In a recent article, we considered the claims of Brittney Cooper, a professor at Rutgers University. She believes that all “white people”— whom she also refers to as “motherf***ers” who are “committed to being villains,” in a word, racists — need to be “taken out.”
[Sign petition to fire Cooper for her racist and divisive remarks here.]
One of her arguments is that, whenever non-whites try to have a “reckoning” with whites, the latter say, “It’s just human nature. If y’all had all of this power, you would have done the same thing, right?”
To this, Cooper insists,
No, that’s what white humans did, white human beings thought there’s a world here and we own it. Prior to them, black and brown people have been sailing across oceans, interacting with each other for centuries without total subjugation, domination and colonialism, right?
This must be the professor’s most ignorant of claims — which is saying much — that non-whites somehow behaved with more tolerance and civility whenever they landed on the shores of others.
While we don’t necessarily have historical records of black sub-Saharans “sailing across oceans,” we do know that they savagely warred on and enslaved one another. It is enough to point out that, as Michael Omolewa, a Nigerian diplomat, once did:
[T]he bulk of the supply [of African slaves sold to Europeans] came from the Nigerians. These Nigerian middlemen moved to the interior where they captured other Nigerians who belonged to other communities. . . . Many Nigerian middlemen began to depend totally on the slave trade and neglected every other business and occupation. The result was that when the trade was abolished [by England in 1807] these Nigerians began to protest. As years went by and the trade collapsed such Nigerians lost their sources of income and became impoverished.
These are not just historical observations. Despite Western efforts to abolish slavery, there are currently more than 50 million slaves—all of them in the non-Western world. To quote from one report,
As the world marks 400 years since the first recorded African slaves arrived in North America, slavery remains a modern-day scourge…. Africa has the highest prevalence of slavery, with more than seven victims for every 1,000 people.
Even the overly romanticized American Indians engaged in “total subjugation and domination”:
Long before Columbus, many historians agree that Native American tribes committed atrocities against each other, thirsting for power and land and killing anyone that stood in the way long before any European settler set foot on the continent.
More to the point, we have multiple examples of what non-whites did after landing on the shores of whites — and centuries before the transatlantic slave trade began.
In 711, for example, hordes of African Muslims (“Moors,” which came to mean dark-skinned or black Muslims) “godlessly invaded Spain to destroy it,” to quote from the Chronicle of 754. They did not pass “a place without reducing it, and getting possession of its wealth,” boasted al-Hakam, an early Muslim chronicler, “for Allah Almighty had struck with terror the hearts of the infidels.” One year later, the Muslims had, the Chronicle of 754 continues, “ruined beautiful cities, burning them with fire; condemned lords and powerful men to the cross; and butchered youths and infants with the sword.”
Several other early sources corroborate the devastation and persecution. The oldest account, the Tempore belli, tells of Muslims from Africa “sacking Christian temples [churches] and homes, burning the cities of those who resisted, and taking their young women as sexual slaves, all creating an indescribable terror.”
In 715, after the Muslim conquest of Spain was complete, its generals made the long trip to the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus. They brought with them thousands of camels laden with immense treasures and thirty thousand captives as a flesh-tribute to Caliph Al-Walid, who, according to al-Maqqari the Arab chronicler, was delighted by “the resources of all the people of Spain … its riches and the beauty of its young girls.”
Thereafter, and because the “Umayyads particularly valued blond or red-haired Franc or Galician women as sexual slaves,” writes historian Dario Fernandez-Morera, “al-Andalus [Muslim-controlled Spain] became a center for the trade and distribution of slaves [The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise, p. 159].” Christian subjects were sometimes even required to make an annual tribute “not of money, or horses, or arms, but of a hundred damsels (all to be distinguished for beauty) to ornament the harems [Spain and Portugal, p. 132].”
The Moorish conquest of Spain — and depredations deep into France, where tens of thousands of more Europeans were slaughtered and enslaved in the years leading up to the Battle of Tours, 732 — is just one example of what “black and brown people,” to use Ms. Cooper’s terminology, did to “white humans,” centuries before the transatlantic slave trade.
One can give many more examples. Consider what the Turks, who migrated from the eastern steppes of Asia, did to and in Europe. In the years preceding the First Crusade, Turkish invaders were running amok in Asia Minor, formerly a bastion of Christianity (now “Turkey”). An anonymous Georgian chronicler wrote of how “holy churches served as stables for their horses,” the “priests were immolated during the Holy Communion itself,” the “virgins defiled, the youths circumcised, and the infants taken away.” Similarly, Anna Comnena, the princess at Constantinople, wrote of how “cities were obliterated, lands were plundered, and the whole of Anatolia was stained with Christian blood.”
Centuries later, in 1438, Bartolomeo de Giano, an Italian Franciscan who was holed up in Constantinople as the Turks laid siege to it, described their slave raids throughout the Balkans. From Hungary, 300,000 were enslaved and “carried off in just a few days,” he wrote; from Serbia and Transylvania, 100,000 were “led away in iron fetters tied to the backs of horses … [and] women and children were herded by dogs without any mercy or piety. If one of them slowed down, unable to walk further because of thirst or pain, O Good Jesus! she immediately ended her life there in torment, cut in half.”
