Well kids you better get ready to work those livers and follow me down this bottle of 151, because someone made a TIL about slavery. Now of course that spawned all levels of racism, but the one that really caught my eye was this little gem of a quote.
Well that's shitty but nothing really insane. But! He included a source! Oh goody! Let's take a look at it shall we?
Now it's titled Hey Kids... It's Time For Some Dumb Myths And Smart Facts About Slavery! Promising, promising. Doubtlessly ol' Jim Goad here is gonna open the floodgates of knowledge unto us. I'm positive this unaccredited man is gonna turn all those exhaustively-researched textbooks on their ass!
SMART FACT #1:
> Black slavery in America was pretty bad, kids, but it wasn't anything special. Throughout history, every color of the rainbow has owned slaves and been enslaved. The dictionary tells us that the root word of "slave" is "Slav," because Slavic peoples—who are REALLY pale and white—were the primary slave population throughout the Middle Ages. And though your teachers will never tell you this, there have been long stretches of history where Africans have owned white people as slaves! How do you like THEM apples? The empire of Carthage transported white slaves to Africa. The African Moors ruled Spain for 500 years and sent white Christian slaves to Egypt. And poor, defenseless white kids—just like you!—were kidnapped by Muslims during the Children's Crusade and sold into Egyptian slavery.
Gee, it would seem that other nations and groups practiced slavery too, therefore the Transatlantic Slave Trade was just another day at the office as far as history goes. Of course that does ignore the exceptionally brutal conditions that chattel slaves faced and how it created a centuries-long prejudice towards black people in America.
SMART FACT #2:
> No, kids—the blacks, Arabs, and Jews were involved, too. The president of an African country called Benin recently apologized to American blacks for his country's role in the slave trade. Slavery was common throughout Africa, with entire tribes becoming enslaved after losing battles. Tribal chieftains often sold their defeated foes to white slave-traders. Goes on to mention how other slave trades asides the TAST existed
Oh yes, the classic 'well other people did it too' argument. This is like saying that cholera isn't a big deal because everyone shits. Yes slavery has been a thing since pretty much forever, and yes untold numbers of slaves had shitty lives too. But it is fairly well-known that the TAST was a unique turd and that it differed from most other forms of slavery in significant ways, namely that it was a very closed system. In many, many other slavery organizations throughout history a slave could very well rise through the ranks and become a respectable member of society, however TAST chattel slavery was entirely closed and justified through race.
I hate this kind of argument for having the gall to try and blame the Africans for their own misfortune. For one 'Africa' is not some homogeneous mass anymore than Europe is. Using that logic we could blame 'Europe' for it's own enslaved population because of all the Slav's who were enslaved. Secondly it ignores that fact that the Transatlantic States Right's Slave Trade was responsible for providing a constant demand.
SMART FACT #3!
> Of the 10 to 15 million Africans who were transplanted to the New World, no more than 6 percent—around 400,000—went to the Northern Hemisphere. Almost all of them went to South America, but you don't see your teachers giving Brazil a hard time, do you?
Maybe because Brazil isn't part of America and American highschools tend to focus on American history? Also what the fuck? Is he saying 'Location location location'? This is no way diminishes the horrors of the TAST.
SMART FACT #4
> Blacks were never close to a majority in America, so it's mathematically impossible for most whites to have owned black slaves. At the peak of black slavery in the South, only 6 percent of Southern whites owned slaves. If you include the white people in the North, it means that only 1.4 percent of white Americans owned black slaves at the HEIGHT of slavery.
Shameless number fudging, the actual numbers are fairly self-evident.
SMART FACT #5
> An estimated 3,000 blacks owned a total of 20,000 black slaves in the year 1860. One study concluded that 28 percent of free blacks owned slaves, which is a far higher percentage than that of free whites who owned slaves.
This of course prompts the usual response of 'And?' And so what? That makes it okay? That absolves all the white slave owners?
SMART FACT #6
> Although your textbooks are silent about it, most historians agree that two-thirds of ALL whites came to the colonies in some form of bondage. Legal papers on both sides of the ocean referred to them as "slaves." White slaves outnumbered black slaves in America throughout the 1600s.
I'd love to see these 'most historians'. I'd also like to see where he gets off comparing the status of African chattel slaves to indentured servants who came from Europe. I'll give you a hint, they're not the same.
SMART FACT #7
> Hundreds of thousands of white slaves were kidnapped and brought to America; their middle-passage death rates were comparable to those of black slaves; they were sold at auction and traded for livestock, they were routinely beaten—sometimes to death—and an estimated one half of them died before gaining freedom. It's possible that more whites came to America against their will than blacks. Historians from both ends of the political spectrum say that white slaves were treated worse than black slaves.
Toeing on mortatorium ground here, but the word Irish doesn't come up, just saying.
Where the fuck is he getting this information? More whites came to N.America unwillingly than blacks? Certainly some did but not a majority by any stretch. Historian Richard Hofstader has the following to say on the subject.
"Although efforts were made to regulate or check their activities, and they diminished in importance in the eighteenth century, it remains true that a certain small part of the white colonial population of America was brought by force, and a much larger portion came in response to deceit and misrepresentation on the part of the spirits [recruiting agents]."
No one's saying that being an indentured servant was a peaches and sunshine, but it was leagues better than chattel slavery. You had legal rights and were free to become a regular member of society after ten years, an options black slaves virtually never had.
SMRT FACT #8
> According to statistics, farm work is relatively safe. It is far more dangerous to be a lumberjack, Alaskan crab fisherman, coal miner, or cabdriver. Either way, white slaves were forced to pick cotton under the hot sun, too, which is where they got those red necks.
Oh lovely, modern farm work is relatively safe compared to other modern jobs. Obviously that applies to the conditions slaves in the cotton fields were subjected to as well, totally legit. And this bottle is emptying fast. I found out this writer is a published and acclaimed author. Oh goody. twitch
I AM SO SMART S-M-R-T FACT #10
> When General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, it had been nearly 20 years since Lee owned slaves—he freed his slaves in the late 1840s. In 1856, five years before the Civil War started, he wrote that slavery was "a moral and political evil." On the other hand, General Grant STILL owned slaves at the end of the Civil War, because Abe Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation cleverly outlawed slavery only in the South. Grant had stated that he would refuse to fight if he thought the war had anything to do with slavery. And hey, kids, even if it WAS fought to end slavery, how often do you see the descendants of slaves thanking the 600,000 or so white soldiers who died in the fight to free them?
Well children this certainly has been a learning experience, one where we learn the limits of our livers and just how fucking low standards can be in order to be considered an 'expert.'