Question

How do the depictions of slavery in paragraphs 7-8 help us understand it?

The language of business fails to capture the impact of the trade on those who were bought and sold. The black scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois, writing in the 1930s, described the slave trade this way: The “transformation of ten million human beings out of the dark beauty of their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of the West” was the most “significant drama in the last thousand years of human history.” The men and women captured and sold into slavery, he argued, had “descended into Hell.” They had been ripped from their families and forced to march long distances in Africa in chains (perhaps almost two million died in the process). They were then imprisoned in slave forts, dungeons, or barracoons on the African coast before being placed into the holds of slave ships.


“They are imprisoned in the ships,” reported a Spanish Jesuit in South America in 1627, “lying with one person’s head at another person’s feet. They are locked in the hold and closed off from the outside.” These men and women were fed “a half cup of corn or crude millet and a small cup of water” but once a day. “Other than that, they get nothing else besides beating, whipping, and cursing.” After this treatment, they arrived in the Americas “looking like skeletons.”
A.
They stress that few slaves made it to America.
B.
They emphasize the horrible treatment of slaves.
C.
They explain how slaves were eventually freed in America.
D.
They compare the treatment of slaves in America and Africa.

Answer 1

The depictions of slavery help us understand it in the sense that:

B. They emphasize the horrible treatment of slaves.

Step-by-step explanation:

The two depictions we are analyzing here were made centuries apart, yet they both portray the cruelty with which Africans were treated by Europeans once they were captured and taken. Both passages focus on the horrors they suffered, the inhuman treatment they received. They were beaten and underfed. They were ripped apart from their homes and families to either die on their way to the coast of the African continent, or to work and die in the Americas. With that in mind, we can select letter B as the correct choice:

B. They emphasize the horrible treatment of slaves.