Zone1 Here's Why White Guilt About Slavery Is Insane

[forkup]

Let's just ask a few questions. Have you ever heard a leftist, Democrat, woke SJW, or BLM activist say:

1. Slavery is a world-history problem that goes back as long as humans have been alive, and has manifested in all races and cultures and thus has just been another chapter in a long-standing evil institution?

2. Blacks are the ones who captured other blacks in Africa, and thus are guilty of initiating the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade?

3. 97% of Africans were not brought to the USA?

4. Only 1% of White people owned slaves?

I've never heard any of it. Never. Not from a Democrat, not from a CRT/1619 Project guru, not from a woke SJW, not from a BLM activist...

On the contrary, we've seen the messaging from the left on the topic. White people hold an "original sin", black slavery was uniquely evil, all of white people benefitted, we need reparations from all whites. Africans were victims only (despite being the ones who enslaved one another).

1. I have acknowleged on multiple occasions on here that slavery is an historical fact outside the US. Usually in the context of biblical slavery.

2. So your assertion is, is that since it were blacks who did the capturing, whites aren't responsible. It seems to me that the blacks in Africa captured their neighbouring tribes and sold them into slavery because whites provided the economic incentive to do so.

In fact, it was a entire economic system called the triangular trade routes.

If I commission someone to steal a work of art. Would you say I'm not responsible because I didn't personally break into the Louvre.

3. You are right. On the other hand, the USA kept the instution of slavery long after most nations abandoned it. Fought a civil war to try to sustain it, and after they couldn't kept Black people as second rate citizens well into the 20th century. Something that still creates systemic problems to this day. So there's that.

4. If by "owned" you mean held the deeds as an individual sure, the number is closer to 2 but sure. On the other hand if you look at it by household like I'd suggest an intellectual honest person would look at it, the number during the colonial era was more like 25 percent. And just before the civil war in the Southern States over 30.

See the reason you don't hear the points you make among leftists, is because you aren't really interested in hearing what they have to say if it doesn't fit your narrative. On top of them being misleading, or simply bad from a rethorical standpoint.

 

[forkup]

Modern woke pseudo-history paints a fabricated story of slavery; that white men came to Africa, stole Africans from their lands, and brought them to America. It was White American men, and only White American men, who were guilty of this, and it was a large majority of them as well. This was unique to the world at the time and in world history, and is a special evil in the history of mankind.

Of course, this is all complete nonsense, and is just woke propaganda we were taught in schools or are being told by politicians or media pundits today. But it's important to look at the context and just how insanely wrong these claims are. Let's look at total number of slaves, for example:

It is absolutely true that the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, in which Africans captured other Africans and sold them, shipped approximately 12.5 million slaves across the Atlantic to the Americas.

The Issue becomes where those slaves were taken. A woke liberal would probably assume that 12.5 million slaves were taken from Africa and sent to the American south. That would be insanely false. The breakdown looks like this:

• 5.4 million were sent to Brazil
• 3.6 million were sent to the Carribean
• 1.2 million were sent to Jamaica
• 900,000 were sent to St. Dominique (French Colony)
• 889,000 were sent to Cuba
• 470,000 were sent to the United States

So in this cry of woke left Democrat social justice warriors... cries of the unique evil of America, white men, etc... they make the claims they do when American only partook in 3% of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade.

Add to that how there were only about 390,000 slave owners in the USA out of a population of 31 million... and you have approximately 1.2% of the population participating or benefitting from it, yet is that what Democrats, leftists, or educators say, address, or teach?

Slavery is an evil that has existed as long as human history has. All races have been enslaved, many continue to be. As far as America is concerned, it basically happened for 90 years nearly 200 years ago. However, no woke Democrat can legitimately point the finger at the USA as some unique evil in slavery, nor can they say we were any leader in it. They need to point the finger at Africans of the times first, and then all the South American/Brazilian/Carribean nations who were far greater participants.

And this is just the Trans-Atlantic slave trade. Again, Slavery exists across the world at far greater rates throughout history.

