Slavery, the White Guilt Complex and Political Correctness by Charles Taylor

Recently there have been a number of US academics who have said that because whites have “benefited from slavery and are complicit in it,” they should all commit “mass suicide.” This genocide should be made whether or not one’s ancestors were involved in slavery, which is a new, wide concept of racial guilt. No matter that the number of deaths would vastly outnumber the number of slaves who ever existed anywhere; whitey must die, die, die!

This is a kind of collective racial guilt, now a growing part of Leftism, and a new level in insane political correctness: http://itself.wordpress.com/2015/06/30/should-white-america-commit-mass-suicide-if-not-why-not/; http://www.dailywire.com/news/4180/debater-harvard-says-white-people-should-kill-chase-stephens; http://www.truthandaction.org/mass-college-professor-white-males-are-a-cancer-and-must-die-urges-students-to-kill-themselves.

Such academics may believe that they are not White, because whiteness is a social construction and their ethnic group is immured. Whatever, they do not appear willing to be the first to commit suicide, and sit in their comfortable jobs mouthing manure.

Perhaps there is no need for suicide. Consider this story from the US:  “Four black people beat and taunted a mentally disabled white man in a video broadcast live on Facebook, threatening him with a knife, cutting off his clothing and forcing him to drink from a toilet…. The assault went on for up to two days, until Chicago police found the victim “in distress” walking along a street, authorities said.
Police spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said charges were expected to be filed later Thursday against the suspects, who are in custody. They can be heard on the video using profanities against white people and President-elect Donald Trump. Authorities were reviewing whether the attack could be considered a hate crime, but initially they did not believe that the man was singled out because he was white.

Guglielmi acknowledged that the suspects made “terrible racist statements” during the assault, but he said the investigation showed that the victim was targeted because he has “special needs,” not because of his race”: http://www.gopusa.com/obama-legacy-four-arrested-for-torture-kidnapping-as-they-shouted-f-white-people/.  While they were torturing him, they shouted “F*** white people.” This is only said to not be a hate crime because the victim is white; swap colours and Prezzy Obama would be throwing a tantrum about racism ponding on the White House carpet.
A person went into a bar, said that he liked Donald Trump, and was attacked by a man, of mixed race, with a broken bottle, right in the bar!

US Slavery in Context
The American Civil War was not a war to end slavery. Eighty per cent of Confederate soldiers and sailors were not slave owners. The losses of the South were far proportionately greater than the US losses in World War II. Indeed, if US loses were equal to the Southern losses, then the loss of American lives in World War II would not have been 300,000, but 6,000,000. It is incredible to suppose that such a war could have been fought for such a small percentage of the population to keep slaves.
Rather, the war was a “war for Southern independence” and thus a battle between two nations.

The Northern invasion of the South was not based on high moral principles, but on a fear of economic loss. Lincoln, when asked if the North should let the South go said: “Let the South go? Let the South go? Where then shall we get our revenues?” (J. R. Kennedy and W. D. Kennedy, The South Was Right! (Pelican Publishing, 1997), p. 50)

Slavery was abolished in the North for economic, not moral grounds, when the supply of cheap white labour (“wage slaves”) in the North was sufficient to reduce its costs. Northern White workers viewed Black Labour as a threat, and barriers were erected against Black advancement, so that many commentators of the time felt that Blacks were better off as slaves, given the appalling conditions White Northern workers were subjected to.
Northern exclusion laws (e.g. in Indiana, Illinois and Oregon) prevented Blacks settling in those states. Lincoln said in congress in December 1862: “But why should [an emancipated] South send free people North?… And in any event cannot the North decide for itself whether to receive them?” (as above, p. 55) Reasonable comments for the time, but hardly what one would expect from the so-called great emancipator of the slaves.

As a matter of fact, when laws were passed in the North granting freedom to slaves, this was only for slaves that had reached a certain age. For example, for a slave to become free in New Jersey, the slave would have had to have been born after 1804 and to have reached the age of 21 years. Otherwise the Black would remain a slave for life.

Ten years before the War for Southern Independence, there were 236 slaves for life in New Jersey alone. (as above, p. 75) This saved the North being deprived of slave property so that their slaves could be sold to the South!

The relationship between White slave owners and Black slaves was generally good for the times, and mutual respect usually existed. Many freed slaves stayed on with families. Most slave owners worked alongside the slaves, and slaves generally did not work any harder than whites. (as above, p. 83)
Black ex-slave Elijah Henry Hopkins said: “In slavery times, a poor white man was worse off than a n*****.” (as above, p. 97)
Harrison Betty, A Black slave, wrote and published a pamphlet in 1861 entitled Slavery and Abolitionism, as Viewed by a Georgia Slave, which defended the institution of slavery. This slave could read and write, and contrary to Hollywood movies such as Roots, believed that American slaves were better off than they would have been in Africa.

American slavery was not a racist institution. Larry Koger in Black Slaveowners (McFarland, 1985 and 2011), states that in 1830 over 10,000 slaves were owned by free Blacks. Native Americans such as the Cherokee, also owned Black slaves. Former Black indentured servants and American Indians came, in large numbers, to own White bond slaves. In Virginia, the practice was banned in 1670. George Washington himself owned white slaves: R. M. Grooms, “A History of Race Mixing in the American Colonies,” The Barnes Review, November/December, 2001, pp. 19-22.

