The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was instigated and perpetuated by White Europeans. They went to great lengths to influence Africa's tribal rulers and leaders to provide to them captured Black Africans as one of their three (3) major commodity categories being traded between Europe and the New Western Worlds. White European traders aggressively worked to encourage African consumer demands for European goods. In addition, White European government representatives formed military alliances to instigate fighting between tribal factions and increase the number of African captives, and shifted the location of disembarkation points for the trade along the West and Central African coast to follow their contrived, African military conflicts. In areas of West and Central Africa where slavery was not prevalent, European demand often expanded the presence of their institutional slavery, strategically integrating it into their commercial trade. 

African tribal rulers and leaders enticed and compelled by European trinkets and goods, began bartering with their captured, African-tribal-adversaries and grew wealthy by trading their captives to European traders on the African coasts. Thus, on the African side, the slave trade was generally the business of African rulers or leaders concerned who were with their own selfish or narrow interests, bartering with wealthy and powerful White merchants. At that time, there was no concept of being a Black African – identity and loyalty were based on tribalism, kinship or membership of a specific kingdom or society, rather than to the African continent.

The pressures from European consumer interests in African slavery were great, and the social instability that followed military conflicts inevitably challenged the resources of African groups. Many Africans turned to the trans-Atlantic slave trade to expel their opponents or to garner profits. The population loss and disruptive effects on social, political, military, and labor systems caused by the trans-Atlantic slave trade varied in scale depending on the African region and group.

The bottom line is captured Black Africans were physically restrained and forcibly removed from Africa. As transactional-chattel-commodities, locked iron leg, hand and neck restraints, they were chained together and packed into slave cargo ships like sardines and shipped across the Atlantic, where upon reaching New Western Worlds, they were auctioned off and sold into slavery. The free-for-all among African societies to capture slaves from their neighbors and rivals for sale to a White power structure was deliberately stimulated by White Europeans who anchored offshore with their goods and trinkets. And this same state of chaos comforted whites in their White Supremacy view of Black Africans as subhuman, gullible and ignoble savages.

Without the self-severing and greedy forces of the White European, “British and Dutch Mercantile Trade Systems”, the transactional-chattel-commodity that constituted the slave portion of the Trans-Atlantic Mercantile Trade System might not have existed. See: https://web-clear.unt.edu/course_projects/HIST2610/content/02_Unit_Two/05_lesson_five/02_merc_sys.htm

Over the centuries the British and Dutch Mercantile Trade Systems morphed into today's "Free Market Based, Crony Capitalistic System" where the nexus of materialism, money, wealth and power form the fundamental structural elements for the construct of structural racism, just as it did, during and after the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. 

The very essence of "Capitalism" is the control of wealth and power at the expense of the powerless. Hence, Capitalism is fueled and driven by the exploitation, manipulation and control of powerless victims. From Native Americans' lands being summarily stolen with impunity by a White Power Structure and then the same stolen lands being productively worked by enslaved Black Africans under the brutal oppression of the same With Power Structure; in America's crony-capitalistic-system, which is constructed upon and deeply anchored in structural racism, "victimization" is not a "mentality" it's America's longstanding reality.

Being victimized in America at significant personal and community costs is just as American as slavery, apple pie and baseball. From the infamously egregious, Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to Flint Michigan's lead saturated drinking water; from Takata's faulty, automotive air bags to Boeing's 737 Max 8/9, flawed MCAS system; from America's Civil War to the non-existent, "Weapons Of Mass Destruction" and resultant Iraq War; from America's financially lucrative, industrial prison complex and its racialized, mass incarceration and injustice systems, to the pharmaceutical and health care industries and U.S. FDA's Opioid Crisis... if you and/or your generations of family are not now victims or have never been victims of America's structurally racist, crony-capitalistic-system, then the probability is extremely high that you and/or your generations of family are the Victimizers, who are disingenuously propagating the propaganda that, "Victimization" is a state of mind.

By Stewart Jackson

Black Lives Matter, Columbia, University.