5c2b7f1e
XPost: alt.global-warming, alt.impeach.bush, alt.non.racism
XPost: alt.politics
From: here@home
Slavery was a universal institution first stopped by whites, and
blacks who came to America were already slaves of Arabs or other
blacks. While every American child learns about white-on-black
slavery, other forms of slavery that are more prevalent and still
practiced are ignored. In fact, black-on-black and Arab-on-black
slavery still exists today in parts of Africa such as the Sudan and
Mauritania and in the black Caribbean nation of Haiti.
A few proponents of reparations tried to answer Horowtiz by stating
that African slavery was benign compared to Western slavery. Typical
of this line of thought is the following passage from Randall
Robinson’s reparations manifesto, The Debt (2000): “While King Affonso
[of Kongo] was no stranger to slavery, which was practiced throughout
most of the known world, he had understood slavery as a condition
befalling prisoners of war, criminals, and debtors, out of which
slaves could earn, or even marry, their way. This was nothing like
seeing this wholly new and brutal commercial practice of slavery where
tens of thousands of his subjects were dragged off in chains.”
Dorothy Benton-Lewis, head of the National Coalition for Reparations
against Blacks, claims that only white slavers were racist and brutal:
“It is American slavery that put a color on slavery. And American
slavery is not like the slavery of Africa or ancient times. This was
dehumanizing, brutal and barbaric slavery that subjugated people and
turned them into a profit.”
The claims of Robinson and Benton-Lewis are widely believed but are
simply not true. Orlando Patterson studied 55 slave societies for his
1982 book Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (1982). He
writes:
“It has often been remarked that slavery in the Americas is unique in
the primary role of race as a factor in determining the condition and
treatment of slaves. This statement betrays an appalling ignorance of
the comparative data on slave societies. . . . Throughout the Islamic
world, for instance, race was a vital issue. The light-skinned Tuareg
and related groups had decidedly racist attitudes towards the Negroes
they conquered. Throughout the Islamic empires, European and Turkish
slaves were treated quite differently from slaves south of the Sahara
Desert. . . . Slavery [in Africa] was more than simply
“subordination”; it was considered a degraded condition, reinforced by
racist attitudes among the Arab slave owners.”
Writing on African slavery before 1600, the historian Paul Lovejoy
notes: “For those who were enslaved, the dangers involved forced
marches, inadequate food, sexual abuse, and death on the road.”
In his book on the reparations battle, Uncivil Wars (2002) Horowitz
adds:
“In fact Africa’s internal slave trade, which did not involve the
United States or any European power, not only extended over the entire
500 years mentioned by Robinson, but also preceded it by nearly 1,000
years. In the period between 650 and 1600, before any Western
involvement, somewhere between 3 million and 10 million Africans were
bought by Muslim slavers for use in Saharan societies and in the trade
in the Indian Ocean and Red Sea. By contrast, the enslavement of
blacks in the United States lasted 89 years, from 1776 until 1865. The
combined slave trade to the British colonies in North America and
later to the United States accounted for less than 3 percent of the
global trade in African slaves. The total number of slaves imported to
North America was 800,000, less than the slave trade to the island of
Cuba alone. If the internal African slave trade-which began in the
seventh century and persists to this day in the Sudan, Mauritania and
other sub-Saharan states-is taken into account, the responsibility of
American traders shrinks to a fraction of 1 percent of the slavery
problem.”
African tribes were some of the fiercest defenders of slavery when
whites tried to outlaw the practice in the 19th century. Blacks in
present-day Ghana rioted against the British as they destroyed the
slave ports along Africa’s western coast. In 1808, the King of Bonny
(now Nigeria) told the British: “You’re country, however great, can
never stop a trade ordained by God himself.”
One of America’s most famous black novelists, Zora Neale Hurston had a
very different perspective on slavery than today’s reparations
activists: “The white people held my people in slavery here in
America. They bought us, it is true, and exploited us. But the
inescapable fact that stuck in my craw was [that] my people had sold
me. … My own people had exterminated whole nations and tore families
apart for profit before the strangers got their chance at a cut. It
was a sobering thought. It impressed upon me the universal nature of
greed and glory."
Unfortunately, school children are more likely to get the distorted
Randall Robinson version of slavery than they are to get the more
accurate and poetic version put forward by Zora Neale Hurston.
Ironically, slavery is making a return to America primarily due to
African immigrants bringing their traditional customs with them. In
the last year alone, several immigrants from Cameroon have been
sentenced for keeping other Cameroonians as slaves. In one
particularly gruesome case, African immigrants Louisa Satia and Kevin
Nanji were sentenced to nine years in prison for beating, raping and
torturing their teenage slave. African slavery is becoming so
commonplace in America that the Attorney General has set up something
called the Trafficking in Persons and Worker Exploitation Task Force
to help put a stop to it.
On Mon, 20 Oct 2008 09:51:23 -0700 (PDT), Writerosity
wrote:
>On Oct 19, 11:01=A0am, here@home (Way Back Jack) wrote:
>> What "N" bomb?... Say it, boy. =A0Wanna hear what word ya mean.
>>
>> Many yrs. ago, Fed. agencies declared it taboo to mock or derogate any
>> "protected" group such as blacks and PRs. =A0In the early 80s, they
>> extended this "protection" to all groups. =A0Prior to that,
>> Euro-Americans simply had to put up with it.
>>
>> Polish jokes have always seemed especially ignorant, not because I
>> have some Polish ancestry, but because they portray Poles as being
>> stupid, when my observation from elementary school thru college was
>> that Poles were generally among the brightest pupils.
>>
>> So one day I entered an elevator where some asshole was just winding
>> up a Polack joke. =A0I asked him if it was now acceptable to tell nigger
>> jokes. =A0The people on that car registered expressions of profound
>> shock, followed by expressions of shame, although a couple of them
>> looked hostile.
>>
>> Oh, there were two or three blacks and they laughed the loudest at the
>> Polack jokes.
>
>
>Do you man to tell me that Polak is the name for Polish slaves who
>suffered 400
>years of slavery, and now they're being persecuted with jokes about
[continued in next message]
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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