New DNA evidence reported in the NYT Science section implies how much blacks flourished in America.
Enslaved African Americans in Maryland Linked to 42,000 Living Relatives
The analysis marks the first time historical DNA has been used to trace the descendants and distant cousins of enslaved people, researchers said.
By Carl Zimmer
Aug. 3, 2023A construction team working on a highway expansion in Maryland in 1979 discovered human remains on the grounds of an 18th-century ironworks. Eventually, archaeologists uncovered 35 graves in a cemetery where enslaved people had been buried.
The point of switching during the racial reckoning the term from “slaves” to “enslaved people” is, besides the usual benefit of creating a chance to cancel people not using the latest terminology, is to switch “slaveowners” to “enslavers,” a term logically reserved for those who attacked another African tribe and reduced them from freedom to slavery (i.e., enslavers were almost always Africans) so as to smear whites with not just being slaveowners (i.e., part of a system that they didn’t personally create) but active “enslavers” whose descendants thus must pay giant reparations.
In the first effort of its kind, researchers now have linked DNA from 27 African Americans buried in the cemetery to nearly 42,000 living relatives. Almost 3,000 of them are so closely related that some people might be direct descendants.
Henry Louis Gates Jr., a historian at Harvard University and an author of the study, published on Thursday in the journal Science, said that the project marked the first time that historical DNA had been used to connect enslaved African Americans to living people.
Obviously, most descendants of American slaves don’t have 23 and Me accounts.
But we can look at this question from a simpler perspective. Overall, 388,000 slaves were imported to the modern U.S. from Africa. Today, about 42 million Americans identify as non-Hispanic blacks. Let’s say 10 million are post 1865 immigrants, so that leaves 32 million descendants of American slaves. Let’s say the average DOAS is 80% black and 20% white. So that leaves 25.6 million full-blooded equivalents. So, the 388,000 slaves imported multiple 66 times, which is rather a lot.
Jamaica, in contrast, brought in 600,000 slaves and the total population is only about 3 million today, for a multiple of 5 or 10 (depending upon emigrants, recent immigrants, and % white in the population). Brazil, another sugar-growing hellhole during slavery times, is probably similar. The Middle East’s multiple is likely even lower due to castration of male slaves from sub-Saharan Africa.
In Africa, the population probably didn’t grow much between 1700 and 1900, although some of that was due to the subtraction of the slave trades and some due to the profits from enslaving encouraging tribes to make war upon each other. (John Reader’s mental model in Africa: Biography of a Continent is that nothing much happens south of the Sahara without an outside impetus, so without the Arab and Atlantic slave trades paying good money to enslavers, Africans wouldn’t have much bothered. Reader’s model is something somebody ought to think hard about. Is it true? Beats me.)
So, it’s reasonable to say that sub-Saharans in the United States tended to flourish by world standards.
