Oh paleeez..... Here we go again....Evil Whitey. No other race of people are "racist". Fact is; no other group of people have helped others like the White Christian race. Through charity and humanitarian aid. The invention of the automobile, airplane, cotton gin, electricity, telephone, the submarine, on and on and on.
No.
Not evil Whitey, PB.
Evil mankind.Slavery was commonly practiced thoughout the world.
I'm just correcting the historical revisionism I keep reading here from some quarters.
The revisionist fabrication that Europeans did
not raid African villages to abduct Africans to be sold in the New world needs to be set right.
Yes, Europeans did indeed send out raiding parties to abduct Africans to be sold in the slave markets of the New World.
So did Arabs of North Africa, and so did Black Africans.
Plenty of collective guilt for those of us inclined to feel guilt for things mankind did to itself in our past.
Given that so many White Americans are themselves descended from indentured servants (a form of slavery, which few people seem to understand, but which was slavery none the less) I find it hard to understand why anyone would bother to try to mitigate what Whites ALSO did to Black Africans.
If you're of early German or English stock, the likelihood is that some or all your ancestors were ALSO sold on the block at some port in the New World.
While it is true that indentured were supposed to be indentured for a set period of time, the horror stories of (for example) children who ended up serving not only thier endures, but the endenture of their parents (who'd died while endentured) too, is out there for those of you who want to read about that time.
I'd go so far as to suggest that no a single human being reading this isn't decended from people who somewhere at some time, lived under the lash.
That's how very common slavery once was, folks.
MOST of the people who came off the Mayflower were NOT free persons, for example.
MOST of the Anglos who followed the first "Pilgrims" came over as endentured persons.
MOST of the early Germans, likewise, came to America and paid for their passage by becoming endentured to the highest bidder on the docks, or, when there were no buyers on the docks, they were sold in the hinderlands as the slave trains went inland to sell them to the highest bidders.
They were often not treated especially well, believe me. Horses were more valuable than endentured servants in most cases.
American was largely originally settled and built by former slaves, both White endentured Slaves and Black slaves with no hope of ever being freed.
The Blacks were treated worse, of course, because few of them were EVER given the opportunity to free themselves by labor, plus their children were born as slaves, too.
American history is not the stellar example of free men carving a civilization out of an empty wilderness, folks.
Quite the contrary, it was man exploiting man, sometimes with a brutality that boggles the mind, that carved this nation into being.
