Take a Step Back

In the midst of Nikki Haley's "cause of the Civil War" downfall in her pursuit of the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, the Equal Justice Initiative posted this to Twitter. I'm going to screenshot the whole thing instead of quoting it, in order to show how it looked in my feed:

Sometimes you have to take a step back and think about what the slave trade was in present-day terms, because our schooling taught us to dehumanize the people who were enslaved and humanize the people who enslaved them, and to make the economic system natural. 

EJI's tweet updates language to equate enslavement with human trafficking that happens now. If the events of 1767 were happening now, what would the champions of supposed freedom think about them, or do about them?

The full post about this specific ship and Savannah as a port in the TransAtlantic Slave Trade is worth reading. More than 23,000 people were trafficked through the port of Savannah before the U.S. ended trading in humans across the Atlantic (but not within the U.S.). It had a nine-story building to hold them in quarantine while they waited to be sold.

I've never been to Savannah, though I hear it's beautiful. I will probably never go.