Thomas Sowells article, linked in the previous post by me--you will find it following this post on my timeline--is a powerful dose of intellectual medicine that should scrub off the blinders that distort the view of so many people--average citizens on social media, selected talking heads on the mass media--about ordinary reality in its historical and contemporary manifestations. Nowhere is that more true, perhaps, than in this succinct demythologization of the topic of slavery, which is still actively noxious in many parts of the world today. Consider the following: ... Slavery certainly has its place among the horrors of humanity. But our educators today, along with the media, present a highly edited segment of the history of slavery. Those who have been through our schools and colleges, or who have seen our movies or television miniseries, may well come away thinking that slavery means white people enslaving black people. But slavery was a worldwide curse for thousands of years, as far back as recorded history goes. Over all that expanse of time and space, it is very unlikely that most slaves, or most slave owners, were either black or white. Slavery was common among the vast populations in Asia. Slavery was also common among the Polynesians, and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples before anyone on this side of the Atlantic had ever seen a European. More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed. White slaves were still being bought and sold in the Ottoman Empire, decades after blacks were freed in the United States.
Posted on: Wed, 22 Oct 2014 10:58:34 +0000
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