The ancient Sumerians practiced slavery around 2000 BC, possibly earlier but we don’t have the proof.
It isn’t super clear what race they were, but they’re from the same area (mesopotamia) as semitic-speaking peoples who were linked to Arabs. Not gonna bet my life on it, but I’d guess they’re not evil whities?
And pretty much every major civilization followed suit. Guess what, humans be like that.
Yknow what, actually, let me quickly google this. I’ve got a lot of spite to take out on this garbage Western-obsessed racist perspective.
Here’s a list of what countries banned slavery, and when!
1777 - State of Vermont, an independent Republic after the American Revolution, becomes first sovereign state to abolish slavery
1792 - Denmark bans import of slaves to its West Indies colonies, although the law only took effect from 1803.
1807 - Britain passes Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, outlawing British Atlantic slave trade.
1807 - United States passes legislation banning the slave trade, effective from start of 1808.
1811 - Spain abolishes slavery, including in its colonies, though Cuba rejects ban and continues to deal in slaves.
1813 - Sweden bans slave trading
1814 - Netherlands bans slave trading
1817 - France bans slave trading, but ban not effective until 1826
1833 - Britain passes Abolition of Slavery Act, ordering gradual abolition of slavery in all British colonies. Plantation owners in the West Indies receive 20 million pounds in compensation
1833 - Great Britain and Spain sign a treaty prohibiting the slave trade
1819 - Portugal abolishes slave trade north of the equator
1819 - Britain places a naval squadron off the West African coast to enforce the ban on slave trading
1823 - Britain’s Anti-Slavery Society formed. Members include William Wilberforce
1846 - Danish governor proclaims emancipation of slaves in Danish West Indies, abolishing slavery
1848 - France abolishes slavery
1851 - Brazil abolishes slave trading
1858 - Portugal abolishes slavery in its colonies, although all slaves are subject to a 20-year apprenticeship
1861 - Netherlands abolishes slavery in Dutch Caribbean colonies
1862 - U.S. President Abraham Lincoln proclaims emancipation of slaves with effect from January 1, 1863; 13th Amendment of U.S. Constitution follows in 1865 banning slavery
1886 - Slavery is abolished in Cuba
1888 - Brazil abolishes slavery
1924 - Ottoman Empire
1926 - League of Nations adopts Slavery Convention abolishing slavery
1929 - Iran
1948 - United Nations General Assembly adopts Universal Declaration of Human Rights, including article stating “No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.”
1970 - Oman
1905, 1981, and 2007 - Mauritania
Please take note, some countries still haven’t outlawed slavery? Are there any predominantly white ones on that list? No lol
On to voting! The Ancient Greeks, more specifically Athenians, who are considered to have been white, established the first democracy in about 500 BC, wherein they didn’t allow women to vote. So sure, nasty white men, wah wah, but this went on for well over two thousand years, uncontested, across every race. Let’s see…
Here’s a list of what order countries gave women the vote, and when! (Obviously, the US, Australia, and Canada didn’t let Black people or indigenous people vote until later, and that was a problem of racism, but seriously lmfao look at this list)
1893 New Zealand
1902 Australia*
1906 Finland
1913 Norway
1915 Denmark
1917 Canada**
1918 Austria, Germany, Poland, Russia
1919 Netherlands
1920 United States
1921 Sweden
1928 Britain, Ireland
1931 Spain
1934 Turkey
1944 France
1945 Italy
1947 Argentina, Japan, Mexico, Pakistan
1949 China
1950 India
1954 Colombia
1957 Malaysia, Zimbabwe
1962 Algeria,
1963 Iran, Morocco
1964 Libya
1967 Ecuador
1971 Switzerland
1972 Bangladesh
1974 Jordan
1976 Portugal
1988 Namibia
1990 Western Samoa
1993 Kazakhstan, Moldova
1994 South Africa
2005 Kuwait
2006 United Arab Emirates
2011 - Saudi Arabia
Hm, what color are these people again? Since this is clearly about race for some reason, despite every country clearly doing the same shit?
