Episode 92

In this episode of the Removing Barriers podcast, we continue our discussion with Missionary Marco on Slavery, The Bible and Christians. This time we evaluate the institution in its historicity and what implications that has for us today. Why did great thinkers like Aristotle think slavery was a necessary part of civilization? In light of American history, was slavery necessary? Why was it so difficult to abolish slavery? Missionary Marco tackles these questions head on and answers other questions like these in the light of the gospel.

What ended up happening is a slave ship went down and there was an insurance case attached to it. And what basically it came down to is the people. Were they considered property or lives? Because if they were considered property, you couldn’t insure them, but if they were considered people, you couldn’t put a price on them.

Thank you for tuning in to the Removing Barriers podcast. I’m Jay. And I’m MCG. And we’re attempting to remove barriers so we can all have a clear view of the cross.

This is episode 92 of the Removing Barriers podcast. And in this episode, missionary Marco is joining us again to continue our discussion in slavery, the Bible and Christians.

Missionary Marco, you’re back. Thank you for joining us again. Thank you so much for having me. Again, a pleasure talking with you both. Great. So if you haven’t listened to episode 91, I would encourage you to go and listen to that. In that episode, we touch a lot on the history of slavery. What does the Bible have to say about slavery? In this episode, we’re going to go a little bit closer to home, talk about a little bit more of slavery in the US and stuff like that.

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So let’s dive into it. Marco, why did great thinkers like Aristotle think slavery was a necessary part of civilization? Yes, he definitely thought that. He just thought, like most people thought, that slavery was just being on the lowest rung in civilization, so it was just accepted as normal. So we’re looking at this from 2022 and seeing it as a boring, despicable thing, and yet for him, it was just normal. And for him, it was even noble and good because he saw it as necessary. And even in the country he lived in, it was pretty awful to be a slave. The average life of a slave in Rome, in ancient Rome, was 17 and a half years old. Oh, wow. They were put to work in the mines or in the galleys. It was basically an early death sentence. I can’t remember exactly, but I think the men made it to almost 18 and the ladies were closer to 17. So it was horrible. They were treated like merchandise, like something disposable you’d use until it died, you’d use until it was wasted. It was absolutely horrible. And yet, obviously, a brilliant man, a genius, and geniuses throughout history thought there was nothing wrong with that. So I guess that teaches us something about human nature. There’s something inherently within man, a Christian, we call it sin, or sinful nature that’s separate from intellectualism, because these were very smart people who thought that there was nothing wrong with treating a person like a piece of property or worse, where you could kill someone before they would come to age by working them so hard, so terribly. And that was just a good and noble part of life. It doesn’t matter where you go. In the world throughout history, everyone believed that there was not a people group that I know of that did not have slavery or were not slaves themselves at one point. It was just an accepted part of humanity for millennia up until about the 18th century.

Intellectualism certainly does not guarantee good character or wisdom, that’s for sure. So did they see slavery as necessary because you just need someone to do all of the manual labor and all of the menial sort of jobs that perhaps citizens and non slave people didn’t want to do? Yeah, I think that’s part of it. Some of that even you see results of it in cultures where they had slavery and it’s been abolished. Like in the south, for example. In the antebellum south, obviously slaves did all the menial work. And following slavery, a difficult thing for the southern white people was having them learn how to do things that they’d never had to do before, literally like laundry. And so there was something where people just thought it’s beneath them to do this sort of work. And even in Latin American countries where there wasn’t necessarily the racial tension, but there was the slavery, there is a little bit of an attitude where, well, that’s menial work, that’s something poor people do, that’s something slaves do, and there’s a class of people that do that, and then there’s a class of people that don’t do that. And so it’s actually interesting because in Latin America, a lot of immigrants did very well for themselves because they would come to this new land from other places and they didn’t have any of the stigma. So they would go to the the land, they would just get to work. And so they didn’t carry any of this post-slavery baggage that other people who grew up, even though they never experienced themselves, there’s just this underlying understanding of slaves and poor people doing this sort of work, whereas people who grew up in a society that didn’t have that kind of predominant slavery didn’t have that baggage.

Yes. I think that’s an interesting question, though, because I remember watching what was it? Is it colonial house where they were enacting? Yes, after frontier house. Right. There were two of them. There’s a frontier house and there’s colonial house. And they basically try to take modern people and put them back 100 or 200 years ago and try to reenact what life would have been like back then. So they give them those kind of tools and then they have to spend like six months or so doing that to see they would have survived. Sure. And what was interesting to me in colonial house was that they came, of course, the woman stayed on the ship for a couple of weeks while the men tried to establish some place to live and stuff like that. Okay. So they really tried to get it as closely as possible to what life was back then. And of course, they had to put their own food. Yes. I think initially they gave them some grains and stuff like that, kind of like getting them started. Right, to get them started, of course, things that they would have brought from England, sure. But they had to get their garden up and running, get their home up and running, go to the woods and cut down the trees, drag them back, build their stuff and all that they had to do. And they pointed out something because there was a black man on set doing the re enactment, and he eventually left because the dark truth came out about the need for white slave was necessary back then. Again, I’m not condoning slavery because of course, I’m a descendant of African slaves from the Caribbean. Of course I’m not defending slavery, but it was a survival thing for these folks. And of course you can argue that they were selfish. There was no way they were able to build a home, have their garden, all the other stuff, because they’re dealing with diseases and stuff like that that they weren’t accustomed to. They were dealing with a lot of stuff, and life was so difficult that they saw the need for slave. That’s why the black guy left the set, because it was becoming real to him. Right on the wall. He could see where it was going. Yeah, why they needed people slavery. And again, I understand the history, but I don’t think save it should have happened. But even, at least looking to the lens of the folks that did it, they were saying, hey, we won’t survive unless we get help. And the only way we can get help is by doing this. And as evil as it was, there’s something you look at and say, wow, could that have been? Would America be America without slave? And I think a lot of black folks, obviously not, they would not be going on. The country was built on the back of slave, and I honestly believe that. But just even as academically entertaining the idea of whether it was necessary for civilization and comparing what I saw in front of your house and a little bit of history, I know I wonder and like, man, this seems like it was necessary. What else would they have done? Should they have packed their stuff and went back to England?

