There is no doubt, if you read history, that people in the past treated other people very badly. We still do, too, but I guess it’s much more awful when society is not quite so affluent and when being on the bottom can mean starving to death. It is impossible to read history, particularly primary sources, and not to be horrified.
But part of that is that we’re imposing our values on the past. Look, history is looked at backwards, while we live forward. Take slavery (I don’t want it.) Yes, it was a horrible institution. It was also pervasive in human history, and as far as we can tell pre-history, world without end. Hell, still is as well, considerably less of the world than it was, but in Africa it’s pretty much still a thing, and not just in Arab countries.
Romans had complex rules to deal with it, and lived in fear of slave revolts.
It required mental gymnastics, because it was obvious to anyone that slaves were as human as their masters, and so a complex set of rules and philosophical separations were instituted and once any idea of the equality of man (or that man ought to be equal before the law (and G-d) the whole thing was doomed, sooner or later.
Americans tend to have a bizarre idea that slavery was always by race. I blame public school. I don’t know if it’s deliberately obscured, to emphasize the specialness of racial victimhood, or just because race and slavery are so associated in American history that it overshadows everything else. (Yes, again, is it malice or stupidity? Perhaps we should formulate an axiom that sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice.)
Men and women of all colors were enslaved throughout history. Heck, in the peninsula, in the long centuries in which it was a frontier between Christian and Moor, the slaving went on both ways. […]
Roman slaves were often blond, and the citizens often of African origin. But even there, it wasn’t tied to race. (Though celts were apparently in general fairly cheap, from what I can figure.)
So. All of us have slave ancestors. ALL OF US. All of us have slave owners in our ancestry.
Even in the US — though rare — there were black slave owners. And if you’re going to parse quadroons and octaroons who might very well be slaves, you’re going to assume race is one-drop but only for non-white races.
Sarah Hoyt, “I Am Myself Alone”, According to Hoyt, 2019-02-25.