What I wanna know, is how the fuck can people claim the USA is racist because slavery, but not say fuck all regards the current slave trade going on in the middle East and Africa?
because they blame white people now for the actions of those who are dead, and blame everyone else’s actions throughout history on white people if they can’t ignore it completely or twist it to make it out to be a good thing
True. How many articles did I read while researching this that completely failed to mention the slavery already existing in Africa, why couldn’t I find a single date or a single article exploring that history that didn’t jump straight into the transatlatic slave trade, why are articles on or even REFERENCES TO the arab slave trade so hard to find, why did I find maybe TWO entire articles that opened with “While some africans did keep slaves they were much nicer to them” when lol actually it depended wildly on the region and where they got the slaves (prisoners of war were frequently chattel and as I said this industry built empires in africa) and only ONE article I found TOUCHED on that
Hm
I forgot to mention in my OP that the arab slave trade began fucking 500 years before the transatlantic slave trade and didnt end until pressure from european counties stopped it in the 20th century. If you believe that they even stopped lol.
Also don’t forget:
The modern day word for “Slavery” comes from prolific, historical forced servitude of SLAVIC – eastern European – people. Most of whom are Polish, who are white.
Slavic people were enslaved (in terms of indisputable documentation anyway) starting around the 6th-9th century, far before the Transatlantic slave trade. They were enslaved by EVERYONE. Western Europeans, Arabs, Africans, Mongols, and other Asian ethnic groups, which carried over to the U.S. as well especially (as recorded at least) during the 1900s-1950s, far more recently than chattel slavery in the U.S.
White people have actually provided THE largest slave population globally between at LEAST the 9th century and now. It continues into the modern age. In Russia alone there are over 180,000 Slavics in human trafficking per year to this day. The Slavic slave trade is in fact, still thriving, even though slavery is supposed to be illegal. And you know, that’s actually pretty fucking weird, considering we’re one of the smallest global populations of people.
Pro-white attitudes originate in SLAVERY and the BUYING AND SELLING of white people going all the way back to at least the time of the pyramids, especially white women. White people were considered exotic - no surprise since we make up the GLOBAL MINORITY in terms of race, and so people in other countries (asia, the middle east, africa) saw white people as an imported commodity to show off how wealthy they were, like a fancy car or an animal of the highest breeding. White women with blond/“gold” hair and light colored eyes were the most highly sought prize because - again - rarity – and this attitude STILL persists today in non-white countries, especially Arab countries. Hm, now what does buying people because they’re rare and exotic and show off your wealth sound like?
Africans, especially northern Africans (Morocco for instance, and other Berber African states), were raiding European coastlines for slaves as far north as Britain hundreds of years before the Transatlantic Slave Trade. More than 3.5 million Slavics alone were sold into slavery by North Africans. Nevermind all the western Europeans they also took, or all the slaves taken by the Arabs on top of that.
Most African slaves didn’t even go to the United States colonies. Only 4-5% of Africans were ever imported here. The majority of African slaves (95-96%) went to the Indies and Central/South America, primarily on Spanish ships, to work plantations and silver mines for the Spaniards who drove out, enslaved, and/or killed the Native Central and South Americans. The Spaniards favored male slaves for hard labor and took very few female slaves, making reproduction among the slaves low, which then required them to keep going back to Africa for more slaves to replace the ones who died, which is the reason the number of slaves taken on the Transatlantic slave trade is so astronomically huge, not because they went to the U.S. on English ships.
Indentured Servitude in America was in fact Slavery -IF- you belonged to the “wrong race of ‘white’ ” – again, Slavics, as well as other groups like the Irish, appalachians, were not considered equal to, say, English citizens.
There’s a largely false notion that indentured servants had all kinds of human rights that slaves didn’t have. ON PAPER, this was “true”, because these work contracts were written specifically to deceive people into signing their lives away into inescapable debt, promising a “limited time work contract” to establish themselves, - but only if they weren’t in debt by the end of the contract, in a rigged system meant to put you further into debt each consecutive year. A lot of the time these contracts were written in a language the workers who signed it couldn’t read and didn’t understand and it was done on purpose and often targeting the most vulnerable and desperate populations of European people, again on purpose. If you actually tried to exercise these rights and belonged to certain white racial groups (Slavics, Irish, Appalachians), you were punished, tortured, or killed with little or no consequence or repercussions, if you weren’t worked to death first. Most of these people were forced to work in isolated encampments and towns belonging to their contractors where their injustices weren’t witnessed by the general population and where their rights couldn’t be enforced, where even the roads in and out were heavily controlled, and most people of other “superior” white races preferred it that way because of systematic racism and desired segregation from “inferior” Slavics, Irish, and Appalachians.