Now, there’s some conjecture. I don’t think it was necessary because people have settled places throughout the planet and some harsh places without it, and so I don’t think it was necessary. Certainly it’s changed history, it’s changed the country, it’s changed how you and I live today, but you think of a lot of the north was colonized or settled, the northern states, and certainly the west was settled without slavery. Canada was settled without slavery for the most part, especially the west, and it was hard going. I don’t know if I’ve told you this, but my grandfather was a slave. He escaped Europe before the bolshevik revolution, ended up in Brazil, and he was enslaved. And it wasn’t a racial issue because they could get away with it because he was an immigrant. He was nowhere near home, and so they had him picking coffee in Brazil, and he did that until he ran away. And so that was not a racial issue. That was an issue of opportunity. And so I think that’s how slavery happens. And I mentioned that because I remember looking at pictures with my dad’s, black and white pictures of when he was young, and he’s in front of a mud brick hut, a mud brick house. And I asked my dad, who’s this? He looked at me, said, Oh, that’s me. That’s when we were really poor. People make a go however they can. I remember seeing pictures like that and going to museums. I grew up in Canada and going to museums, and people lived like that. They had side rooms, they had mud walls, and they went through -30 40 deg below zero and they made a go of it. And they didn’t have slaves. But they worked hard. It wasn’t a nine to five job. There was a lot of work. And really, the western US. And western Canada weren’t settled until relatively recently. It was hard work. Yeah, definitely. And individual families just made it go any way they could, looking for a better life. They knew it would take work. So could it have been done without slavery? Yeah, obviously the people who did the plantation thought it could have been done without it, but they did it here, too, and they still do it today. There’s plantations here, and they function, I think, probably the same way today as they did 200 years ago. I’m in Uruguay right now. They have orange plantations. They have cotton fields further south of us. Not nearway, but in Argentina or west and north of us, I should say. And people would pick those, and the owners would pay them for how much they picked. And so that wasn’t a slavery thing. That was just there was just a class of people who would come and do seasonal work, like picking oranges, like picking cotton. And so that sort of plantation was done with a slavery. It’s just opportunities. Just like there was an opportunity in my grandfather’s situation, while there was an opportunity to make it easy in the antebellum south. That’s why it wasn’t such an issue in the north, because there were foundations like that. And so, whether it’s that or the sugar islands, there was an opportunity to get a bunch of cheap labor and put them to work. And so how it would have ended up, I’m not sure, but I don’t think it was absolutely necessary. People are pretty creative if they have to be.

Yeah, I would definitely agree with that. I hope I didn’t come across as saying that he was absolutely necessary. I just was saying that I could see, if I look from their perspective, why they might think it was necessary. Because I think for them it was more selfish. Put it lightly in terms of survival, in terms of what can we do so we can lighten our burden of moving.

Of course. And of course, because of the sinful nature of man, they went to one of the most deviant things in history of slavery, I think, to touch on that sin complicates things, because I think early on, the difference between slavery and not having slavery wouldn’t have been that big a deal. But once it’s an integral part of society, now what do you do? And so whether you’re talking about families, whether you’re talking about governments, whether you’re talking about slavery, once sin becomes part of life society, what do you do now? Because this shouldn’t have happened in the first place. And now what? And so whether you’re talking about broken families, whether you’re talking about any kind of perversion, whether you’re talking about any kind of sin like slavery, like the transatlantic slave trade, now what? So it’s easy. That’s why it’s so much better to avoid it in the first place. Because the issue wasn’t necessarily even in the antebellum south where people were pro or anti slavery. Almost everyone, you’ll find it very hard to find people who are pro slavery, even in the antibiotics, not saying they weren’t people, but what they were is they didn’t know how to undo this mess. They either side as a necessary evil. They wanted to get rid of it. They weren’t sure how. And most everyone thought, other than some very extreme people, thought that it should end. But it had to be a gradual process because of the hundreds of thousands of lives involved and because it’s an integral part of the economy. Now. If it wouldn’t have been in the first place, then getting rid of slavery obviously wouldn’t be so hard because it wouldn’t be part of the makeup of society. And that’s why it was easier in the north than in the south, because the difference between doing your own laundry versus destroying or perceived to destroy an economy is a huge difference.

