Learning about the history of colonial slavery as an elementary school student definitely did not include the picture of New Amsterdam or New York as described by Harris and Foote. My rosy colored image of New York showed the colony as always being a bastion of equal rights, regardless of race. The realization of how wrong that vision was hit me while reading this week.
I must not be the only one who has this flawed perception of New York. My version of history must have been planted there by teachers and curriculums, which conveniently left out this part of our nation’s history. I conferred with my mother who teaches 4th grade general education. She said that there is no emphasis on this element of New York’s history. It makes sense why I was not too aware of the extent slavery in New York.
Perhaps there is no emphasis because a liberal and forward-thinking state such as New York would not like to focus on this ugly aspect of its history. This is understandable, because who likes to dwell on the negative? It is imperative to research the past in order to comprehend the present. Certain aspects of today’s prejudices can clearly be outlined from the history of slavery in colonial New York.
One element of racial prejudice was that “Europeans depicted Africans as unable to be genuinely pious Christians…they strengthened a culturally based racial delineation.” The Europeans distanced themselves from the Africans based on their inability to be proper Christians. This cultural distinction added on to the obvious distinctions made based on skin color. Another element of prejudice is derived from the first laws regulating slavery that were put into play by the British. In 1706, a law was passed stating that “Negroes only shall be slaves.” Harris sums up what this law truly meant, “The British affirmed in law hereditary African slavery in the New York Colony.”
These aspects of slavery in colonial New York are obviously not present in today’s society, but these ideas fueled the status quo in the United States up until the Civil Rights Movement. Until then nothing was really done about slavery. Yes, the slaves were freed, but they were not truly equal because people still had the aforementioned ideas about the inequality between blacks and whites in the back of their minds.
As a present day New Yorker, I was surprised to read about the extent of slavery in New Amsterdam and New York. Teachers and schools should not shy away from teaching this material. Instead, they should embrace the truth and show their students the wrongs that slavery has carried over into the present via prejudices. Perhaps once our generation knows about the prejudices harbored in New York’s history of slavery, we can begin to rectify the situation and live up to my rosy colored standard of New York’s excellence.
