Thursday, September 5, 2013
Something I Never Thought About :/
While I was reading chapter three, I came across a really interesting section of the chapter, which was basically the answer to one of the reading questions. The question was "What are the limits on our understanding of the African immigrant experience in America?" I answered the question by saying our understanding of the African immigrant experience is limited by the nature of the historical record. We have few primary documents that give some insight, but those documents are limited to the late 18th century and the 19th century. The African immigrants before those centuries have no actual evidence or documentations on how their lives were and how they feel. In the book it says that the African immigrants were "non literate" people. When I read that I think wow they weren't allowed to learn to read or write so its not their fault that they were called illiterate. They suffered in many harsh conditions and they weren't able to express how they felt because of this. We have no way of knowing what really happened and how they felt about the situation or anything they encountered. These immigrants didn't get to have a voice and i just feel really bad for them.
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I also found this to be interesting. The fact that African immigrants were not even remotely considered ACTUAL people in the aspect of taking down notes or records of their arrival. It would have been somewhat helpful if white buyers took a small record of their lives.
ReplyDeleteIt really is so sad that we do nit know more about the everyday life of those Africans who were first kidnapped and brought to the New World. While there is no written documents of those early slaves there is an oral history that has been handed down. But there are stories from the lives of escaped slaves in later century like the 19th like she said, an example is the life of a slave girl its actually a really sad,but good book.
ReplyDeleteIt is really interesting and also disappointing. I think history could have been so much more rich with information and knowledge. Luckily, there are better records being taken now about the current immigrants entering the country.
ReplyDeleteI found that interesting too because of the fact that we celebrate black history month based only on the history that is few century in the making. what about the history of all the african that were slaved before that? what about the immigrants african that came with the founding fathers? Its really astounding that we have records that dates as early as the beginning of printing but no records of african history.
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