Slavery Didn’t Happen As You Were Taught In School

by David Sims

SLAVERY DID happen to white people, and I don’t mean only the medieval traffic in white slaves by the Moors or the Turks. Most of the slaves imported to North America between the founding of Jamestown in 1619 and the Declaration of Independence in 1776 were whites who were either war refugees, criminals, debtors, or “excess poor” in Europe, forcibly taken into slavery there and transported across the Atlantic, where they were often worked to death. After the founding of the United States, white slavery continued on a reduced basis, until all slavery was legally ended by the 13th Amendment.

Yes, there were also indentured servants, people who were bound for a period of servitude, usually from four to seven years, as punishment for a crime or as a way to repay debt. When I speak of “white slaves,” I don’t mean these. Hundreds of thousands of whites arrived as slaves, were sold as slaves, were slaves all their lives, and their children inherited their status as slaves. They were bought and sold without regard to their personal relationships. Husbands were separated from wives. Parents were separated from their children.

The same things happened to black slaves, of course. But the black slaves were treated better. Whenever there was work to be done, and the work was so dangerous or so intensely difficult that the death of the slaves doing the work seemed likely, the owners told their foremen to make sure that the white slaves were used to do it. The black slaves had cost them more money than the white slaves had.

Frederick Law Olmstead, the designer of New York’s Central Park, was once in one of South Carolina’s port cities, when he noticed that black slaves were throwing heavy bales of cargo down into the hold of one of the ships. In the hold, white (Irish) slaves were catching them, or trying to. He asked someone why the blacks were on the top deck while the whites were below, and his guide explained to him that the black slaves were worth too much to be risked. The white slaves were cheaper, so they got the jobs that were most likely to entail death or injury. If one of the Irishmen drowned or got his back broken, it didn’t cost the shipping company as much.

Also, the treatment of the white slaves, during their passage across the Atlantic, was worse than was the treatment of black slaves from Africa. Although the blacks were treated so poorly during transit that 15% of them died, the whites were treated so much worse that 25% of them died on the average.

In America, very few whites actually owned slaves: only about 2% of free whites ever owned any slaves at all. Most whites either had no need of slaves or couldn’t afford them, or were slaves themselves.

Some blacks owned slaves. The very first slave-owner in North America was a black man named Anthony Johnson. In 1655, Johnson sued a white man in a Virginia court to recover the service of a black indentured servant named John Casor. When his contract of indenture expired, Casor asked Johnson to let him go free. Johnson refused. So Casor simply walked away and got himself employed by a white farmer as a free hired hand. As a result of the lawsuit, the court remanded Casor to Johnson’s custody and furthermore accepted Johnson’s argument that by leaving without permission, Casor had lost his right to appeal for relief from Johnson’s breach of contract. The court thus converted Casor’s indenture into legal slavery. Slavery became a legal institution in North America as the direct result of a black man’s lawsuit.

In later years, free blacks would become some of the biggest owners and traders in slaves. In 1860, 28% of the free blacks in New Orleans were slave-owners. The two persons who owned the greatest number of slaves, more than 100 each, were both blacks: Antoine Dubuclet and a widow whom I know only as C. Richards. Both of them owned sugarcane plantations and used slaves as labor.

Meanwhile, in South Carolina, many other free blacks owned slaves, including Justus Angel and a woman known as Mistress L. Horry, each of whom owned 84 slaves. In its capital city, Charleston, lived at least 125 black owners of slaves, the largest of whom was William Ellison. (A former slave himself, the black William Ellison took his name after his former owner, who was a white man of the same name.)

Further, there are cases in the legal records of free blacks petitioning a court for permission to become slaves because they were unable to support themselves financially. Slavery, for blacks, was not nearly so arduous and gruesome as modern propaganda describes it (bullwhips lashing tortured backs). Instead, the owners often worked alongside their slaves, and ate with them, too. Whereas it was clear who the boss was, the relationship between master and slave wasn’t nearly so oppressive as the official fairy tale portrays it today. Race relations were better then than they are now.

The story about slavery taught in American schools is a gross distortion of history. Where the official narrative isn’t entirely false, it is so plagued by omissions that it might as well be called a lie. You can still learn the real history, if you want to go to the trouble of searching through the archives kept by state governments. But few people bother to do that, preferring to accept the false story that they heard in school, the story that panders to black self-pity and inflicts upon white people a load of undeserved shame and guilt.

Why is there no movie that shows how things really were? Because the movie and television industries are not really owned and run by white people. Instead, they are owned and run by Jews. Although many Jews have fair skin, they are not “white” — that is, they don’t belong to the same race that I do. They are, and for centuries have been, generally hostile to the white race, hating us even as they mooch from us with their predatory financial schemes, of which slavery has been one. (Usury has been another.)

Skin color isn’t always a reliable identification of race for blacks either. On the island of Panay, in the Philippines, you can find dark-skinned people with nappy hair, who look very much like many Africans do, but whose genes differ with those of Africans to about the same degree that white people’s genes differ.

Which brings up another point. Leftists who say that there are no discernible differences between the races at the genetic level are wrong. Since the late 1990s, geneticists have been able to tell from a drop of blood or a fleck of dandruff the race of the person it came from, by examining the DNA contained in it. The feasibility of discerning race from DNA evidence has been of use to police forensic detectives as well as to people who want to know their racial background in detail.

The idea that the races have no genetic differences originated with Richard Lewontin, a Jewish geneticist working at Harvard University. He said in 1973 that race has no genetic basis and that racial categorization had no biological utility. Leftists around the world were quick to create a number of slogans based on Lewontin’s statement, including “Race is a social construct” and “There is only one race, the human race!” Unfortunately for them, science proved them wrong about 30 years later.

The racially variable genes in humans are less than one percent of the total. But that’s still very important. Humans and apes differ by only two percent of their genes, and most of the genes of men and apes have nothing to do with the differences between them, but rather function to determine them both as metazoa rather than protozoa; as animals rather than plants; as chordates with a central nervous system; as vertebrates with a backbone; as warm-blooded mammals instead of fish or reptiles; as primates rather than felines, ursines or ruminants; as hominids rather than monkeys. Doing all that uses up 98% of our genes.

If we were discussing the differences between humans and oak trees, a much larger fraction of the genes would be relevant to the discussion. But if I’m disputing the equality of the several races of mankind, the only genes that deserve attention are that fraction of a percent that cause human racial differences to occur. The similarity in all the rest of the genes is irrelevant and does not constitute a valid talking point for the egalitarian side. Anyone who thinks otherwise should be asked whether farm tractors and passenger cars are the same things because they both burn fossil fuels, both require lubricant on their moving parts, and both have wheels, transmissions and internal combustion engines.

While we share a common ancestor with the blacks, it is possible that the skin of that ancestor was covered by fur. While both whites and blacks bleed red, so does any pig or reptile when you cut one open. Egalitarian arguments don’t survive examination.

The descendants of white slaves are all around you. There are probably more of them than there are blacks, residing in the United States. Do you see them failing to make their way, whining about the slavery of their ancestors, and demanding reparations, social programs, and hiring preferences? No? Well, there’s a reason for that, and it has everything to do with the higher character and the superior human potential derived from white genes.

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Source: David Sims