Have you ever really thought about where the word "Kidnapping" comes from? Why is the word "kid" in there? Does it have anything to do with kids? And why would I write a heading like this? Was not America built on the backs of blacks? Let's find out!
Like most people I used to connect the word slavery and colonies with evil white men stealing blacks from Africa. That's what we learn in school, and that's what our uninformed and intellectually lazy parents tell us.
After reading about the Arab slave trade and the crusades many years ago, and what it was really about, I realized that what we are thought often fits a narrative told by people, organizations or governments with different agendas. You rarely get the whole truth, sometimes you only get to learn fragments from history, and sometimes you're even being lied to. The first time I ever read about this topic was in the book "Redneck Manifesto" by Jim Goad.
White slaves in the early colonies
About one half of all new arrivals in the American colonies were white slaves, and they were the first slaves of America. This slavery was even hereditary. White children born to white slaves were enslaved too.
In England, people were flocking into the cities because of unemployment and poverty. So called "Bridewells", prisons for vagrants, women and children was established in many English cities. Well off settlers paid smugglers and captains good money to carry young people and kids over to the New World.
These white slaves were often considered less valuable than black slaves, and records show that plantation owners often paid a lot more for black slaves than white ones. The reason was the cost of transportation from Africa versus the cost from England. It was invested more into brining black slaves than white slaves, and white slaves was viewed as more expendable. The death rate of white slaves to America was about 25% compared to 10% of black slaves.
Black slaves did more plantation work, while the white slaves made up the overwhelming majority of slave-laborers in the colonies in the 17th century. Black slaves rarely did the kind of lethal work the white slaves did in the formative years of settlement like felling trees, soil clearance and general infrastructural development. So to say that America is built on the backs of black slaves is not true. It is as much, or more so, built on the backs of white slaves. They worked and died in greater numbers than anyone else.
Hundreds of thousands of white slaves did this backbreaking work in the early settlements. And yet, I suspect none of you have ever heard about it.
Kid-napping
Reliable sources (published papers from 1670 and onwards) estimate that over 100,000 people were kidnapped in the 1670's alone. For all the bad reputation AmeriKKKa gets about black slavery, America probably never received more than 5% of ALL African slaves shipped to the Western Hemisphere.
A large percentage of these were actual children. Tens of thousands of white slaves were kidnapped children from the streets of England, Scotland and Ireland. The origin of the word kidnapped is kid-nabbed, the stealing of White children for enslavement.
A plead
I hope people read more into this. This is just a resume to open your eyes. It's a damn shame that Americans in particular, but all western (a fuck it, white people..let's be honest) people so ashamed of their own kind and their own history. Most people suffered in those days, and as you can see, probably more white kids suffered a horrible fate than black kids. Shouldn't we instead focus on the horrors that some few privileged people in those days committed, rather than race-blame?
Shouldn't we see things for what they wore in the context of history? There were some pretty bad and evil people in those days, as there are now. But it was not "white people" that was bad. It was a small number of bad people, regardless of race. There were bad black people who tracked down and sold captured rivaling tribesmen to white slave traders. There were Arab pirates and conquerers who enslaved both whites and blacks. And there were whites who enslaved and kidnapped whites.
I hope this can help at least one person to balance their mind. Perhaps read into it a little bit more, and realize how insane the debate has become. White people should by no means feel bad about slavery. White males in particular should not feel so bad in general. In Norway, we are often reminded of the fact that women was allowed to vote in 1913. But they alway forget to tell us when most males were allowed to vote - in 1898, just 15 years earlier. Before that only rich men were allowed to vote.
We were slaves too.
