Sweet Nikole claims slavery in America started in 1619 when
the first black slaves arrived in Virginia
Only they weren't really slaves that were indentured
servants. English law did not recognize slavery at that time. English called indentured
servants “slaves” because they did labor
Nikole claims Jamestown manager bought these men and woman
so they must be slaves
He traded food for the black people, most of whom later
became free as most indentured servant did.
One, Anthony Johnson, an African, actually became a slave
owner of black people when slavery did become legal later.
Nikole’s Project 1619 depends on a lot of a conspiracy theory
created by a whacko journalist in the 1980s for her mistaken data. But then
almost all of the essays that make up Project 1619 depict theories that even
black historians 20 years ago saw as the lunatic fringe.
Nikole follows in the footsteps of the 1840s abolitionists, well-meaning
lunatics – only she takes her project one step further into paranoid delusion.
This crew of nut cases – some with impressive college
degrees – doesn’t like us using that term “indentured servants” or the claim
that white people must have been slaves to if they were indentured.
And though white and black or both sold on the auction
blocks blacks in New Orleans; whites in Philadelphia
All coming to the block and chains, some beaten with whips,
all of them like horses, teeth, eyes. Limbs examined to make sure white or
black they were strong enough for the labor that their masters would put them
through.
Nikole tells us that black slavery began in America in 1619
which is simply not true. The Spanish had black slaves in Florida, even
Georgia, not to mention other parts of the twin-American continents before the
ship with blacks showed up off the coast of Virginia.
And the Spanish didn’t invent black Slavery, the Arabs did,
the Spanish only brought the slaves here.
Slavery wasn’t even new back then. Native Americans made
slaves of people long before the shadow of white man showed on the horizon, for
labor, for torture, even as food. Natives made slaves of black men, too, and
white men.
Though Nikole blames white men for black slavery, and claims
American wealth came on the backs of blacks, not Germans or Pols or other Eastern
Europe stock, or the prisoners who came to work for their freedom, the way the
sold called “slaves of Jamestown” did.
Those white slaves here before the blacks arrived don’t
count, nor do the Irish who sailed here in coffin ships, with mothers throwing
their babies out the portholes so as to not live in slavery. Their tale of mid
passage long erased by the myth of the black Passage. The Irish the Germans, the pols the Hungarians
all part of that slave trade that was not made illegal in 1608.
The white slaves who later blended in with their Masters in
order to escape the whip and the stocks and being hunted down, who later became
part of a different wage slavery, working in company towns, living in company
houses, forced to buy company food, often dying of disease or watching their
children perish, resentful workers who spent their lives waiting for freed slaves
to come north and steal their petty underpaid petty jobs in slaughter houses or
in places like the Triangle Shirt factory.
White slaves must be racist because they want to survive.
Nikole wants us to believe that America was built on slavery.
Some of it was. Most of it was built on the backs of immigrants who were treated
almost as bad as black slaves, who worked hard to became assimilated. Nikole wants
us to believe blacks and the abolitionist whackos like John Brown freed
themselves, when it was the blood of Irish and Germans and Pols and other white
Americans who accomplished it. Nikole wants us to think Lincoln was a racist
because he didn’t’ know what to do with black, uneducated, unskilled, illiterate
slaves once they were set free – even consider sending them back to Africa.
Nobody knew. Not even the abolitionists. It was all a work in progress. Many of
the black slaves actually returned to the plantations where they continued to
work with and care for their former masters – an option the white wage slaves
of the north did not have.
The north – particularly those abolitionists out of Boston –
like to brag out they freed black slaves in the north without war decades before
war forced the south to do so, neglecting to say that the Boston slave masters mostly
didn’t set anybody free, but sold those black bodies to the south while continuing
to pay slave wages to the Irish immigrants arriving in Coffin ships.
Project 1619 appears to be a lie from start to finish, written
by a pack of people who would have been considered lunatics even to black
historians a few decades ago, who are trying to reinvent history by dragging
out long-discredited ideas with the questionable aid of The New York Times
(which is seeking to take its place along the great abolitionist newspapers of
the past to make up for its support of slavery when slavery was still legal).
