If you’re a typical VICE reader, you’re about
halfway through elementary school—or maybe you’re a member of the
magazine’s ever-expanding preschool readership. Either way, you’re very
young, and your mind and sexuality are easily molded by bad people who
want to hurt you.
There are a lot of bad people in the American educational system who
are being forced by a lot of bad people in the financial world to tell
you a lot of bad facts about history that are designed to make you feel
bad about yourself. This is especially true if you’re a WHITE
schoolchild.
If you’re white like Uncle Jim, your teachers will try to convince you
that you’re responsible—even though you’re only, what?, eight years
old?—for a bunch of bad, bad things that happened a long, long time ago. So I’ve collected a bunch of DUMB MYTHS and
SMART FACTS about slavery that you can use to clown your teachers and
everyone else at school!
DUMB MYTH #1: SLAVERY IS A BAD, DIRTY THING THAT HAPPENED TO BLACK PEOPLE IN AMERICA BEFORE THE CIVIL WAR
SMART FACT: 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.
DUMB MYTH #2: WHITE EUROPEAN CHRISTIANS WERE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR THE AFRICAN SLAVE TRADE
SMART FACT: No, kids—the blacks, Arabs, and Jews were involved, too.
• BLACKS: 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. In the late 1700s, a freed black
American slave named Ottobah Cugoano wrote, “I was first kidnapped and
betrayed by my own complexion, who were the first cause of my exile and
slavery.”
• ARABS: The word “Abed” means “slave” in Arabic. It also means
“black.” The “Holy Land” of the Middle East has hosted far more African
slaves than North America ever did.
• JEWS: The oldest synagogue in America was built by Aaron Lopez, a
Jewish slave trader. Jewish writers such as Cecil Roth, Wilfred Samuels,
Seymour B. Liebman, and Moshe Kahan acknowledge that Jews were involved
in all levels of the African slave trade.
In fact, children, white Christians were the first group to make a concerted effort to ABOLISH slavery.
DUMB MYTH #3: AMERICA’S A UNIQUELY EVIL PLACE BECAUSE IT IMPORTED ALL THOSE SLAVES FROM AFRICA
SMART FACT: 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?
DUMB MYTH #4: MOST WHITE PEOPLE OWNED SLAVES, SO EVERY WHITE PERSON SHARES GUILT FOR AMERICAN SLAVERY
SMART FACT: 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.
DUMB MYTH #5: BLACKS NEVER OWNED SLAVES IN AMERICA
SMART FACT: 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.
DUMB MYTH #6: THERE WERE NO WHITE SLAVES IN AMERICA
SMART FACT: 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.
DUMB MYTH #7: WHITE “INDENTURED SERVENTS CHOSE TO COME HERE AND WEREN’T TREATED AS BADLY AS BLACK SLAVES
SMART FACT: 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.
DUMB MYTH #8: ENGLAND ONLY SENT CONVICT LABORERS TO AUSTRALIA
SMART FACT: England
only started sending convicts to Australia in 1776—when the American
Revolution made it impossible for them to continue sending their
convicts here. By 1776, more than 50,000 convict slave laborers had
already been sent to America. That’s a lotta criminals, kids!
DUMB MYTH #9: PICKING COTTON IS THE WORST POSSIBLE JOB
SMART FACT: 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.
DUMB MYTH #10: WHITE PEOPLE NEED TO PAY FINANCIAL REPARATIONS TO BLACK PEOPLE
SMART FACT: American
blacks enjoy the highest standard of living of any black population on
earth. Their average per capita income is TWENTY to FIFTY times higher
than in any of the African countries from where they were displaced.
It’s true that part of America’s wealth was built on black slavery; it
is also true that American blacks are enjoying the fruits of that
wealth. You, fair child, whether you were born black or white, weren’t
born in debt to anyone. You were born free. Don’t let the bad people
take it away from you.
DUMB MYTH #11: THE CIVIL WAR WAS FOUGHT TO END SLAVERY
SMART FACT: 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?
DUMB MYTH#12: SLAVERY ENDED WITH THE CIVIL WAR
SMART FACT: The
US government estimates that 50,000 humans are brought into this
country every year for the purpose of forced labor. Various agencies
estimate that there are anywhere from 27 to 200 million humans currently
enslaved worldwide. (Compare this to only four and a half million
slaves at American slavery’s peak.) Most of these slaves live in South
Asia, Africa, and South America. Their labor comes far cheaper and is
much more profitable than black American slavery was. In many horrifying
cases, poverty-stricken women sell their vaginas on the black market
and become lifelong sex slaves to fat, stinky men for as little as
$1,500. In today’s dollars, a black slave in the American South cost
approximately $40,000.
*
Remember, kids—the enemy’s all around you, and he comes in all colors.
Slavery exists in so many ways, children. Open your eyes before they
shackle your asses.
Two small additions:
First, one reason the percentage of blacks owning slaves was so much higher than whites is that some blacks bought family members or love interests in order to prevent them from being sold somewhere else. There was some contemporary legal conundrum about why they couldn’t free them immediatly, I think.
Second, I read some back and forth about how much slavery played a role for whom in the civil war at which phase of the war.
But the first military unit in the United States in which blacks attained commissioned officer ranks was a black volunteer unit from Lousiana – on the side of the Confederates. The volunteer unit was formed by the local blacks explicitly in order to fight for their right to keep slaves, as they state themselves in documents and letters.
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