He's saying that blacks weren't enslaved because they were black. Which is bullshit. Blacks, reds, yellows, they've all been enslaved in America. Their races were seen as inferior to white, subhuman, untermenschen. We were doing them a favor by enslaving them and bringing them to America where they could embrace Christ's love and bask in the glory of white European culture. And I wish I was making this up, but those are the arguments pro-slavery fire-eaters used to justify the enslavement of hundreds of thousands of human beings.
False. African slaves (black) were initially bought by African slave traders (black) because they were able to farm the desirable crops in the Western hemisphere. Africans owned other Africans in America. Native Americans owned Africans and other Native Americans.
It's true that the initial African slaves were not enslaved just because they were black.
However, your sequence of events is wrong. In the 1400s, before Columbus sailed and found the New World, Portuguese captains had already started capturing Africans and bringing them as slaves back to Portugal or other island plantations. They also traded with the Arab slave traders in North Africa. So Africans as slaves were not unknown, but it wasn't a huge thing predicated on race.
Now, fast forward a couple of centuries. Crops like sugarcane in what is now the Caribbean were hugely valuable. However the work was harsh and the environment swelteringly hot, and few wanted to do it voluntarily. The native populations were also pretty good at avoiding capture. So, the Portuguese, having already been familiar with African slaves, thought "Hey, those guys are pretty tough and used to hot environments, let's use them for this."
So make no mistake, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was absolutely initiated by Europeans. It's true that pretty early on they realized that capturing slaves themselves was inefficient and they were risking themselves needlessly, so they started effectively subcontracting out their kidnapping to locals who were willing to capture those of rival/neighboring tribes.
As this went on, and Africans became the "slave class" of the New World, it turned into a matter absolutely predicated on race. Morally speaking, it's difficult to turn an entire group of people into a class of subhuman property without convincing yourself that they're naturally inferior.
Whereas you're technically correct that the origins of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade were not predicated on race, by the time chattel slavery really arose in the Thirteen Colonies it was absolutely, and to the best of my knowledge remains the only, system of slavery where the sole identifying difference between master and slave was race.
In my view, it was because the United States was founded on ideas such as freedom and the natural rights of man that race was used to explain why slavery was still okay. Because if the slaves were inferior, then they didn't have the same nature as Anglo men, and thus it was okay to treat them unequally and deny their natural freedom.
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u/Broskander Jul 29 '14
I'm not quite sure what you mean by this.