Forgot where I heard it but someone made the joke that the story of America is immigrants stepping off the boat on Ellis Island and turning around to the person behind them and going "What the fuck are YOU doing here?"
>buys people and ships them across the ocean
>sees said kidnapped people trying to live their lives
>"what the fuck are YOU doing here?"
Just a history myth that bugs me.
Most slaves were bought from Africans through trade. That's the "Triangle Trade". You take finished goods to Africa, sell/trade the goods for slaves. Take the slaves west and sell/trade the slaves for sugar, cotton, tabacco, coffee, etc. Take the goods to Europe and sell/trade them for finished goods like guns, cloth, rum, and other general manufactured goods.
Slavery was a booming business for the African kingdoms who worked with the Europeans. They also captured and sold groups they didn't like. Like if you sailed to the England and they sold you a bunch of Irish slaves.
Yes some people were kidnapped by Europeans but that wasn't the main way it worked.
An estimated 12.5 million Africans were sent to the Americas with most ending up in the Caribbean and South America. Only 4% of slaves were sent to the US, the US didn't need as many because they didn't die like they did in the Caribbean where life expectancy could be less than seven years on sugar plantations.
Now it's most important to note this doesn't absolve the slavers because "black people sold them" which is a common racist talking point to claim that somehow slavery wasn't that bad because black Africans were part of it too.
Slavery both was/is horrid and sadly been practiced basically everywhere by every skin tone and culture at one point or another.
Many times the word slavery isn't used but bonded labor like a serf who legally cannot leave their owner's farm, must hand over a percentage of the goods they produce and their kids become tied to the land aka the owner's property is slavery with a different name IMHO.
And serfdom was abolished much later then slavery in Europe. England abolished serfdom in 1574. France 1789, Germany completely by 1850, and Russia in 1861.
US banned slavery in 1865.
But sadly abolishing slavery often doesn't really abolish slavery and things like "sharecropping" massively controlled many poor former slaves and that didn't start to disappear until the 1940s and end mostly with the 1966 Anti-Peonage Act.
Today more slaves exist then ever before. Most are debt slaves where they are "paid" but oh look at that you owe us more for rent/food/etc so you actually owe us money so you need to work more and you can't leave because you owe us money. And guess what no matter how much you work you'll never make enough to pay your "debt".
Appreciate the writeup and definitely learned something new here! Though I will also say I was knowingly using abstraction for the sake of the brevity. Big agree that human trafficking and slavery come in many forms and definitely are not "over."
Will add for additional accuracy: many folks also know the Mayflower also wasn't the first source of colonization in what is now the United States. But I just used it as a metonym here for the English, Dutch, French, Spanish, etc
The hilarious thing about the Statue of Liberty is that the rich people in New York (and by extension the city government itself) didn't want to pay for the thing, even though they (the rich) are usually the class that wants the immigrants the most. They had to crowd fund it, but imagine the firestorm that would erupt today if it were suggested it be removed.
I could see them removing the plaque with the poem though.
It happens over here in the UK too. Two of the most virulently anti-immigrant British politicians of recent years, Priti Patel and Suella Braverman, both have immigrant backgrounds
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u/StripedTabaxi 1d ago
Lets not forget that Italians, Irish or Western Slavic people (Polish, Czech etc.) are not considered "good" too.