#inverted exceptionalism

By: Keith Woods

Published: Jul 2, 2023

A look at slavery outside of the West

It has become popular to blame White people for slavery, to the point that many actually believe slavery was invented by or exclusively practiced by Europeans.

But the history of slavery outside the West is far more brutal.

The Arab slave trade emerged in the 7th century, 10 centuries before the Atlantic slave trade

Arabs sold Africans to the Middle East for a variety of jobs such as domestic work or harem guards - castrating male slaves was common, causing over half of males to bleed to death

The Arab slave trade was particularly brutal: it's estimated that 3/4 captured slaves died before they reached the market for sale

Historians estimate that between 10 and 18 million people were enslaved by Arab slave traders, including women and children taken as concubines.

Arabs did not create the slave trade out of nothing, in fact, enslaving conquered tribes was already common practice in Central Africa when they arrived.

The West African Songhai Empire relied heavily on captured slaves in all levels of society, even as soldiers.

Africans themselves also played a large role in facilitating the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

African tribes conducted raids on rival groups to provide slaves for sale. African middlemen facilitated trade between European traders and African suppliers.

The Arabs also had a slave trade in Europe. Estimates are that up to 1.25 million Europeans were enslaved by Barbary pirates, who would raid villages in coastal countries like Italy, France, England and Ireland, bringing them to North Africa for sale.

In some cases entire villages would be captured, such as the Irish coastal village of Baltimore, entirely raided in 1631.

These slaves faced a brutal future, engaging in hard labour or sexual servitude, and spending nights hot and overcrowded prisons called bagnios.

Many slaves captured by Barbary pirates were sold eastwards into the Ottoman Empire. Slavery was central to the Ottoman Empire, most towns had dedicated slavery markets called Yesirs.

Slaves came from Africa, the Caucasus, the Balkans and Eastern & Southern Europe.

Sexual slavery was a big part of Ottoman society. Slavic women were popular slaves, and Köçeks became a popular source of entertainment in the 19th century:

These were young boys, usually from European backgrounds, who were circumcised, cross-dressed and trained as dancers.

Hereditrary slavery is recorded in China dating back to the Xia Dynasty in 2100 BC. Africans purchased on the Silk Road were used as a sign of wealth.

After Chinese law began to treat women as property around 1000AD it was common to sell daughters and sisters into slavery.

The Mongols enslaves tens of thousands of Chinese as punishment for resistance.

In the post-Mongol Ming Dynasty, thousands of slaves were employed to do bureaucratic jobs for the government, and rich families also employed thousands of slaves to perform menial labour.

Slavery was common in American civilizations like the Aztec and Maya

Among the Aztecs, slavery was a punishment for a variety of crimes or even failure to pay taxes. Husbands and wives sold each other in times of economic hardship. Slaves were identified by wooden collars.

Slavery was also common practice in the civilizations of South-East Asia.

The Khmer Empire had a massive slave class that did much of the work building monuments like Angkor Wat. Historians estimate 25-35% of the population of Thailand/Burma were slaves in the 17th century.

Slavery also existed among Native American tribes. Slavery was common practice among Northwest tribes like the Tlingit, for whom one third of their population during the mid-1800s were slaves.

Various tribes practiced debt-slavery and enslaved captives of other tribes.

The only difference between these cases of slavery and that practiced by Europeans is that Europeans abolished slavery on humanitarian grounds, and spread this across the globe.

The intense focus on the White role in slavery is a product of widespread Anti-White animus.

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American exceptionalism comes in two varieties: "we're exceptionally virtuous," and "we're exceptionally evil."

Both rely on lying about or being ignorant of history.

https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/dashboards/schools_dashboard.aspx

Glenn Loury: The Case for Black Patriotism

Frederick Douglass, the escaped slave and great abolitionist, in a famous speech of 1852 titled “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” asked America whether he had a share in the nation’s civic inheritance. Douglass was cautiously hopeful that America might be faithful to its founding principles and grant liberty and equality to his people. But he had to plead with his audience to consider the gravity of the times; he had to indict his country for not standing up to its own ideals.

Today we stand 170 years later. Douglass’s criticism of America remains fashionable, but many Americans seem to have forgotten what it was about America that Douglass wanted to be a part of. When we talk about race and America, we must ask whether the standoffishness exemplified, by, for example, the “America ain’t so great, and never was” posture popular on campuses and in newsrooms, truly serves the interests of black Americans. The narrative we blacks settle upon about the American project is fundamentally important. Is this, basically, a good country that affords boundless opportunity to all who are fortunate enough to enjoy the privileges and bear the responsibilities of American citizenship? Or, is this, basically, a venal, immoral, rapacious bandit-society of plundering white supremacists founded in genocide and slavery, and propelled by capitalist greed and unrepentant racism?

I wish to make the case for unabashed black patriotism—for the forthright embrace of America by black people. Our birthright citizenship in this great republic is an inheritance of immense value. Our Americanness is much more important than our blackness.

Of course, there is some warrant in the historical record for both sentiments. African slavery flourished at the time of the founding, true enough. And yet, within a century of the founding slavery was gone and people who had been chattel became citizens of the United States. Should equality before the law have taken another hundred years? Should my ancestors have been enslaved in the first place? No and no. But we must not forget that slavery had been commonplace since antiquity. Emancipation, the freeing of slaves en masse as the result of a movement for abolition—that was a new idea. It was a Western idea, brought to fruition in our own United States of America. It would not have been possible without the philosophical insights and moral commitments cultivated in the West during the Enlightenment—ideas about the essential dignity of human persons.

The founding of the United States of America was a world-historic event by means of which enlightenment ideals about the rights of individual persons and the legitimacy of state power got instantiated for the first time in real institutions. The United States of America fought authoritarian fascism and communism in the Pacific and Europe in the mid-­twentieth century. Our democracy, flawed as it most surely is, has been a beacon to billions of people. On our shores, we have witnessed since the end of the Civil War the greatest transformation in the status of an enserfed people that is to be found anywhere in world history. Some 46 million strong, we black Americans have become by far the richest and most powerful large population of African descent on this planet, and it’s not even close. We have access to more than five times the income of the typical Nigerian, the richest nation in all of sub-Saharan Africa.

I am a descendant of slaves and I came up in the 1950s and 1960s on Chicago’s South Side; I didn’t have an easy upbringing, but I was a beneficiary of the civil rights revolution, which made possible for me a life that my forebears ­only dreamed of. I became an economist and Ivy League college professor. I am a product of the Enlightenment, and I am an inheritor of its great traditions: Tolstoy is mine. Dickens is mine. Newton and Maxwell and Einstein are mine.

We Americans, of all stripes, have a great deal in common, and our commonalities can be used to build bridges, undergirded by patriotism, between black America and the nation as a whole. We all want the same things. We want a shot at the American Dream. We want each generation to do better than the ones that came before it. Connections among groups in America could be stronger if we focused more on the things we have in common than on the things that divide us.

Those who make their living by focusing on our differences believe that there is something fundamentally wrong with the American project. They’re wrong.

They betray the legacy of Frederick Douglass, and we should resist their divisive rhetoric. It is easy to overstate the racial problems facing our country, and to understate what we have achieved.