The Truth About America's History of Slavery
The Truth About America's History of Slavery
Dennis Prager / April 18, 2023
A generation of Americans is being raised on half-truths and
lies about the history of slavery in America.
They are given the impression that America was uniquely bad
and that American slavery was uniquely bad. They learn no-
thing about slavery elsewhere. Among the many lies they are
told are that black slaves-built America and that America is
systemically racist.
Since the only mortal enemy of the Left is truth, here
are some truths about slavery.
*Americas Slavery Compared to Slavery Elsewhere*
If you are interested in morality and committed to truth, you
do not ask, Who had slaves? You ask, Who ended slavery?
Who had slaves?
Every civilization throughout history had slaves: Asian societies,
Africans, Native Americans, and other Indigenous peoples around
the world, and the Muslim/Arab world, which may have had the most
slaves of all.
Who ended slavery?
There was only one thing unique about slavery in the West:
It raised the issue of the morality of slavery, ferociously de-
bated it, and finally abolished it there, before it was abolished
in any other civilization.
If you care about moral truth rather than, for example,
promoting America-hatred, you must recognize and you must teach
that America was one of the first slave-holding societies to
abolish slavery. This even includes Africa.
Cornell professor Sandra Greene, a black scholar of African
history, notes, Slavery in the United States ended in 1865, but
in West Africa it was not legally ended until 1875, and then it
stretched on unofficially until almost World War I.
The numbers of slaves.
According to the authoritative SlaveVoyages.org, the total
number of black slaves imported from Africa into America was
305,326. The number of black slaves other countries imported
from Africa into the rest of the New World i.e., into the
Caribbean and South America was 12,521,337.
In other words, other countries imported 41 times the
number of black slaves into the Western Hemisphere than the
United States did, including the years before American
independence).
Yet, the American Left never mentions this important
moral point because the Left-controlled education system sup-
presses facts it finds inconvenient, and the Left is not
interested in morality or truth, but in vilifying America.
And then there is Arab/Muslim enslavement of blacks.
Professor Paul Lovejoy, in his Transformations in Slavery:
A History of Slavery in Africa (Cambridge University Press,
2012), reveals that from the beginning of Islam in the
seventh century through the year 1600, the estimated number
of Africans enslaved by Muslims was about 7 million. After
1600, it was about a million per year.
Do American students ever learn about the Arab/Muslim slave
trade? How many know, for example, that a great percen-
tage of the African male slaves were castrated so that they
could not have families?
Black Slaves Built America
This is another lie of the Left.
Those who make this argument point to the lucrative
cotton manufacturing and trade in the 19th century the in-
dustry in which black slaves were primarily used in the
American South.
But University of Illinois professor of economics
Deirdre McCloskey answered this:
Growing cotton, unlike sugar or rice, never required
slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cot-
ton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton
was not a slave crop in India or in southwest China, where
it was grown in bulk. That slaves produced cotton does not
imply that they were essential or causal in the production.
The United States and the United Kingdom and the rest would
have become just as rich without the 250 years of unre-
quited toil.
They have remained rich, observe, even after the pe-
culiar institution was abolished, because their riches did
not depend on its sinfulness.
But one need not know anything about cotton to under-
stand how false Black slaves built America is. All you need
is common sense.
First, even if slavery accounted for much of the wealth
of the South, the Civil War that brought slavery to an end
in the United States wiped out nearly all of that wealth and
cost the Union billions (in today's dollars).
Second, if slavery built the American economy, the most
robust economy in world history, why didn't Brazil become an
economic superpower? Brazil imported 4 million black slaves,
about 12 times as many as America. Why did the slave-owning
American South lag so far behind the North economically?
Why did England, which, though it played a major role
in the transatlantic slave trade until the beginning of the
19th century, had almost no slaves, become the most advanced
economy of the 19th century?
Black slaves built America is left-wing propaganda to
vilify America and to discredit capitalism.
America is systemically racist.
This is the Great Left Lie.
Four million black people have emigrated to the United
States since the 1960s and tens of millions more would if
they could. Are they all fools? Why would anyone move to a
country that is systemically bigoted against them? Did any
Jews emigrate to Germany in the 1930s?
Blacks have emigrated to the United States because they
know what Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the black woman who fled her home-
land of Somalia and who now writes and lectures in America,
knows:
What the media do not tell you is that America is the
best place on the planet to be black, female, gay, trans, or
what have you.
Blacks emigrating to America know what Algerian writer
Kamel Daoud, writing in Le Monde and Le Point, knows:
It is forbidden to say that the West is also the place
to which we flee when we want to escape the injustice of our
country of origin, dictatorship, war, hunger, or simply bore-
dom. It is fashionable to say that the West is guilty of
everything.
As regards American slavery and everything else, always
remember this: Truth is a liberal value, and truth is a con-
servative value. It is not a left-wing value.
Now all Americans have to admit that no one alive today
was a slave and No one ever owned a slave in the US and
paying reparations is ludicrous.
May God have mercy on our once great nation.
Conservatively,
John
Conservativelyjohn.com 