Saturday, March 11, 2017

UPDATE: Best to get your facts straight when criticizing the Trump team



Source:  Twitter

The fact is.....millions of slaves were brought to the Western Hemisphere.


How Many Slaves Landed in the U.S.? by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.  (PBS, originally posted on The Root)
The most comprehensive analysis of shipping records over the course of the slave trade is the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, edited by professors David Eltis and David Richardson. (While the editors are careful to say that all of their figures are estimates, I believe that they are the best estimates that we have, the proverbial “gold standard” in the field of the study of the slave trade.) Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database,
  • 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 
  • 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America.
And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That’s right: a tiny percentage.
Related reading:
Rapid Natural Increase in U.S. Slave Population.  (Economic History Association)


Original 3/7/2017 post, "Photo of HUD Secretary Ben Carson selected as dictionary illustration for 'obtuse'", starts here.

He may have been a brilliant neurosurgeon, but on every other topic on which he expounds, he seems just not to get it.



Dual senses of 'obtuse' provided by Merriam-Webster


[emphasis added]

Ben Carson just referred to slaves as 'immigrants'.  (USA Today, 3/6/2017)

Aboard the Underground Railroad:  The Slave Trade.  (National Park Service)

Equating the slave trade with immigration is just....well, actually, it's not all that surprising coming from a member of the Trump administration.

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