Sept. 13, 2025
The Whitewashing of Slavery, Part 2: Propaganda, Racism & the War on History
In Part 2 of our deep dive, we unpack how right-wing influencers like Candace Owens and Matt Walsh, and platforms like PragerU, are rewriting history to downplay the horrors of American chattel slavery. We explore the false equivalence between U.S. slavery and ancient systems, examine how Nazi Germany borrowed from Jim Crow laws, and discuss how caste, race, and colonial violence continue to shape our present.
From revisionist narratives about African complicity to the demonization of Indigenous peoples, this episode exposes the propaganda campaign to erase the legacy of white supremacy in the U.S.
Welcome to Unwashed and Unruly, where we Fact Check your favorite delusions.
Today we're kicking off Part 2 of the whitewashing of American slavery.
If you've ever heard someone say slavery was everywhere or Africans sold each other too, this is the episode you don't want to miss.
0:28
I'm your host Lola Michaels with walking citation Ezra Saeed.
Hey, Lola.
Hi, everybody.
And culture Surfer Cam Cruise.
Hi, guys.
Please make sure to rate and review us wherever you're listening.
0:43
Seriously, do write a review.
We are listening to you and you are listening to us.
You can read.
We're not listening to you, but do write a review, please.
You can reach us at unwashedunruly@gmail.com.
1:07
There's a wide range of distortions used to downplay the brutality of US slavery.
Right wing ideologues like Candace Owens and Matt Walsh and Prager U propaganda are twisting history to erase the legacy of Black subjugation and racial repression.
1:22
They recycle tropes about Indigenous savages benefiting from European colonization, pushing another white man's burden to justify violence and genocide.
Some states have approved this marketing for educational use, attempting to indoctrinate the next generation with these bigoted myths.
1:40
What are these reactionary narratives, and whose interests do they serve?
No matter when or where, slavery is and has always been a crime that reduces a human being to a state of bondage.
But in emphasizing ancient slavery, these conservative mouthpieces are not expressing concern for the past.
1:58
Their purpose is to tell black people to move on and to claim that chattel slavery in the US wasn't unique.
OK, so I want to start a little bit since this is Part 2 with what we talked about in the last episode with the slave system as being a defining mark of America, the foundation of American capitalism, and black oppression being the engine that drives American capitalism.
2:28
We talked about the through line from slavery to today.
Even after slavery was abolished, the concept of race continued to justify segregation, colonization, economic exploitation.
These methods were used to put blacks in their place, so to speak.
2:45
The Black Codes, Jim Crow laws, modern policing, political disenfranchisement, legal discrimination, extra legal violence, and mass incarceration all grew from these racial hierarchies rooted in plantation slavery.
And even though that was a long list, I feel like we barely touched the surface in the last episode.
3:04
So one of the things I wanted to start with was about Jim Crow segregation specifically and how it got replicated by other racist regimes.
Yeah, any one of those people who tell you that black people should get over the past and move on, they'll tell you, of course, they hate the Nazi regime.
3:20
But what they will not tell you is the Nazi regime, upon taking power in the early 1930s, drafted a set of laws known as the Nuremberg Laws.
Those laws were used to, they had another name which I think gives gives away with their purposes, the law for the protection of German Purity and German blood.
3:40
So I I think you get the idea.
Purity, huh?
Not.
Not very ambiguous.
No, no, no.
The Nazis were were not for ambiguity or euphemisms.
And in drafting those laws which went into effect in 1935, they very much relied on and said so openly American Jim Crow laws.
4:01
They carefully studied them.
In particular there were three or so aspects that they focused on.
One was so-called anti miscegenation laws.
Now, the very word miscegenation is an invented word that the US came up with, Invented in the North, by the way, not the South that the US came up with to denote interracial marriage.
4:20
It's not a word that has any prior existence.
It's a word that they put together.
So it's not a scientific term, is it?
Well, racist science, you know, there was a lot of race science back in the 19th century and 18th century.
I believe it was racist sociology.
4:35
But it's really just, it's just a fancy way of saying we don't want blacks and whites to intermarry.
The other aspect that they studied was segregation.
The whole Jim Crow system was based on enforced legal segregation and subordination of the minority, in this case the black minority.
4:52
So they studied that very carefully to see how they could apply to Germany.
And the third aspect was how do you define immigration and how do you define citizenship?
They looked at the 1924 US Immigration Act which set racial quotas and barred citizenship for many non white immigrants and this was seen by the Nazis as something to emulate when they were working out the Nuremberg Laws.
5:14
The Nuremberg Laws were a set of laws that were meant to legally codify the second class and subordinate status of first and foremost Jews, but also other groups that were considered well to use the German term intervention subhuman by the Nazis such as the Roma and other peoples who were in Germany.
5:36
So to give you an example, the Nazi Handbook for Law and legislation that's the name of the book which was a guide for Nazi policy makers held up the American system as an example stating in 1936 quote, the United States of America have laws for the protection of the blood that we as Nazis can only envy.
5:59
Close quote.
That's not a great legacy to have.
Well, but it is America's legacy.
OK so that was a source of inspiration for drafting their anti-Semitic legislation.
What about other places where we've seen apartheid, like South Africa?
6:16
Without question, the architects of apartheid paid close attention to the American South.