Yeah, as you talk about that, what came to my mind is something that somewhat off topic, but you talk about how thin complicates things, because today we are actually going down the road of that same complication within. Because if you think about the LGBTQIA movement now that the west as a whole is allowing gay marriage and all these things, what do we do? When someone gets saved, but they’re in a gay marriage. Of course, we know typically they’re not married, but they have a legal contract that they have signed because that’s what marriage is to the world, basically a financial contract. Of course, we know marriages are coming in according to the bible, so we are digging ourselves in complication of sin because again, we’re also saying people can be born male, but they can transition to be female, again, using to complicate things. And 50 years from now, it might just be very difficult to unwind, just like survey was to unwind. Of course, I’m not equating LGBTQIA issues with racial issues because one is the same and one is not. So let me just clarify that. Okay, so as we think about that, what do you think makes the European enslavement of Africans unique compared to the European enslavement of other Europeans or even African enslaving other Africans? Yeah. It all of a sudden became a huge business. People enslaving their neighbors, conquering their neighbors is not unusual. I mean, it happens throughout history. Like, Africa is a continent. You’ve got Warren people group. Europe, even just up until a few centuries ago, was so unstable. We happen to be speaking English today. But if any one of several battles would have gone another way, we wouldn’t be. And so it was a very unstable place. The world was very unstable, a lot of work. So with regards to what was done, there was just huge business. Instead of just conquering and conquesting and having your local struggles within the country, within the people group, now you’ve got people who are actually, for lack of a better word, kidnapping whole groups of people and selling them elsewhere. And so that never was even possible until obviously better ships were built and countries had huge ship fleets and navies, and that didn’t really happen until the 1500 or so. And so that wasn’t even possible until that, I guess, technology came about. So that’s a very fairly recent thing. Even though slavery was practiced throughout the world, the transatlantic slave trade was kind of a new phenomenon just because shipping existed like it never had before.

It’s interesting because you think about it, I don’t think a lot of folks realize that Africans enslaved Africans or European enslaved Europeans in history. I think when they think of slavery, they always think about the western form of slavery in terms of slavery as a racial dynamic rather than a people or a human sinful nature dynamic. Yeah, you’re right. And it is. Obviously we’re always going to be more interested in learning about our own culture, and so anything to do with slavery is going to be based around our own history or the history of where we live. But history is full of slavery. The Arabs continued slavery in a very grotesque manner long after England and America put an end to it. And a great deal of effort was put in by England and America to put those slave ships to rest. They would do everything they could really do great sacrifice, finance slavery globally, not just within their borders. So it wasn’t just saying, well, live and let live. It was people all over the planet have right to freedom. And so the kind of slavery practice was literally kidnapping. And you’re right saying it was just like it was Europeans and slaving Europeans with a slave trade. It was slightly different where you had Africans and saving Africans, which is not new, but now they were selling them abroad. And so European ships would come to port, fill up full of newly kidnapped people and take them either back to their countries or sell them elsewhere. It was just merchandise. And it’s interesting, one of the impetus is to end slavery was actually a court case in England. I don’t remember the name of the case at this point, but what ended up happening is a slave ship went down and it was an insurance case attached to it. And what basically it came down to is the people. Were they considered property or lives? Because if they were considered property, you could insure them, but if they were considered people, you couldn’t put a price on them. And so the funny thing to me is, I think God providentially use that greed to all of a sudden make whether this African man is property or a person. And so that came to light and that helped actually the whole situation, whether this is just merchandise or soul. And so I don’t have the name of that. I can send that to you later. Things like that happen and people realize and determine these are people and they’re just being kidnapped and shipped abroad. And it became an ethical problem, especially as Europe became more and more, if I can say Christian, because now you’ve got people who are being mistreated. And I’ll say this too. England was somewhat isolated to the slave trade because none of the slaves ended up going to England. They would buy them and sell them elsewhere. They were just like merchandise. So basically, other than slave traders, the average Englishman didn’t really know what was going on with the slaves. And so some Christians took it upon themselves. I believe one preacher by the name of Clark who’s angry man he was in contact with William Lob Ford. His main goal was to write letters and send them to the press and let people know what’s actually happening. Because the average person didn’t even know what was happening with regards to slavery because they weren’t all going to England. England is not a large country, not full of plantations, for example, the Sugar Islands were, the American South was. But there wasn’t a need for a huge amount of slaves there. And so most Englishmen and most Europeans were isolated from what was actually going on during the slave trade.

Yeah, I think they send a lot of them to the islands. Of course, the islands are littered with sugar mills, what we locally call towers, as a mark of history. There’s several of them still standing and most of them are historical sites in the country. I think one of them, I don’t know if he’s still actually working, but it’s probably the closest one that you can actually look inside and see the mechanical mechanism of how we would work. Most of them have been gutted, but that one still has a mechanical mechanism inside of it and stuff like that. I think the government has preserved that one. But we learned something in school called the triangular trade where the slave would be brought. If you draw a triangle from England to the US. To the Caribbean, then back to England, that’s how the slave trade went. The trips come down, they may start on the US. And they go to the Caribbean, drop off whatever they’re dropping off there before they go back either to interesting England or wherever they to reload. Yeah.

