SOME HISTORY ON SLAVERY

An Old White Professor Speaks to the Class of 2020

A dose of reality for those who think they can change the world simply by following woke causes.
by Abraham H. Miller
 
This is an excerpt on slavery taken from Professor Miller’s commencement address. It is critical that all of history be taught. Our kids are being indoctrinated with selected and fabricated parts of history being taught. Education teaches all of history with its glory and gory details.
 
"Your generation thinks you have discovered the evils of racism and discrimination and that both are uniquely Western institutions.
 
Let me burst your bubble. There are few societies, if any, that have not practiced slavery, and more white people have been enslaved by North Africans than Africans by white people.
 
In 1785, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams negotiated with Tripoli’s envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, over the enslavement of Americans. They asked Abdrahaman what right he had to seize slaves. He replied that his right was “founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran.”
 
But if your teachers were to teach about that — assuming they would want to — political outrage and cries of Islamophobia would ensue, and they would be cowed into submission.
 
Two African kings, Tegesibu of Dahomey and Alvarez of the Congo, numbered among the richest men in the world in the early 18th century. Their wealth came from providing slaves to the Portuguese.
 
Slavery is evil in all its manifestations, whether the horror of the Middle Passage, the North African slave raids on Italy, or the Ottoman forays into the Slavic countries. The word itself comes from the Muslims of Andalusia (Spain) taking slaves from among Eastern European Slavic peoples.
 
And while your generation is marching, protesting, and calling for revolution because of the remnants of racism in this society, you need to be reminded that black chattel slavery, in all its ugly forms, is still alive and well in Libya in the 21st century.
 
So, when you say that racism and slavery are uniquely Western institutions, you are not simply wrong, you are pathetically ignorant."