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One of the first wars fought by the US was over slavery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War
Anti-slavery sentiments built up over time. Abraham Lincoln was moved by this popular book for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufferings_in_Africa
Of course these things aren't often taught in school.
And your link makes clear the Barbary form of slavery had little in common with the extreme form practiced in the US.
The violent rejection of England and monarchy allowed the founders to make a dramatic break from the past. A new approach to human rights, a government of the people, for the people. Ideals broadcast and institutionalized via the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, ..."
All the mindful attention, negotiation and agreements, toward implementing a system explicitly establishing liberty and justice for all, adds a thick layer of criminal responsibility for the systematic exception made, to continue upholding one form of extreme injustice. The complete violation of all those principles, held dear, for one unfortunate group.
And I am sympathetic to pushback. Many of these discussions are thinly veiled "slavery in the states wasn't bad" nonsense. Slavery in all forms is bad. Period.
Perhaps but the difference is that the West African tribes often sold the slaves to Europeans. Why would they pay a ransom to get those people back?
There were certainly racist connotations associated with slaves and ex-slaves. But it seems a stretch to say that white slaves in a non-white country fared better than black slaves in a white country.
This is also little-known information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_slave_owners Some slave owners in the colonies and early US, maybe even the very first one, were black.
I think that you are being disingenuous here. The African tribes that sold slaves were not necessarily the slave’s own tribe, but rather a different tribe that proved victorious in war or raiding. The slave’s own tribe, as I mentioned, would hardly have been unable to ransom its own people from the US due to lack of literacy, lack of communications, and lack of financial means. Meanwhile, postal connections between North Africa and Europe were reliable enough by the 17th and 18th centuries that slaves could message home for ransom, and this was frequently allowed as it proved highly lucrative for Barbary slaveholders.
> white slaves in a non-white country
This is a completely ahistorical way of describing the matter. In terms of race linked to skin colour, Barbary slaveholders very much considered themselves white in opposition to the black African populations to the south whom they exploited. (This survives in modern Mauritanian slaveholding.)
Moreover, Muslim slaveholding here and in the broader region was bound up with with issues of religion, not race as the modern USA understands it. In as little as a single generation post-manumission, those descendants of raided European slaves were no longer necessarily regarded as an outcaste, provided they were observant Muslims, which is why so much of the power in the Ottoman Empire famously ended up in the hands of men of Eastern European descent. At least in terms of knowing your progeny would be better off, they had privilege that African chattel slaves in the USA could only dream of.
As an easy rebuttal to one of your points, yes blood purity is bad; and so is religious purity.
Look, I'm open to the idea that slavery in the US was somehow the worst slavery ever. But most arguments used to prop up the idea rely on laughably naive views on slavery elsewhere. Worse, much of it seems to stem from a naive "US bad" gullibility in taking in information.
As you say, slavery is pretty bad and trying to figure out which one is "better" is rarely a productive exercise.
But the point of slave narrative being a genre that was "homegrown" in the states is so awkwardly touched here. Calling in to question the influence of white editors and how that likely silenced some narratives completely ignores why there aren't similar narratives from many other places.
Worse, it continues with the common narrative that slavery was solely a United States thing. Specifically pushing that the published narratives were specifically edited to shape a more positive view of the nation. Ignoring any other reason edits may have happened.
How many people know about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War or the Barbary slaves in general?
(1) slavery and treating people of other ethnicities badly wasn’t a new thing, but the ideology of there being a natural hierarchy of races was a new idea and it led to new cruelties.
(2) In the European Middle Ages, there had been a taboo against Christians holding other Christians as slaves. The western slavers knowingly took advantage of the chaos in early modern Europe and did it anyway, over opposition, constructing the above ideology to justify it.
(3) the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was unprecedented. It dwarfed the Barbary and Indian slave trade. Maybe Rome or the golden age Islamic slave network were on a comparable scale when various factors are accounted for, but neither were chattel systems, and they lacked the whole racial dimension.
Your first point, I suspect, is almost certainly not true. The concepts of racial or familial lineage with divine connotations is pretty old. The entire "divine right of kings" and related hierarchies have long been there. I /think/ you are trying to say that it was a scientifically supported hierarchy and it was bad for that reason. I think that is defendable?
Not clear what point 2 has to do with US slavery? Similar existed in the Barbary area, where it was just a different religion being preferenced.
Your third point is the most amusing of them to hold against slavery as it existed in the US, though. Yes, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was unprecedented. With the majority of those enslaved not going to north america...
I think I said this in another thread, but worth repeating. There is nothing at all "well actually" in what I'm saying. Slavery is bad. Period. I wish people didn't plaster over how bad it was elsewhere in a rush to attack the US, though.
That said, I stand by every word of my argument.
I used the word natural as in naturalism, the intellectual movement that emerged in Europe in the Renaissance and came to fruition in the Enlightenment. Naturalistic racism was indeed new. I can point you to the texts where it was developed. It was accepted as cutting-edge science among enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Kant. I object strongly to the term, “scientifically-supported” racial hierarchy. Science in the post-baconian sense cannot support a concept of a racial hierarchy. Such a concept is a value judgement. Values are and can only be extrinsic to modern, empirical science (another lesson of history our progressive friends have failed to learn).
When it comes to the nature of this value judgement, I do think it makes things worse that the western slavers should have known better. Christian society had been agonizing over slavery for more than a millennium; what does this mean for our own seemingly invincible moral convictions that it all melted away so quickly? I don’t think our contemporary political discourse, left or right, can handle serious answers to the question.
