"History is written by the victors."
What mostly white people in charge are comfortable with publishing is never the whole story.
What mostly white people in charge are comfortable with publishing is never the whole story.
For example, everyone knows the details of the Barbary, Arab, Ottoman, Caucasus, Saharan, and Andalusian slave trades, and countless movies were made showing how whites suffered under them, and their mythologized wars to end them. Some were even made showing Blacks' suffering under the Saharan slave trade, as it was politically useful for whites to demonize Arabs.
However, did you know Europe and its colonies also engaged in slavery? Before the US abolished slavery in 1865, 12 million Black slaves were shipped to the Americas. Mostly to South America, but some to North and the US as well. That may be less than the estimated 11-17 million the Saharan slave trade claimed, but it's hardly something we should ignore.
Of course the white people in charge aren't comfortable publishing this, so it has been relegated to the footnotes of history.
Yes? It seems you're sarcastically referring to very recent history in which some people are like, you know, the actual legit dominance of white narrative in history and pop-culture could maybe be dialed back a bit and we could do a better job of representing the stories of all the people who are part of our shared experience instead of just the white ones?
Slavery and Indigenous American genocide only very recently happened, and there remains a lot of residual inequity, including modern-day slavery in the prison marketplace. The people you're complaining about are also in the country where those things happened, so obviously they'll be more prominently discussed in history than the Saharan slave trade. There's also a lot of discussion about banning teaching of these topics, so it needs to be discussed and defended; as far as I know, Florida isn't banning teaching the Saharan slave trade.