Essays

School Special for Black History Month: Dumb Myths About Slavery

IF YOU’RE OLD, you were taught lies in school and they have become second nature to you. If you’re very young, your mind and sexuality are easily molded by bad people who want to hurt you. Listen up!

There are a lot of bad people in the American educational system who are being forced by a lot of bad people in the financial world to tell you a lot of bad facts about history that are designed to make you feel bad about yourself. This is especially true if you’re a White schoolchild.

If you’re White like Uncle Jim, your teachers will try to convince you that you’re responsible — even though you’re only, what?, eight years old? — for a bunch of bad, bad things that happened a long, long time ago.

Chances are that you’re White — at least for the next generation or two, those are the chances — so I’ve collected a bunch of dumb myths and smart facts about slavery that you can use to clown your teachers and everyone else at school!

Dumb Myth: Slavery happened only to Black people in America before the Civil War

Black slavery in America was pretty bad, kids, but it wasn’t anything special. Throughout history, every color of the rainbow has owned slaves and been enslaved. The dictionary tells us that the root word of “slave” is “Slav,” because Slavic peoples — who are really pale and White — were the primary slave population throughout the Middle Ages. And though your teachers will never tell you this, there have been long stretches of history where Africans have owned White people as slaves! How do you like them apples? The empire of Carthage transported White slaves to Africa. The African Moors ruled Spain for 500 years and sent White Christian slaves to Egypt. And poor, defenseless White kids — just like you! — were kidnapped by Muslims during the Children’s Crusade and sold into Egyptian slavery.

Dumb Myth: White people were solely responsible for the African slave trade

No, kids — the Blacks, Arabs, and Jews were involved, too.

• BLACKS: The president of an African country called Benin recently apologized to American Blacks for his country’s role in the slave trade. Slavery was common throughout Africa, with entire tribes becoming enslaved after losing battles. Tribal chieftains often sold their defeated foes to White and Jewish slave-traders. In the late 1700s, a freed Black American slave named Ottobah Cugoano wrote, “I was first kidnapped and betrayed by my own complexion, who were the first cause of my exile and slavery.”
• ARABS: The word “Abed” means “slave” in Arabic. It also means “black.” The “Holy Land” of the Middle East has hosted far more African slaves than North America ever did.
• JEWS: The oldest synagogue in America was built by Aaron Lopez, a Jewish slave trader. Jewish writers such as Cecil Roth, Wilfred Samuels, Seymour B. Liebman, and Moshe Kahan acknowledge that Jews were involved in all levels of the African slave trade.

In fact, children, non-Jewish Whites were the first group to make a concerted effort to abolish slavery.

Dumb Myth: America is a uniquely evil place because it imported all those slaves from Africa

Of the 10 to 15 million Africans who were transplanted to the New World, no more than 6 percent — around 400,000 — went to the Northern Hemisphere. Almost all of them went to South America, but you don’t see your teachers giving Brazil a hard time, do you?

Dumb Myth: Most Whites owned slaves, so every White person shares guilt

Blacks were never close to a majority in America, so it’s mathematically impossible for most Whites to have owned Black slaves. At the peak of Black slavery in the South, only 6 percent of Southern Whites owned slaves. If you include the White people in the North, it means that only 1.4 percent of White Americans owned Black slaves at the height of slavery.

Dumb Myth: Blacks never owned slaves in America

An estimated 3,000 Blacks owned a total of 20,000 Black slaves in the year 1860. One study concluded that 28 percent of free Blacks owned slaves, which is a far higher percentage than that of free Whites who owned slaves.

Dumb Myth: There were no White slaves in America

Although your textbooks are silent about it, most historians agree that two-thirds of all Whites came to the colonies in some form of bondage. Legal papers on both sides of the ocean referred to them as “slaves.” White slaves outnumbered Black slaves in America throughout the 1600s.

Dumb Myth: White “indentured servants” chose to come here and weren’t treated as badly as Black slaves

Hundreds of thousands of White slaves were kidnapped and brought to America; their middle-passage death rates were comparable to those of Black slaves; they were sold at auction and traded for livestock, they were routinely beaten — sometimes to death — and an estimated one half of them died before gaining freedom. It’s possible that more Whites came to America against their will than Blacks. Historians from both ends of the political spectrum say that White slaves were treated worse than Black slaves.

