A Story From the Deep North
A friend of mine highly recommended this film. I plan to watch it…
Synopsis below the fold
First-time filmmaker Katrina Browne makes a troubling discovery - her New England ancestors were the largest slave-trading family in U.S. history. She and nine fellow descendants set off to retrace the Triangle Trade: from their old hometown in Rhode Island to slave forts in Ghana to sugar plantation ruins in Cuba. Step by step, they uncover the vast extent of Northern complicity in slavery while also stumbling through the minefield of contemporary race relations. In this bicentennial year of the U.S. abolition of the slave trade, “Traces of the Trade” offers powerful new perspectives on the black/white divide. An official selection of the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.
Filed under: Race
Wow! Interesting…this should be shown on PBS
Asalaam Alaikum,
I watched this the night it was on PBS, it was excellent. Bill Moyer’s Journal highlighted it the week before as well as a book, Slavery by Another Name that I put on reserve from the library. I highly recommend the documentary it was a good look at how slavery is still affecting each and every one of us even today, when so many of us think we are past it.
Ruqayyah
Looks very good and moving.
It amazes me that people that could call themselves Christian could enslave another.
This obviously relates to the African American thread and I’d not thought of that perspective until you brought that up. As I’ve had time to digest that I do agree that the AA handle should relate to those Americans decended from slavery, those with a true American history entwined with the every other American and should not be a catch all for all Blacks in the US.
When it comes to this issue, this is where some of my Northern friends/family have disagreements with.
As a kid , I would hear my maternal grandmother joke about the “rednecks going North” and my Northern family worrying about running into Jim Crow. In elementary school, the only thing that I was taught was that cross burnings and lynchings only existed in the South. It was only in high school where I would learn the whole story about it.
I’m glad that PBS is.has shown this documentary, because there are a lot of informed people in all regions. The slave trade and other forms of racism did exist in the North as much as it did in the South. I remembered reading stories about Fredrick Douglass life in the North. His wife discussed her experiences of segregation/racism that she endured in many sectors in North, including out of all places in their place of worship.Who would also think that slaves has a role in building the Whitehouse?
If I told my some of my Northern counterparts that the slave trade existed in the North, they wouldn’t believe it. Lynchings, cross burnings etc took place there also.We often read stories about the Northern politicians liberating slaves from their misery, but for many if them, it was based only on their own needs. There were also a lot of them and their people who didn’t want Blacks in their states. It should tell us something when politicians in states like New Jersey and Maryland apologized for it.
Patb,
Yes. I have always wondered how slavemasters justified slavery /racism, when god ( in the bible) put a leprosy curse on Moses ’s siblings for making downgrading Zipporah( his wife) for their racism against her. God is no racist whatsoever.
Thanks for the heads up on this! I can’t wait to see it. POV is one of the best shows on TV. It reminds me of a fantastic book I read a few years back called “Slaves in the Family”, I believe the authors’ name was Edward Ball. I definitely recommend it to anyone who is interested in the topic.