There Should be Official Apologies for Slavery and Race Crimes!

RationalMale

This is a radical notion, but I firmly believe there should be official apologies for slavery and past racial sins.

There Should be Official Apologies for Slavery and Race Crimes!

Namely, the fact that well over a million Europeans were enslaved in the North African slave trade by 1780. http://www.historynet.com/how-long-did-the-moors-have-white-slaves.htm

See, while slavers who sold Africans would buy slaves from losers in tribal wars, African slave traders would literally depopulate European coasts like jihadists going to war.

"North African pirates abducted and enslaved more than 1 million Europeans between 1530 and 1780 in a series of raids which depopulated coastal towns from Sicily to Cornwall, according to new research."

https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2004/mar/11/highereducation.books

Other sources go into detail about how the devastation this horrible time period of race crimes had. (And talk about irony... African piracy attacking white Europeans. Some things never change huh?)

There Should be Official Apologies for Slavery and Race Crimes!

"What is most striking about Barbary slaving raids is their scale and reach. Pirates took most of their slaves from ships, but they also organized huge, amphibious assaults that practically depopulated parts of the Italian coast....

In the more frequent smaller raiding parties, just a few ships would operate by stealth, falling upon coastal settlements in the middle of the night so as to catch people “peaceful and still naked in their beds.” This practice gave rise to the modern-day Sicilian expression, pigliato dai turchi, or “taken by the Turks,” which means to be caught by surprise while asleep or distracted.

Constant predation took a terrible toll. Women were easier to catch than men, and coastal areas could quickly lose their entire child-bearing population. Fishermen were afraid to go out, or would sail only in convoys. Eventually, Italians gave up much of their coast."

(Robert C. Davis, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800, Palgrave Macmillan, 2003, 246 pp.)

While over a million Europeans were held in African slave trades, far less than half that amount of black slaves ever made it to what has become the modern USA. Henry Louis Gates Jr, Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University, estimates that at most, 450k black slaves ever made it to the USA.

There Should be Official Apologies for Slavery and Race Crimes!

http://www.theroot.com/how-many-slaves-landed-in-the-us-1790873989

Meaning that while in the USA, slavery is still a common topic and taught in schools, even talked about by Presidents as "America's original sin" the far worse and far wider white slavery in Africa, which literally devastated European nations and advancement for hundreds of years, is barely even mentioned despite resulting in far more white slaves in Africa than were ever brought to the USA. This is a racial injustice that needs to be addressed, and African nations and peoples need to accept the terrible legacy of racial hatred and slavery passed down by their ancestors. Apologies and possible restitution should be considered to right this horrible crime. Many famed scholars and celebrities agree that even if you did not personally own slaves, you benefited and have a duty to make this right.

There Should be Official Apologies for Slavery and Race Crimes!

Not only that, but while blacks owned so many white slaves in Europe, they were instrumental in spreading slavery to the USA as well, and a significant amount owned slaves in the USA. http://www.theroot.com/did-black-people-own-slaves-1790895436

There Should be Official Apologies for Slavery and Race Crimes!

Truly, official apologies are needed from black people and African nations for these terrible sins. After all, it's only right.

There Should be Official Apologies for Slavery and Race Crimes!
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