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Comment by Nevermark | Hacker News Reader

Lateness can be debated. But the US wasn't just coasting on history.

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.

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It is hilarious to refer to the US practice as extreme in comparison to the Barbary practices. I'm curious what makes you think that?

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.

It's easy to see African chattel slavery in the US as worse than the Barbary practices: European slaves of Barbary owners could be and often were ransomed out of slavery by their societies back home, but West Africans were rarely in a position to do that for abducted Africans in the US. Secondly, African chattel slavery in the US was bound up with rigid notions of blood purity, which can seem bizarre to us today, that severely hobbled the opportunities of former slaves and their descendents even after manumission.

>European slaves of Barbary owners could be and often were ransomed out of slavery by their societies back home, but West Africans were rarely in a position to do that for abducted Africans in the US.

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.

> the West African tribes often sold the slaves to Europeans

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.

Moroccan black slave status being by descent was majorly opposed by the ulema there

It is only easy to see it as worse if you ignore all of the bad things they did.

As an easy rebuttal to one of your points, yes blood purity is bad; and so is religious purity.

In Muslim society, one can choose not to believe in Islam and have no problem, as long as one continues to outwardly perform the expected public rituals, recite the shahada etc. (Quiet personal atheism is much more widespread in the Muslim world than outsiders might suspect.) But if you are a black slave or a descendant thereof in a society based on blood purity, you can’t change your skin colour or descent no matter hard you try. So, while both bases for slavery and segregated society are indeed bad, it’s hard to claim that one might not be a more preferable fate for some unfortunate people than the other.

This is a bit of a non-sequitur? You couldn't just "choose to pretend to believe in Islam" and somehow escape slavery. And with castration having been a common practice, anything that was dependent on descendants was going to be different at face value. So, kudos to them for not allowing their slaves to continue their bloodline?

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.

Um, you might want to ask certain minorities about that.

Ironically, most people using that line are trying to say American slavery was worse than other forms of slavery, as a weird way of trying to make America out to be the worst place in the world.

As you say, slavery is pretty bad and trying to figure out which one is "better" is rarely a productive exercise.

Apologies, I meant my argument against US slavery being the worst. As you say, the common framing is usually a willingness to believe any framing that can support the US being the villains. I truly don't get it.

Agreed.

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