or detention, we imply that we agree that the government has the authority to destroy that person’s life; inasmuch as we appeal to a power, we also consent to it.

But at the same time, there’s a strong moral argument that an attorney’s practice of manumission law to secure a client’s freedom was necessary for a simple reason: it saved lives. It did require a lawyer to play by the rules of slavery, but practically it also saved the lives of individual human beings, shielding them from torture, murder and rape – just as deportation defense often does today.10 Ultimately manumission won an individual person’s liberty (or at least reduced their level of bondage11), albeit without injuring or truly challenging the evil institution from which they were liberated. The same can be said of the practice of immigration law today – like manumission before it, it may be necessary to save lives.

Historian Jessica Millward, in her article discussing how enslaved women used manumission laws to gain their freedom, describes this moral tension:

Manumissions were granted on an individual basis and never jeopardized the balance of power, which positioned the laws of the slaveholding South as an omnipresent force in the lives of African Americans. After all, manumission laws were slaveholders’ laws, and any space left for a slave to gain freedom through them was a loophole, not an open door. However, the ability to negotiate one’s manumission and that of one’s kin became a very important vehicle of resistance for enslaved women.12

As immigration lawyers, especially in the world of public interest law, we take enormous emotional shelter in the perception that we are on the just side of a war between right and wrong, and with good reason – we are. But we do not enough acknowledge the moral tension Millward describes in the context of manumission, where that tension is more obvious: we are doing the right thing, yes, but in a context that is so wrong that any proximity to it at all puts us closer than we want to be to culpability. As such that proximity deserves our scrutiny and critical thoughtfulness.

So this comparison is not to say that a lawyer’s practice of manumission or immigration law was/is evil in and of themselves; rather manumission practice, like immigration practice, could be a necessary vehicle of resistance (to use Millward’s words) when and inasmuch as it becomes a necessary intervention to save lives and protect people from harm. This comparison prompts us to conclude that their practice does not by itself satisfy the moral responsibility of the practitioner. Such a practice is necessary, but insufficient. It was not enough for a lawyer to advocate for the manumission of individuals during a time when the terrorism of slavery thrived – rather the minimum level of moral responsibility required that they call for the abolition of slavery as an institution.

Thus, like legal manumitters before them, it is not enough for immigration lawyers to practice the law – we must be abolitionists. It is morally insufficient to fall somewhere in the middle or to fail to take that position. And it is in that sense too that these two areas of law are analogous – not in the depth of the cruelty of the institution that they were a part of – no oppression Olympics please – but in their failure of each in and of themselves to be morally adequate conduct on the part of the practitioner in each of their respective contexts.

For both the manumitter advocate and the immigration lawyer, it is a failure of their moral imagination to believe that their responsibility ends with their legal work. Our duty does not end with advocacy on behalf of someone’s life or liberty, but with calling for the abolition of the institution that threatens them in the first place. Our job may begin with filing a Notice of Appearance, but it ends only with speaking out in favor of abolishing the border.13

Footnotes

1 Martinez, Elizabeth. 1993. “Beyond Black/White: The Racisms of our Times.” Social Justice 20 (1/2): 22–34.

2See, e.g., Michael P. Mills, Slave Law in Mississippi from 1817-1861: Constitutions, Codes and Cases, 71 Miss. L.J. 153, 184-188 (2001); Andrew Kull, Restitution in Favor of Former Slaves, Symposium: The Jurisprudence of Slavery Reparations, 84 B.U.L. Rev. 1277-78, 1280-81, 1286 (Dec. 2004); Warran T. Burns, Book Review: Judith Kelleher Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862, 78 Tul. L. Rev. 2339, 2340 (“slaves nevertheless continued to enter into contracts for self-purchase during the antebellum period”).

3 A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. & F. Michael Higginbothom, “Yearning to Breathe Free”: Legal Barriers Against and Options in Favor of Liberty in Antebellum Virginia, 68 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1213, 1255 (Dec. 1993); Michael P. Mills, Slave Law in Mississippi from 1817-1861: Constitutions, Codes and Cases, 71 Miss. L.J. 153, 184-188 (2001).

4 See Warran T. Burns, Book Review: Judith Kelleher Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans, 1846-1862, 78 Tul. L. Rev. 2339, 2340 (“slaves in Louisiana had the right to bring suits for their freedom in their individual capacities . . .”); A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr. & F. Michael Higginbothom, “Yearning to Breathe Free”: Legal Barriers Against and Options in Favor of Liberty in Antebellum Virginia, 68 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 1213, 1260-61 (Dec. 1993).

5 See Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad 42, 133 (2015).

6 I don’t use this phrase here to refer to attorneys who work for Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Citizenship and Immigration Service – although they are practicing immigration law as well, inasmuch as a lawyer representing a slave state in opposition to an enslaved persons request for manumission could be said to have been practicing manumission law.

7 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, new edition 296 (1968).

