The Transatlantic Slave Trade

Racism has had a great impact on our modern world. Whether it is a country that directly benefited or lost from racism, there is no doubt that racism was and arguably still is a huge driving force of how a society operates. Since racism is such an important subject to understand, the roots of this prejudice must be evaluated. Looking back in history, the Transatlantic slave trade played a big role in racism. The Transatlantic trade, designed to ship black Africans as slaves across the Atlantic, took place in the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries and affected millions of people. Looking back at history, the Transatlantic slave trade was the root cause of racism due to the the economics and justifications used against the black African peoples

Over the course of history, there have been many justifications of slavery. However, all of the justifications for holding black africans under slavery were racially based. “Blacks were simply deemed racially incapable of self-interest, self ownership, self-rule, and civilization itself.” (Carlander, Jay R. and W. Elliot Brownlee). These general (racist) ideas, by the height of slavery under the trade, were widely accepted. “Some Europeans were appalled to hear that Africans ruled themselves and possessed their own system of government. This disgust was justified by claims that Africans were barbaric and uncivilized” (Muhammad, Patricia M. 888). The racist justification normalized the idea that black Africans were inferior because of their race; this ideal survived the slave trade. These justifications appeared during the Transatlantic slave trade - thus, the racism against black africans that survived can be credited to the trade. Widely accepted racism against Africans was a result of the justifications of holding black Africans as slaves - which occurred during the Transatlantic slave

Slavery has been around for a very long time - and with no doubt existed before the Transatlantic slave trade. A major key difference between those forms of slavery compared to slavery black Africans suffered during the Transatlantic slave trade, however, is the justification of keeping the people enslaved. For example, take the ancient Greek’s justification of their slavery - “On the one hand, the natural slave, due to an innate defect in his capacity to engage in practical deliberation, is morally inferior to those who are naturally free” (Harvey, Martin). Influential thinkers of the time didn’t endorse racially based justifications of slavery, either. “Aristotle himself concedes the essential hopelessness of attempting to draw a substantive master/slave distinction on the basis of putative physical differences between the two” (Harvey, Martin). This is an example of justification of slavery in ancient Greece, far before the Transatlantic slave trade - and racist ideas were not used in justification. Since racist justifications for slavery didn’t exist before the Transatlantic slave trade, the conclusion that racism is rooted in the trade can be drawn. There is also the argument that if slavery is inherently racially based, and if racism against black Africans existed before the slave trade, black Africans would’ve been the