So let me ask you this mission, Marco, in the light of American history, was slavery necessary? We cannot touch on that in terms of what it was necessary for civilization at the Broad, but uniquely to the US. Do you think it was necessary for the US. Uniquely, I don’t think so. I mean, that’s shaped, I guess, by me being a Christian. I don’t think sin is ever necessary. So I would say no. I can understand, and I don’t condone, but I can understand why it was a complicating issue. More so to the south. When David was offered the threshing floor to sacrifice, he wanted to pay for it because he didn’t want to worship if it didn’t cost him anything. And it’s easy for me to judge how other people have lived if it doesn’t cost me anything. The people in the north, although they did sacrifice and I praise the Lord for good people who wanted to end slavery it was the people in the south who really thought they were going to pay a price because a great deal of their economy revolved around the plantation. So for a Southern man to be an abolitionist was a noble thing. It was a good Christian thing to realize this will cost something. And so I don’t think it was necessary. I think it was complicated once it was introduced because it became integral to how they ran things there. And people are ingenious and ingenuity when they need to be. And so they had a lot of cheap labor and they put it to use. I happen to think that the Jews had a great part of building Egypt. When you’ve got a lot of cheap labor, you can get things done and you don’t worry about how you can be more intuitive, use different machinery. Well, that kind of ingenuity wasn’t necessary in the south because well, you had a bunch of slaves that you could put to work. So labor was not an issue. There was an abundance of labor, and so it wasn’t necessary. I somewhat understand. I do not condone at all. It was wicked, it was evil. But I understand why the south was more resistant to getting rid of it, and I hope that’s never taken out of context. I’m talking about how we can understand how some people struggled with the issue more than others. That doesn’t make it right.

Now, some people would argue that because it was such a contentious issue, that’s precisely why we fought the civil war over it. And others would say it wasn’t really about slavery, it was about states rights. Where do you fall on that spectrum? I know there’s a lot of people who would say that it wasn’t about slavery, and potentially they’re correct. But if there wasn’t slavery, I don’t know that there would have been a civil war. People will say that it was about secession, but without slavery, they wouldn’t have been secession and there wouldn’t have been a civil war. So I would say that even if it wasn’t directly the cause of the civil war, it had a lot to do with it. It’s hard to say what would have happened without it, but it was definitely a major factor.

You’re listening to the room of invariabus podcasts. We’re sitting down with missionary Marco, and we are discussing slavery, the bible, and christians. We’ll be right back.

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Yes, it’s interesting that you said that, brother Marco, because you also mentioned both in this podcast and the previous one, that the west were up until, I think you said, the 18th century. No one really better than I at slavery, and we were going to great lengths to try and bring it to an end, even to the point of having such a destructive and deadly war as the civil war was. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. The civil war, people can argue it wasn’t directly because of slavery, and it was more to do with secession, but a lot of secession had to do with slavery. And if it wasn’t directly the cause, it was very much indirectly the cause. The civil war was done at the cost of one life for every six slaves freed. So there was a huge amount of sacrifice there for people who are willing to fight and die for something they believed in. And so if it wasn’t definitely for some people very much directly, slavery is not for everyone.

Yes. Why do you think it was so difficult to abolish slavery, though? I think we have touched around it a little bit. Let’s zone in on this because we talk about what it was necessary, we talked about maybe their economic impact, maybe the social impact, because these slaves were illiterate, basically have no means of supporting themselves. Are those basically the social issues that were making it so difficult to abolish slavery? I guess there are two steps to abolishing slavery. The first one was the abolishing of the slave trade. And so that happened first in England and then it happened in states, and there wasn’t really a lot of conflict around that. So the credit of the people who are critical of not ending slavery soon enough, the slave trade was ended without much I don’t want to say without conflict, but without very much conflict. Because once the average person understood, I’m saying the average person, because up north and in England predominantly, which is what we’re talking about, the average person didn’t know what was going on with the slave trade because they’d never see these slaves, they weren’t going to work in England, they were going to some citation somewhere. And even in the northern states, they didn’t understand all that was going on. There was good preachers in England, like obviously Newton and Clarkson was another one, would publish papers so that the average person would know what was actually happening. And once the average person in these quote unquote Christian nations, and I use that term very loosely because there’s a lot of deists and a lot of nonborn, again, persons who would call themselves Christians, when they realized what was going on, they knew they couldn’t have any part of this. So the slave trade, the transatlantic slave trade ended and yet slavery continued within these countries where it already had existed. And that’s I guess, the point of contention in the states because there was actually slave traders who were executed in the US. Before emancipation, even the antiabortionists, nobody said anything about it. So we have history of these people being executed in the US. And even southerners would say nothing about it because everyone knew it was illegal. You shouldn’t kidnap people and bring them across. That age is over. And yet slavery still persisted.

And so then you have this complicated issue where you have a whole economy built around that. What ended slavery is just when your average Christian person realized what was going on and wanted to put it into it, or the average civilian, the average person, the average citizen, there were some powerful politicians who obviously wanted to keep the slave trade intact in some way, both in England and us. But when the average person started to realize what was actually going on, they had to deal with it. So even politicians who didn’t want to deal with the issue and would rather ignore it had to deal with it because it became very political. People didn’t want it anymore, even though it didn’t affect them directly. It was complicated to get rid of because it was an integral part now as a society, not the slave trade itself, but now you’ve got a huge population of people, particularly in the south, in England, in some ways, it was easier to deal with slavery because slaves were an integral part to English life. There was no plantations per se there where people would be put to work. In the antebellum south, it was completely different. Where you had an entire economy built around the need for cheap labor, and that labor was provided by slavery. That’s the way it had been done for a long time. And so they had no impetus to change it. And so it was viewed as necessary. And that was some of the arguments that people use who are anti abolition because they thought, this has to continue or else we’re going to ruin the country. We have I’m not going to say it wasn’t a valid concern, but it certainly shouldn’t have been the most important concern. People obviously worth more than money, right? Definitely.