Racial classifications, segregation of public spaces, prohibition of interracial marriages, residential segregation, all of these things which actually started in the United States have versions of them that were implemented in South Africa under apartheid.
6:39
So the Population Registration Act of 1950, that was racial classification in South Africa.
It was white colored or Bantu.
In India, the Reservation of Separate Amenities Act of 1953.
You can think of that as separate but not equal.
6:55
The Prohibition of Mixed Marriages Act of 1949 and the Immorality Act of 1950 in South Africa, which basically outlawed interracial marriages.
The Group Areas Act of 1950, which separated racial groups by designating specific residential and business sections for each of them.
7:14
These were all replicas, obviously adjusted for the South African terrain of what the US had done in the Southland and Jim Crow.
Again, I think it's useful to look at quotes from South African officials.
For example, a South African government Commission in the 1930s praised the American approach, saying quote, the United States of America with its large Negro population has found it necessary to protect the white population against miscegenation and has provided an example which South Africa could well follow.
7:46
Close quote.
Later, Prime Minister DF Milan, a key architect of apartheid, defended apartheid, saying and he was speaking to the American press when he said this quote.
In the United States, you have your Negro problem.
You keep your white race white, and we want to keep our white race white.
8:07
Wow, so it's not even subtext, it's just right out there.
No, there's no subtext.
There's no subtext to any of this stuff.
We're talking about Nazis and apartheid and Jim Crow.
They're all cut up the same cloth.
I'm really surprised to hear how much the model of American racism was exported around the world.
8:24
Yeah.
And I think that's really important because when we're talking about the way that this slavery propaganda is coming around today, part of the way that they try to diminish the brutality of racism in the US is by talking about how slavery wasn't that bad in the US or, you know, everyone kind of did it.
8:48
So I wanted to talk a little bit about this in terms of what we addressed in the last episode about this rollback of quote, UN quote woke education and trying to, I think, Cam, you mentioned reclaim the narrative to disappear any history at all that talks about the atrocities by the US ruling class or basically disappear any instances of white supremacy in this country.
9:14
So some of the ways that they do this is by equating all forms of historical servitude.
You know, they're all the same.
Slavery's universal human history that goes back to ancient times.
The Romans did it.
Why do you focus on black people?
Sometimes they're very explicit, like, oh, slavery wasn't that bad.
9:33
I think we'll get into that a little bit later.
And then another way they do it is to say black people were complicit.
So Africans had slaves.
Indigenous people had slaves.
They were the brutal ones, not the white slave traders.
So we're going to listen to this clip by Candace Owens.
9:53
She's a conservative political commentator.
She's known for many things.
Her outspoken criticisms of Black Lives Matter, she's associated with right wing platforms like Prager U Prager U is this right wing media organization.
10:09
It's not a university, even though it's short for Prager University and it was founded by Dennis Prager.
So Candace Owens is doing this clip for Prager U called A Short History of Slavery.
It is a 5 minute clip.
10:25
We'll link to it, but we're just going to edit some of the main arguments.
You can watch the whole thing on their channel or on YouTube.
And now for a brief history of slavery.
Here's the first thing you need to know.
Slavery was not invented by white people.
10:42
It did not start in 1619 when the first slaves came to Jamestown.
It existed before then.
It did not start in 1492 when Columbus discovered the New World.
In fact, when the intrepid explorer landed in the Bahamas, the native Taino tribe hoped that he would help them defeat their aggressive neighbors, the Caribs.
11:03
The Caribs enslaved the Taino and on occasion served them for dinner.
Slavery existed in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East.
The word slave actually comes from the Slavs of Eastern Europe.
Millions of them, all white by the way, were captured and enslaved by Muslims in the 9th century and later by the Ottoman Turks.
11:26
Slavery existed when the Roman Empire controlled the Mediterranean and most of Europe from the 1st through the 5th centuries.
Slavery existed when Alexander the Great conquered Persia in the 4th century BC.
It was so common that Aristotle simply considered it natural.
11:44
The slave master model was just how the world operated in the great philosopher's day.
Slavery existed during the time of the ancient Egyptians, 5000 years ago.
As far back as we can go in human history, we find slavery.
12:02
Intrepid explorer Christopher Columbus.
Yeah, fucking intrepid.
By the way.
I don't know why she needs to cite Aristotle.
She could cite something far, far nearer and dearer to Prager Yu's heart, which is the Bible.
The Bible says it says to the slave owner to be kind to the slave, and it says to the slave to serve the master faithfully.
12:26
You know what it doesn't say?
Slavery is wrong.
No, it doesn't say that, doesn't say slavery is wrong, and it doesn't say you should end slavery.
It doesn't even call for the manumission of slaves.
Would you call the Bible a pro slave text?
Yeah, it's a text that apologizes for slavery.
12:43
It's a text that.
Regular It's a text that regulates slavery in an in a sort of more kindly way, but it is a pro slavery text now that's not it's not even meant as an insult of the Bible because the Bible was written by human beings in the 1st century AD we.
13:00
Need some sound effects for this.
The The Bible was written by human beings in the 1st century AD at the height of the Roman Empire, which was a massive, powerful empire in the Mediterranean where the dominant form of production was through slave labor.
