A Quote by Opal Tometi
What we are oftentimes reminding people of is the fact that the history of police in the U.S. was that they were slave patrols. They were quite literally created in order to capture enslaved Africans.
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Blacks were not enslaved because they were black but because they were available. Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years. Whites enslaved other whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere. Asians enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved other Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans, and indeed even today in North Africa, blacks continue to enslave blacks.
History is a continuum, it's not these separate moments. That's how we look at it. In the 1700s in Virginia before there were police officers - there were these groups of men who would wander the countryside - and if they saw a black man or a black woman they would presume that that black man or woman was a slave. If you didn't have the kind of pass that you were supposed to have, then you could be whipped, you could be enslaved, you could be taken into custody - even if you were free. And as I'm reading this I find myself thinking, "How is this any different from stop-and-frisk?"
After the Moslem Africans lost control over Spain, they began to prey on the Africans further to the south. They destroyed the great independent states in West Africa, and subsequently set Africa up for the Western slave trade and the Arabs were in the slave trade before Islam and they are still in the slave trade.
When the early Europeans first met Africans, at the crossroads of history, it was a respectful meeting and the Africans were not slaves. Their nations were old before Europe was born.
People were encouraged to snitch. [South Africa] was a police state, so there were police everywhere. There were undercover police. There were uniformed police. The state was being surveilled the entire time.
In the early 1800s, both Spain and Portugal disseminated the smallpox vaccine throughout the Americas via the 'arm to arm of the blacks,' that is, enslaved Africans and African-Americans, often children, who were being moved along slave routes as cargo from one city to another to be sold.
Whites have been the most subsidized group in the history of the United States and maybe the history of the world, while Blacks were enslaved and were the assets of Whites.
Much of the foundation of our criminal justice system is derived from slave patrols and was created when African Americans could still be bought, sold, and traded.
On the one hand, the guns were there to help capture the imagination of the people. But more important, since we knew that you couldn't observe the police without guns, we took our guns with us to let the police know that we have an equalizer.
People don't know that the very reason the police were made was to oversee slaves; they would be called overseers, and if a slave got out of line or tried to break away and escape, these were the people to hold them in and bring them back.
It would be very nice if there were a God who created the world and was a benevolent providence, and if there were a moral order in the universe and an after-life; but it is a very striking fact that all this is exactly as we are bound to wish it to be.
In my opinion while lynchings were quite possibly the most heinous crimes ever witnessed in American history, they helped in bringing people together for a sole purpose. It was because of these lynchings that armed self-resistance was created. If white people knew black people were capable of fighting back then there was less of a chance that violence actually would break out.
What has been imposed on religion is not religion itself but the custom of those who have been converted to it. I think that the most atrocious of all of this is Islam. They were in the slave trade before Islam. The Arabs were natural slave traders. They were the people who were called on to conquer us, unfortunately.
The Spartans were a paradoxical people. They were the biggest slave owners in Greece. But at the same time, Spartan women had an unusual level of rights. It's a paradox that they were a bunch of people who in many ways were fascist, but they were the bulwark against the fall of democracy.
Races didn't bother the Americans. They were something a lot better than any race. They were a People. They were the first self-constituted, self-declared, self-created People in the history of the world.
We have never owned, as a country, the damage done not only to people who were enslaved but to future generations in which they were treated. I think that has damaged the future of many African-American people. Some have risen above it quite nobly, but it has impacted generations, and we have to be able to own that as part of the past.
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