Debate on Historical Education and Slavery

The culture shift comes from what children learn at school and online.

Ask any young person what history they learned at

school and they'll tell you, Ask them what else? Slavery. Ask them what else?

American civil rights.

In fact, what little they know of

history will be all about black and brown people fighting for

equality against the white man.

Women fighting men for the vote.

Gay and trans people fighting for various rights.

Our young people have

been taught that history is simply one long story about various

groups struggling under the oppressive dead

white man. Out with Dickens, Shakespeare, Kipling, and Wordsworth.

We must decolonize.

History is taught through an oppressor lens.

The triangular slave trade, white men held the power. What about Britain ending the

slave trade? More than a quick mention, if at all? No.

What of the Arab slave trade that lasted three times as

long as the triangular slave trade? No.

Okay, so GCSE history in Britain is often taught as migration through time.

So the idea that Britain has always been a

land of immigrants is embedded in our children's heads. Most schools

would prefer to concentrate learning about the tiny number of black people

who existed in

Tudor England over a thorough analysis of England's break from Rome.

Medieval history becomes her story and is told through the

eyes of Eleanor of Aquitaine because, after all, she was a woman,

not to mention weeks on King Mansa Musa of Mali because he was a black Muslim.

His bearing on British institutions,

laws, and faith is non existent.

And the fact that he is said to have been the richest man in history,

thanks in part to his massive slave owning society, is a detail, somehow,

that teachers rarely ever teach.

But it isn't just our schools.

It's our general culture, too.

Take your kids to a museum or an art gallery in any Western country,

and you'll find the same narrative.

As an example,

when learning about aviation in London's Science Museum and the extraordinary

feat that is man making massive machines move in the sky,

a write up on the wall explains that women and

black people were historically barred from aviation schools and the military.

Similarly, James Watt,

the man who invented the steam engine and is

considered the founder of the Industrial Revolution, has a write up on the

wall explaining that his early career involved slave trafficking,

with a bonus analysis of the whole of Britain's complicity in the slave trade.

They flatten the entire human story and all of its complexities into the narrative

of oppressor and oppressed, leaving young people unable to see the world in any

other terms.

There's one other thing that I want to show you from this woman because she's very

on point and this video just builds on that last video.

It goes right side by side and it's

about the mass indoctrination around slavery and what really happened with slavery.

This is important and you should definitely listen to this.

Slavery was not about race and it's important

it was not about race. The only reason we think it's

about race is because philosophers like David Hume in the 18th

century ranked human beings and put Africans at the bottom saying

that they had no souls.

The Enlightenment imposed the concept of

race on a practice that had been going on for centuries in order to

justify that practice.

And why did they have to justify it? And this is the point.

Because people in the West began to question slavery's moral validity.

The fact is that people of all

colors owned slaves, both as part of the Atlantic slave trade and outside of it.

In the United States and Caribbean, black people owned thousands of black slaves,

and so did the Native Americans.

Nearly 20 000 of the Native American five civilized tribes

sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War, fighting to keep slavery alive.

28 of the black

population who were free in New Orleans pledged their support to the Confederacy.

All of the 13

southern states of the Confederacy had substantial numbers of black slave owners.

There were more than 250 000 free blacks and nearly 4 000 of them were slave

masters who owned more than 20 000 slaves.

The practice of slavery was legal, after all.

We need to remember that governments did not own slaves. Slave owners did.

In fact, the U S.

government fought a war to end slavery.

How much should the descendants of the 400 000 Union soldiers who lost their lives

fighting to free the slaves pay to the

descendants of the slaves they freed? It's bizarre to suggest

that human beings should inherit the outrage of the deeds of their parents.

Should the child of a mass murderer be

sent to prison because of his father's crime? No.

In America, in the Maine,

it was the Democrats who owned slaves,

and the Democrats who in the Maine passed and enforced Jim Crow laws.

It was also the Democrats who founded the Ku Klux Klan.

Should the current Democratic Party be held responsible for this? No.

We do not inherit the sins of our fathers.