phous abstraction. The technique has provided important
insights into the plight of the slave as the victim of a dehumanizing
system, but it tends to obscure the active participation of Africans in
American life. Further, it is a crude generalization which, in fact,
included many types within it. While most slaves were plantation field
hands, there were many whose lives followed different lines and for whom
slavery was a very different experience. Some slaves departed sharply
enough from the "Sambo" image to become leaders in insurrections. These
men were usually urban slaves possessing unusual talents, and thereby
escaping much of the emasculation which the typical slave had to endure.

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. The morale of the
American prisoners was easily broken, and each one strove to look out for
himself even at expense of his comrade's life. In contrast, the Turks
maintained military discipline and group solidarity. This evidence would
seem indicate that, while individual differences were insignificant,
cultural differences did in