Nobody who wrote the Bible could conceive of maintaining such a society without massive use of slaves, so all they could think of is be kind to your slaves.
13:25
So why do you think she's going on about ancient slavery and slavery in other parts of the world?
Because what she's trying to say is there's nothing unique or interesting or peculiar about America's peculiar institution, right?
Slavery.
13:41
In other words, to Miss Owens, if we're going to talk about American slavery, we could just as well be talking about slavery in ancient Rome.
To her, the two are the same.
Can we talk a little bit about Candace Owens before we go into the Roman stuff?
For people who don't know, Candace Owens is an African American.
14:00
That might be shocking hearing hearing the clip you just heard.
Candace Owens is a black woman who lives in a sunken place.
She for sure does.
The real Candace Owens is screaming behind her eyes and terror.
Candace Owens supports the white patriarchy.
14:16
And I'm speaking directly to you right now, Candace Owens.
And sit down while I tell you this girl, they are not going to love you back, OK?
They will never love you back.
It sounds like.
A charming, charming woman.
Yeah.
So what you're saying is?
Like all these people are charming, charming people.
14:34
Yes.
Anybody who wants to argue for slavery, it's just like, come on guys.
Like your starting point, it's a red flag.
You should know.
You shouldn't be making this argument just just as was at the starting point.
Yeah, so we talked about this in par one that American chattel slavery was very uniquely brutal and racialized and foundational to EU s s economic and social order.
14:56
And So what you're saying as comparing it to ancient forms of slavery is just a political tool to deflect accountability.
But I hear this argument like a lot about Roman slavery.
Can you say something about Roman slavery and how it was different from US slavery?
15:13
It's not even that like American slavery was more brutal than Roman slavery per SE.
It's not a competition of brutalities.
Roman slavery was really fucking brutal.
It's that the impact of American slavery lives with us to this day.
15:31
It is something that is not gone and dead.
It is very much in the present.
Roman slavery was long ago, and it's a system that fell apart long ago and has zero impact on the present.
15:47
So when we talk about Roman slavery, we can talk about it with a certain detachment because it doesn't impact us, but it also is a fundamentally different form of slavery, even though it's also chattel slavery.
It is chattel slavery, but it's fundamentally different.
16:03
I think part of the reason why they're saying this is because they want to downplay race and say it had nothing to do with race.
Right.
Well, there are two things that differentiate Roman slavery, that there are more than two things, but there are two things I want to focus on that differentiate Roman slavery from American slavery.
16:22
One, Roman slavery didn't produce for the capitalist market because there was no such thing as a capitalist market in ancient Rome.
So Roman slavery produced for the Roman economy, which was based on the collection of tribute and rent from conquered territory.
So if you were a slave in the conquered territory, whether it was mining or in agriculture, you had to collect the material that you can pay to the center of power in Rome as a province as the tribute or the rent it produced for consumption by elites and aristocrats.
16:50
When you hear about all the amazing things that Rome excelled in a trade and all that stuff that wasn't for the people, that was for a very thin layer of elites in in the Roman aristocracy.
It produced to sustain the growing populations of the cities and their slums.
And that's where you get the large scale agricultural plantations and for example Italy and all worked by slaves.
17:13
It produced for state supplies, bullion and coinage, gold, silver, copper weaponry, all extracted through mining and quarrying.
That was a particularly brutal form of enslavement, where the slaves died so quickly that they didn't even bother bringing women for the slaves to naturally reproduce because it was easier to just go conquer new territories and get new slaves.
17:33
They used slaves for urban and domestic service, which included everything from concubines to gladiators to instructors and teachers to secretaries and eventually even government bureaucrats.
So you get here a sense where Roman slavery was very different and that was much more variegated.
17:49
There were no teachers in American slavery.
Slaves who are teachers.
There were no secretaries.
There were no government bureaucrats who were slaves.
Yeah, if I was a slave teacher, I would be teaching those kids all kinds of fucked up stuff.
But it was like the height of fashion for a Roman aristocrat to have a Greek slave teacher.
18:08
And also the whole idea within the US was that black people were biologically inferior.
Yeah, that brings up the other thing about Roman slavery that was so different from the American system of slavery.
The Romans had absolutely no concept of race.
18:26
The overwhelming majority of slaves in Rome were the product of wars, of conquest.
It had nothing to do with whether they were white, black, brown, anything else.
Lost a war?
Tough shit.
Yeah, you're now a slave.
18:41
Yeah.
And you mentioned that they had a different concept of race, or the concept of race really hadn't been invented in the way that we know it now.
So like, how did your skin color affect how you were treated in society?
Or did it have an impact on your status in society?
18:57
The Romans had no concept of race.
I would go further and say human beings had no concept of race until really the early modern era.
Now the Romans weren't stupid people.
They could see that to the north people tended to be lighter skinned than they were, and to the South people tended to be darker skinned than they were.
19:17
And they would come up with explanations for this.
The Greeks did the same thing.
The explanations would be, you know, the people closer to the equator of the Earth are closer to the sun, and so their skin tends to be darker because they're closer to the sun.
The people further to the north are further away from the sun, so they tend to be lighter skinned because they're further away from the sun.
19:37
These are explanations because they're seeing phenomena that they trying to.
The geographic.
Yeah, geographic and.
They're trying to understand.