8 This is probably not the case with federal impact litigators who might challenge an immigration law on constitutional grounds, for example, since they may be challenging the institution itself, just as, say, the 13th Amendment did to slavery, or Brown v. Board of Education did to slavery’s later incarnation, Jim Crow.

9 Judith Kelleher Schafer, Becoming Free, Remaining Free: Manumission and Enslavement in New Orleans at xiii (Jan. 2003).

10 In truth, the lawyer defending the person from deportation does not “save” that person – but merely engages in a partnership in which the non-citizen saves themselves through that partnership, and the same can be said for any attorney who defended an enslaved person against a nineteenth century tribunal.

11 Manumission did not restore a former slave to full human being-status – they could still face violence and discrimination and in some jurisdiction could be re-enslaved to pay off their owners debts. Likewise, a non-citizen may win Legal Permanent Residence before an immigration court, but could still be deported if they commit a crime or engage in any number of other actions.

12 Jessica Millward, The Relics of Slavery: Interracial Sex and Manumission in the American South, Frontiers: A J. of Women Studies, Vol. 31, No. 3 (2010), pp. 22-30, at 26.

13 And when I say abolishing the border I mean abolishing the border.

from Open Borders: The Case http://ift.tt/2oYdBLQ

[afishtrap]

Compares slave trading and slavery in the Dutch colonial empire, specifically between the former trading and territorial domains of the West India Company (WIC), the Americas and West Africa, and of the East India Company (VOC), South East Asia, the Indian Ocean region, and South and East Africa. Author presents the latest quantitative assessments concerning the Dutch transatlantic as well as Indian Ocean World slave trade, placing the volume, direction, and characteristics of the forced migration in a historical context. He describes how overall the Dutch were a second-rate player in Atlantic slavery, though in certain periods more important, with according to recent estimates a total of about 554.300 slaves being transported by the Dutch to the Americas. He indicates that while transatlantic slave trade and slavery received much scholarly attention resulting in detailed knowledge, the slave trade and slavery in the Indian Ocean World by the Dutch is comparatively underresearched. Based on demand-side estimates throughout Dutch colonies of the Indonesian archipelago and elsewhere, he deduces that probably close to 500.000 slaves were transported by the Dutch in the Indian Ocean World. In addition, the author points at important differences between the nature and contexts of slavery, as in the VOC domains slavery was mostly of an urban and domestic character, contrary to its production base in the Americas. Slavery further did in the VOC areas not have a rigid racial identification like in WIC areas, with continuing, postslavery effects, and allowed for more flexibility, while unlike the plantation colonies in the Caribbean, as Suriname, not imported slaves but indigenous peoples formed the majority. He also points at relative exceptions, e.g. imported slaves for production use in some VOC territories, as the Banda islands and the Cape colony, and a certain domestic and urban focus of slavery in Curaçao.

Rik van Welie. "Slave trading and slavery in the Dutch colonial empire: A global comparison." New West Indian Guide / Nieuwe West-Indische Gids, Volume 82, Issue 1-2, pages 47 – 96.

This continued admiration for the VOC signals that the Dutch historical imagination still connects most negative aspects of colonialism with the history of the West India Company (WIC) and its Caribbean possessions. That slavery also played a prominent role in the VOC domain has seemingly been forgotten. This public ignorance merely reflects the state of academic scholarship on the subject. Slavery has never been a fashionable topic among historians of the VOC, and its general absence in the literature is not an exclusively Dutch phenomenon either. In fact, the historiography of Indian Ocean World slavery in general is still in an embryonic stage. Fortunately, propelled by the recent efforts of a small number of historians, we are learning more about the nature of European colonial slavery in the East and can begin, in the words of one of these scholars, “to ‘unsilence’ this part of our history and ‘re-Orient’ the historiographical imbalance” in slavery studies (Vink 2003:135).6

Whenever the topic of slavery is discussed in contemporary society, an instinctively defensive reaction has been to claim that it was always a natural and widely accepted institution among human beings, and that even the tolerant Dutch were unaware of its moral wrongs until the abolitionist movement emerged in the late eighteenth century. A closer look, however, reveals that argumentation is deceiving at best. First of all, the early modern Dutch – and with them most other Europeans – no longer deemed it morally acceptable to enslave fellow Europeans. Apparently, slave status was only fitting for people of African or Asian descent.7 Secondly, while outsiders were still eligible to become slaves, as an institution slavery had almost completely disappeared from the Dutch Republic and selected other parts of Western Europe and would not return, even though an official moment of abolition eludes us.8 Historians have often been struck by this curious paradox: that the seventeenth-century Dutch took great pride in their hard-fought freedom and climate of tolerance at home, while simultaneously employing hundreds of thousands of slaves in their overseas dominions (Eltis 1993, 1999, Drescher 1994).