You said that there were no plantations in England, so the abolishment of slavery wouldn’t affect them that much. Wouldn’t that be the fact? Because, for lack of a better term, outsource their plantation to the islands because a lot of the sugar and stuff like that, tobacco and many of the other stuff that the island produced, majority of it was sent back to England. You’re right. No, it would affect them, but just not directly because they don’t see it. Right. It’s just like we were talking about earlier, about buying tennis shoes made in the sweatshop. I don’t see the little kid putting that together. Is it wrong to have slavery today? Yeah, because I don’t see it, though. It doesn’t affect me. And so in England, it took the power of the press as well to show these people what is actually happening because they don’t see it. They don’t see these people being traded. In the south, people would see it. And of course, the Americans from the north who would come south to see it, they would know that it exists. But in England, though, slavery did exist in some small part, it was nothing like having plantations. And you’re absolutely right, it would affect the cost of merchandise and it affected their economy to a great deal and they were prepared to make that sacrifice. But because they didn’t see it from day to day, it’s different. Talk about something that we have. No, and that’s exactly the issue. If, as a politician says, this is going to cost us way too much, we can’t do it. And you never see the dark side of slavery, okay, this will cost too much. But once people and good people, I mean, were made aware of the wicked practice that was sustaining them, then people said, we can’t do this. Forget tobacco, forget sugar, forget cotton. This can’t happen. This is inhumane.

You know, the scriptures do say, mine eye affected in my heart. And so when you see it, it really becomes something you can’t unsee, and you actually have to do something about it. Yeah. On that note, though, I want to bring up William mobile force, because I think he did a lot in England in politics and stuff like that, with the abomination of slavery. Could you speak more about that? Yeah, he spent his life, fortunately, before he died. He was able to see fruit of his labor. He spent a great part of his life trying to end slavery, and before he died, he was able to see it. He first was ending of the slave trade, and then with the abolition of slavery in England and then later in the colonies, it was multiple steps. It was a gradual thing. You think about something that’s been ingrained, unfortunately ingrained. I don’t think it was a god given thing. It was just a depravity of man thing, where man saw an opportunity to take advantage of his fellow man and give slavery as long as we have history. And Wilbur force took it upon himself to put an end to this. Part of it was because he was a Christian and preachers got in touch with him and wanted him to bring this up. Newton was obviously a preacher who had a lot of influence in his life. And there was a preacher by the name of Clarkson who tried to get as much information as he could about what was actually happening in the slave trade and put it into the press and get it into Wilbur forest’s hands so he could do something with it. And, I mean, he was taken to task for it. He battled and battled to try and put it into this, but it had a lot to do with really with christians who wanted to get it out in the open what was actually happening here. Because, as we said earlier, the average person never aborted a slave ship, never saw the people shackled up, never saw the conditions they were in. The conditions they were in were horrible. There’s plans of old slave ships. There’s no way these people could stand up. Like it was just taking for granted some of them would die on board the ship. It was awful the way they were treated.

Yeah, definitely. I just want to add that I believe William william fourth was actually genuinely saved. Yeah, I do too. Going back to the fact that you said that Christians played a heavy hand in the abolishment of slavery. If that’s the case, why was emancipation so controversial then? Emancipation was controversial in the US. Mostly because people didn’t know how to do it. There was good men who were anti abolitionist, and I say good men. I don’t want that to be taken out of context. Men who cared for their slaves, who were anti abolitionist. So maybe good is the wrong word to say, but actually compassionate men. Randolph was the name of one fellow, John Randolph. He hated slavery. Slavery to him was a cancer, but one which must not be tampered with by quacks who never saw the disease or the patient. There were very few people who were pro slavery, but he just didn’t know how you could get rid of it. When he died, he left a good portion of his estate to his slave, and he wanted them to go to a free state, buy land, and make a go for it by themselves. He brought in the doctor before he died to make sure there was a white man to witness his will, so that they would be sure that they would get what was part of his estate. And so it’s not that these people were pro slavery. They were just saying, like, how do you undo this ugly thing? You’ve got hundreds of thousands of people who are mostly illiterate, don’t know how to take care of themselves, have relied on someone else, have been violently taken out of their habitats. They really, in some cases, don’t have a culture of their own. They don’t know how to do things without being told. And all of a sudden, you’re going to release them into society where a lot of people don’t like them. That’s not going to go well for them, at least for what it’s worth, at least masters would feed their slaves. And so that’s not to say that there were not awful atrocities that in the name of slavery in the United States and in the antebellum south. But he thought that it was important to deal with it in a gradual respect. Even people on the abolition side said that it should be done gradually. Because how do you deal with this if you just free all these people and don’t give them a way to sustain themselves, don’t give them a way to take care of themselves, it means certain deaths to them. Like, winter is a reality in America. And just like we were talking about colonial life, if you don’t prepare for the winter, one winter, you’re done. And so you have hundreds of thousands of people who’ve never known how to take care of themselves, their families, other than in this very twisted way created by slavery. And there had to be preparations made for it. And that did happen, but people realized that it couldn’t be just done. Haphazardly and so even people who were anti abolition weren’t necessarily pro slavery. They just thought you should do it more carefully. Not all of them, obviously, some horrible anti abolitionist. But just to put things in perspective, just because someone was an abolitionist didn’t mean that they were pro slavery.

