It’s not exactly breaking news that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was an indefensible nightmare. The Land of the Free™ bears a long list of indelible stains and being built upon the backs of slaves is up near the top.
But to reflexively blame white supremacy or simply “white people” for the totality of slavery is a willful lack of understanding.
For example, Brazil forced about 10 times as many African captives to become slaves as the U.S. did.
Also, some Native American tribes held war captives as slaves long before (and during) European colonization while others (e.g. Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles) later kept Africans as slaves.
Where and how does all that fit into The Narrative™?
Back in my “activist” days, I’d twist myself into a pretzel to avoid digging this deep into accepted dogma. Thank Heaven, I shrugged off those chains.
On a wider and more urgent scale, way too many folks restrict discussions of the peculiar institution of slavery to only the Trans-Atlantic trade when at least 50 million humans live in slavery right now.
(For context, the 1860 census found there were four million slaves in the U.S.)
Today’s ongoing crime wave exists in 160 countries — 11 million victims in India alone — and involves trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation, debt bondage, child marriages, domestic servitude, forced labor, and more.
An estimated 25 percent of these slaves are children.
Taking a historical view, why is the American South the poster child for treating humans as property when Korea had the longest unbroken chain of slavery of any society in history? It started there about 2,000 years ago and lasted roughly 1,500 years.
Meanwhile, type “slavery” into a search engine and you primarily get images like this:
Another angle: With so much support (woke and otherwise) for Arabs and Muslims these days, did you know that the Ottoman Empire didn’t abolish slavery until 1924? For Iran, that happened five years later.
Oman didn’t get around to it until (wait for it) 1970 — but they still kept slavery going under the kafala system of “sponsorship.” In 2024, slaves are also found in remarkably high numbers in Muslim nations like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Afghanistan.
Isn’t it a foundational feature of the new logic [sic] that we’re supposed to unquestioningly line up against any culture that ever took part in oppression and/or colonization at any moment in history?
Spoiler alert: Contrary to headlines and hive minds, virtually every human grouping in history has been treated abhorrently at some point, and countless nations were created on a foundation of injustice.
Using the au courant definition, all land is stolen land. So… now what?
Attempting to re-legislate the past to virtue signal in the present is a cynical redirection of our best intentions. We’d be far better served to attain at least a rudimentary grasp of history so as not to repeat previous transgressions by adopting groupthink today.
How ironic that contemporary discussions about slavery and colonization are colored by the mental-emotional-spiritual bondage imposed upon us by The Powers That Shouldn’t Be™. People are being chained and subjugated by seductive narratives designed specifically to control their perception of reality.
(That’s how, for example, we can even have “land” viewed as something to be “owned” and therefore, something capable of being “stolen.”)
Take-home message: Ideological echo chambers are not designed to provide impartial information, foster community, or seek justice. They are ego- and profit-driven cults with diabolical motives — cherry-picking “causes” that further their agendas while counting on us to conform out of guilt, shame, fear, and ignorance.
Our first step on the path toward righteousness is to reject these broods of vipers and start the arduous task of reclaiming the subversive pleasure of thinking for ourselves.
From The Matrix: “There's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path.”
From Mickey Z.: Don’t just know and walk the path; encourage and help others to do the same.
When you liberate yourself, you’re less likely to want to see others in chains.
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Amen. History is not, and cannot be, a morality play. But we can make (painstaking) progress towards something more humane.
This is very good stuff. Thank you for posting it. The world cannot be reminded too often that slavery is a world-wide, ongoing concern, not by any means limited to westerners exploiting people from elsewhere. As a Brit, I'd like to point out that, whatever is being taught in schools these days, about 17000 (I believe) Royal Navy sailors died *fighting* the slave trade, and the country that so many claim is rich 'because of the slave trade' actually spent almost exactly the same amount of money in that battle as it made from the slave trade in the first place. As you rightly say, such facts don't 'fit the narrative'.