Synopsis
Slaves to Racism is a historical eyewitness account of the effect of racism in two countries, one black, one white, showing how American racism traps blacks even in Africa. The tales he tells illustrate the twists of irony and misplaced pride on all sides.
Prof. Dennis chronicles the compulsive and repetitious nature of racism and its destructive effects on peoples and societies. During the 1990s, Liberia descended into civil war and anarchy. African-Liberian rebel groups roamed the countryside randomly killing as they vied for power. Doe was killed by a segment of these rebel groups and warlord Charles Taylor eventually became president in 1997. In 2003, Taylor was deposed by rebel groups and is now on trial at The Hague for war crimes. Despite Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's democratic election in 2005, Liberia remains in ruins as a classic failed state in Africa. The obvious question is: Why did the Negro experiment planted in Africa in 1822 fail so miserably?
Liberia was doomed from the start. The sins of the master were inevitably passed on to the freed slaves who returned to Africa to "make a fresh start." To assert status the Americo-Liberians blindly followed the worst habits of the whites, imposing themselves as a superior class on the "African Liberians" who had never left. With only a superficial knowledge of Western culture, they imagined the white way without truly understanding it, and made Liberia a caricature of Southern society.
Prof. Dennis compares the prejudice and discrimination between groups in Liberia with the patterns he has encountered between and among blacks and whites in the United States, from blatant bigotry to the almost subliminal boundaries that still exist even among liberal communities that "want more blacks."
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About the Author
A true African-American who belongs to all of the groups involved, Dr. Dennis writes from a broad historical and social perspective. The son of a Liberian diplomat and a hereditary chief of the Mende tribe, he spent his school years in Berlin and summers in Liberia in Monrovia, in his father's tribal village of Vahun, and in his mother's Gbande village of Somalahun.
Dr. Dennis moved to the United States in 1950, earning a double PhD in Sociology and Anthropology from Michigan State University. He has experienced life as a "Negro" and since the Civil Rights Movement as a "black man in America," while at the same time becoming a member of the American academic elite and other white-dominated circles. As an insider, he was privy to confidential racial and cultural viewpoints.
As an outsider, his academic training allowed him to apply the principles of sociology and anthropology to what he observed. He analyzes the highly-charged issues of racism, discrimination and hypocrisy with humor, grace and understanding.
His wife Anita K. Dennis has a degree in sociology with a minor in anthropology and has been accepted into her husband's Mende tribe.
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