An Inconvenient Truth: Slave Trade Edition
(twitter.com)
Comments (4)
sorted by:
Has there been any shows similar to that which would show the whole history of slavery, not just the single American part of Africans as slaves and their (mostly) white owners? The current obsession with that is disturbing and does give a rather wrong impression of the whole thing, when you know that slavery has been common through most of human history and all races have been both the traders and owners and the slaves in their turns.
I gather most Americans don't even know of the Eastern trade from Africa, or that it continued almost to the modern era, or the way Europeans were captured and traded by the North Africans (well, those on the Mediterranean shore, so mostly a bit more white themselves), or how East European trade to the Middle East also lasted nearly as long as the Atlantic trade - that is, the capture and selling of East Europeans. A Finnish scholar recently wrote a book about that Eastern trade, after he got access to some old records in Russia, and it came as far north as my country. Blonds were very highly valued by those traders because they could get very high prices for those who survived all the way to the main markets for them.
https://www.medievalists.net/2014/04/medieval-slave-traders-go-finland/
And the white slaves were not treated any better than the African ones by their captors, except on those cases when their families were rich enough that the captors might hope for ransom money. Now they were captured for different reasons, the Africans were mostly used as laborers, the Europeans, especially towards the end of the trade, were luxury items mostly used for entertainment, so their treatment, when they complied, was probably less brutal, but does that make it any better, really?
The whole slavery thing is not connected to races or how one was worse than the other, it's about humans, and how horribly we can treat each other given the chance.
So it does piss me off when it sometimes looks like certain groups try to push the whole blame solely on people of European descent. Sorry, I refuse to feel any guilt over what some whites who are not even my ancestors once upon a time did. Maybe my personal ancestors weren't slaves themselves, but there are probably several who lost family or friends to that trade if you go back past the 17th century.
And if you go back far enough we all have both slaves and slavers in our family trees.
Slavs in Eastern Europe today are called "slav" because it comes from the same root word as "slave."
Also, people are completely without empathy for how people lived hundreds or thousands of years ago.
There was no such thing as maximum security prisons, or even prisons at all. Yet, there were people who failed to pay their debts, failed to live up to contracts, and committed various crimes.
What should a society do with such people, if there are no prisons?
They kick them out of society so that those people have to live outside of the community, and that is where the term "outlaw" derives. These people had to live on their own, or band together with other outlaws, many of whom could not be trusted.
That is a tough life. Life for most people was hard, and even harder if you were kicked out of your community.
And forget about just showing up in a new community, because those people would know you were an outsider and be suspicious of you -- especially fighting aged men.
So, it became a practice to repay debts or "debts to society" by working for the person who was harmed. They were given room and board, and worked for free for a set period of time. Maybe 1 year, maybe 7 years, or whatever.
At the end of their servitude, they could buy their way out or just be set free.
But some people did not want to be free on their own, because they could not make it on their own. Some of them would rather be given room and board and a small income, in exchange for labor for a wealthy man, rather than go out into the tough world and make it on their own.
Some women had fathers or husbands who died, and they couldn't just go down to the local office building and put in a job application. That was not the reality of the time.
So, some of them sold themselves into servitude, if they could not find a husband to provide for them. It was not ideal, but the alternatives were prostitution or dying from hunger.
Eventually, warriors invaded other tribes or groups, and they did not want the survivors to rise up and fight back a few years later. They would kill the men and boys, or enslave them (usually setting them free after some years of indenture).
"Roots" was possibly one of the most harmful fictional TV shows to ever air, due to its extreme story. Yes, those things did happen sometimes, but the overall story of slavery was distorted, and today people don't understand the historical context and automatically react to slavery as a racist crime. It was at times, but then the blacks would never have been enslaved if the non-blacks had to go into the jungles of Africa to get them. Their fellow blacks are the ones who sold them into slavery, and that is always overlooked.
"European slave traders" spoiler alert, it was Jews
Interesting you bring that up.
I was listening to the radio in the car a few days ago, and someone mentioned that the author of "Roots" was quoted, saying that his intention was to create a great fiction story that would be so powerful that it would be remembered in the black community.
Instantly reminded me of the work of fiction known as "Schindler's List."
Works of fiction are greatly magnified when shown in movie or TV form.