Yeah, there's now we know that your skin color is really based on how cool you are, and the cooler you are, the darker your skin is.
Of course, of course, of course, of course.
19:53
So the point is, is that it wasn't like people are naturally suited to be slaves or anything like that.
Yeah.
Well, I mean to the Roman, everyone who's not Roman is naturally suited to serve the.
Roman, yeah.
But to the Roman, that's a cultural thing.
Culture is a learned trait.
20:10
If you are a Germanic barbarian and taken as a child and raised in Rome, for example, you have now been inculcated with the also superior culture of Rome.
So you're groovy.
You're now a Roman, especially if you're in the aristocratic circles.
I mean, that's the other thing was all very class based.
20:26
You know, there was never ever any conception that skin color was in any way shape or form tied to inherent superiority or inferiority.
So there was no concept of race.
Yeah, that's what's so different.
Only American slavery created that racial hierarchy, and that lasted generations.
20:48
Last to this day.
Yeah, and it defines citizenship, and it defined freedom, and it defined your personhood and your identity.
And that racial caste system did not exist in Rome.
And I wanted to talk a little bit more about caste because we brought it up in the last episode, because I think it's fundamental to understanding black oppression in the US And the whole point of caste is that black people cannot shed their ancestry.
21:15
It defines them.
It limits their social mobility.
A caste is a system of social stratification in which people are divided into hereditary groups.
It's often depending on where you are in the world, linked to occupation, social status, and notions of purity.
21:35
Sometimes those notions, like if you're in India, are notions of ritualistic purity.
If you're in America, notions of racial purity.
Membership in a cast is typically determined by birth.
It's not by choice, and the boundaries between casts are usually very rigid.
21:52
So that's what a cast is.
You're born into it and you can't get out of it and your children can't get out of it.
Yeah, I learned about this from a number of books on trying to figure out like what is black in society.
And I don't know if this is a common thing that people talk about, but the one drop rule, which doesn't apply to any other group than American blacks and it determines who's black.
22:19
And it was obviously strongly enforced during Jim Crow.
But this whole idea that if you have one drop of black blood, then that is your ancestry and you are considered black, It doesn't exist anywhere else.
It's so unique to the US.
22:35
No, and I'm going to tell you something that's very funny.
Funny in a perverse way.
We mentioned earlier the Nazis drafting the Nuremberg laws, right?
The one thing they didn't want to adopt that the Americans had was the one drop rule.
They were like, that's too far, guys.
Yes, actually, actually, yes, Because they said, well, they found it quote UN quote unscientific.
22:58
That was the term they used.
But they also, there was a practical reason behind us because it was like, well, if we're going to go after every German that has a drop of Jewish blood in him, we're going to probably end up killing half the German population.
That's so interesting because I always think about that in terms of the concept of passing in the US, this concept of passing as white.
23:18
If you pass that way, it means society sees you.
How you appear visibly, what your physical characteristics are, are enough that you look a certain way.
You don't look black, quote, UN quote, but you are constantly threatened to be exposed for your lineage, and that could get you lynched.
23:37
And I always remember the longtime president of the NAACP, Walter White, not the Walter White from Breaking Bad.
And he looked completely white.
And then he married a white woman and people were outraged.
And that kind of goes to your point, Ezra, also about interracial marriage and the whole concept of quote UN quote miscegenation, which was to keep this definition of race.
24:05
And it wasn't based on who was just visibly black.
It was any sexual content was taboo and you would be killed.
So this brings up another point about cast that I think is really important.
One of the clearest ways you can measure the strength of the cast, strength, as in how hard it is to break out of the cast that you're in, is what's called endogamy, which is again one of those fancy words that means how much does the society compel you by force of pressure, not necessarily legally, to marry within your caste.
24:40
Now bear in mind things like the one drop rule and the idea that black people can only marry black people.
These weren't just social norms.
These were actually laws in America.
Even if they're not today, the social norms that exist today are reflection of previous legal codes that exist.
24:57
The idea is if you can marry outside of your cast, you at least have a chance of integrating into the broader or more dominant society and breaking out of your cast.
The tightest cast in the world probably is.
Just to go off topic for a second, is the Dalit or the outcasts in India where the out marriage rate is something like 3%?
25:20
Oh wow.
Dalits used to be called untouchables, right?
Was that?
Yeah, The Untouchables.
Exactly.
So let's talk about the United States.
So these are some interesting statistics and I'm going to use them to compare black people to other oppressed minorities in the United States to give you a sense of the uniqueness of black oppression.
25:40
So black to non black marriage rates and most of non black is white.
So we can sort of summarize this to black to white marriage rate is a total of 18%.
Only 18% of black people marry outside of the black population.
25:58
You're talking about currently today.
Yes, that is today.
Those are the most recent figures.
Only 18% of black people marry outside of the black population, and overwhelming that's to white people.
It's even more interesting when you break it down by gender.
For black men, that's 22%.
26:14
For black women, it's 9%.
That's a cast.
And to demonstrate that, let's look at other minorities.
For Hispanics or Latinos, the marriage rate outside of the Latino population is at 30%, but it's actually higher than that.
26:35
If you only look at US born Latinos, which are the majority of Latinos in the United States, it's actually 41 percent. 41% of US born Latinos marry outside of the Latino population, overwhelmingly to white people.
