I have to say that this obsession with "slave names" strikes me as more than a little irrelevant. There are countries where people only have one name (eg Burma). Moreover most Chinese are quite happy to adopt a western name and use it wherever convenient so that they can get on with the business of improving their lives via interacting with the west.
Yes the lot of African-Americans in the US is shameful now and was worse in the past. Having said that, how about people concentrating on real problems?
You pick the slavery post to get cranky?
We give one name to our pets and possessions, but people in America, which is the place under discussion, also have a family name. The fact that slaves didn't even get a whole name strikes me as particularly poignant.
Ummmm... did they have last names in their homelands? Many cultures, even today, don't have last names as we in the United States recognize them. Of all the evils of slavery, "we didn't even let them have last names" is kinda... inane???
did they have last names in their homelands?
Do you think their owners gave them just one name out of respect for their cultural heritage? It's irrelevant what they did in their homelands, and I'm not pointing to the absence of a last name as an "evil," but as a poignant, evocative, symbol of the evil that was done.
Having done some research in antebellum property records, the lack of last names for slaves isn't quite as shocking as it was at first. But what still gets me are casual references to minority groups by slurs in the material I parse through: from stories about a "happy, watermelon-eatin' darky" or a photograph of a Mexican day laborer with the simple title, "spic." I see this stuff alot in my research and workplace (in a museum archives), and it never fails to astound me.