Slavery or Holocaust

Slavery, a word that conjures up images of blacks being chained and forced to do hard labor on the plantations of white slave owners. Is this term sufficient enough to describe the actual horror of the african slave trade? I say no, the word downplays what actually happened to africans. The word gives us the idea that people were merely taken from one place to another and forced to do work, but the real horror is far worse. For instance the godfather of gynecology, J. Marion Sims, often practiced new techniques on slaves without the use of any anesthesia or pain killers even remarking how strong africans were when it comes to pain. Yet when he would do procedures on white women, he used anesthesia and pain killers. The are other countless horrors, too numerous to mention unfortunately. There are instances in which white people would take slave babies and use them as alligator bait, hence the derogatory term "gator bait."


In Nazi Germany the jews were rounded up and forced into labor camps. They were forced to do labor, they were experimented on, they were tortured, and killed. The jews received reparations for this atrocity and this even is never downplayed. In fact in many countries you can be jailed for even denying the holocaust. Comparatively African-Americans received no reparations and their sufferings are downplayed as if their suffering wasn't all that bad. There is another term we could replace slavery with and that is holocaust. I think we should rename slavery the black holocaust, because that is exactly what it was. The term slavery, in my opinion, was used to downplay what actually took place and is therefore another slap in the face of the African-American. We should not follow suit in calling it merely slavery, we should call it what it is, a black holocaust.