Disaster

Why do so many Americans, and non-Americans too, seem to think that slavery was a specifically American thing? Like, I presume that most people know that it wasn’t, but I hear so much discussion of American slavery and its impact, and so little of any other kind. It also makes slavery look like a strictly white-slaver black-slave dynamic, which, again, I presume most people know it isn’t, but nobody talks about it as much as about American-type slavery. The Roman slave market, which existed for centuries and had slaves of all races, the Korean slave market, which was gigantic, the Ottoman slave market, in which North Africans and Middle Easterners enslaved people of different races, including Europeans. My point being that slavery has existed for centuries, and has heavily impacted our whole world, and yet some people seem to believe that slavery existed only in an American-type way. At the moment, there are more slaves in the world than ever before, and yes, most of them are from Third World countries, but nobody talks of real-time slavery either. Not as much as of past American slavery anyway. I genuinely wanna know how that came to be.

Sometimes I think about the fact that our present is the same history in which the Greeks wrote poetry, the Spanish Inquisition hunted witches, the Mayans built temples, the Jacobites uprose against British rule, Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, and Lenin spoke to the crowds during the Red October. Our world is the same world in which hundreds of Middle Ages mothers rocked their babies to sleep, and thousands of eighteen century teenagers fell in love for the first time, and the same world in which Stone Age tribes danced around the fire, and Victorian era scientists kissed in the night. The water you drink has been the same since the dinosaurs. We are part of the ongoing story of the world. Just as real as everybody else had been. Do you ever think about that.