 |
| Plantation life in the American South? |
SLAVERY:
What They Didn't Teach in My High School
 |
| Larry Elder |
TOWNHALL
by Larry Elder
July 12, 2018
A man I have known since grade school changed his name, years ago, to an Arabic one. He told me he rejected Christianity as "the white man's religion that justified slavery." He argued Africans taken out of that continent were owed reparations. "From whom?" I asked.
Arab slavers took more Africans out of Africa and transported them to the Middle East and to South America than European slavers took out of Africa and brought to North America. Arab slavers began taking slaves out of Africa beginning in the ninth century -- centuries before the European slave trade -- and continued well after.
In "Prisons & Slavery," John Dewar Gleissner writes: "The Arabs' treatment of black Africans can aptly be termed an African Holocaust. Arabs killed more Africans in transit, especially when crossing the Sahara Desert, than Europeans and Americans, and over more centuries, both before and after the years of the Atlantic slave trade. Arab Muslims began extracting millions of black African slaves centuries before Christian nations did. Arab slave traders removed slaves from Africa for about 13 centuries, compared to three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade. African slaves transported by Arabs across the Sahara Desert died more often than slaves making the Middle Passage to the New World by ship. Slaves invariably died within five years if they worked in the Ottoman Empire's Sahara salt mines."
My name-changing friend did not know that slavery occurred on every continent except Antarctica. Europeans enslaved other Europeans. Asians enslaved Asians. Africans enslaved other Africans. Arabs enslaved other Arabs. Native Americans even enslaved other Native Americans.
Ad
He accused me of "relying on white historians" who, he insisted, had a "vested interest to lie.”
What about Thomas Sowell, the brilliant economist/historian/philosopher, who happens to be black? Sowell writes: "Of all the tragic facts about the history of slavery, the most astonishing to an American today is that, although slavery was a worldwide institution for thousands of years, nowhere in the world was slavery a controversial issue prior to the 18th century.
"People of every race and color were enslaved -- and enslaved others. White people were still being bought and sold as slaves in the Ottoman Empire, decades after American blacks were freed.”
Sowell also wrote: "The region of West Africa ... was one of the great slave-trading regions of the continent -- before, during, and after the white man arrived. It was the Africans who enslaved their fellow Africans, selling some of these slaves to Europeans or to Arabs and keeping others for themselves. Even at the peak of the Atlantic slave trade, Africans retained more slaves for themselves than they sent to the Western Hemisphere. ... Arabs were the leading slave raiders in East Africa, ranging over an area larger than all of Europe."
I asked my friend if his anger over slavery extended to countries like Brazil. "Brazil?" he said.
 |
| Man's inhumanity to Man rife everywhere |
Harvard's Department of African and African American Studies professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. -- who also happens to be black -- wrote: "Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America. And how many of these 10.7 million Africans were shipped directly to North America? Only about 388,000. That's right: a tiny percentage. In fact, the overwhelming percentage of the African slaves were shipped directly to the Caribbean and South America; Brazil received 4.86 million Africans alone!"
African tribes who captured other tribes sold them into slavery. For this reason, in 2006, Ghana offered an official apology. Emmanuel Hagan, director of research and statistics at Ghana's Ministry of Tourism and Diaspora Relations, explains: "The reason why we wanted to do some formal thing is that we want -- even if it's just for the surface of it, for the cosmetic of it -- to be seen to be saying 'sorry' to those who feel very strongly and who we believe have distorted history, because they get the impression that it was people here who just took them and sold them. It's something we have to look straight in the face and try to address, because it exists. So we will want to say something went wrong. People made mistakes, but we are sorry for whatever happened."
Over 600,000 Americans, in a country with less than 10 percent of today's population, died in the Civil War that ended slavery. "While slavery was common to all civilizations," writes Sowell, "...only one civilization developed a moral revulsion against it, very late in its history -- Western civilization. ... Not even the leading moralists in other civilizations rejected slavery at all.”
And, no, even after all this, my friend did not reconsider his name change.
 |
| Note the mosque in the background |
Why, my friend, must you traffic so flagrantly in such controversial, inconvenient (and incontrovertible) facts??? ;-)
ReplyDeleteYou know why, my buddy. It's very simple. SOMEONE who came of age before the onslaught of the SICK-sties –– and was PROPERLY educated –– has to try to COUNTERACT the nearly-FACT-FREE flood of manufactured GARBAGE that passes for News and Information spread daily by the Merchants of Malice, Mischief, Mendacity, and Sedition.
DeleteAs my late father would say, when he got angry at the condition into which the house or garden had lapsed, "The whole goddam place is swimming NECK-DEEP in SHIT!"
Then he would roll up his seaves, and DO something to correct the stitatuon.
Before the day was out whatever it was that had set him off was "all shipshape and Bristol fashion." Then peace and harmony would return to the household –– till the NEXT crisis arose.
Anger CAN be very constructive if it ENERGIZES you to make your cornrr of the world a better place –– in ANY capacity –– even if it's nothing more than standng up and telling what-you-believe-to-be-the-TRUTH when everyone around you is lying ihs fool head off –– even to HIMSELF.
