Month: August 2017

khalifaziz:

llyod223:

lynati:

Unsourced screencap making the rounds on Facebook.

Fuck “black pride” they were sold by their own kings to everyone else, the ones ho truly had their ancestry beaten out of them and christianized was and IS the native Americans.

Slavery in Africa was actually very different than in America. Children could not be born into slavery, and slavery often had a buy-out price or a limited number of years of servitude. Simultaneously, African kings weren’t selling their own, they were being sold by RIVAL territories. Racial solidarity didn’t exist back then because the concept of race was new and only being used by White Christians to justify colonialism (Reference: Polygenesis theory). Additionally, slaves in Africa were often kept nearby their home lands, thus not only.would they have access to their culture but they also had the opportunity of returning home upon release or escape. And remember, Black oppression does not end with slavery. There was religious persecution, scientific experimentation, segregation, legalized rape and murder, etc to an extent which had NEVER been seen ANYWHERE in the world before. Even after the 1800s we still see numerous atrocities and instances of systematic oppression against Africans and African Diaspora groups.

Now, since you want to use territorial conflict as a way to invalidate the slave trade and the subsequent oppression of Black people, I must remind you that the EXACT same thing happened to Native groups. The Mayan empire fell not just because of the Spanish but also because of the involvement of rivaling kingdoms and groups. The European settlers often played Native Americans against each other and then violate the treaties that they claimed to be allied with. Native Americans, just like Africans, did attempt to band together to remove settlers, but these wars were shortlived either due to being overwhelmed by European forces, old and new tribal rivalries complicating relations, or both.

What happened to Africans and Native Americans is actually a repeated pattern across stories of colonialism. Because when a people were colonized by white settlers, they often had no concept of racial solidarity. The settlers manipulated their already existing conflicts in order to gain power. Often, this involved opposing parties to be complicit in the early stages of their collective oppression because they did not forsee it being taken to the extreme which European settlers did, and they especially didn’t expect for the settlers to turn their backs on them.

Seriously, people need to stop using intergroup conflicts as a way to erase the oppression of the settlers. European settlers were smart, they played these groups against each other then betrayed them all once they got what they wanted. To blame one group is to justify this line of thinking for all other instances of colonialism.