Attempts in various jurisdictions to have Critical Race Theory removed from educational curricula have of course been denounced by the religious Left as an attempt to stifle the truth. But C.R.T. is anti-Caucasian propaganda that both ignores the irrefutable facts of history and, in typical Neo-Marxist fashion, simplistically reduces everything to issues of power in attempting to validate its one-sided, hate-filled narrative.
There is no doubt my university professors in the 60s and 70s assumed Western European Culture, and more specifically the English literature which was my major, to be beacons of enlightenment to the rest of the world. Politics rarely entered our discussions. Ironically, two of my most revered instructors were from India! But over the last 50 years, Academia has come to be dominated by the notion that any celebration of our wonderful Western Heritage is steeped in arrogance and no more than a political tool used to oppress non-Westerners around the world.
The salient fact would seem to be that it was European colonialists, led initially by the Portuguese, who incited the Atlantic Slave Trade which surged in the 16th Century. Yes, sadly, slavery became an integral aspect of the economy of America’s Southern States for more than 200 years after that by now notorious first “slaver” reached the shores of Virginia in 1619. But Nicole Hannah-Jones’ thesis in her “1619 Project” that slavery was an essential as opposed to incidental aspect of the American colonial experiment is utter nonsense. And that’s putting it politely!
Wikipedia’s entry on the history of slavery includes several succinct questions which it immediately answers. Among those is: “Who first started slavery in Africa?” Its response is that it was the Portuguese in the 15th Century. I have no idea if this is simply an inadvertent error or an intentionally promulgated lie, but while the Portuguese certainly were amongst the earliest Europeans to attempt to profit from bringing slaves to the Americas, slavery was not their invention, indeed had been an integral aspect of the peoples of both Asia and Africa for thousands of years. The notion that Europeans “first started slavery in Africa” is 100% incorrect!
Evidence suggests slavery to have been practiced as early as 3500 B.C. as peoples began to abandon their hunter-gatherer past and settle into more sophisticated, stratified social/political constructs.
Islamic nations in West and Central Asia as well as North and Eastern Africa held significant portions of their populations as little more than slaves from the 7th Century onward. In the thousand years of conflict between Muslims and Christians which followed the birth of Islam, each side customarily enslaved their captives for extended periods if not for life.
It is estimated that in Senegal and Gambia, from 1300 to 1900, approximately a third of their populations were enslaved in one way or another.
As tribal wars throughout Africa frequently resulted in the victors enslaving the vanquished, European slavers would often simply wait on the Continent’s west coast to have their Black captives delivered to them by people of the same color.
In Sierra Leone throughout the 19th Century, it is estimated approximately half of its population was enslaved.
In Ethiopia, slavery continued to be legal until 1942 when it was abolished by Haile Selassie. While banned universally by the 1990s, it was nevertheless found to be a systemic aspect of West Africa’s cacao plantations which continued to enslave children as a source of cheap labor as recently as 30 years ago.
In 2019 it was estimated that approximately 40 million were still living in servitude in parts of Asia and Africa, many of them children exploited both as workers and as soldiers, many of them women forced into unwanted marriages or sold as sex slaves.
The ancient Greeks and Romans were not innocent of enslaving others in the course of their histories. Yet as the Middle Ages unfolded, no doubt as a result of Christianity, the practice of holding large masses of people in captivity became relatively rare in Western Europe. Indeed the first concerted assault on the heinous institution of slavery was initiated by White, Western Europeans, while the rest of the world continued to tolerate this abomination even into the 21st Century! How then did Western Civilization become the villain of the “progressive” historical narrative?
As I have dealt with this issue in earlier blogs, I shan’t go into great detail. In the late 18th Century, British litigators began to rule against slave owners. The 1807 Slave Trade Act made human trafficking illegal while in 1833, led by P. M. Wilberforce, slavery was banished outright from the British Commonwealth. From 1808 to 1860, the West African Squadron of the British Navy patrolled the West coast of Africa, intercepting approximately 1600 slave ships while freeing over 150,000 of their prisoners. Amazingly, the British government decided to buy the freedom of every slave within its purview, the debt which it incurred, the equivalent of approximately 20 billion contemporary pounds, only being eradicated in 2015. Yes, British taxpayers continued to pay the price of their government’s early 19th C. moral convictions for almost 200 years!
