Mr Sowell gives the truths and facts of it all in one short and concise History lesson. Feel free to repost this to ignorant masses...
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Slavery has existed for thousands of years. It still exists today.
Originally, it was a means to punish and/or pay retribution when one person violated the rights of another. If one man stole some property from another man and was caught, what could be done to him?
There was no such thing as a maximum security prison. If there was a jail at all, the economic reality was there were not enough resources to have a 24/7 security detail at a jail. There had to be some other way to punish wrong doers.
One solution was to outcast the bad actor from society. This is where the term "outlaw" came from. They were outcasts from their society. But they still had to survive, so they would move to another society. But people were skeptical of outsiders suddenly appearing from nowhere. What was their story? What was their REAL story?
A lot of people did not want to be outcast, so they would agree to work for "free" meaning, room and board. You work on my farm (99% of people lived off the land) for no pay, and I will provide room and board. You do that for 1 year, and we will call it even.
Some people on the working end of this arrangement found they liked it. They liked having someone else reponsible for their basic needs, and all they had to do was work like they would anyway, but they didn't have to go looking for work.
Many people like that exist today. Back then, they would be considered slaves.
At some point, one group of people would invade the territory of another group and conquer them by force. They realized they could hold the men to manual labor and the women to sexual favor.
This is when the harshness of what we think of as slavery began. Over time, as Sowell states, the slaves became people from distant lands rather than from within the community.
As economies grew, the slave trade developed into what we now think of as slavery. It was no longer voluntary. It was forced.
Today, slavery still exists, some for labor, but primarily it is sexual. We still have more rooting out to do in the 21st century, when it comes to slavery.