You cannot discuss racism without that one white person telling you how Africans enslaved and sold other Africans. This claim is supposed to absolve whites of their role in the slave trade or somehow equally implicate blacks. This is at best, a disingenuous claim. Blacks have not been perfect and African nations had conflicts just like every other nation or tribe on this planet during the history of the world. Many European cultures killed those who they captured in wars. Most African tribes enslaved prisoners of war.
Slavery was used to pay off debt. Slavery was also a punishment for criminal behavior. There were sex slaves also. None of these things are right, but neither is the Africans sold other Africans’ argument. The Trans Saharan slave trade existed, but going back to the Pre histoorric times to find an excuse to say that other nations did it too or how slavery has been practiced since the beginning of time is weak. While it is true that slavery existed in Africa before Europeans got there, the lie ignores the fact that whites made slavery legal in America.
But let get past this because this fool tried the Anthony Johnson story.
America had every chance not to implement slavery. We are told how the so-called founders of this country created the way to end slavery when they wrote the constitution. Many will cite the fact they made the importation of slaves illegal by 1808 as evidence. But refusing to stop importing slaves did not end the slaving business in the United States. What it produced was an original American industry-slave breeding.
“During the fifty-three years from the prohibition of the African slave trade by federal law in 1808 to the debacle of the Confederate States of America in 1861, the Southern economy depended on the functioning of a slave-breeding industry, of which Virginia was the number-one supplier.”
Ned & Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry, Chicago, Lawrence Hill Books, 2016
If America had continued to import slaves, it would have diluted the market, thereby driving down the price of slaves. Slave sellers could not have this.
“In fact, most American slaves were not kidnapped on another continent. Though over 12.7 million Africans were forced onto ships to the Western hemisphere, estimates only have 400,000-500,000 landing in present-day America. How then to account for the four million black slaves who were tilling fields in 1860? “The South,” the Sublettes write, “did not only produce tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton as commodities for sale; it produced people.” Slavers called slave-breeding “natural increase,” but there was nothing natural about producing slaves; it took scientific management. Thomas Jefferson bragged to George Washington that the birth of black children was increasing Virginia’s capital stock by four percent annually.”
Ned & Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry, Chicago, Lawrence Hill Books, 2016
“According to database-backed estimates by David Eltis and David Richardson, only about 389,000 kidnapped Africans were disembarked in the ports of the present-day United States, the majority of them before independence.” “By 1860, those few hundred thousand Africans had given way to four million African Americans.”
Ned & Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave -Breeding Industry
According to this information , 389,000 slaves landed on the shores of what is now America. By 1860, there were four million slaves living here. The importation of slaves was made illegal in 1808. So from 1808 until 1860, the number of slaves increased by at least one thousand percent. If we allow for the Africans selling each other, Africans would be responsible for approximately 389 thousand slaves. What about the 3.1-4 million additional slaves? Africans did not create them.
The white controlled slave breeding "industry" IN AMERICA created 10 times more blacks than the number that came from Africans who "sold other Africans".
The narrative of the African running up to whites on the African coast yelling, “We got slaves for sale,” is untrue. Europeans decided to invade Africa and purchase African war captives. I have not been able to find research whereby Africans loaded up slave vessels that landed in Europe to sell slaves. I see no record of any west African shipping company that sailed the Atlantic, dropping off slaves in South America, the Caribbean, and then America.
The question is who is responsible for slavery? In America it was the government. The same government that is responsible for 100 years of Jim Crow after slavery.
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