And it's about even between men and women.
26:53
The drop comes because for foreign born Latinos it drops to only 11%.
That's an indication of the oppression of immigrants.
Asians 32%.
As an interesting experiment, I thought I would compare the United States to Britain.
27:09
Everyone knows Britain is a racist country.
And in Britain there's a substantial black population, mainly derived from the Caribbean with some from Africa.
And they suffer racism, no question about that.
But they are not a cast and you want to know the measure of that?
27:25
In Britain, 42% of All Blacks are married to whites.
Holy shit that's so many. 50% of men, 35% of women.
Now I want to add one last thing about the American situation, about that 18% that is married outside the cast.
27:46
That does not mean you've escaped the cast.
Bear in mind the one drop rule still applies in the US.
The child of a black white marriage is black, and unless that family is particularly wealthy, that child will likely fall back into the cast.
28:05
So actually I did want to go back to some of the clips that we have of Candace Owens, and also we have another one from Matt Walsh.
But what you were saying really reminded me a little bit about what I find most interesting about how race plays out in Latin America and how different it is.
28:25
And that's not to say at all that there's no racism in Latin America.
Obviously it's very entrenched.
But the people who would be definitively considered black in the US might be mestizo or mulatto in the Caribbean or Latin America.
28:42
So yes, class and racial discrimination are very acute there.
It's not a post racial or harmonious society.
But what I found really interesting in Brazil, for example, is the policy of racial classification is so much more based on amalgamation than segregation or racial purity.
29:00
So it's much more influenced by physical appearance and class rather than ancestry.
If you compare Brazil and the US, those were the two biggest slave societies of modern times.
But in Brazil, you don't have that same cast line that you were just referring to.
29:20
And there was this acceptance of quote UN quote, miscegenation, hate that word.
But interracial marriage, it didn't carry that same burden of violence.
It wasn't prescribed the same way it was in the US The way that race is characterized in Brazil is so much based on hair color and texture and skin color and eye color.
29:44
You could have a different racial identity than your siblings or parents.
If you climb the social ladder like you have a higher education or higher economic status, your racial designation can change and it can change in your lifetime.
So there's this actual saying.
30:01
It's a common expression.
Money whitens and there is actually a lot of pressure to whiten through intermarriage.
Why is racial characterization different and how is it related to slavery there?
There's this book called Neither Black Nor White by Carl Degler, and it goes into detail about the differences in slavery.
30:23
But one reason he poses is that there were fewer European women.
So there was a lot of union between Portuguese colonizers and Indian women and black slave women.
And a lot of these women were concubines.
But if you had something like the one drop rule, then those offspring would have had a lower status than their European fathers.
30:44
And so they didn't want, they didn't want that.
And they wanted to be able to maintain their wealth.
Yes, exactly.
And and status.
Another reason could because the Portuguese needed this other layer to act as a buffer between slaves and slave masters.
So they use free mulatos and mestizos for that function, and the US kind of already had that with poor whites.
31:04
But yeah, there's a lot of interesting distinctions in the history and the difference in slavery.
Like in Brazil, they armed the slaves for national causes.
Oh hell no.
They would never give American slaves guns.
No, of course not.
But the biggest thing I think is that after slavery in Brazil, even though there's a lot of racial discrimination and hierarchy, there wasn't the same entrenched discriminatory laws.
31:31
There was more of a repudiation or an attempt to repudiate old colonial laws.
Racial classification existed, but it wasn't based on this innate genetic inferiority like it was in the US.
Now let's talk a little bit about the Candace Owens video when she talks about where the word slave comes from, from the from the Slavs of Eastern Europe.
31:58
And she says millions of white people were captured and enslaved by the Muslims in the Nice century and later by the Ottoman Turks.
Before we talk about Arab slavery and the hunting of Slavs in Eastern Europe, I wanted to play this other clip from Matt Walsh.
So Matt Walsh is another infamous right wing ideologue known for attacking trans people.
32:20
And his main point in this video is to point out that white people were not the only slave traders.
The problem with the way that slavery is taught in school today is not that it is taught or that too much is said on the subject, but rather, but the lessons are intentionally narrow so as to give the laughably false impression that slavery was a sin unique to white Westerners.
32:43
Kids should be taught the truth that slavery was, you know, a ubiquitous institution across the entire globe for millennia.
That Africans kidnapped and sold each other into slavery.
That white Europeans were captured and sold into slavery themselves by Arab slave traders for centuries.
That Western Western powers abolish slavery and the slave trade long before much of the rest of the world did, etcetera.
33:02
All of this should be taught.
But leftists are the ones who don't want any of that mentioned.
They are the ones trying to censor the slavery conversation in schools.
As usual, they are guilty of the sin that they are accusing others of committing.
It's amazing how many lies you can squeeze into a what was it, 30 seconds or 45 seconds?
33:22
Oh, so leftists aren't trying to censor history?
So one of the things he mentioned is about Arab slavery.
And with that, white people were not the only slave traders.
It's true there weren't.
Who says they were?
Who's he arguing against?
I think I was taught that white people invented slavery.
33:41
I mean, there's an element here who says white people were the only slave traders in the world?
Yeah, it's such a weird thing to say.
I mean, seriously, at a certain point.
