![]() ![]() ![]() They paid for the pernicious myth that dark skin was inferior to light – that African ancestry was lower than European. Their bodies were bruised, broken, or raped through machine-tooled violence in the fields and under their roofs, tears of anguish and humiliation running down the generations. Enslaved people forfeited social capital when separations prevented ancestors’ wisdom and knowledge from being passed to the next generation. They paid at the point of sale when children were stolen by strangers, when parents were snatched up by slave traders, or when spouses were separated at sheriffs’ auctions following owners’ deaths or business failures. This excerpt has been reprinted with permission.Īfrican-descended Americans bore the social costs of slavery. This is an excerpt from Calvin Schermerhorn’s Unrequited Toil: A History of United States Slavery (Cambridge University Press, 2018). By Calvin Schermerhorn, African American Intellectual History Society. ![]()
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