By Glenda Buya-ao Claborne
Arizona Daily Wildcat
December 10, 1997

'Amistad' portrays brutality of slave trade

Editor:

In all the huff and puff surrounding discussions of race relations in America, the historical facts of the African slave trade remain a meaty point for the argument that, even at the level of the psyche, African Americans have to break down thick barriers before they can even get to the point from which other groups have already blithely and fluidly took off.

Many other ethnic groups in the U.S. have experienced persecution and discrimination, one way or another, in their countires of origin or in the U.S. itself, but for the most part, they were free. As an Asian, what do I know about the weight and pain of a collective memory of non-personhood that African Americans might have of their past?

The African slave trade has played an important role in the development of European and American economies in the 18th and early 19th centuries. But many Americans are now amnesiac or just plain ignorant of the fact that part of the prosperity that they now enjoy resulted from the labor of slaves in plantations in the Americas.

Watch Spielberg's latest film, Amistad, and gain a visual image of how countless human beings were packed like sardines in dark, putrid lower decks of trading ships, thrown overboard easily when dead or deemed too sick, auctioned off like cattle and worked like horses. Amistad tells the story of how a group of about 40 African slaves fought for their freedom and dignity by capturing the schooner Amistad from its Spanish owner as they were being transported from Havana and Puerto Principe in 1839, long after many Western nations outlawed trading in slaves. The vessel drifted aimlessly along the eastern coast of the U.S., the slaves captured and tried in Connecticut and were eventually brought back to Africa.

This Christmas, if you happen to see Dicken's A Christmas Carol, remember that he also wrote American Notes (1842) in which he had something to say not only about those who brazenly practiced slavery but also about those who admitted its horrors only in the abstract and about htose who regard themsemves as genteel people but would never allow a negro to "come too near."

Glenda Buya-ao Claborne
Journalism Graduate Student