How Is Slavery An Ethical Issue

Slavery has been around since the early years of mankind. Even before the 1400’s forms of slavery were in existence. Every major empire has had some form of slavery or indentured servitude. From the Mayans, Spaniards, Romans, Chinese, to Africans boarding slave ships to America, the morality of slavery had not been put under the moral scope of humanity until the last hundred years. The African slaves were seen as subhuman and lower than dirt. Rudyard Kipling first wrote about the white man’s burden then others put their own meaning behind it. They thought it was their “burden” to bring “light” to all the dark places in the world.(Kipling) In legal terms, there was no foundation for compensating the descendants of slaves for the crime against their ancestors when, “no crime was committed”. For at the time, most white men thought that they were doing a moral thing since there were no laws prohibiting slavery and the fact that the African American community had no political power, or even a platform to speak out on. Many claim that since slavery was legal in U.S. history, reparations aren’t due to the black community;
The profitable crops of the South including tobacco and cotton were built into the mega corporations which we see today, including the American Tobacco Company and U.S. Cotton(Abagond), and were originally built off the backs of the hard working slaves. According to researcher, Thomas Craemer, from the University of Connecticut, the amount of money that U.S. slave labor made through roughly working “12 hours a day, 7 days a week” would be around $5.9 trillion dollars today(Ehrenfreund), which doesn’t include the hardships black individuals faced after the abolishment of slavery. The money that America made through slavery was never repaid. The government at least needs to make strides in apologizing and beginning to explore how reparations could work