Black National Anthem

[SunsetBengal]

(07-05-2020, 02:39 AM)BmorePat87 Wrote: Yea, slavery has existed throughout all of recorded human history. Nearly every region has struggled with it at some point in time.

I would advise against using unreliable sources like Caldron Pool, however, if you are trying to learn more about history.

For example, the quote from Thomas Sowell attempts to downplay the impact of the transatlantic slave trade and suggest that white Christians had it worse, but he's referring to a very specific figure: slaves imported into only the 13 colonies prior to 1776 versus a North African slave trade that existed hundreds of years prior. 

The transatlantic slave trade resulted in the largest forced population shift in all of human history: 10-13m African slaves taken to the Americas. It's estimated that maybe 500,000 to 1,500,000 white Christians were enslaved by North Africans in a 400 year period. It is estimated that there were up to a million more African slaves that died during the transportation to the US than there were white Christian slaves enslaved period. 

The claims made later are questionable as well. Attempting to portray abolition as a uniquely Christian invention is wrong. For one, abolishing slavery was not first done by Christians. Second, you won't find many historians treating European Christians as a monolith because they were not. Third, the transatlantic slave trade was a European invention, so it's weird to praise European Christians for getting rid of the terrible system they developed without properly giving them any of the blame. 

Further review of Caldron Pool reveals it to be a far right, Christian propaganda website that deals in pseudoscience and falsehoods, so I can see why the author wrote that, but there's far too many things taken wildly out of context or outright falsified to take it seriously. 

So, we should reject and refute an article stocked with direct quotes from what many would consider to be reliable sources?  One is a historian, author, and former Mayor of Ghana, one quote was cited from a Surgeon on a slave ship, another from a Nigerian who is a Professor of African Studies, one from an actual person who was held in slavery, another from an Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies, one from a Nigerian author that was part of an essay posted in the Wall Street Journal, African-American economist and Social Theorist Thomas Sowell. and even a citation from The Washington Post?

I completely understand the need to debunk disinformation and items falsely portrayed as factual.  However, this particular piece appears to be legitimately resourced and written to shed light upon historical activities based on the opinions and accounts of people who have expanded knowledge of, and or actual participation in the actual slave trade process.