A little light reading

RE: Salt eating This has been on my mind since I read the paragraphs in the piece about Fryar regarding his take on an illustration he once saw that "seemed to show a slave trader in Africa licking the face of a prospective slave." Fryar theorizes that slave traders may have tried to select "with a lick to the cheek, the 'saltier' Africans." The principle being, according to the author of the profile on Fryar, that "a person with a higher capacity for salt retention might also retain more water and thus increase his chance of surviving" the passage from Africa to the Americas. As a result, the "Africans who did manage to survive the voyage - and who then formed the gene pool of modern African-Americans - may have been disproportionately marked by hypertension." In other words, the stress of living for centuries under racialist barbarism may not be as sufficient a factor in the rates of hypertension and strokes occuring among African Americans as an inherited capacity for salt retention. This is an interesting supposition and it reveals the workings of a nimble mind that is quite open to novel insights. What troubles me, however, is that salt was not widely used by West Africans in their food prior to the mid-20th Century. In other words, if slavers were testing slaves for salt retention then it was because the slaves were being literally forced to eat salt because the slavers - most of whom were from Europe where salt was widely used - believed that it would help the slaves to retain water and better ensure their chances for survival. At some level it may seem that I am not saying anything markedly different from what Fryar has theorized, however there is a subtle but major difference in how my interpretation differs from his. Proponents of his findings would argue that slavery and racial oppression alone would not account for the high rates of hypertension and strokes among blacks because genetic predisposition also plays a role. This is undoubtedly true but it is equally true that forcing people who did not normally use salt in their diet to eat salt, perhaps in higher than normal amounts, for generation after generation while simultaneously denying them access to the foodstuffs that they normally consumed would eventually result in a disproportionate number of people who retained salt in their bodies. Those who could not retain salt died in higher numbers and could not pass their genes along. What made this peculiar dietary system possible was the existence of chattel slavery. And the unhealthy dietary practices that took root among these displaced Africans has continued to this day among their descendants. If Fryar and others want to claim that today African Americans are free to make other choices about what foods they should ingest little or no argument can be made to the contrary. What should not be overlooked, however, is that centuries of American slavery and racial oppression are what was used to create this predisposed gene pool.