Op-Ed: America Didn’t Invent Slavery - But We Did Help Abolish It

By Steve Levy

How many times have we heard the “blame America first” crowd that America is an evil nation because slavery once existed within our shores?

Without question, slavery was a stain on any nation, but it’s not as though it was unique to this country.

To the contrary, it was practiced just about everywhere long before it came to the Americas and long after it was abolished here.

The far-left, Marxist perspective in America is exemplified by the writings of New York Times columnist Nikole Hannah-Jones, who wrote a blatantly false historical narrative entitled "The1619 Project," which claims that America was not founded for the purpose of establishing religious and political freedom, but rather to establish and perpetuate a slave colony.

This historically inaccurate trash is being taught in over 4,000 schools in America today, and is helping to raise a generation who think quite badly about the nation in which they live.

These leftists preach the Marxist-based concept of critical race theory, which claims that the world can be divided into two sectors: those who exploit (primary white Christian straight males) and those who are exploited (people of color, women and gays).

White is bad; brown and black are to be given empathy and a presumption of victimhood.

A marvelous article by David Harsanyi in the Washington Examiner cites a United Nations resolution seeking reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, which they claim was the “greatest crime” ever committed against humanity. (Of course, the Holocaust and the Gulag are not mentioned.) 

Nowhere in the UN resolution is there any mention of the fact that, in Athens - the birthplace of democracy - there were more slaves than free citizens. 

There is also no mention that black Africans were victims of Arab slave traders (ie: the Sultanate of Zanzibar) who enslaved black Africans and transported and sold them around the world from the seventh to the 20th centuries.

Or that:

• black Africans were nearly always first rounded up by OTHER black African tribes and nations - ie: the Kongo Kingdom, the Ashanti Kingdom, the Dahomey Kingdom - to later be sold into the transatlantic slave trade.

• slavery in Saudi Arabia was still legal up until the late 20th century.

• slavery wasn’t abolished in China until 1910, and China continues to place Muslim Uighurs in today’s equivalent of concentration camps.

• the Japanese practiced slavery up until World War II, when the West stopped it.

• fewer than 5% of the African slaves who came across the transatlantic slave trade route ended up in the US. Far more were sent to Spanish, Portuguese, British Caribbean and French colonies in the western hemisphere. (388,000 to British North America out of 12.5 million total)

• the South American Aztecs not only enslaved their captives, but also sacrificed and murdered them.

• Greeks, Hungarians, and Russians were captured from Europe and enslaved by the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks.

• Nearly 1.5 million people in Spain, Italy, Greece, and other Mediterranean countries were captured and enslaved by the Ottoman-Barbary states of North Africa between 1530 and 1800.

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And of course, there were the white European Slavs who were taken by Viking raiders and sold to the Ottomans and various Islamic outlets in Asia. Did you ever wonder where the word "slave” came from ?

Yet Hannah-Jones, Mamdani, the socialists, the leftist media, and the left in general, talk about how slavery only existed over 160 years ago in America, thereby making America and Americans forever unworthy.

Every nation has its flaws. All human beings, regardless of which continent we are born within, share the same DNA. And throughout the globe, all people can exhibit enormous positive behavior, as well as sinking into the depths of loathsome, reprehensible actions.

We Americans are no better in the eyes of God than any other human being. We are not born better than others. We have, however, built a system that is far and away better than most other systems on earth.

It is a system that allows for change and a bending of the arc towards justice

When people are allowed to speak freely, atrocities such as slavery can be denounced and challenged. And abolished.

When we celebrate America, we are not celebrating our superiority as human beings on this planet. We are celebrating how lucky we were to have a system that allows for our better angels to flourish.

A system that enables us to combat the more evil inclinations that exist within every human being.

It is OK and even obligatory, to beat on slavery. It is not OK to incessantly beat on the nation that sacrificed 700,000 of its people in the Civil War to end this scourge.

Of course, none of these enslavements are hyped by the characters who dominate the UN because their ultimate goal is to seek reparations from the nations with deep pockets to transfer money to their favorite nations.

Despite all their contradictions they feel pretty confident. They believe they have an ace in the hole — white guilt.

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Steve Levy is President of Common Sense Strategies, a political consulting firm. He served as Suffolk County Executive, as a NYS Assemblyman, and host of “The Steve Levy Radio Show.” He is the author of “Solutions to America’s Problems” and “Bias in the Media.” www.SteveLevy.info, X (formerly Twitter)  @SteveLevyNY, steve@commonsensestrategies.com