So, any person who wants to demonize the USA and White people as a unique evil as far as slavery, or as a major historical cause of it, is just revealing their tragic indoctrination and ignorance of history.

What you went on about wasn’t “wokeness” in any meaningful sense, it was just an anti-woke rant aimed at a strawman.

To me, woke has never meant assigning personal guilt to people for what their ancestors did. That’s a cartoon version invented so people don’t have to engage with the substance.

What it actually means, is much simpler and much less hysterical:
It’s the demand that past actions be acknowledged as morally wrong, that the systems built on those actions be honestly described, and that the downstream consequences of those systems, where they still exist today, be recognized and mitigated.

That’s it.

No inherited guilt. No racial original sin. No collective punishment.
Just moral clarity about history and a refusal to pretend its effects conveniently stopped mattering the moment it became uncomfortable.

 

[Failzero]

Jewish Liberal Guilt far surpasses any White guilt over the Kluxers & Slave ownership of the past Guilt

 

[ding]

Crackers Southern racists did it then as they do it now. Just because Crackers Southern racists are now MAGAts doesn't change anything. They still support Black/minority vote suppression.

Democrats in the north voted in lockstep with them. Learn some history.

 

[Failzero]

Democrats in the north voted in lockstep with them. Learn some history.

Democrats facilitated the Klan Bakes of 1919 1924 1928 and 1934 in DC

 

[ding]

The extremes of either party should be ignored.

I'll be happy to include you in them, if you like.

 

[ding]

There are also middle-class Black families living in my neighborhood. Something unheard of a generation or two ago.


Maybe there is no magic bullet.


Yep. It is good to know I'm on the right side of history.

No one is coming to save them from themselves.

 

[ding]

I do dimiss it because white lead the nation annually in crime against family and children. So what good is it to have a so-called nuclear family when 1 or more of the parents is abusive?All you are doing is repeating the same tired white racist bromide about the black family. And none of it is supported by fact.

“In 1965, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s report, The Negro Family: The Case for National Action, attributed racial inequality as well as poverty and crime in the black community to family structure, particularly the prevalence of families headed by single mothers. Not only did research at the time cast doubt on this causality, but evidence over the last the 50 years demonstrates that rates of child poverty, educational attainment, and crime do not track rates of single parenthood. Thus, even though the share of children living with a single mother rose for all racial and ethnic groups through the mid-1990s and has remained high since then, school completion and youth arrests for violent crimes have declined significantly, while poverty rates have fluctuated according to economic conditions.

Family structure does not drive racial inequity, and racial inequity persists regardless of family structure.”
-Amy Traub, Laura Sullivan, Tatjana Meschede and Thomas Shapiro, DEMOS, “The Asset Value of Whiteness: Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap.”

The Asset Value of Whiteness: Understanding the Racial Wealth Gap | Demos

No metric more powerfully captures the persistence and growth of economic inequality along racial and ethnic lines than the racial wealth gap.

www.demos.org

Defining the rule through exception isn't a good way to see reality.

If they keep doing the same thing, they will keep getting the same result.

No one is coming to save them from themselves.

 

[alang1216]

No one is coming to save them from themselves.

Maybe, but at least the Dems are working to save them from ourselves.

 

[ding]

During the Civil War period, Radical Republicans had great power and were able to get initiatives passed providing blacks with civil rights. The pressure from Radical Republicans was responsible for creating the 14th Amendment and the implementation of the Reconstruction Acts over President Johnson’s veto. These two actions allowed protection to the newly freed blacks.

The influence of the Radical Republicans was gone once reconstruction ended, and the republican party began to turn away from issues affecting blacks. Southern white Republicans resented that the party had become the “black folks party” to use the kindest description, and felt that they needed to gain support from southern whites to become national. As blacks gained power and started winning elections, white resistance increased, and as a result, there was a backlash against southern black republicans called the lily-white movement.

“The lily-white movement was an all-white faction of the Republican Party in the Southern United States in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It battled and usually defeated the biracial element called the Black-and-tan faction.