As to the exceptional evil of the US system, there was nowhere else that the hereditary and permanent racial chattel system was implemented and enforced so thoroughly (I could maybe grant Haiti as a possible exception). Spanish and Portuguese slavers used religious justifications carried over from suspicions of Jewish and North African converts after the reconquista. This was disgusting, but it also meant that the slaves’ status was impermanent and mutable. Manumission was vastly more common, and social-racial boundaries were much more permeable. This is reflected today, where racial relations are far less damaged in Latin America than in the North.
I'm far too removed from any time in my life where I was reading history documents, but the christianity slant is still odd to me. Specifically, I remember reading back in the day that some anti-slavery groups were instrumental in converting slaves to christianity in an effort to undermine it. That, in turn, was itself coopted, such that it was not necessarily a success. (And I'll throw in the caveat that I didn't find history that engaging.)
My gripe on the "nowhere else had hereditary slavery" is that this is complicated. Firstly, many places basically ended bloodlines of their slaves. Castration and executions were the norm. So, hard to see that this is really a comparison that you'd want to stake a "which is worse" debate on. They are both abhorrently evil. (And, not shockingly, serfdom has its own curve ball to this debate. That was hereditary and while slavery has obviously worse aspects, I don't understand why people seem to think serfdom was mostly fine.)
Bringing it fully to this general topic. The slave narratives being a US literary thing is largely because that is allowed in the US. Do I think the US should get a pass and kudos for amplifying voices of people that they used to enslave? Complicated question.
Well, sorta complicated. I can firmly say "get a pass and kudos" should be dismissed as a silly statement. But, it is frustrating that places that almost certainly did worse things heavily censor their histories. This isn't even really debated. But, because people hear the US criticisms and the others are largely silenced, so many people take the view that there are only US criticisms.
Edit: Meant to say thanks for the opening. I know this is a topic that is prone to yelling way too easily. I'd also be interested in reading any texts you recommend reading.
1. Chattel Slavery
2. Racism as a form of pseudo-scientific theory that established why different "races" were of lower quality than others, and thus any member of the lower race deserved to be enslaved by members of the higher race.
3. Laws in various states of the U.S that established black people could be enslaved when traveling in that state, or that free black people traveling in the region would not be allowed to do so https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-free-slave-8336f214da45
4. After finding slavery unacceptable, the U.S with its pseudo-scientific cover of Racism in much of the country still treated black people as if they were enslaved, and often killed them for no particular reason discernible to reason.
5. One can argue as to the exact point that Black people became equal in the U.S, some might argue that it isn't the case yet, but anyone fairly arguing would have to concede that there are a number of Black people still living who were at least children when it was not the case that this state of equality existed - even if they wanted to argue that it does exist now.
on edit: changed either to still
That said, sure, scientific Racism was project of Western Civilization, but it seems really that America - at least where Black people were the subject (and maybe also Indians, but they were more to be exterminated - not enslaved) - put a lot more heart and soul into it than other participants.
Not sure who is blaming the West for slavery, but whatever.
The West did set the norm that slavery is unacceptable, but only after embracing slavery on a vast scale for centuries, overlapping to a great degree with the Enlightment and with the birth of representative democracy. I think that is the underlying dissonance - the founding fathers expounded at length on equality, liberty from arbitrary rule and so on, while the South prospered on the back of slavery. A similar criticism could be made of French revolutionaries, and British liberals of the 17th/early 18th centuries.
Yes the West abolished slavery after embracing philosophy invented by the West. Then it forcibly ended slavery everywhere else that it could.
>I think that is the underlying dissonance - the founding fathers expounded at length on equality, liberty from arbitrary rule and so on, while the South prospered on the back of slavery. A similar criticism could be made of French revolutionaries, and British liberals of the 17th/early 18th centuries.
Thousands of Southern slave owners were themselves black. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_slave_owners Many slaves were sold to Europeans by their own people. Yet in modern times we only hear about a particular angle that pushes blame solely on the very cultures and nations that forcefully ended slavery, often at great cost.
The reality was a lot less glorious than that. And with a lot of less than glorious moral compromises and cognitive dissonance. Again, I refer you to the founding fathers.
> Yet in modern times we only hear about a particular angle that pushes blame solely on the very cultures and nations that forcefully ended slavery
We don't only hear that angle, it's trivially easy to access balanced and detailed history. Maybe you're spending your time arguing with zealots on social media but the rest of us can actually educate ourselves
> blame solely on the very cultures and nations that forcefully ended slavery
In fairness those societies were also responsible in the first place for the expansion of slavery into an unprecedentedly vast system
Can we just accept that, and not feel so defensive?
Yes in reality a lot of people died to end slavery too. The founding fathers were great men and some of them having slaves at a time when that was very common does not really change my opinion of them.
>We don't only hear that angle, it's trivially easy to access balanced and detailed history. Maybe you're spending your time arguing with zealots on social media but the rest of us can actually educate ourselves
I haven't heard a balanced account of history from any mainstream source. I often see school teachers on social media admitting that they believe these radical narratives. So I am compelled to argue with zealots. Lots of people want to believe that there's some "big reason" they didn't get ahead in life, and what better reason than "systemic racism" going back "hundreds of years"? I actually hate arguing with people about this issue but nobody saying anything against that extreme misrepresentation of things can lead to bigger problems in society.
>In fairness those societies were also responsible in the first place for the expansion of slavery into an unprecedentedly vast system
That is not an inherent characteristic of those societies. They just happened to have ships that could cross oceans.
>Can we just accept that, and not feel so defensive?
I'll stop being defensive when people stop attacking me and my society for things that a tiny fraction of people living hundreds of years ago benefited from. The media is constantly trying to stir up racist sentiments against white people under the pretense of talking about history or some other innocuous thing, and it's disgusting. But their goal is to cause conflict, not to actually fix race relations. I've seen race relations in general decline for at least 10 years because of this.