6 Ways Slavery Still Negatively Impacts Black People

Names

Just as Kunta Kinte was forced under the lash to change his name in the novel and movie Roots, black people both in the West and Africa were forced to take their slave masters’ names. Today, many black people carry European or Arabic names, which is a direct link to our enslavement.

Food

The diets of many black people who in live in the Diaspora are a direct result of slavery. The slave masters generally consumed the lean and fleshy parts of farm animals, and left the scraps for the slaves. Enslaved Africans were forced to incorporate those leftovers – such as chitterlings, ox tails, tripe, pigs feet, cow foot, and other bad foods – into their daily meals. Those unhealthy foods are still part of the diets of many black people today. They are harmful to the body and are the cause of chronic illnesses that plague our communities including strokes, high blood pressure, diabetes and heart disease.

Economics

Before Arab and Transatlantic slave trade, many African economies flourished and were the foundation of stable, developed societies. Mansa Musa, who was king of the great Mali empire in the 14th century, was the richest man on the planet, worth $400 billion dollars, which is more than any black nation’s annual GDP today.

Post slavery, blacks tend to invest the majority of their income in communities outside their own to the detriment of their daily lives and well-being.

Language

Currently the official language of many people who are African or African descent is either European or Arabic. Whether it was during the 7th century Arab invasion into north Africa or the European colonization and slave trade that began in the 15th century, foreign languages were forced upon black people and have been the legacy for generations.

Self-Hate

The slave masters used Machiavellian systems to mentally break the enslaved Africans. While validating themselves as superior, they used every propaganda tool within their power to teach black people to hate themselves. The results still have major impact on the psyche of black people today.

Family

A weakened black family emerged from slavery. The destruction of the family unit through the slave master’s intrusive sexual exploitation of women and other evil designs, evolved into a volatile moral code for black people.

As a consequence, today over 70 percent of African-American children are born to unmarried women in America.

That number is an astonishing residual effect of slavery. Such large numbers children born to single mothers is clearly the wrong model for a stable, secure future for black people, as there is a direct link between an absent father and an increased chance that a child will drop out of high school and have a criminal record.