During Reconstruction, following the U.S. Civil War, black leaders in Texas and around the country gained increasing influence in the Republican Party by organizing blacks as an important voting bloc. Conservative whites attempted to eliminate this influence and recover white voters who had defected to the Democratic Party. The effort was largely successful in eliminating African-American influence in the Republican Party leading to black voters predominantly migrating to the Democratic Party for much of the 20th century.

The term lily-white movement was coined by Texas Republican leader Norris Wright Cuney, who used the term in an 1888 Republican convention to describe efforts by white conservatives to oust blacks from positions of Texas party leadership and incite riots to divide the party.[1] The term came to be used nationally to describe this ongoing movement as it further developed in the early 20th century, including through the administration of Herbert Hoover. Localized movements began immediately after the war but by the beginning of the 20th century the effort had become national. This movement is largely credited with driving blacks out of the Republican party during the early 20th century, setting the stage for their eventual support of the Democrats.”

Jeff Charles, Lily-White Movement: Why Black Americans Left The GOP, Liberty Nation News, April 02, 2021, https://www.libertynation.com/lily-white-movement-why-black-americans-left-the-gop/
Lily-white movement, https://www.americanhistoryusa.com/topic/lily white-movement/
Tsahai Tafari, The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow, https://www.thirteen.org/ wnet/jimcrow/print/p_struggle_president.html

Radical Republicans? Apparently you place your party above your people.

 

[Failzero]

Radical Republicans? Apparently you place your party above your people.

There are no Far Right Politicians in the House & Senate in but almost all of the Democrats are Far Left

 

[IM2]

While exact numbers vary by year, at the peak of slavery in the U.S., roughly one-quarter to one-third of white Southern families owned slaves, with a total of around 3.5 to 4 million enslaved people held by about 380,000 slaveholding families (mostly white) by 1860, though many Black Americans also owned slaves, particularly in the Deep South, making it complex, but the vast majority of slaveholders were white.

Once again, we must break things down about blacks and slavery because the issue is more complex than a sentence that says black Americans ownes slaves.

Did Black People Own Slaves?​

Henry Louis Gates Jr.

How Many Slaves Did Blacks Own?

So what do the actual numbers of black slave owners and their slaves tell us? In 1830, the year most carefully studied by Carter G. Woodson, about 13.7 percent (319,599) of the black population was free. Of these, 3,776 free Negroes owned 12,907 slaves, out of a total of 2,009,043 slaves owned in the entire United States, so the numbers of slaves owned by black people over all was quite small by comparison with the number owned by white people. In his essay, “ ‘The Known World’ of Free Black Slaveholders,” Thomas J. Pressly, using Woodson’s statistics, calculated that 54 (or about 1 percent) of these black slave owners in 1830 owned between 20 and 84 slaves; 172 (about 4 percent) owned between 10 to 19 slaves; and 3,550 (about 94 percent) each owned between 1 and 9 slaves. Crucially, 42 percent owned just one slave.

Pressly also shows that the percentage of free black slave owners as the total number of free black heads of families was quite high in several states, namely 43 percent in South Carolina, 40 percent in Louisiana, 26 percent in Mississippi, 25 percent in Alabama and 20 percent in Georgia. So why did these free black people own these slaves?

It is reasonable to assume that the 42 percent of the free black slave owners who owned just one slave probably owned a family member to protect that person, as did many of the other black slave owners who owned only slightly larger numbers of slaves. As Woodson put it in 1924’s Free Negro Owners of Slaves in the United States in 1830, “The census records show that the majority of the Negro owners of slaves were such from the point of view of philanthropy. In many instances the husband purchased the wife or vice versa … Slaves of Negroes were in some cases the children of a free father who had purchased his wife. If he did not thereafter emancipate the mother, as so many such husbands failed to do, his own children were born his slaves and were thus reported to the numerators.”

Moreover, Woodson explains, “Benevolent Negroes often purchased slaves to make their lot easier by granting them their freedom for a nominal sum, or by permitting them to work it out on liberal terms.” In other words, these black slave-owners, the clear majority, cleverly used the system of slavery to protect their loved ones.