So let me ask this, Marco, because a lot of folks will push back on some of the things you just said, because a lot of times we’ll hear that all these slave masters, some of them were nice to the slave and leave them inheritance and stuff like that, and some of them will push back and say, well, a lot of these slave masters actually had kids with the female slaves, and those kids were born into slavery, grew up as slaves, and because of societal pressure, they couldn’t necessarily reveal to society that that’s my son and that’s my daughter that was born into slavery because I met with the female housekeeper, stuff like that. So they say, Oh, they were not trying to be nice to a slave. They were trying to be nice to the defendant. Are there any truths to that? What would you say to that? I’m sure there was all kinds of ungodliness and sin and abuse done. I think slavery just proves man’s depravity. People get away with whatever it existed for millennia, and nobody had an issue aside from the antebellum south, nobody had an issue with the institution of slavery for thousands of years anywhere. It wasn’t until the 18th century Christians started to say, this is wrong and shouldn’t continue, that somebody actually said the institution of slavery must end. Before that. People just figured, it’s part of life, we deal with it. I’m not going to stick my nose in your business. You treat those people however you want to. So it was evil, it was wicked, it was ungodly what was done and all kinds of abuse, but it wasn’t localized, unfortunately, to the south. That doesn’t make it right. But I don’t doubt for a minute that all kinds of ungodly actions were done there.

Did slavery give birth to racism and segregation? Or is it, like many people believe, the other way around, people were enslaved because they were black? I don’t think so. I think that slavery actually only became racial in the United States. I really believe that before that, like I said, there were Europeans, slaving other Europeans, africans, enslaving other Africans, and even I was just reading a book by Booker T. Washington, and it was interesting because he did such a great work. He educated so many black people, and he had such a great philosophy of education. And so, unfortunately, as he traveled the country, there were many places he couldn’t stay in a hotel because he was black. And he remembers one situation where there was one hotel he couldn’t stay in, and there was a Moroccan man who went there. This Moroccan man went to stay there, and they refused to house him because he was black. And he spoke good English, by the way. And so they created a scandal, if I recall correctly. Maybe it already stayed there, but it created a scandal unless and then it came out that these people realized he was a Moroccan, he wasn’t an American, and then it was okay. There was no scandal. And so there was something peculiar about being an African American versus just being an African. The disturbing part of that story is for the rest of that man’s visit in America, he never spoke English because he didn’t want anyone to think he was an American or a former slave. So there was some sort of esteem for a man who was a foreigner, for black, and he would be allowed to stay in that hotel. But if you were an African American, they wouldn’t have let him in the exact same hotel. So whether you call that racial or not, it depends how you draw the line. I don’t necessarily think I don’t know that it was racial, but there became this ethical problem because Christians knew that all people should be treated equal. We’re all the same under God. God doesn’t treat one race of people or one group of people, or one people group superior to another. When Jesus Christ established the church, now the Gentile was brought into the fold, so all were made one in Christ, and so there was no us versus them anymore. So all of a sudden this created a problem because, okay, the average person believed that even the US. Constitution alludes to that, that all men created equal. And yet you’ve got this huge group of people that are slaves. Well, now what you do and so there you have I think part of what happened is situational theology is now, well, maybe these people aren’t really people. And so you have some racism, not because it was necessarily part of it, but the institution created the races, where I don’t think you see that kind of racism in other slavery. I don’t know if you know this. The word slave actually comes from Slatin. It’s from the same word as Slavic, because they would go to Eastern Europe and capture a lot of slaves. It wasn’t necessarily a racial thing. It was just the easiest place to go grab slaves from. And so I think that it became racial in the US. Because of that. You now have to reconcile all men are created equal, and yet some of our people own men. What do we do with that? And so I think that created the racism. And that’s why you have some of the ugliness where some extreme people believe that blacks were even people, or at least African Americans were even people.

Yeah, I think that’s the logic that was used for racism and segregation, because if you listen to some of Matthew Luther making speeches, he alluded to that, where they will say, now we know that all men are created equal. That’s your premise. But then you know, now the black man is not a man, so therefore he’s not entitled to the same. So the justification for slavery and the justification for segregation and racism was that the black person wasn’t a man or wasn’t human. So then we can keep them inhumanely because they’re not human. And to your point where you use the example of an American man who has refused to stay at the hotel until they find out he was an African American, we did an episode I think it was episode 19 or episode 18 racial Relations of the Church with Pastor Mike. And he said something that I’ve never really thought about because of course I’m not African American in the sense I’m from the Caribbean. And as soon as I open my mouth, any American will know that I’m not from any place in America because I have a uniquely Caribbean accent. And he said that there’s a unique relationship between African Americans and white Americans that is not experienced by any other black groups in America in terms of Caribbean Americans or anyone from the continent of Africa America. So you think about your Nigerian American, Garden American, your South African American is a unique relationship. And I quite honestly can’t explain it because I’m not in it. But there’s things that African American will see or observe that I probably might not see observed because I didn’t grow up in this society and experience what they have experienced, what is right or wrong. I’m not even commenting on that. I’m just saying that a lot of folks will look at it and say, hey, you don’t understand it because you’re not in it. And I think at times they take it a little bit too far because at times African Americans would behave like you can’t understand racism if you’re not black, or they would tell you, well, you can’t speak on it. And even going back to episode 18 would pass the mic. When we talk about whether racism is sin and stuff like that, a lot of white folks will actually pull back from speaking about some of these things because of the color of their skin. They can’t talk about it. There’s a unique relationship there for sure, between African Americans and the white that has been passed on to history that someone like me, someone like other black folks from different countries in the world, may not even get talking about what birth racism and segregation. I agree with you. When you look at history, majority of slavery were not race based. But I wonder if it wasn’t some sort of we cannot make these people who we have enslaved, we cannot make these people who we have cheated as being beneath us now be equal with us. So the only way we can do it is by surviving, by keeping them at a lower economic status than us. Because I can argue I think the Democrats are probably doing that right now. But anyway, we’re not going to get into politics. But I wonder if those were the underlying issues where we cannot now make someone who we are over now equal with us.

