selling of East Europeans

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.