But perhaps this paradox holds the explanation as to why the public awareness of slavery in Dutch history has until recently been so limited. In sharp contrast with most other lucrative commodities bought and sold by the merchants of the VOC and the WIC, slaves seldom passed through the Dutch Republic. The trade in slaves, even then considered an “uncommon market” (Gemery & Hogendorn 1979), was always held at a relatively comfortable distance. And whenever this physical distance was occasionally bridged, like in the frequently cited Middelburg case of 1596, the Dutch commitment to freedom was instantly tested.9 Colonists returning to their homeland were generally prohibited from taking their slaves along and, when doing so anyway, risked the loss of their property by implicit manumission. David Brion Davis (2000:458), the eminent historian of Western slavery, spoke of these moral and legal boundaries as “primitive ‘Mason-Dixon’ lines, now drawn somewhere in the Atlantic, separating free soil master-states from tainted slave soil dependencies.”10 Because of this physical and psychological separation, there was hardly any need to come to terms with colonial slavery in the metropolis.

[...]

Despite the inherent subjectivity of all assumptions, extrapolations, and estimations involved, historians generally agree that slightly more than half a million Africans were transported on Dutch ships, with somewhere between 50,000 to 100,000 slaves perishing before they reached the New World.21 While research on specific periods and aspects of the trade will likely continue, any dramatic alterations to this general picture need no longer be expected. With regard to sheer volume, the Dutch are regarded as a second-rate player in the transatlantic slave trade, certainly important, yet not comparable to the massive numbers transported by Portuguese or British vessels.

[...]

As the rise of Dutch colonial expansion was closely tied to the enduring conflict with Spain (as well as with Portugal since 1580), Iberian shipping became fair game for Dutch privateers. The capture of Portuguese slave ships in and around the Atlantic Ocean resulted in what has been labeled an “incidental slave trade” (Emmer 1972b:728-29). Slaves carried by the enemy were defined as contraband and, when possible, sold to the nearest friendly buyer.27 The incidental slave trade reached a peak during the first full decade of the WIC, but the 2,356 slaves, if we accept WIC official Johannes de Laet’s count, taken between 1623 and 1636 (Van den Boogaart & Emmer 1979:355) were, despite their value as propaganda, rather insignificant from a quantitative perspective.28

Qualitatively, however, some of these slaves caused a historic impact far greater than their numbers may suggest. Which slaves, for example, received more attention than the twenty Africans delivered in 1619 by “a Dutch man of warre” to the English settlers at Jamestown, Virginia?29 In various other Protestant settlements in the New World (New Netherland, Bermuda, Barbados, Tobago, Guianas) warfare and privateering were often responsible for the arrival of the first Africans.30 Almost all originated from West Central Africa (Congo-Loango, Luanda, Benguela), which between the 1580s and 1640s possessed a virtual monopoly on slave exports. Some of the names assigned to the first African residents of New Amsterdam – Paulo d’Angola, Anthony Portuguese, Simon Congo, Assento Angola – confirm this Portuguese-Angolan connection (Berlin 1996:265).31 As the first and rather isolated Africans among small communities of struggling settlers from northwestern Europe, this “charter generation” of “Atlantic creoles” (Berlin 1996, 1998, Heywood & Thornton 2007) witnessed the slow crystallization of slavery before its own eyes. At times, they may have experienced a level of freedom and social mobility that was generally absent among future generations of African American slaves.

The conquest of Pernambuco and several other Portuguese captaincies in northeast Brazil during the early 1630s handed the WIC the richest sugar-producing area in the world, and a full-blown slave society at that. The Company officials soon came to the realization that without slaves, sugar cultivation was in danger. After the surrounding rural areas were sufficiently “pacified,” the WIC began expanding its commercial interests on the African coast by simply conquering long-established Portuguese trading posts. Earlier attempts to do so had failed miserably (Ratelband 2000, Den Heijer 2006), but victories at Arguin (1633), El Mina (1637), and São Paulo de Luanda and São Tomé (1641) guaranteed an unprecedented Dutch dominance on the African coast. Never would the Dutch have easier access to slaves than during the 1640s (Ratelband 1953, 2000).

[...]

It is in this volatile arena that the emergence of Curaçao as a slave trade entrepôt for the Spanish Americas should be situated. No longer useful as a military base now that the war with Spain had ended, and never entirely suited for commercial plantation agriculture, the Company was desperately looking for another niche. For the next half century, Curaçao would take advantage of the asiento trade, receiving “saltwater” slaves from Africa and distributing them to the Spanish Americas according to contracts made in Europe. The asiento contracts were renewed and reconfigured several times during the second half of the seventeenth century, thereby consolidating the Dutch position as a major player in the transatlantic slave trade (Klooster 1997).

[timeismusic]

Blackfist don’t talk we take action.

[beatsforbrothels]

Blackfist - Absence

[beatsforbrothels]

Blackfist - Juneteenth

[beatsforbrothels]

Blackfist - Used2It