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Anyone who has been to an American high school should know that the Greeks and Romans had white slaves, and the ancient Egyptians made slaves of captured prisoners, only some of whom were black. If you went to a Catholic school you know the Irish captured the future St. Patrick on a slave raid, and he was slave there before he escaped. And so on. Some native American tribes enslaved captives as well.
But the fact is that after secondary school there are no reminders in the culture of these ancient non-black African slaves.
I think the enslavement of black Africans preoccupies the American people for a number of reasons:
1. The size of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the great amount of surviving material on it.
2. The fact that it existed quite late in the United States and Brazil.
3. The black and mixed-blood descendants of slaves are a sizable part of the population of the United States (and Brazil, of course.)
4. On the other hand, the fact that enslaved Roma and Tartar existed in present-day country of Romania until they were freed in the mid-19th century is probably virtually unknown due to the fact that their numbers where very much smaller, and their condition existed in an area (the Balkans) whose history is unimportant to most Americans.
And in the end, no one can deny that it is the existence of a slave system based on the ownership of black Africans that became a national issue, the focus of a terrible war, and a post-war history of Jim Crow laws, legal racial segregation of these people, and discrimination well into the 20th century. The absence of life-long chattel enslavement of white persons in the U.S. in practical terms makes that type of slavery an academic pursuit.
How many Americans ever saw or knew of a white person who was born and lived as a chattel slave, probably close to none (until the use of slave labor by the Third Reich). But most Americans of my generation and my parents knew of living black Africans who had been chattel slaves, and some whites would have know these people personally. And that is all the difference in the world.
"Some people mistakenly think that only Black Americans were slaves, and that all Whites were free. In fact, tens of thousands of White folks were slaves. Two points explain this odd fact. First, Whiteness back then was based on appearance. If you looked White and were accepted as White, then you were White, even if you were a slave. The modern-day notion that you could be Black due to invisible ancestry had not yet been invented. Second, for half the span of U.S. history there was no legal connection between continent of ancestry and slave status. This changed in 1802. Session C9A of a series on the history of U.S. slavery and “racial” classification."
In 1653 Virginia, one of Anthony Johnson’s involuntary African laborers, a man named John Casor, claimed his freedom because his term of indenture had allegedly expired seven years before. He fled his master’s plantation and took refuge with a nearby farmer, Captain Gouldsmith. Johnson insisted that his runaway laborer was not indentured, but was a lifelong slave and demanded the African’s return. Not wanting to become embroiled in a legal fight with a powerful plantation owner, Gouldsmith turned the worker over to another wealthy planter, Robert Parker. Parker took the worker’s side in the dispute, kept him on his own plantation’s workforce, and argued on his behalf in court. The case dragged on for two years, with Johnson at one point agreeing to manumit Casor, but then reneging on the settlement. On March 8, 1655, the Northampton County Court ruled that Casor had been a slave all along, ordered that the worker be returned immediately to Anthony Johnson, and ordered Robert Parker to pay damages for sheltering the runaway for two years, as well as court costs. A few years later, Parker abandoned his career as a Virginia planter and returned to England. Twenty years later, Casor was still owned by Mary Johnson—Anthony Johnson’s widow. What is important about this tale is that Anthony Johnson was also African. His plantation, from whence Casor fled, was named “Angola,” and it exploited European forced laborers as well as Africans.1
And this discounts that the majority of the slave owners or "slave masters" were European and most of the slaves were African?
Sobre, its not relevant because as a rule this wasn't the case its deeply offensive to me personally because my ancestors were slaves on the plantations in the Caribbean wiped, raped, overthrown at sea, hunted down like animals.
You are offending people so just stop with "some whites were slaves too" like that somehow changes history.
All of you are deluded and borderline racists including the one from Finland.
As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.
African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.
Racism is in the air, even when we think we're being "PC" or when we're joking we're being racist we can't except it because that's the only way we know to think.
Quote:
The "social "construction of race in America does not rely on skin color. "African Americans," as Asante notes, " constitute the most heterogeneous group in the United States biologically, but perhaps one of the most homogeneous socially.
Karenga notes that it "is . . . playing Europe's racial game to concede that Egyptians are white or Asian if they don't look like a Eurocentric version of a West African." Furthermore, "Ethiopians and Somalis, perhaps, resemble the ancient Egyptians and ancient Nubians more than any other peoples and they are, even by Eurocentric standards, African." Unless we revive the hoary "Hamitic" Myth."
The question for the discerning student of history is; why do all the conclusions always serve to empower Europeans and disempower Africans. It does not matter if they use archeology or genetics, linguistics or reasoning the conclusions always make a deposit towards the greatness of Europe, and a deduction from the glory of Africa.
•Who ended the slave trade- Europe
•Who stopped the Arab trade – Europe
•Who was the greatest Abolitionist – A European
•The greatest scientist, thinker, architect, composers, inventors – Europeans
•Who invented modern civilization – Europe
•Who invented everything good – Europe
•Who is the most civilized - Europe
•Who knows what is best for Africans? - Europeans
The question that should be put to these historians is “What has indigenous Africa contributed to the world?” Because the history of take-away has reduced Africa to nothing, thus implying the old statement “Africa is of no historical significance.” So how are today’s scholars any different from David Hume and Kant? If all their conclusions reduced all the nobility of Africa to given, borrowed or stolen.
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