Nathan Whiteside
Jul 25, 2017 · 3 min read

Oh, boy, this is going to take some unpacking. You want truth? Here you go:

“Africans sold Africans to whites,”

Yes, and so what? That doesn’t absolve or even water down the culpability of the white slavers. If two people rob a bank, the 1st robber isn’t less guilty just because there was also a 2nd robber. And what sets American slavery apart is that it was basically industrialized by and into the capitalist system and turned into brutal chattel slavery, based entirely on race and racism. Prior to the logical contortions that white Christians went through to justify racially based slavery, racism wasn’t really a thing (shocking, I know, we take it so much for granted now). Skin color wasn’t seen as any more of an issue than eye color. People hated based on tribe, clan, nation, religion, territory, blood feuds, etc. but it took a special kind of white Christian greed to create hate for skin color.

“slavery has always been with us.”

True, but again that is neither here nor there. It’s wrong, it’s always been wrong, and it isn’t any less wrong for having been around for a long time. And black Americans never got the benefit of owning white slaves, so saying that slavery has always been with us is a deflection from the asymmetrical harm that it has done to black people vs white people.

“White people stopped slavery"

In some cases, yes, but you don’t get credit for ending the atrocities that you started, especially not after benefiting from them for 400 years without redress or reparations.

“The Civil War was fought mostly by whites to end slavery after the emancipation proclamation,”

Our bloody Civil War was fought by an awful lot of white people to uphold and maintain the institution of slavery. A lot of white people also fought for the North, some as Abolitionists but many others either to hold the Union together or simply because they were drafted. Also, the Emancipation Proclamation was made in 1863, well after the war had started, and it only applied to 11 states, leaving 500k slaves in border states unaffected and still enslaved. The Proclamation was made more to hurt the South strategically than out of altruism.

“Blacks did not fight for their freedom till the end of the war”

Correction: Black people were not allowed to fight for their freedom until near the end of the war. They wanted to fight from the beginning, but white Northerners were too afraid to give freed black people guns until almost the end.

“White gave you the 12 th. amendment, voters rights and civil rights, without white people, you would more than likely still be picking cotton.”

Again, you don’t get credit for doing the very baseline of human decency after centuries of atrocities. And without white people, they wouldn’t have been forced to exhaust themselves under the skin flaying whip picking cotton in the first place. They would still mostly be in Africa, and before you get all excited by the idea of all the great things white colonizers did for Africa, local economies suffered tremendously as a result of trade and domination by white colonizers, for reasons too extensive to list here. But suffice it to say that it wasn’t a consensual relationship, and that by itself should be enough to understand that that was wrong, too.

And, ultimately, this little history lesson is a distraction from the real issue, which is that black, brown, and native peoples are to this day harassed, killed, and exploited in ways I really wish you would consider and recognize as real, and not what you yourself would want to experience. That’s the kind of truth that will actually do your soul some good.

Nathan Whiteside

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