Dumb Myth: England sent convict laborers only to Australia

England only started sending convicts to Australia in 1776 — when the American Revolution made it impossible for them to continue sending their convicts here. By 1776, more than 50,000 convict slave laborers had already been sent to America. That’s a lotta criminals, kids!

Dumb Myth: Picking cotton is the worst job possible

According to statistics, farm work is relatively safe. It is far more dangerous to be a lumberjack, Alaskan crab fisherman, coal miner, or cabdriver. Either way, White slaves were forced to pick cotton under the hot sun, too, which is where they got those red necks.

Dumb Myth: The Civil War was fought to end slavery

When General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant, it had been nearly 20 years since Lee owned slaves — he freed his slaves in the late 1840s. In 1856, five years before the Civil War started, he wrote that slavery was “a moral and political evil.” On the other hand, General Grant still owned slaves at the end of the Civil War, because Abe Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation cleverly outlawed slavery only in the South. Grant had stated that he would refuse to fight if he thought the war had anything to do with slavery. And hey, kids, even if it was fought to end slavery, how often do you see the descendants of slaves thanking the 600,000 or so White soldiers who died in the fight to free them?

Dumb Myth: Slavery ended with the Civil War

The US government estimates that 50,000 humans are brought into this country every year for the purpose of forced labor. Various agencies estimate that there are anywhere from 27 to 200 million humans currently enslaved worldwide. (Compare this to only four and a half million slaves at American slavery’s peak.) Most of these slaves live in South Asia, Africa, and South America. Their labor comes far cheaper and is much more profitable than Black American slavery was. In many horrifying cases, poverty-stricken women sell themselves for as little as $1500 to become lifelong sex slaves in non-White countries. (In today’s dollars, a Black slave in the American South cost approximately $40,000.) In even more horrifying cases, White women are captured or lured from impoverished areas of eastern Europe to become lifelong sex slaves of Jews in Israel and elsewhere.

Remember, the enemy’s all around you. Slavery exists in so many ways, my friends. Open your eyes before the liars slip the chains on you.

* * *

Source: read the original article by Jim Goad at Vice magazine

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Lochlean
Lochlean
21 February, 2017 2:33 am

Even for the black slaves of White owners in America, life was FAR from the horrors depicted by Hollywood. The American Slave: A composite autobiography is a hard-to-find 41 volume set of firsthand accounts of the last generation of slaves still living in the 1930’s, taken down in their own words by interviewers. You only need to read a volume or two to see that slavery was VERY different from plantation to plantation. I have a copy of North Carolina, Volume I with the original typescript and date stamps. While it does contain the occasional whipping by a master or overseer, over half the accounts (33) tell of: * All slaves being invited to the main house every Sunday for dinner when the Mistress would check the children for illness… Read more »

mercyme
mercyme
Reply to  Lochlean
25 October, 2023 3:24 pm

What you are saying is hard to believe, not that I will not give it a chance. Is it possible to find this 41 volume set that u are talking about anywhere online. I too would give up trying to find such a work, it certainly would be hidden, burned or neglected in todays political atmosphere.

Jim - National Alliance Staff
Jim - National Alliance Staff
Reply to  mercyme
25 October, 2023 5:00 pm

Because of today’s atmosphere of rewriting or erasing our histories, the National Alliance has long been a repository for original works that bring the the truth. Today, a state-of-the-art library complex is being built and will become the William Luther Pierce Memorial Library when finished. This will be an educational resource for researchers at first, but later on may develop into a place where other Whites who wish to produce other educational materials for projected schools for youth, entertainment and historical electronic media producers, and other needful purposes. If we’re to endure as a race, this library is to be a key component. Those who wish to donate their 41 volume set to us should contact us to make the necessary arrangements by writing to: National Alliance, PO Box 4… Read more »

WHITE_WARRIOR
WHITE_WARRIOR
25 February, 2017 2:24 am

Do not argue with them anymore. They are so demoralised and dehumanized nothing you say will matter. Their minds are totally locked shut. Logic and facts are of no importance to them. They have what I call an “already, already listening attitude.” Whites are bad, blacks are good! Instead let them have a good dose of reality with blacks doing what blacks do best – raping, robbing and murdering. Some demoralised whites might wake up and those who do not will get a lesson in eugenics the hard way. It must happen, because time for change is now gone. I stated in a previous post that if you were to start a program of re-educating whites at this very moment, it would take about thirty years of really hard work… Read more »