As the always-outspoken Bette Davis said late in her astonishingly poductive life, "IF you want to be a success in a place like Hollywood, you have to have the courage to let yourself be HATED."
Related and something hardly ever covered in school:
ReplyDeleteThis is the forgotten story of the million white Europeans, snatched from their homes and taken in chains to the great slave markets of North Africa to be sold to the highest bidder. Ignored by their own governments, and forced to endure the harshest of conditions, very few lived to tell the tale. Using the firsthand testimony of a Cornish cabin boy named Thomas Pellow, Giles Milton vividly reconstructs a disturbing, little known chapter of history. Pellow was bought by the tyrannical sultan of Morocco who was constructing an imperial pleasure palace of enormous scale and grandeur, built entirely by Christian slave labour. As his personal slave, he would witness first-hand the barbaric splendour of the imperial court, as well as experience the daily terror of a cruel regime. Gripping, immaculately researched, and brilliantly realised, WHITE GOLD reveals an explosive chapter of popular history, told with all the pace and verve of one of our finest historians.
The book's title = White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and North Africa's One Million European Slaves .
Thank yoo so much for this valuable adjuct to Larry Elder's excellent report on chapters in history long ignored or actively suppressed by agenda-driven Marxian activists determined to deracinate American culture as it developed and became established in the United States' relatively short but remarkably brilliant history.
DeleteOff Topic: President Trump slammed Carl Bernstein, who's still smoking Watergate ashtray roaches from the 70's. This is a biting and effective tweet:
ReplyDeleteCNN is being torn apart from within based on their being caught in a major lie and refusing to admit the mistake. Sloppy @carlbernstein, a man who lives in the past and thinks like a degenerate fool, making up story after story, is being laughed at all over the country! Fake News
SF,
DeleteLove that Tweet!
Drs. Elder and Sowell are, of course, correct in their historical summaries, but this doesn’t explain the situation in which we find ourselves today. And by use of the word “we,” I mean to infer nearly every western society wherein there resides a substantial percentage of non-white minorities.
ReplyDeleteIt is both interesting and instructive to note that in the definition of “black theology,” a term that was first used in 1966 to address “white oppression” of African-Americans, that the problems that confront American black communities are equally prevalent in non-American cities throughout Europe, and unsurprisingly, in Africa itself.
We cannot deny that white society has, in the past, have had a diminished view of black people ... nor that leading the charge in this has been a major platform in the Democratic Party since the 1920s. Only recently have Democrats espoused the notion that blacks have suffered from “white oppression.” In previous decades, Democrats have been the source of that oppression. Today, the crafted strategy has become more sophisticated: blaming the political right for the plight of black communities while continuing to discriminate against blacks through diminished expectations.
Understandably, white society reacts unfavorably to racist diatribe, such as promoted by Juan Williams (and too many others). This is because most people do not see themselves as being racists —with good reason. It isn’t white society that produces large fatherless black families, or black children who grow up discounting the importance of education (predominantly paid for by non-black taxpayers), or the exceptionally high crime rates within black neighborhoods.
There is more missing here than black fathers. Hope is missing. In a world filled with violence, negativity, and the despair proffered to us by the agenda-driven media, how should we expect the black community to respond to the racialists who keep driving that wedge in our society. Hope is what allows human beings deal with difficult times.
The Scottish author Samuel Smiles reminded us, “Hope is like the sun, which, as we journey toward it, cast the shadow of our burden behind us.” With hope, we can find the light ... it helps us to see through the darkness of despair. For example, hope could help people to understand that education is a doorway, through which we can change the circumstances of our birth.
What I have found, however, is that only a small percentage of people ... white, black, or any other skin color, are able to see beyond their immediate circumstances. The politicians who make their living by dividing us according to the color of our skin, or our socio-economic circumstances, are working overtime to ensure that young blacks never develop a sense of hope for real change in their condition and it guarantees continuation of racial divide, prolongation of the myth of white oppression —which suits the racialists just fine; it is, as I have said, how they earn their living.
Good post ...
Excellent comment!
DeleteThank you, Mustang. You've stated the problems regardng race relations in our country with eleoquence and dignity. Comments of this quality are sorely needed and all too rare in Blogistan.
DeleteI've come to rely on Larry Elder as a significant source of hope and encurgement. He's one of the sanest, best-prepared, most even-temmpered commentators in the scene.
While most in charge are playing power games for their own aggrandizement without an ounce of sincerity in their unrestrained use of affected moral outrage, harsh denunciation ,bombast, and fulsome rhetoric, Larry –– like the excellent Dr. Ben Carson from whom we hear far too little these days –– engenders confidence with his fearless, low-key, straight-from-the-shoulder statements of plain, solid home truths of which every citizen needs to hear a great deal more.
The concept of "white guilt" is a construct of the Democratic Party -- and a concept that has gained acceptance in large part because of Howard Zinn's book A History of the American People, upon which numerous social studies textbooks have been based.
Delete