Maybe there was some pride there that could have been part of it. Another thing that we haven’t mentioned so far is there actually were race riots in the US. And on the Caribbean Islands, and they got pretty ugly. Lots of people lost their lives, but this was prior to emancipation. And so Thomas Jefferson, I believe, said, yeah, he said, peaceful coexistence of these two large populations in the south, unlikely. And Robert E. Lee, a Southerner, he regarded slavery as an evil he wished to see somehow gradually ended. And so those things are true. And yet there was a Virginian uprising. The fellow was named Nat Turner in 1831. So asking about that, there was some suspicion, I guess, on both sides. There were obviously some black slaves who are very against their masters, understandably, and there are obviously some white people or European based people who are concerned that how do you all of a sudden live in a peaceful coexistence when you’ve been over something else? Even if it’s not a pride issue, it’s a very real problem. We look at the Middle East situation today, and we look at many of those countries and think, okay, these people are just in all of a sudden old hands and get along. This is something that’s gone back for centuries. So there could have been some pride there, but there was some very real concerns about violence. Oh, yeah, I didn’t talk about it.

I think about some of the history lessons or even historical fiction books that we were required to read in school. I think about one, I don’t remember the name of it, but they talk about the Maroons and the Red Coats and of course, the Maroons of Jamaica, the Blue Mountains of Jamaica, and how they would of course, they didn’t have the weapons to fight the British redcoats, okay. But because they know the area much better and they basically live in the mountains, they were able to fight them off. Gorgeous warfare, so to speak, rather than matching them with their weapons. And of course, you can think about islands like Haiti, where they uprise, of course, and gain the independence, and many other islands in the Caribbean where flavors uprise and won. And I think one of the bigger difference between the islands, though, and the US. When it comes to segregation and racism, is that the British basically left. So the islands are now 99.9% black, sure, but the British left in the US. The white man didn’t leave. They say, no, they have to coexist, of course, because of the sinful nature of man. Now, who’s going to have the most wealth and stuff like that? Even if the slaves are free, it will be the white man. So the white man now use their wealth and power to keep the black man down, in a sense. And I think that’s what kind of burnt the racism of segregation.

Yeah, I agree. Something to keep in mind, too, is that one of the practical ramifications of freeing a bunch of people who were previously enslaved is what about our safety? They might come for us. Sure. Again, I’m not justifying it at all. I’m just saying those are things that you seriously have to consider. Just like that gentleman on Colonial House. All of a sudden it was real to him when he realized where this was inevitably going. We have to realize that they had to consider those things as well. When it comes to what they were going to do about slavery, it wasn’t just what they were going to do. Like Brother Marco was saying, I don’t think there’s any question about what to do. The question was how to do it right. Yeah. And it wasn’t a wealthy, if I can say this, it wasn’t a wealthy nation at the time. It was volatile. They weren’t sure. They just carved out a country. They left England, they left the Commonwealth, and so all of a sudden they’re out on their own. And so it was an economic problem. What would happen their currency, the economy was a volatile thing. Would this thing here we are a couple hundred years later, we say, you know, they should have done this. They weren’t sure their country would even exist. It was a sketchy time in history. So whether we’re looking back at slavery a couple hundred years ago or a few thousand years ago in Israel’s history, it’s pretty easy living in a peaceful country, judging and determining how other people should have done things from our comfortable climate controlled couches where these people were just trying to carve out a living in the savage land and had very real enemies. Do you think part of the reason why slavery became so entangled with the color of the skin? Could it be perhaps a small part of it was that slaves were actually pretty expensive to purchase, and with abolition on the horizon, they probably thought, well, I’m not going to be able to buy slaves. Let me, I don’t know, have rights to the original slaves, so I could keep making my own. So that you don’t have to buy new slaves. You just let your slaves procreate, and then you get more and more slaves that way. So one slave becomes many. You didn’t have to spend extra money to buy new slaves. So then I would imagine that’s how it came to be. If you were the child of a slave, you too were a slave. Or if I’m not mistaken, before. It wasn’t like that. Am I wrong on that?

I’m not 100% on the history of that. I think it was always like that. Remember, they have the one job rule, but JT your point, though, of safety? I think that’s a good one, because if you notice what they did is they did segregation and red lining and all these things kind of separate the blacks from the white and also gun control. And a lot of folks didn’t realize that gun control started to keep guns out of the hands of freed slaves because they didn’t want the black folks to have weapons, at least to match them. So I think you have a point there as well when you talk about the safety that they may or may not have felt there. But of course, I’m not saying that black people are prone to violence or something like that. I’m a black man. Well, I have a couple of crimes. I might be prone to violence if someone attacked me or family association, but at least normally I’m not, put it that way.