In the US, from the beginning of the 17th century, between one half and two thirds of the White colonists who came to the new World, came as slaves. They were owned as property with no legal rights, and with the same laws applying to fugitive Black slaves, as to them. These Whites were whipped and beaten, often to death. Their conditions were so appalling that over half the “indentured servants” died before the term of their indenture expired. It is likely that more Whites than Blacks were captured and involuntarily taken to the New World, thus making American slavery, not just a Black, but a multi-racial institution: http://takimag.com/article/white_slavery_denial_jim_goad/print#axzz4VOVp6hda; Jim Goad, The Redneck Manifesto, (Simon and Schuster, 1998).

Early parliamentary debates, referred to the Whites, not as indentured servants, but as slaves: Michael Hoffman II, They Were White and They were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America, 4th edition, (Independent History and research, 1992), p. 11) Newspapers of the times also referred to them as “slaves”: http://www.westernspring.co.uk/slavery-and-white-guilt/; http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2013/10/america-the-land-of-the-free-and-the-brave-or-of-the-oligarch-and-the-white-slave/.

By 1627 sugar plantations in the British West Indies used White slave labour and there were few Black slaves until the mid-1640s. In the 1640s, in Barbados, 25,000 slaves, 21,700 of then White, were brutally treated and worked to death. The main source of these slaves were Britain and Ireland.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, American White “servants” and Black slaves did essentially the same work. This work was not designed to work the slave to death. Compare this situation with 19th century England where genocide against poor Whites occurred. Children as young as four years became factory fodder for the Satanic mills of industrial capitalism. Their small bodies were worked to death or mutilated in machinery. Old English cemeteries still tell the tale of the deaths of these children. Yet because they are White, no bleeding heart liberal sheds tears for them. In some British work houses the mortality rate for children was up to 90 percent. (as above, p. 19) See generally D. Jordan and M. Walsh, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America, (2008).

Africans in the African Slave Trade
Africans too were complicit in African slave trading, as Jim Goad has recently discussed: http://takimag.com/article/did_africans_sell_africans_into_slavery_lets_ask_some_africans_jim_goad/print#axzz4VOVp6hda.
Africans sold slaves to Islamic and European slavers at coastal markets, and 90 percent of Africans transported to the New world were enslaved by other Africans. An estimated 10 million Africans died being marched in chains to these markets by their African captors, but liberals do not lament about this, and as usual are silent about any injustices outside of their paradigm. And just so one does not think that this is “fake news,” here are some quotes from leading Africans reflecting on a subject that the white guilt liberals will not think about that Jim Goad has compiled:
“…I must own, to the shame of my own countrymen, that I was first kidnapped and betrayed by some of my own complexion, who were the first cause of my exile and slavery…If there were no buyers there would be no sellers.”
— African abolitionist Ottobah Cugoano (1757-1791)

“The savage chiefs of the western coasts of Africa, who for ages have been accustomed to selling their captives into bondage and pocketing the ready cash for them, will not more readily accept our moral and economical ideas than the slave traders of Maryland and Virginia….We are, therefore, less inclined to go to Africa to work against the slave trade than to stay here to work against it.”
— Frederick Douglass

“African chiefs were the ones waging war on each other and capturing their own people and selling them. If anyone should apologize, it should be the African chiefs. We still have those traitors here even today.”
— Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni, 1998

I want to apologize for the role my ancestors played in the slave trade….I knew one day I wanted to come to this land and ask forgiveness of my black brothers and sisters. I wanted to cross the ocean to see the land where my ancestors suffered.”
— King Kpoto-Zounme Hakpon III of Benin to a black audience in Alabama, 2013

“We cannot continue to blame the white men, as Africans, particularly the traditional rulers, are not blameless….In view of the fact that the Americans and Europe have accepted the cruelty of their roles and have forcefully apologised, it would be logical, reasonable and humbling if African traditional rulers…[can] accept blame and formally apologise to the descendants of the victims of their collaborative and exploitative slave trade.”
— Civil Rights Congress of Nigeria, 2009

“I believe there is a great psychic shadow over Africa, and it has much to do with our guilt and denial of our role in the slave trade. We too are blameworthy in what was essentially one of the most heinous crimes in human history.”
— Former Ghanaian diplomat to the UN Kofi Awoonor, 1994

Who dares to call these people “racists”?
The Muslim world engaged in the African slave trade centuries after the end of the Atlantic slave trade. It is estimated that 19 million people were the victims of Islamic slavery from 650 AD to 1900 AD. The vast majority of the slaves were Blacks, from 11-18 million, but many million were Whites.
The Barbary Corsairs, primarily Muslim pirates from the Barbary coast of North Africa, in the 1600s raided southern Europe, Britain and Ireland and captured white slaves, with some 1.2 million Europeans being enslaved by 1780: Francis Brooks, Barbarian Cruelty: An Eye-witness Account of White Slavery Under the Moors, (1693). This pirate threat led to many coastal towns in the Mediterranean being abandoned until the 19th century.

The White men were worked to death and the women used for housework, if older, and if young, for sexual slaves. See Robert Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2004); “The White Slaves of Barbary,” at http://www.ancient-origins.net/ancient-places-africa/white-slaves-barbary-002171.

Conclusion
The American slavery argument is thus used as part of a complex strategy of psycho-political warfare to demoralise White people. Elaborate myths have been constructed by both academics and Hollywood to produce an unending sense of guilt. In the brief discussion I have attempted to expose and criticise some of these myths. Readers desiring a more detailed treatment should consult the attached reference works.
No race has a monopoly on misery and suffering.