Drawing the Color Line

"Drawing the Color line" by Zinn was about people England coming to America and bringing African Americans over to the states from Africa. They were brought over in boats, where the African Americans were kept below the deck in these small cages. The African Americans that were being transported were chained together and smashed together like sardines. The article tells how, many of the African Americans died because of suffocation, some killed others in an attempt to breathe.(p.26) The conditions were so bad that one out of three African Americans transported overseas died. Which made the English happy because this doubled the investment for one trip. The article also talked about the treatment of the African Americans once they were brought over to America and sold. They were treated as though they were not human. At one point the article talks about what happens to the African Americans if they were caught trying to run away. If they were caught running away, their punishment was up to the person who caught them.
How is it that one person can feel good or all right hurting another person just because of the color of their skin? I would like to think that if someone saw another person being hurt, they would be like hey, what are you doing and hopefully stand up and say this is not right, these are people. I think in the text where it says an African American was beat after lying next to a white man. This man was given a harsher punishment, when it sounded like it was not his idea to sleep with a white man in the first place. So I feel that the white man ordered the African American to sleep next to him, so he could get the African American in trouble.
This article made me mad because the Dutch and the English did not care about what happened to the African Americans while being transported or even when they got to America. All they saw the African Americans as, was money, and the more that died the better because then the Dutch could charge more money because the value for a slave became higher as more of them died on the way over to America. I have found out, that, so far I have had a hard time reading these articles. It has been hard for me to read these because of the violent acts that the people committed, but also because I would have never believed that this happened. I knew from grade school that the African Americans were treated poorly, but I had no idea that they were being beat and killed for nothing. I feel that I will learn a lot that I did not know about the different groups that we read about.