I found this week’s readings extremely interesting, regarding the human rights movements within Latin America. Being from the United States, they teach us from a very young age about slavery in America from the past. From youth we’re shown that it was usually just the white man in power while the other races were overlooked and treated poorly. However it was interesting in the case of Brazil, to learn that there were also quite a few blacks who were the masters of other blacks. Its interesting to think that slavery was more than just a race issue, but for man’s greed to have power over other human beings. It wasn’t taught to me like that. The way I learned it was that people were afraid of people who were different looking from each other so they tried to control what they could not understand, but this new information makes me view slavery in the United States in a different way.

It was also interesting to read that different countries that has different economic backgrounds gave slave rights because of these economic reasons. Dawson states on page 78 “Those places where slavery was not a centrally important part institution generally produced different kinds of histories than those where it was.” Meaning that places where the economy relied heavily on the use of slaves, gave up slavery a lot later than places where slave labor wasn’t as widely used. This even came down to regional level in the case of Cuba, where certain regions relied a lot more on slave labor than different parts of the nation did. Also interesting were how different slaves were granted rights if they  decided to fight for a certain party in Civil Wars. That could be seen in Latin America but also in the United States. The American Civil War was a war fought primarily about slavery.

Its also important to note that even after slaves are emancipated that full rights are not always given to them. For instance Argentina, Cuba, and Brazil had free womb acts, meaning that any child born into the family of slaves was free, however the child would be forced to work for the master until he was 25 years old. Also especially in America it was very hard for free slaves to find work after emancipation because the world’s view point on blacks had not completely changed and few were willing to let them work.

Slavery is a dark stain on humanities past, but time has shown us that eventually people will get the justice that they deserve.