Decky wrote:It wasn't obvious. The centre left like to make it out that slavery was an American black/ white issue but they only do this by ignoring the rest of history. What about north African pirates raiding Cornwall for slaves?
Or for that matter, the bondage and forced labor of the Jews in Ancient Egypt, or the extensive use of slaves in everything from farming to aqueduct construction throughout the Roman Empire, which had less than nothing to do with the racial or ethnic background of the captives turned slaves in question. The Romans didn't care whether you were white, black, brown, or covered with purple spots from head to toe. Most slavery throughout history has little to do with race and more to do with the unfamiliarity of an "other" being quite easy to demonize to the extent that one can easily justify their captivity and forced servitude on the basis of either "might makes right" a la the pre-Judeo Christian morality of pagan Rome, or the Christian moralism/paternalism of the American Old South. Ironically similar to what provided the basis for justification of colonialism itself, in fact, as Victorian Britain among others managed to place the most beautiful masks and wreaths upon the most gratuitous and systematic acts of carnage.
Why do folks believe black Africans were selected when they were by British, Dutch, etc. traders and proliferated throughout the Americas and the Caribbean? They were primitive in technology and societal organization (the latter is more subjective, but this was undeniably the general perception) and thus lacked the capability to resist as states (because they were largely not states), as well as looking different enough and coming from an exotic enough part of the world that they could be marketed as some form of strange half-human to a very insular European society. Remember, we were still half jokingly referring to the Vietnamese, Laotians, etc. back in Nam as monkeys, as was the propaganda directed against the Japanese people during the war. Does anyone seriously believe that if Orientals had been less organized and advanced as societies, and more physically suited for the harsh treatment of transportation across an open ocean and a life of hard manual labor, that they would not have been snatched up in an instant?
The Africans weren't captured and enslaved out of a doctrine of racial supremacy. That ideological narrative only came about later to justify and lend legitimacy to an arrangement which was purely financial.
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