White Slavery Denial

The currently approved conceptual framework for American race relations dictates that whites–all of them, simply by dint of being white–are oppressors. Any deviation from this rigid script, no matter how deeply rooted in fact, must be immediately annihilated like a blood-engorged tick.

We are taught that black academic and financial underperformance–as well as black over-performance in crime–are the direct result of slavery’s horrid legacy. There are to be no other possible explanations. To note the hugely embarrassing fact that American blacks live far longer and under vastly superior economic conditions in America than they do in any majority-black nation on Earth may be factual, but it is RACIST because it undermines the ironclad Guilt Narrative that must never be questioned.

Here are some facts that The Script demands you ignore:

1) Even at the peak of American slavery, only a tiny percentage of American whites–about 1.5%–owned slaves.

2) Leading up to the Civil War, a vastly higher quotient of whites had worked as indentured servants and convict laborers than had ever owned slaves. Most historians, regardless of their political orientation, agree that anywhere from half to two-thirds of whites who came to the American colonies arrived in bondage. The fact that the vast majority of whites existed in a state closer to slavery than to slave ownership is something resolutely ignored in the modern retelling of history.

3) Documents from the era show that so-called white “indentured servants” were often referred to as “slaves” rather than “servants.”

4) These “servants” did not always enter into voluntary contracts. There is overwhelming evidence that many of them were kidnapped by organized
criminal rings and sent to work on American plantations. It is possible that as many, if not more, whites than blacks were brought involuntarily to the colonies.

5) The middle-passage death rates for these “servants” were comparable to that of blacks on slave ships from Africa to the New World.

6) Indentured servants were whipped and beaten, sometimes to death. When they escaped, ads were placed for their capture.

7) They lived under conditions so brutal that an estimated half of them died before their seven-year term of indenture expired.

I covered many of these facts in my book The Redneck Manifesto. The chapter regarding white slavery is here. A simplified “kids” version is here. And recently Gavin McInnes and I covered much of the same ground in this video.

I’ve often discussed how guilt is one of the primary political weapons–in the long run, possibly more powerful than bullets. Since the currently accepted narrative is based far more on an attempt to quarantine historical guilt among whites than it is a sober assessment of the facts, the typical response to any discussion about white slavery is emotional rather than logical.

Ninety-nine percent of the time, “rebuttals” consist of nothing more than ad-hominem attacks, straw men, and appeals to motive. I often get accused of trying to “justify” slavery or of trying to argue that two wrongs make a right. When I counter that I’m arguing that two wrongs make two wrongs–and that I wonder why the sole focus is on one wrong rather than all of them–I am accused of being a racist liar.

Most frustratingly, I’m falsely accused of saying that white slaves had it worse than black slaves. No, actually, in The Redneck Manifesto, I was merely quoting people who alleged that:

Howard Zinn states that “white indentured servants were often treated as badly as black slaves.” Eugene Genovese claims that “In the South and in the Caribbean, the treatment meted out to white indentured servants had rivaled and often exceeded in brutality that meted out to black slaves….”

OK, well, obviously those were neo-Nazi, Holocaust-denying, minority-lynching, right-wing KKK lunatics saying that, right? No–both Zinn and Genovese were Marxists.

The book also quotes early observers saying much the same thing:

A colonial observer of Virginia convict laborers said, “I never see such pasels of pore Raches in my Life…they are used no Bater than so many negro Slaves.” A 1777 screed protesting the indenture racket claimed that a white servant’s body was “as absolutely subjected as the body or person of a Negro, man or woman, who is sold as a legal Slave.” In the 1820s, Karl Anton Postl commented that non-slaveowning whites “are not treated better than the slaves themselves….A 1641 law provided for all disobedient servants to have their skin branded, regardless of its color. A 1652 law in Providence and Warwicke (later Rhode Island) mentions “blacke mankind or white” servants. A 1683 Pennsylvania law contains the phrase “no Servant White or Black.

But rather than even attempting to dispute any of this, critics merely call me a white supremacist and think they’ve won. That’s truly how stupid they are. Or dishonest. Or stupidly dishonest and dishonestly stupid.

Last week I was alerted by about a half-dozen friends to a story circulating about the “Myth of the ‘Irish slaves’” and how it was based on “a purposeful lie” spread by “Neo-Nazis, White Nationalists, Neo-Confederates, and even Holocaust deniers.” If that sounds like the frothy, methinks-the-lady-doth-protest-too-much vituperations of a Southern Poverty Law Center press release, that’s exactly what it is. The article features an interview with a certain Liam Hogan–who is nothing more than an Irish librarian–in a frantic attempt to “debunk” this “myth.”

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