Re: Is white racism nec. all bad?
Donald Edwards (warrl@blarg.com)
15 Apr 1995 22:43:53 -0700
Gary Strand (gary@ra.cgd.ucar.edu) wrote:
" You musta missed my discussions with Aungk of a few months back. I'm not
" talking "Columbus discovered the Americas, Africa didn't amount to anything
" until whites colonized it," that kind of balderdash. What I am talking about
" is the kind of pap served up by folks like Jeffries. Making up history to
" suit an ideology isn't right when it's done by whites, blacks, Nazis, Com-
" munists, or anyone else. It doesn't serve to educate, it serves to brain-
" wash. Let's take slavery, for example. Did whites enter West Africa and
" grab blacks from their homes and villages and use them as slaves,
Reality: in general, no. Whites entered West Africa and bought black
slaves from their current owners, who were also black. This was
sufficiently profitable for the now-former owners that many of them
took to raiding neighboring villages for the express purpose of
collecting slaves to sell.
Admittedly, other means were common. But that was the most common.
For one thing, it was about the safest and cheapest way (from the white
slave traders' point of view) to do the job.
" as a first in
" human history? Or was it a continuation of an age-old process, which in-
" cluded African blacks, Arabs, and others, with the new twist being that
" slaves were shipped overseas instead of being traded between nearby groups?
Hint: the word "slave" doesn't derive from any European word for the
residents of sub-Saharan Africa.
It derives from "Slav" as in the sort of people who live in what is now
Poland, Hungary, etc.
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