See, at a certain point, this is where we get back to this point we talked about last time, where we're talking about a very serious subject, but we're dealing with people who are so unserious that you can't you can't take them seriously.
34:01
Yeah.
The Arabs.
The Arabs engaged in the enslave trade.
Yes.
Yes.
What do you want?
Me?
What do you What?
What does it have to do?
What does that have to do with the fact that millions of black Africans were put through the Middle Passage and enslaved in America?
34:20
Yeah, And the whole point about African complicity, this is like a big thing for both of them.
So Matt Walsh mentions it, Candace Owens mentions it.
This idea that African complicity was there, slavery was all over the African continent.
34:36
They probably think Africa is a country actually, so they probably don't even know it's a continent.
OK, so let's break this down in a different way.
So he mentions Arabs captured slaves in Europe and obviously brought them as slaves into different parts of the Middle East.
34:52
That's both true and false.
It depends where you are, and it depends when you were.
Most of the time vis A vis Europe, the Arabs were actually kind of lazy.
They let others do the capturing.
They just did the buying.
If you go to the Barbary Coast in Northwest Africa, around where you have now Morocco, yeah, there they did raiding parties and they would capture people, you know, delicate, beautiful white Europeans, God forbid, and sell them into slavery.
35:20
The Arabs did that.
I'm sure in these people's minds, Arabs is a word that just encompasses one people, undifferentiated, that have just one singular history and one singular identity, one singular everything.
But I know that in our video, Miss Candice Owen, the woman who lives in the sunken place, she refers to the Arabs hunting down and kidnapping slobs, and so much so that the word slave comes from the word Slav.
35:48
Now, there's a little logical problem with this.
We are speaking the English language, right?
I don't know, I have to check.
Hold on.
Let me let me run it through a translator.
Yeah, so if the Arabs are the ones hunting down the Slavs so much to turn them into slaves, why does the word Slav become slave in the English language?
36:12
I didn't even think about that.
That's a really good point.
Hold on, let me put that into ChatGPT.
Do you happen to know the word for slave in Arabic?
There are at least 2 words.
There's a common word, and then there is a word that is derived from the word Slavs.
But it's interesting that the Arabs had a word derived from the word Slavs.
36:29
But it's also interesting that a bunch of Europeans had words derived from the word Slavs for slave.
Now what does that tell you?
That tells you that Europeans engaged in slavery against the Slavs as much as the Arabs did.
36:45
And then?
White on white slavery.
I'm going to shock you.
The Arabs didn't actually hunt down and capture Slavs.
They enslaved Slavs, but they didn't go get the Slavs themselves.
You know who did?
It was the Vikings.
The Vikings were situated in what is now Russia and Ukraine.
37:04
They had captured those areas and they had a clear river and sea route and lots of Slavic peoples and they would do the capturing and they would sell them and they would sell them to the Arabs and they would sell them to people throughout Europe such that the word Slav became synonymous with the word slave it.
37:24
Was commerce.
So how come no one ever talks about Oh my God European sold Europeans into slavery?
Europeans also killed Europeans in World War 2.
Did you know about that?
I I heard rumors.
So this stuff is like, what does any of this have to do with the fact that black people were enslaved in the United States of America?
37:47
So even if kingdoms throughout Africa sold war captives or rival groups to European traders, but they didn't create the global market, they didn't control the scale or the logistics or the ideology behind it.
38:03
So it does seem like they're just basically trying to say, look, black people are complicit in their own oppression.
Yeah, the slave system within most of Africa.
And yeah, you're probably right when you say they think Africa is a country because they treat Africa as just a singular entity.
38:18
You're talking about multitudes of societies, multitudes of people, traditions, cultures, kingdoms, everything.
State structures.
Levels of development.
Geographies.
Geography, everything you can imagine, it's a massive continent.
But when you're talking about the parts where the Europeans tended to get their slaves from the kingdoms there that engaged in slavery, it tended to be this.
38:44
Before the Europeans showed up, it tended to be you engage in a war, you captured slaves, and the reason you captured slaves was to incorporate them into your Kingdom.
In other words, you are trying to assimilate people forcibly into your Kingdom in order to grow the size and influence and power of your Kingdom, right?
39:04
So within a generation or so, maybe 2, I don't know exactly, those people or their offspring are no longer slaves.
They have been assimilated into your Kingdom.
Again, it's not nice.
It's a brutal fucking system.
It's slavery.
I'm not trying to make it sound nice, but it's also not hereditary and it's serving a different purpose.
39:25
Yeah, and they're not saying that and saying but also enslaved Africans endured a brutal Middle Passage and were placed in a racial caste system in the Americas.
It's clear that they're just trying to frame black people.
Yeah, and it's actually the polar opposite of a racial caste system.
39:41
You're enslaving people to assimilate them into your society.
It's literally the opposite of a racial caste system.
I was going to mention one other thing about African slavery.
The impact of European slavery on Africa was devastating because what it did is it took a slave system that was really, by European standards, by what would happen later, small potatoes.
40:04
And it industrialized it because what it said is for trading purposes, bring us more slaves, bring us more slaves, bring us more slaves.
And they did bring more slaves.
And when they didn't bring more slaves, the Europeans went and haunted the slaves themselves.
Right.
So they didn't get to control who was going in that case.