As one historian observes, “[t]he massive enslavement of slavic populations during this period gave rise, in fact, to our word ‘slave’: in Bartolomeo’s time, to be a slave was to be a Slav.”
The slave markets of the Ottoman sultanate were for centuries so inundated with European flesh that children sold for pennies, “a very beautiful slave woman was exchanged for a pair of boots, and four Serbian slaves were traded for a horse.”
It was the same elsewhere. In Crimea — where many millions of Slavs were enslaved by the Ottomans’ Muslim allies, the Tatars (Mongols turned Muslim) — an eyewitness described how Christian men were castrated and savagely tortured (including by gouging out their eyes), whereas “[t]he youngest women are kept for wanton pleasures.”
As for the Moors, even after being ejected out of Spain and back to North Africa (or Barbary), they continued raiding virtually every corner of Europe — going as far as Britain, Ireland, Denmark, and Iceland in search of plunder and slaves. These raids were so successful that, “between 1530 and 1780[,] there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast,” to quote American historian Robert Davis.
With countless European women selling for the “price of an onion,” little wonder that by the late 1700s, European observers noted how “the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather white complexion.”
Then there was the abysmal treatment meted out to European slaves. As Robert Playfair (b.1828), who served for years as a consul in Barbary, explained, “[i]n almost every case they [European slaves] were hated on account of their religion.” Three centuries earlier, John Foxe (b.1516) had written in his Book of Martyrs that “[i]n no part of the globe are Christians so hated, or treated with such severity, as at Algiers.”
The punishments these European slaves received for real or imagined offenses beggared description:
If they speak against Mahomet [blasphemy], they must become Mahometans, or be impaled alive. If they profess Christianity again, after having changed to the Mahometan persuasion, they are roasted alive [as apostates], or thrown from the city walls, and caught upon large sharp hooks, on which they hang till they expire.
These are just a very few examples to counter Professor Cooper’s assertion:
Prior to them [whites], black and brown people have been sailing across oceans, interacting with each other for centuries without total subjugation, domination and colonialism, right?
Wrong — abysmally so.
It is simply absurd for anyone — anyone at all — to suggest that only white people enslaved others. It is doubly absurd for someone who pretends to be a professor of a university. Slavery has been a virtually universal practice throughout history, and it is only coming to be understood as cruel and an offence against rights. Indeed, Saudis enslaved black Africans long after slavery was condemned by majority white populations, and only abandoned slavery (if in fact they really have, which we may doubt, given the way they treat foreign domestic workers) in the 1960s (I think), and ISIS has been enslaving Yazidis since its inception.
As to Cooper pretending to teach at a university. This is not within the reasonable purview of academic freedom. It is simply false to suggest that only white folk have enslaved other people. Presumably the university does not dare to fire her, because she would make more noise about that than she does about the silly positions she defends.
Thanks for this. It is beyond belief that anyone this stupid can teach anywhere, let alone at a university.
A while back, Raymond, you cited statistics on the number of whites (mainly Europeans) who were enslaved by Muslims. The numbers ranged from 15 to 40 million based on the two academics you cited. May I ask you to republish them again? The undergraduate students that I have instructed and supervised in the area of ME studies have been woefully unaware of these historical facts. Thank you for the research and advocacy you have provided throughout the years!
And pales incomparison to Christian slavery!
Interesting article – thank you ( not that the others are not 😊)
I had to laugh about this so-called professor’s ignorance. What an indictment of the American education system!
Being born and raised in South Africa and well schooled in history, I can assure you that no black ethnic groups south of the Sahara had ‘dugouts’ that could sail anywhere but across crocodile invested rivers.
Most of the tribes were hunter catheters and grazed cattle. They were ruled by chiefs, most were warlike and cruel and had their own black slaves captured from other tribes.
If it were not for colonialism they would still be uneducated and running around in the bush wearing animal skins.
People like this racist black professor need to be grateful for living in America with ‘equal opportunity’.
With many people here and elsewhere, black, brown and white, being civilised is only a veneer.
“hunter catheters” Please proofread before you post, Ma’am.
Thank you. Are you perfect?
No, ma’am, I’m certainly not. If I had a mistake like that, however, I would appreciate someone calling me on it. I meant no disrespect.
I realised after I had posted my comment what a fuax pas that was. I have since removed autocorrect
Obviously, English must be her second language. It is mine also.
You make an incorrect assumption 😊.
English is my first language! It was ‘auto correct’ that changed the word, which I only noticed once I had posted my comment.
I have since removed that feature.
Granted she is a classic example of a racist. However, to say Africans would not have advanced if not for colonialism that did so for natural resources is a stretch.
Yes, in ZA at least, colonialism began when the Dutch East India Company set up a halfway station in 1652 on route to East Asia during the spice trade, because sailors fell ill, mainly with scurvy, during such a long journey.
Diamonds were first discovered in 1867 and gold in 1884.
No one can say how Africans would have developed if they had been left alone. Very likely like humans elsewhere they would have done the same and formed nations on their own.