Your children inherited your debt if you died or were killed, either until they worked it off or, more likely, also died to pass it on to next of kin. There were laws about how young children had to be to work, but this was largely ignored again without any legal consequence, and small children often died in dangerous conditions because of this.
Work contractors would hire teams of thugs to keep their workers “in their place” and outright assassinate anyone who tried to exercise their “equal rights as citizens” and intimidate the rest of their workers into silence. If you tried to run away from your debt contract, they would hunt you down and either kill you or throw you into hard labor prisons until, again, you either worked off your debt or died trying. Even if your contractor kicked you out on their terms, they would STILL send assassins after you, your wives, your children.
The government and police often outright refused to get involved because even THEY were terrified of these work contractors – who were basically just as bad or worse than mafia.
When primarily WHITE workers revolted against all of this, the government finally stepped in. The contractors got off scott-free, while oppressed workers were charged with crimes and many of their few rights they still had were further stripped away, and those who managed to get away from their contractors were blackballed from entire towns and cities from working jobs, buying homes, or even being able to make purchases for basic survival supplies like food.
The only reason this changed is eventually, around the 1940’s-1950’s, much more recently than the abolition of slavery, the government cracked down hard on economic practices to recover from the World Wars and Great Depression.
The whole concept of a “unified white race” is bullshit and also extremely new.Thiswasn’t even a thing in my grandparents’ time. It was barely a concept in my parents’ time, and I’m not that old. If you were Polish, then you were Polish. If you were English, then you were English. If you were French, then you were French. You weren’t “white” to anyone except someone who WASN’T “white”. This only just changed the last couple generations, less than 100 years ago. The reason that, in America, we have a concept of a “white race”, is because of racial mixing. Most “white people” in America these days have heavily mixed lineage. Largely because, around my Great Grandparents’ and Grandparents’ time, you had mixed-race marriages between different European races because of rebellious youth romance, and even then, it wasn’t accepted. You were expected to marry someone of your own race exclusively (German with German, Polish with Polish, Irish with Irish, English with English, Norwegian with Norwegian, etc) and if you didn’t you were shunned,excommunicated,disowned, you were subject to discrimination for being a “mixed race couple”, you were barred from businesses, you and your children were subject to possible hate crimes. The only time people made exceptions was if someone of an “undesirable” race was independently wealthy – and you’d better watch out that someone’s family you marry with never takes you to court for it, because the courts will make sure they take your money and leave you with nothing because of their race vs yours.
A big thing people talk about frequently now is that “white people don’t get discriminated against for their name” – it should be noted this is also extremely new, and in large parts because of huge efforts – including war, enslavement, genocide, etc etc etc to “Anglicize” everything, largely by the British and French. When “white people” first came to this country, a lot didn’t have Anglicized names. They had traditional Irish, Scottish, Polish, German, Norwegian, Swedish, Dutch, etc “heathenistic” or “pagan” names. Just like people of Black or Spanish names get treated differently today, “white” people got treated just the same back then for having names that weren’t “proper” names common among the English and French. When Irish and Slavics and other “inferior” races came to the U.S. back then, they often changed their names to a “more acceptable” Anglicized name, similar to how a lot of Asian-Americans adopt new names when immigrating to America today, or naming their children “American” names instead of traditional names, to better assimilate into American culture. If you were someone who didn’t assimilate in this way, you were treated far worse for holding onto the culture of your homeland and people, and often a target for hate crimes and systematic racism.
“White people” having “privilege” in this country isn’t because of skin color, its because of mass, VIOLENT, racist erasure of all of our unique cultures from Europe by English and French imperialism.
Do they think white people went to Africa and just rounded up free black people? Those slaves were purchased from African slavers.
