Dakota Beacon

            The sordid history of slavery spans the history of the human race. Blacks alone do not bear the stigma of this vile practice. Historically, Whites have been sold as slaves in greater numbers for centuries. For many people slavery means White Americans holding Black Americans in bondage.

            Throughout history, most slaves were not racially different than their slave masters. Africans enslaved Africans; Europeans enslaved Europeans; Asians enslaved Asians; American Indians enslaved American Indians.

            Any excuse is reason enough to produce wall-to-wall racial incitement by the dominant media. Race becomes a phony ginned-up issue when the outcome does not fit the race baiters’ narrative. The most effective support for the racist narrative is to dredge up sympathy and divisiveness stemming from America’s past wrongs -- slavery. It works every time. This is typical fare for those who make a living exploiting racial division.

            Here is the line of reasoning never highlighted by the dominant media. Any economic, social, or political event that does not conform to the progressive narrative justifies being branded as racism. Reason? Racism somehow always plays a part. Why? Racism runs deep and wide in our contemporary culture. Reason? Blacks have been mistreated since the days of slavery. Result? Blacks can never receive fair treatment in a White society. Conversation over.

            In the shadow of the Black Lives Matter movement, knowledge of White slavery has all but disappeared. Educators in academia focus on the Black experience ignoring White slavery across all cultures. White slavery is little known in revisionist American history. Faux historian Howard Zinn’s text “A People’s History of the United States” is the gold standard. Required reading of “White Fragility” by academic Robin DiAngelo pits race against race. These works and others reinforce the idea that America was evil and corrupt from its founding and still is. The New York Times-sponsored “1619 Project” makes slavery rather than freedom the central and defining idea of the American experience.

            From the earliest days of the American colonies up through the Industrial Revolution hundreds of thousands of Whites were cajoled, kidnapped, chained, whipped, and worked to death. “Indentured servants,” many of them English and other Europeans, contracted to work for seven years in the New World. Little did they know they were selling themselves into bondage.

            Thousands of years ago the Greeks, famous for their early practice and advocacy of democracy, enslaved other peoples as well as their fellow Greeks. Romans enslaved thousands of Celtic peoples in Britain. Julius Caesar enslaved more than a million Gauls. Slave dealers followed in the wake of his legions. After Charlemagne conquered Saxony huge numbers of captured Caucasians were forced into slave markets to be sold like cattle.

            Slave trading was a major commercial activity in the Viking age with the main source of slaves coming from the Scots, Irish, Danes, and Icelanders. Viking slavers sold tens of thousands of White slaves to Muslim Spain. So lucrative was the slave trade that Spanish Muslims sent diplomatic missions to Scandinavia during the 840s to formalize slave trade relations.

            From the eighth to the 11th centuries France was a major transit point for White slaves to the Muslim world. The sale of Whites to Asia and Africa filled European coffers. Rouen, France was the port for shipping Irish and Flemish slaves to the Muslim world. Venice, Italy was a major transit point for White slaves brought from northern Europe across the Alps and traded for oriental luxury goods.

            In the eastern European steppes there was a flourishing slave network. Slavs and Finns entered the Muslim slave markets via the Black and Caspian Sea routes. The word “slave” is derived from the word “Slav.” White Russian Muscovites were enslaved by both European slave traders and large slave raiding operations conducted by the Mongols and by the Ottoman Empire.

            The British parliament in 1659 debated the practice of selling British Whites into slavery in the “New World.” Later this became the British solution to the problem of poor Whites in urban England during the Industrial Revolution and the “Irish Problem” confronting British landlords.

            Today, White Americans are called upon to carry what Harvard Professor Shelby Steele calls “White guilt.” White guilt is a self-serving effort by liberal Whites to feel better about themselves for America’s history. Black militancy is an effort to profit from White guilt. In its sickest form, race hustlers, liberals, progressives, and Democrats today use White guilt to politically induce support for affirmative action and redistribution of wealth via reparations.

            It’s time to get over it. No American Black today experiences slavery. No American White today is a slave master. Slavery must not be the catalyst for progressive social justice reforms. Nevertheless, progressives and liberals claim slavery as a “debt that will never be paid.” Intellectuals criticize slavery as the historic evil of “our society” but never acknowledge that Western civilization was the first to turn against slavery. For a century Western civilization destroyed slavery within itself and then around the world through military power in the age of imperialism. America overcame slavery’s stigma to create the freest nation on earth. Today, people flock here, legally and illegally, to experience freedom.

            America must free itself of slave talk and stop chaining itself to the sensitivity of slavery.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).