African American Religion Chapter 1 Summary

The book’s first chapter’s main purpose was to highlight the history of the slave trade and the enslavement of Africans in “the New World”. Answering the question of what African American religion is hard to do without the history of why blacks in America behave the way they do. The first Africans were brought to America in the 1600s and those who bought them were given benefits to encourage the use of this cheap form of labor. Slavery played a major part as to how the Europeans, mainly English, viewed Africans helped which ultimately shaped the way Blacks viewed themselves once fully integrated into the way of life in America. The drastic difference from Africans appearance and the Europeans was the main component to how they were treated

At first Europeans, did not know how the Africans fit into their society and scrambled to find justification and explanation from the Bible as to how Africans were meant to be treated. There were even arguments on how to treat the slaves if they were to do baptized as the slave masters claimed to be converting and civilizing the Africans. I do agree with the premise that history plays a big role in the Black Religion of today, those that were taken from their home had to blend their own rituals with the rituals of their master’s. As much as I do not want to admit, slavery is the beginning of African American history and religion, there were no, or very few, Africans in America before the slave trade began. There are varying historical aspects, from the salve trade to Jim Crow laws, that were in place to ultimately try to Christianize the slaves. Also, I can attest to the fact that the period of enslavement has long lasting effects on society today; there are nuances in the way we view ourselves and how the structure of Black Religion is that can be traced back to the beginning of the slave

As I read this chapter there were certain aspects I agreed with and others that I did not. For example, the author referenced a historian which argued that Europeans developed their views of Africans as less-than or subpar after the institution of slave trade began and even said that racism was a modern occurrence. I completely disagree, Europeans viewed themselves as the closest to God because of their socio-economic status and appearance. In their eyes, they were the ideal and Africans were almost the stark opposite, so they chose to work, demean, and enslave anyone who did not fit their perfect mold. The colonizers began with their own people who were poor, then moved to the indigenous people of North America, and eventually to Africans, enslavement was used to get cheap or free labor. I believe they chose Africans because of the way they viewed them in society and used appearance and their own religion in efforts to justify their own actions but ultimately, they still felt as if those enslaved were not human. This disagreement leads way directly to the part of the chapter I agreed with the most which was the definition of a black body. There is a standard of beauty in the 1600s that unfortunately is still around today, which is the appearance