Don't ask me why I thought to look this up. I stumbled upon the idea while doing a completely unrelated Internet search. In that search myriad side bar stories came up. One was a story about a white teen ager in Kansas City who had been doused with gasoline by black teen aged boys. It happened a month ago and I never heard a word of it. I have heard an endless barrage of stories about Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman, but no word of the burning of an Anglo boy by Black boys. I began to think about what I was taught in high school and even college American History classes about blacks and whites in America and about America's slavery. What I found was interesting.
We all were taught a good deal about black slavery in America. We all know that he civil war was in part fought to change the plight of the black slave. We think we know that happened. Then I remembered a term that was talked about regarding whites. "Indentured servant." I began to research what it really meant, not what I was taught it meant. What it means in the vast majority of all situations is "slave".
Long before any black person was enslaved or sold in America, tens of thousands of Anglo-Saxons were. Writer Elaine Kendall asks "Who wants to be reminded that half - perhaps as many as two-thirds - of the original American colonists came here, not of their own free will, but kidnapped, shanghaied, impressed, duped, beguiled, and yes, in chains - ?...we tend to gloss over it... we'd prefer to forget the whole sorry chapter." The word "slave" itself is derived from the word "slav," a reference to the Eastern European White people who, among others, were enslaved by their fellow Whites, by the Mongols, and by the Arabs over a period of many centuries. The white people, who were bought, sold and worked until death did not refer to themselves as servants but as slaves. The Black slaves referred to them as "white slaves".
According to Thomas Burton's Parliamentary Diary 1656-1659, in 1659 the English parliament debated the practice of selling British Whites into slavery in the New World. The Irish and the Scots were the most heavily traded and often put into situations often more dangerous than their black counterparts because their owners deemed them less valuable and expendable. If they died or fell overboard it was not a great loss. The term kidnapping, originally kid-nabbing, was a term coined to refer to the abduction of poor white children to be sold into slavery in Britain or plantations in America. Also the term "spirited-away" was a term used when any White person was taken against his will as the white slaves were called "spirits".
The mass establishment media, as well as academia, focuses exclusively on the enslavement of Blacks. It is promulgated that only Whites bear responsibility for enslaving Blacks and that only Blacks were slaves. The perpetuation of this non-truth is in part responsible for the ongoing division in America between Blacks and Whites. There is still blaming and there is still shaming even though not single living black person was a slave nor a living white person a slave owner. In fact, Blacks in Africa engaged in widespread slavery of their own. Slavery was endemic in Africa, with whole tribes being enslaved through conquest on a regular basis. When Arabic, Jewish and White slave traders arrived on the coast of sub-Saharan Africa, they did not often have to hunt their quarry -- they almost never had to leave port. They were met on the coast by Africans more than willing to sell slaves to them by the thousands. And in America, records show that Black slaves were owned, not just by a few wealthy Whites, but by free Blacks and by Cherokee Indians. In some cases, these Blacks and Indians even owned White slaves.
While I found a lot of answers in my research, it left me with a nagging question. Why? Why is it so important to keep the historic plight of the black slave alive and well yet the story of the white slave is never, not ever told? Why is the story of the white slave not only "not told" but a new story called "indentured servitude" fabricated to gloss over it? There were some indentured servants (both black and white), but in all my reading I found that the vast majority of them were slaves with no way what so ever to work toward freedom. This rewriting of history is a very deliberate and calculated process. To what end? I hesitate to use the word "agenda" because I don't want this to be laced with anything other than the facts as I found them. But it bears to ask what is the purpose today to perpetuate this fallacy? What was the purpose in the first place?
It might be a useful thing to talk about and to bring out in the light and I mean REALLY talk about. Maybe, just maybe if we do this true equality can be felt and resentments of past crimes can be let go. We might find some connectivity in our ancestors' common misery. It seems that finding common ground -- of any kind is a good thing.
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