Because the ancestors of white Americans have never been enslaved, whites can never know what true oppression is.
So argued Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) at a recent hearing on DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”). At one point she yelled out:
You tell me which white man was dragged out of their homes! You tell me which one of them got dragged all the way across an ocean and told that you’re gunna go to work! We’re gunna steal your wives—we’re gunna rape your wives. That didn’t happen—that is oppression!
Such statements reveal a staggering level of ignorance. Untold millions of white people have been enslaved, raped, and forced into labor since well before recorded history. And not a few of their enslavers were non-whites.
Consider Mongol enslavement of Europeans, particularly under the Muslim Tatars. Described by contemporary Christians as the “heathen giant who feeds on our blood,” the Crimean khanate alone is estimated to have enslaved and sold “like sheep” some three million Slavs—Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, and others—between just 1450 and 1783.
In fact, our word “slave” is derived from the word “Slav.” To be a Slav was to be a slave and vice-versa.
Similarly, according to the conservative estimate of American professor Robert Davis, “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.”
Thus, in response to Crockett’s rhetorical questions—“which white man was dragged out of their homes!”—we can safely say that at least 4.25 million Europeans were enslaved by non-whites (Mongols and Arabs) between just 1450-1780.
Records for specific years also exist. In 1438, Bartolomeo de Giano, an Italian Franciscan described the Turkic slave raids throughout the Balkans. From Hungary, 300,000 were enslaved and “carried off in just a few days.” 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.”
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.”
This is to say nothing of the countless Europeans who were enslaved before the modern era, when accurate records were not kept or are lost. We know, for instance, that once Islam became a great power among men, beginning in the seventh century, countless successful slave raids were launched against Europe, though exact numbers are seldom relayed. Rather, sources talk of “many” or “a large amount” of Christians being hauled off to North Africa or the Middle East.
As far as the sixteenth century, Muslims were raiding and hauling off slaves from Iceland; and America’s very first war as a nation, the First Barbary War (1801-1805) was occasioned by Muslims enslaving American sailors.
As for Crockett’s suggestion that the wives of white men never experienced what the wives of black men did—rape by their masters—in fact, it’s quite the opposite: records make perfectly clear that Arabs, Mongols, and Turks particularly coveted European women for slaves and concubines. This traces back to Muhammad who enticed his followers to attack Byzantine territories in order to enslave fair haired and skinned women (banu al-asfar). Because the Arabs “particularly valued blond or red-haired women as sexual slaves … al-Andalus [Muslim-controlled Spain] became a center for the trade and distribution of slaves,” writes Professor Darío Fernández-Morera in his Myth of the Andalusian Paradise.
As for the Crimean slave trade, after describing how the Muslim Mongols castrated and savagely tortured European men (including by gouging out their eyes), an eyewitness adds that the “women are kept for wanton pleasures.”
In short, Congresswoman Crockett is flat out wrong to suggest that whites have never been dragged from their homes, enslaved, and raped by nonwhites.
The logic of her enter tirade—to defend and permit DEI practices to continue—is also worth noting: because whites have never experienced slavery, she argues, and because slavery is apparently something that no one can ever recover from, reparations (including via DEI practices) are in order.
In reality, of course, the Arabs, Turks, and Mongols never made “reparations” to the white man; rather, Europeans overcame their abusers and enslavers through sheer will and determination—through hard work, ingenuity, and perseverance. These are all splendid traits for all humans to have, though none of them can ever be attained, much less developed, by those accustomed to living off “freebies.”
Yet, for those who, like Crockett, believe that no one can overcome oppression except through artificial “assistance”—that is, for those who subscribe to Fake History—the constant need for “freebies” is all that they will ever see.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.