The fathers of the American Constitution, however reviled by contemporary academia, were generally motivated by the same Enlightenment Principles as the Brits. In 1788, the year of that document’s ratification, they had to chose between enforcing their Ideals, which would no doubt have immediately dissolved their newly formed Union, or adapting pragmatically to the economic realities of the South, realities centered around an institution that was still widely tolerated elsewhere. No doubt the fact that the colonies had just concluded a war with Britain had much to do with the unwillingness of the new nation’s founding fathers to immediately go to war with its own southern states. But while such realities clearly had much bearing on the early history of the U.S., they are simply ignored by those presently obsessed with exposing the apparent hypocrisy of a country which has always claimed to be a champion of Freedom even as it tolerated slavery for almost a hundred years after its Declaration of Independence.
Jefferson would seem to be a perfect metaphor for this paradox. Growing up on his father’s Virginia plantation surrounded by slaves, he owned many through the course of his life, releasing only a few of them when alive while continuing to treat them as property in his last will and testament. Apologists maintain he was a victim of circumstances; critics that he was a venal man primarily concerned with his own welfare. Whatever the truth, as both Governor of Virginia and President of the States, he initiated several pieces of legislation designed to banish slavery altogether from his country. Indeed it was in 1808, during his presidency, that Congress made the importation of slaves to the U.S. utterly illegal.
So we would seem to be dealing here with two separate issues, the Principles prescribed, however abstractly, by any given Culture, as opposed to the success or failure of any Individual to live up to those principles. Perhaps Jefferson was deeply flawed even as he championed values he deemed unassailable. But the narrative of the contemporary Left, the narrative promoted by B.L.M., The 1619 Project, C.R.T., etc., doesn’t simply indite White individuals who were and are in fact vile people, it indites Western Civilization itself. So-called “systemic racism” suggests Whites who have never had a racist thought in their lives are nevertheless racists simply for embracing their own cultural heritage. Hence the notion of Ibram X. Kendi and others that the Post-Enlightenment, Western World’s reverence for Science, Reason, Self-Awareness and Self-Discipline, is merely a racial eccentricity of no objective merit. It is an absurd hypothesis born of Postmodern Relativism which of course walks hand in hand with Marxism. Nothing is ever true or false or right or wrong, those who insist otherwise being oppressive monsters. As this literally eliminates any discussion of the quality of human Beliefs and Values from the political domain, “progressive” social criticism is definitively, laughably, devoid of Substance, resolving every political debate not in terms of the legitimacy of the arguments posed, but of the level of “oppression” of those involved. As Women are “oppressed” by Men but Transgenders even more so, Lia Thomas and others like her are being allowed to undermine female athletes around the world because they rate higher on the scale of “oppression,” their masculine biological attributes not an apparent concern to the brain-dead Left. This is a moral abomination and it is absurd!
Contemporaries who flatter themselves as “anti-racists” are Racists of the first order, filtering every aspect of reality through the lens of Identity. The many wonderful Black “conservatives” I have cited agree, prioritizing Truth and Morality over the color of their skin [Thank you M.L.K]. From such a perspective the history of all peoples is rife with abhorrent behavior, Western Europeans, in spite of the German holocaust, being no more guilty of such than others and, arguably, far less so. From such a perspective the truly liberal Principles and Values which emerged from the European Enlightenment are Mankind’s hope for the future rather than subtle tools of White oppression. From such a perspective those who conflate the Norms of Western societies with Racism would themselves seem to be motivated by racial envy and resentment, as those norms have unequivocally resulted in major improvements in the realm of social justice throughout the West, improvements unparalleled in much of the rest of the world.
Just read a N.Y. Times book review of Imani Perry’s “South to America” which suggests the many racially motivated atrocities committed throughout the South in the past continue to be an accurate reflection of “Americanness itself.” Has Perry, a Black woman, really defined the soul of her country or would her grossly simplistic perspective be a perfect example of why I chose to title this blog “the politics of hate?”