Yeah, I think, Jay, you were saying something also about the cost of slavery and whether that was an issue. I actually don’t know what the going price was for a slave in the antebellum. So I know that a lot of even abolitionists didn’t want to trade slaves anymore. They just thought that practice was bad. Like even George Washington had slaves. I don’t know if people realize this, but a lot of the slaves were actually tied to the land. So even Randall, who was an abolitionist, the only reason he had slaves is because they were tied in land. And George Washington is a similar situation where just by virtue, it was part of the they didn’t have a mortgage back then, but part of owning that piece of property and that plantation meant that you had these people as part of it. And so they supported them because that’s what you had to do. They were part of the land, they were part of the parcel that they had. And so as far as the price, I don’t know. In the antebellum south, I know in the Pacific Islands, a cow was actually worth more than a person. So I don’t know. That was before Christianity took root in the Head Reed Islands, but I don’t know what the going rate was back then. I don’t think that the cost I could be wrong, but I don’t think the cost of slaves play that much of a part in it, because even the people who were not against emancipation, trading of slaves, even within the country was really there was a lot of slaves. Like Thomas Jefferson lamented that he had so many mouths to seed. I say that because he cared. Randolph as well, george Washington as well. These were people who cared for these people that were under their care, and he wanted to make sure that they had enough to sustain themselves.

Yeah. So let’s wrap it all up because we have been going for a while here, and we really appreciate you being in here. Tell me, is the current state of African Americans in this nation a direct result of slavery, or has enough time passed to negate any correlation, I guess that’s hard to equate. Like, how do you measure how much baggage somebody carries? How much is directly related to someone? I mean, we’re just talking about Booker T. Washington earlier. The man was highly educated, was born a slave. He didn’t even have a mattress to sleep on growing up. He just had a piece of dirt that he curled up on. And so I don’t know how much. I definitely think it influences society today. And I think particularly in the US, it influences the way people think. I think it would be wrong to say, though, that it would hold somebody back from achieving something. Will some people have more barriers than others to cross to get to the same goal? Absolutely. I totally agree with that. But I think that the US as a whole is free enough that people who set their mind to things can get them done. And the complicated thing is, if there is some kind of roadblock for someone who is a descendant of a slave, what do you do about that? At what point? Who’s to blame? Like, how do you set those things right? How bad is it? It’s a complicated issue, I guess. I guess, like slavery, try and understand what they should have done or how much people held back. Today it’s hard to say.

Yes, it’s interesting here because no one alive today were slaves. Of course, we know folks alive today who are descendants of slaves. And it’s hard for me to say how much would something affect you? How much generation? Now, even slavery has been several generations. Segregation is probably two or three generations. So it’s hard to say how that would affect you today. I think the argument can be made if you want to say that racism and the segregation affect you. But I’m not quite sure if you can make an argument that slavery affects you. But then we go back to the previous question, which birth rich? And if they argue that racism and the segregation, then there might be a point there. But I think the bigger picture here is at some point in life you’re going to have to take personal responsibility for yourself so you can’t control where you were born, the family you were born into, the society you are born into, the way you were raised. But at some point, responsibility come to you. And if you’re not going to take personal responsibility, we’re always going to blame someone else because of the situation you’re in, then you’re not taking personal responsibility. And that’s what I would manage. My fellow black folks in the US. Who have to listen to this podcast. Hey, yes, all these things were bad. Slavery was bad. Racism segregation was bad. But at some point, you have to take responsibility for yourself. And also you’re realizing that you have a great God in heaven who decided that he got to send his son to die in your place for your sins, where you can gain eternal freedom from the punishment of hell. And the aim of this is that, yes, we understand that all these things are bad. We understand that your ancestors, just like my ancestors, went through some really terrible things. But at the end of the day, there was a point in my life where I repented of my sin and trust Christ as my Savior. And the Bible says that when you do that, that he’s not only going to give your life, but he’s going to give you abundant life that more abundantly. And that’s what I would encourage people, because the ultimate forgiveness that can be given to us is the forgiveness of what Christ have done on the cross for you when you receive that as your Savior. And that would be my encouragement to folks who are even hindered by these things because it’s still real in the US. Unfortunately, I think the gospel is the answer and not reparation or any other things. The gospel of Jesus Christ. I think Jesus Christ has made this equal at the cross, as we said before.

Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right. I think the average person in society sometimes maybe even unconsciously, thinks if you throw money at a problem, it will disappear. And yet people have received all this money, all these stimulus checks, and I don’t think the average person is really that much further ahead. And I think no difference if you want to bring reparations into it. There’s a deeper problem than a lack of material goods that people have. Even material, if you’re talking about people who were descendants of slaves, it’s something much deeper than something you can just throw money at. I don’t remember the statistic, but most family business, successful, multi million dollar family owned businesses, they don’t last one or two generations. Because it’s not like people talk about the top 1%, the top 10%. Those aren’t the same people all the time. And so if someone was born into slavery, you’re born into affluence, that doesn’t mean your children and grandchildren will be or won’t be. They probably won’t be. If you were born into affluence, more than likely your grandchildren, if they do have any kind of privilege, it won’t be nearly what the grandparents was. Most of it is because the first generation knows what it takes to sacrifice and work and get ahead. And oftentimes children and grandchildren take those things for granted. And so it’s hard to just think that throwing money at a problem like that, although it is a problem that needs to be dealt with, just like slavery had to be dealt with, throwing money at the problem won’t solve it.

Yeah, definitely. Missionary Marco, thank you for joining us and Removing Barriers podcast. Thank you so much. Good luck.

Thank you for listening. To Get A Hold of US. To support this podcast or to learn more about Removing barriers, go to removingbarriers.net. This has been the removing barriers. Podcast. We attempted to remove barriers so that we all can have a clay view of the cross.