Emphasizing the slave as the victim of the slave system further
reduces him to a passive object by insisting that the slave was
effectively detached from his African heritage. Many scholars,
including Elkins, believe that the attempt to discover
Africanisms in America by researchers such as Melville J.
Herskovits has led to trivial and insignificant results. This
belief is reinforced by the example of the German concentration
camps. There, people from wide variety of social and educational
backgrounds reacted in highly similar ways. Apparently the
individual had been detached from his prior life, and his
reactions to the camp were shaped in standardized manner.
Similarly, it is argued, the slave was stripped of his heritage,
so that none of his African background could influence his life
in America. His personality and behavior were shaped exclusively
by the unique form of American slavery.
However, if we apply the experiences gained in the Chinese
prisoner-of-war camps during the Korean War, some doubts on
this point can be raised. While Americans from a wide variety of
social and educational backgrounds behaved with a marked
similarity to each other, thereby appearing to prove that their
previous experiences were irrelevant to their reactions to the camp,
there was, to the contrary, a significant difference between the
behavior the American and Turkish prisoners who had both been
fighting the Korean War.
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