40:21
In that case, they didn't, and so I'm going to just give you one example.
There was a king of the Congo named Nzinga and Bamba.
He was known as King Alfonso.
He converted to Christianity, became a very devout Christian, and he wrote a letter to the Portuguese king because he thought he was speaking as one Christian king to another.
40:40
This is from 1526 begging the Portuguese king to tell his people to tell the Portuguese traders to stop raiding his Kingdom for slaves.
And now I don't want to make clear this king in Zynga and Bamba is not opposed to slavery as an institution.
40:57
He is saying you are kidnapping free people of my Kingdom, including members of my court.
And he says we cannot reckon how great the damage is, since the mentioned merchants, the Portuguese, Daley sees our subjects, sons of the land and sons of our noblemen and vassals and relatives, and take them to be sold to the white men who are in our Kingdom.
41:20
This corruption and depravity is so widespread that our country is being utterly depopulated.
And your Highness should not agree with this, nor accepted as in your service.
And of course, he was ignored.
That's a really, really powerful illustration of how different the slave system was in these two places.
41:42
Yeah.
And I want to talk a little bit about this other trend that we're seeing because the myths and the ahistorical narratives are not just limited to Black people.
This other trend that we're seeing in these videos and propaganda is this playbook of villainizing indigenous people in the Americas as being barbaric and again, presenting themselves as this white savior.
42:09
We civilize them.
They were cannibals.
So Candace Owens talks about the native Taino tribe, hoping that the Spaniards could help them defeat the Carobs and that the Carobs enslaved the Taino and serve them for dinner.
There's this other clip I want to talk about from Prager U.
42:28
Again, this has been circulating on the web a lot.
This is a cartoon.
It's supposed to be Christopher Columbus with a very weird accent, and he's talking to two kids on a ship.
I guess they've been transported back in time.
But anyways, the two kids have been manipulated by the liberal school system guys.
42:48
They're.
Woke.
They're woke guys.
These are woke children.
Woke children.
They heard that Columbus was bad and that slavery was bad.
So this is the conversation that they have and you have to listen to the end for the real message of this.
I ordered my men to treat them well.
43:05
I'm sorry, Mr. Columbus, but I heard at school that you spoil paradise and you brought slavery and murder to peaceful people.
Leo.
Sorry.
It's what I read and heard at school.
Karamba.
Those are some accusations.
The place I discovered was beautiful, but it wasn't exactly a paradise of civilization, and the native people were far from peaceful.
43:28
But you just said the Taino were peaceful.
They pretty much are, but there are other tribes who aren't.
The Taino I had met had cuts in scars and bruises all over them.
I asked why and they told me about the Carobs, who are vicious warring cannibals.
43:45
Cannibals like they.
Eat people, see.
Whoa, right.
Hey, all the things that are bad in the world I come from, jealousy, lying, murder, war.
It all exists in the land I just found too.
Ah, in Europe we draw the line at things like eating people and human sacrifice.
44:06
Some of the native folks from where I just left do those things regularly.
So these people in your time, you think it was a peaceful paradise are misinformed or lying?
Yeah, but what about slavery?
You didn't deny that.
44:21
Deny no slavery is as all this time and has taken place in every corner of the world, even amongst the people I just left.
Being taken as a slave is better than being killed.
No, I don't see the problem.
Does anybody want a slice of pizza?
44:41
Mamma Mia being taken as a slave is better than being killed.
I mean I.
Can't.
I can't fucking believe what I'm just what?
I just heard the, the what I what I hear from this the most is this idea that they're trying to basically say that eliminating savages is much more ethically justifiable than enslaving human beings.
45:06
And so if they present them as savages, then they can demonize them to justify their own military actions and enslavement of indigenous people.
Yeah, they're savages, and they also should be grateful that they were given the gift of civilization by the white man.
45:22
So if I could just talk a little bit more about Tainos here.
The Taino people were the indigenous people of the western Caribbean islands.
So Cuba, Dominican Republic, Haiti, Puerto Rico, and the Caribs were the indigenous people from the eastern part of the islands.
45:37
And in this video and also in Kansas Owen's video, they make it sound like the Spaniards came to be the friends of the Taino people, but in actuality, they enslaved the Taino people.
And the Tainos who resisted, they killed.
They took advantage of the fact that some of the Taino tribes or some of the Taino nations wanted to create treaties with them.
45:58
Daniola Avondo invited a bunch of Taino leaders to a feast and he killed them in what became known as the Haragua Massacre.
So you can see right from the beginning, they were trying to figure out how they can systematically breakdown the nation's, the Taino nations.
46:15
And within 27 years after their arrival, the population dropped from, in the millions of some estimates, up to 4 million down to 50K.
So a combination of slavery, just killing people who were resisting and smallpox completely decimated the population.
46:30
Just to talk more about the idea of civilized versus uncivilized.
You know, there's this idea that they should be grateful because they're going to bring them pants and stone buildings.
But can we talk about how Europeans didn't even bathe at this point and a lot of being cows from the indigenous people were just about how gross the Europeans were?
46:47
Yeah, and I think you pointed out this.
Question of resistance, too, because the Taino people did organize revolts, and sometimes in alliance with the Caribs.
Yeah, the idea that they were in any way friends.