Did Black People Own Slaves? – The Root

www.theroot.com

So what we see here is that very few blacks owned slaves and most of them purchased family members, or in some cases purchased friends or helped out other blacks by purchasing them and letting them buy or earn their freed. Of course there were Larry Elder types back then to who were sellouts and bought slaves and treated them like the whites did, but they were very, very few.

So once again when people try blaming blacks for slavery, which I know was not your intent, but it is the intent of those like the OP, these things must be said.

 

[IM2]

There are no Far Right Politicians in the House & Senate in but almost all of the Democrats are Far Left

Another lie.

 

[RoshawnMarkwees]

I have to congratulate the Democrats who owned the slaves for housing them, feeding them, providing clothing and things essential for slaves and not simply hanging them. Hanging a slave would cost the owner a fortune. Slaves then sold for over $1,000 dollars in many cases. Then it was a fortune.

Excellent point. The fallacy of abuse and torture of slaves. Who would abuse farm animals to expect them to become more productive?

 

[AZrailwhale]

Slavery began as a British institution. But unlike everywhere else, only in America did the British write a law which forbid the mixing of races.

During the 17th century, British colonies in North America increasingly codified laws defining enslaved people as property (chattel) and inheriting that status through the mother. Therefore, while the practice of being born into slavery is as old as slavery itself, the specific combination of racial, hereditary, and lifelong chattel slavery in America was highly distinct in its scope and application.

So blame the British.

You have no idea what you are talking about. Slavery goes as far back as recorded history does. The Spartans kept a class of slaves called Helots. If I recall correctly, they even had one day a year when any Spartan citizen could kill any Helot without penalty as a measure of control.

 

[Failzero]

Another lie.

Name me 4 Far Right GOP Congress Critters and 2 Far Right US Senators ( so I can figure out who to send $ to )

 

[IM2]

Name me 4 Far Right GOP Congress Critters and 2 Far Right US Senators ( so I can figure out who to send $ to )

Find any Republican in the House or Senate, then give them your money.

 

[Failzero]

Find any Republican in the House or Senate, then give them your money.

I won’t give $$ to Closet Socially Liberal RINO politicians so no

 

[AZrailwhale]

No. I didn't say that. Do you believe slavery in America was different than their contemporaries? Because that's what we should be blaming Great Britain for. The key being the laws that were passed to prevent the mixing of races.

Slavery in the United States was distinctive due to its explicitly race-based, hereditary nature, resulting in permanent, multi-generational chattel slavery (status passed from mother to child). Unlike other systems, the U.S. enslaved population grew rapidly through natural reproduction rather than relying solely on slave trade imports.

Key differences in American slavery compared to other regions (such as Africa, the Caribbean, or Latin America) during the 17th–19th centuries included:

• Race-Based and Hereditary: It was entirely racialized, where African ancestry became a legal requirement for enslavement, creating a rigid social hierarchy.
• Permanent Chattel Property: Enslaved people were considered legally defined items of property, lacking basic human rights, often for life.
• Natural Reproduction: By the 1730s, the U.S. slave population was able to reproduce itself, with the population rising from roughly 300,000–400,000 imports to 3.5 million by 1860. This contrasted with high death rates in the Caribbean and Brazil, which required constant importing.
• Plantation System Intensity: It was highly labor-intensive, driven by large-scale agricultural exploitation.
• Legal Protections: Unlike some African or Roman systems where slaves might have rights, join the captor's family, or eventually attain freedom, American slavery was designed to be absolute and inescapable, justified by a distinct white supremacy ideology.

Although slavery existed in other places, the combination of these factors—specifically the permanency, hereditary status, and extreme racial definition—made American slavery a unique and rigid institution.

The Roman Latifundio made the Southern plantations seem like charitable institutions. While in the ancient world, slavery wasn't race based, it was hereditary and slaves had zero rights. A master could do anything to a slave. American slavery was anything but inescapable, many slaves bought their freedom as well as that of family members. freedom.

 

[jotathought]

Why are states like California, who had no slavery, proposing reparations? That’s what I find mysterious and only a political tactic.