You quickly pointed out the Professor’s racist rhetoric but seem to be oblivious to your own hypocrisy. You speak as though your ancestors were given a mandate from the imperialism gods to invade and conquer the southern Bantu people as a favor to them. The audacity to assume that their lives required European intervention is mind blowing. Egypt and Timbuktu were centers of education, but even if the tribes had remained “uneducated” bush people wearing animal skins as you say, why should that be of any consequence to you! Truly none of us can really know what might have become of the continent without European colonialism.
It is also a fact that Jews were among the most responsible for the slave trade in the USA. There is extensive literature on this.
Imo your comment is somewhat misleading. There is also literature refuting what you say. The Jews were not “most responsible for the slave trade in the USA.”. There were some traders from elsewhere and others who owned slaves in the south, like most Americans did at that time, but their numbers were small by comparison to the rest.
History is a discipline subject to too many interests and manipulations. We can see this in so many ways. One of them is what Raymond is writing on a daily basis. It is not the only aspect of political incorrectness:
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/2021-06-22/ty-article-magazine/.premium/slave-owners-confederates-and-wrestlers-jews-of-the-u-s-south-in-the-showcase/0000017f-da74-dea8-a77f-de766f7c0000
The Uncomfortable Truths of Jewish Life in the U.S. South
Jun 22, 2021
“An advertisement in North Carolina’s Wilmington Journal in 1847 reveals a
stain on local Jewish history. Ansley Davis, who came from Petersburg,
Virginia, published the ad under the heading “Negroes Wanted.” The text
stated: “I wish to purchase a large number of Negroes of both sexes,
from the age of 14 to 30, for which I will pay the highest cash marke
price.” Davis, whose family owned one of the largest Jewish-run
slave-trading companies in the entire South, would tour the region every
summer seeking new slaves, which he later sold.
I suppose one’s views on the Jews depend on whether one is an anti-Semite or not!
The same is said in CNN
In that era Jews were a small minority of the US population. 1820 the US population was 9,6 million with a Jewish population of about 3 thousand.
There were many slave traders and Davis was not the biggest. In fact the first slave holder in the US was Black. New Orleans area had several Black slave holders that had slaves up to 100. An era where slavery was still acceptable.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/men-who-made-slavery-big-business/618628/
Thanks Raymond!!!
I must have missed the posting by Raymond. Looks like he did, but it’s now unavailable. May I ask you to send that info to me?
This is what slavery looks like RIGHT NOW. White culture is the ONLY culture to have abolished slavery worldwide a century and a half ago, while every other race is holding CURRENT SLAVE MARKETS, and black people attack the US over slavery, but champion African countries.
BLACK countries are the worst of all, with CURRENT SLAVE MARKETS IN EVERY SINGLE COUNTRY IN AFRICA. Where is BLM’s outrage?
You will see not a single BLM protest against any of it–quite the opposite, in fact. Black people universally support the US government giving billions of dollars in aide to African countries fully supporting slavery.
THE FACTS ARE IRREFUTABLE: BLACK PEOPLE LOVE SLAVERY, THEY JUST DON’T WANT TO BE THE SLAVES.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/118007b13ab49cc5d4641b631205b7e92d64776960350224195a6958be51c1ce.jpg?w=800&h=380
In northern Africa in the Sahel regions of Mauritania etc., slavery by the Arabs is still very much alive and well.
Good evening, Tershia! 🙂
Yeah, there and everywhere else in Africa.
When was the last time you heard an American black man or woman take issue with slavery in Africa? I guess their interest in stopping slavery is limited to our own country. White people, on the other hand, were not satisfied to stop in only in our country, but abolished slavery in every white country in the entire world. Have a look at the map, it’s the WHITE race who unified on this and ended it everywhere we have control, and it’s the BLACK race who perpetuates it everywhere they have control.
BLACK PEOPLE LOVE SLAVERY, THEY JUST DON’T WANT TO BE THE SLAVES.
This commentary is ridiculous, and biased. I can imagine when one is living a challenging existence in their own country they may not have the wherewithal to also fight for others on a different continent. And it’s not as if mainstream media has any interest in highlighting the plight of Africans.
Your argument that Europeans worked to abolish slavery globally is moot since Europe also had been the primary perpetrators at the time. Black people love slavery? That seems a stretch however, quite evidently the same could be said of Europeans.
Why would black people’s interest against the institution of slavery stop at the borders? It certainly didn’t with white countries. Are you saying that white people are inherently superior to black people in terms of responsibility stretching across borders?–because that’s just racist. lol
That’s not me saying that, that’s the Global Slavery Index saying it–have a look. All white countries are all green, all black countries red. The math is pretty simple. You don’t even need a calculator for this one.
https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/118007b13ab49cc5d4641b631205b7e92d64776960350224195a6958be51c1ce.jpg?w=800&h=380&w=600&h=321
That seems rather niggardly.
https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=niggardly&utm_source=extension_contextmenu
You seem to epitomize the word the best.
…and you seem to post bitchy comments that do not advance the topic. People who have totally the argument tend to get personal when they run out of anything sensible to advance their arguments.