Of the Taino people or bringing them anything good, the only thing they bought it was the misery of the western economy and it was pretty notable.
47:07
How they talked about how in Europe they drew the line at eating people and human sacrifice.
Well, from what I heard from Ezra.
Columbus was considered to be a stand up citizen in the time that he left.
Oh right, that was in our pre show notes.
Yeah, human sacrifice and.
47:24
Yeah, Europeans never, never ever did any of that shit.
Since these guys love to talk about the Romans, I'll just point out very, very quickly, but the Romans generally didn't suppress religion.
The only religion they actually did crush was the Druids.
47:40
Yep, in Ireland and in Northern and.
Like in you, in the England and the UK in general, and the British Isles and their reasoning for suppressing.
The Druids was that the Druids performed human sacrifices and the Romans found that repugnant.
Didn't they burn witches in town?
47:57
Squares.
That was actually around Christopher Columbus time.
So that was that's you can't blame the Romans for that or the Druids.
The Romans also talked about how the Germanic tribes, you know, the master race regularly resorted to some of them, not all of them regularly resorted to cannibalism.
48:14
So on Columbus, one of the things you always hear is that you shouldn't measure people by the by the the morals of today.
Thank you by the.
Morals of today.
I'm still in shock.
From that video, by the way, Yeah, Every time I see.
No, I knew what you were.
48:29
I know what you were.
Going to say, because I hear that all the time.
Like you can't judge people based on how what the ideology or how it was the time it was normal at the time.
So fine, so let's judge.
Columbus by the morals of his time.
Yeah, for real.
And by the morals of.
48:45
His time, he was a.
Fucking monster.
And those are by the dreadful morals.
And they were pretty dreadful morals of his time.
Not just because he didn't bathe either.
No, no, those were the least of his sins.
But it was one of his sins.
So there's a priest, I think he was Dominican, named Bartolomo Bartolome de la Casas.
49:07
Bartolome de la Casas.
And he wrote a book called A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies.
Now, that title itself kind of tells you what his take is.
It's written in 1552.
Here's a few quotes on Columbus's men in Hispaniola.
49:24
They made bets as to who, with 1 slash of the sword, could split a man in two, or cut off his head, or spill out his entrails with a.
Single stroke.
On the general cruelty of Columbus's men, the Spaniards tore the natives to shreds, literally hacking, looting and murdering.
49:44
They laid wagers on who could slit a man into or cut off his head at a blow.
Apparently this was a common thing that the Spaniards like to do.
Peaceful people.
Sounds like the IDF.
Yeah, on the.
Devastation that Columbus.
Set in motion, what we committed in the Indies stands out among the most unpardonable offenses ever committed against God and mankind.
50:08
Jesus Christ against God too.
And this trade?
IE, this enslavement as one of the most unjust, evil and cruel among them, on now Columbus himself, the Admiral.
50:24
Columbus was the first to bring ruin and destruction upon these people of the Indies, who had welcomed him as an Angel from heaven.
But Ezra, he was an intrepid.
Explorer he was.
He was.
So that is Columbus measured by the morals of his time, and those are all by his contemporaries, right?
50:46
Yes, Father de la Casas was.
On the voyage with the Columbus.
That's why he he was a witness to all this stuff.
He was initially a supporter of Columbus and later ended up writing this book after he saw what the intrepid explorer had unleashed.
51:06
Mamma Mia.
That was a good way.
In that segment, OK, well, let's let's wrap it up a little bit here.
I think we could probably go on for episode 3, but we'll save that.
51:22
Maybe we can go off on another tangent at some point.
But I do think we always try to explore on this podcast why something is happening.
So not only give a little bit of a historical sense, but explain what is the reason behind it.
51:39
And I think in this administration, they are trying to further entrench the ideological terrain to really rollback any gains or benefits for Black people and for minorities from the Civil rights movement and even going back to the Civil War.
51:57
Besides the fact that American slavery still lives with us in so many ways, slavery in the New World didn't just reflect the subjugation and oppression based on race, it really created it.
Yeah, just to reiterate a point.
52:14
It's not that Europeans enslaved black Africans because of racism.
It is that the enslavement of black Africans produced the concept of race and racial oppression and racism.
And that is the effect that lives with us to this day.
52:34
And that's why all these people who want to talk about Rome or Arabs or Slavs or whatever, it's all a distraction.
And it's all in the service of throwing sand in the face.
Because just always ask yourself, what do all these arguments have to do with the fact that Black people were enslaved and that the effect of that enslavement lives with us to this day, not simply in the abstract, but in very real, measurable and quantifiable terms.
53:07
And I think in the last two episodes, this one and the one previous, we tried to give you a taste of that.
And all I can say is behind all this are elements of the ruling class of this country, represented by both parties that are defending the indefensible of the past in order to defend the indefensible of the present and maintain that indefensible going into the future.
53:33
But we don't love anybody who doesn't love us, and that's a.
Conclusion of Part 2 on how slavery is being whitewashed.
If you enjoyed this episode, or maybe not enjoyed it but appreciate learning something, please write us a review.
53:53
We like hearing from you and stay tuned for our upcoming content on Conspiracy Theories because we always bring you some levity and a glimmer of hope here.
As always, you can reach us at Unwashedunruly at gmailcom.
