Amistad means "friendship" in Spanish. It is also the name of a ship, recently dubbed the "freedom schooner", that in 1839 was the site of a slave revolt that took place as a vessel laden with a human cargo left Havana, Cuba and headed for the sugar fields where these slaves were destined to be worked to death. Instead, the leader of the slaves, a man given the name Joseph Cinque by Americans who even then were confounded by foreign-sounding names, killed the captain and took command of the vessel bringing it up the east coast (where newspapers continued to report on the sightings of a "long low black schooner" (if only they'd known!)).
L'Amistad got as far as Long Island Sound where it was impounded by a revenue cutter and taken to the Customs Dock in New London, CT. After that, a fight ensued between the owners of the slaves, the slaves themselves, and the state of Connecticut which wouldn't abolish slavery for another nine years.
The drama reached its denoument when John Quincy Adams was selected to represent the slaves in court agains charges of murder and piracy. When he won the case two years after the initial internment, the slaves were free to return home to Sierra Leone with the aid of Christian organisations with an eye to future missionary action in Africa. Although this case gained infamy recently because of the Steven Spielberg movie of the same name as the ship, in fact, there was no lasting legal effect from this case, and it did not hasten the abolition of slavery anywhere. Nor did it improve the opinion of whites towards black people at the time or in the future.
What it did accomplish was to bring Christianity to Africa. The missionaries who accompanied the ex-slaves back to their continent began an assault on the inhabitants that to many seemed to bring good things: education, better nutrition, and medical care. And for what? So that ultimately dark skinned men and women could and would believe that one God created all men equally, that the black man (or woman) was not inferior in any way to his white counterpart.
It is true that there is no difference between the DNA of individuals from any ethnic group except for different alleles (or versions) of genes for superficial physical traits. It is also true whether you hide your bigotry behind the label of "Intelligent Design" or you understand the tenets of evolution, that
Homo sapiens first showed up in Africa. Whether or not man was made by God in His image or by a series of mutations over time that eventually gave him an advantage over other primate ancestors, the first ones were Black.
So how did we come to a place and time where we have not only rejected human ancestry but are trying to marginalize it even more today when what we have in front of us is perhaps one of the most highly evolved individuals living. Much has been made of Barack Obama's past in terms of his associations that shed a negative light on him.
The Jeremiah Wrights of the world were born when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated and it became clear that smart black men scared white people. He was nurtured when other supporters of MLK and his ideas of a peaceful revolt were stripped of power. He blossomed when senators like John McCain voted against making Martin Luther King Day a federal holiday. It turned out that white "Christians" didn't actually think all men are created equally. White "christians" even now liken black people to monkeys, not, more appropriately, Adam and Eve. So race riots, street gangs, angry rappers, and incendiary preachers grew in the void left by the dearth of peaceful dialogue.
If the Chicago welfare queen that Ronald Reagan used as a means to try to eliminate public programs that help the needy had been presented as white, his case would not have been very strong. If the CEOs that were just on the receiving end of obscene salaries and now a huge bailout were black, there would never have been a bailout plan in the first place.
And yet, through all of this, Barack Obama has perservered as the Democratic nominee. Doesn't this say something about this man's character, intellect, and vision? Here is a man who once again embraces peaceful dialogue, behaves in a charitably Christian manner, and is now on the threshold of reaping the benefits promised to the inhabitants of Sierra Leone by Connecticut missionaries nearly two hundred years ago. But the fearful white Christians, instead of embracing what they themselves have ostensibly been preaching about God's love for more than 2,000 years, are instead behaving like the politicians of 1839, selling the myth that people of African-American descent are somehow less human than white men. They cannot come out directly, so they call it by other names: terrorist, Islamic extremist (and it's no wonder so many blacks turned to Islam after Christianity let them down), That One, unpatriotic. It's not very Christian is it.
