Slavery and reparations
This video of Don Lemon being confronted – by a British royalty spokesperson named Hilary Fordwich – with some salient facts about the history of slavery, has been making the rounds. In case you haven’t seen it yet, here it is:
Lemon looks like he doesn’t quite know what hit him.
I wonder whether he actually is unaware of facts such as the Brits’ role in ending slavery. I guess he doesn’t read my blog; in 2015 I wrote a post with some later history on the subject.
Two years ago the BBC actually posted an essay by a young woman entitled “My Nigerian great-grandfather sold slaves.” It is shocking how little is known, especially by the young and by loud and “woke” activists, about this topic (Sowell, of course, has done much to argue against the popular misconceptions), and how often is overlooked the unfortunate existence of this institution, in various forms, around the world (including Russian serfdom, abolished at roughly the same time as black slavery here). Few indeed, even amongst conservatives, are aware of how many Europeans (millions upon millions) were enslaved, not only by the Barbary pirates, but also by the Ottoman Turks and the Crimean Tatars (also Muslim), over many centuries, nor is contemporary human-trafficking (involving countless victims, mostly female) widely discussed.
She’s not a palace pr official. She owns a consulting business that specializes in marketing. Evidently, she has some sort of sideline covering the royal family.
Not all intelligence is created equal. There was a time early in their careers when Lemon and even, if you can believe it, Brian Stelter would have been justifiably considered pretty smart. But put them on TV to do punditry and not journalism, and throw in a little Trump Derangement Syndrome, and after just a few years they both ended up complete morons.
Mike
There was a time early in their careers when Lemon and even, if you can believe it, Brian Stelter would have been justifiably considered pretty smart.
If you say so. Nothing about their biography suggests they’re above the 75th percentile in that respect.
smartly dressed maybe
“She’s not a palace pr official. She owns a consulting business that specializes in marketing. Evidently, she has some sort of sideline covering the royal family.” Art
Does her resume in any way lessen the accuracy and validity of her response?
“Nothing about their biography suggests they’re above the 75th percentile in that respect.”
Stelter was working at the New York Times at 22 and Lemon had won multiple regional TV Emmys for his reporting. Perhaps I should have said “pretty smart as journalists go.”
Mike
Fantastic job. I didn’t know she was a marketing consultant. Lemon looked shell-shocked. Would love to see more of this.
Does her resume in any way lessen the accuracy and validity of her response?
My point was that she is not paid to defend the royal family. It’s really cumbersome to have to annotate every post so you get it when you’re in a contentious mood.
From memory and I can’t remember the sources —
An estimated 29 million African tribe members were enslaved by their chieftains and sold to slave traders (mostly Arab) between 1400 and 1900. A majority ended up in Arab hands. The rest were shipped mostly to South America and the Caribbean. About a half million ended up in what is today the USA. That’s less than 2% of the total.
Not surprisingly, a higher percentage of the white crew members on the slave ships died during transit than the slaves. After all, the white crew members had no property value to the owner.
The descendants of those African slaves who ended up in the USA have the highest standard of living of blacks in any country in the world. As Muhammed Ali said in 1974 after his time in Africa, “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat.”
The law doesn’t recognize any legal claim by which reparations could be awarded. If reparations were to be awarded, they should be directed at those who did the enslaving. More interestingly, the standard measure of damages would be computed as the difference between what the claimants have and what they would have had there been no wrong committed. In this case, that would be the difference between what blacks in the USA have and what they would have if they lived in Africa. That’s a decidedly negative value.
Maybe African nations should sue American blacks to recover that difference. 😉
Lemon: … “It’s an interesting discussion Hilary, thank you…”. LOL.
The new semi-historical movie of African amazons (female warriors), including one asking their king to stop slavery, might create more discussion about it.
Some of Obama’s great-great grandparents were almost certainly slave owners, and even slavers. Virtually every African tribe had slaves from other tribes.
And there remains lots of tribal hatreds, not reduced by colonial boundaries. Too bad South Sudan didn’t create a Swiss style confederation of tribal cantons – tho it remains not too late.
Well they were probably omani this is who the brits took over in the 19th century
check this out:
https://www.modernghana.com/news/102821/ghana-apologizes-for-its-role-in-slave-trade-countrys-50th.html
https://www.modernghana.com/news/102692/ghana-apologizes-to-slaves-descendants.html
As for reparations, it should consist of a one way airplane ticket to any country the “victim” of slavery chooses to go to, permanent loss of US citizenship and prohibiting the “victim” from ever setting foot again in the USA.
And throw in free freight shipping of all their possessions they wish to take.
These “victims of slavery,” whose contempt and hatred for the whitey, racist USA is so profound and deep seated will naturally jump at this great opportunity to leave a nation they despise with every fiber of their being.
Expect hundreds of thousands ( millions??) to sign up for this great offer.
Speaking of slavery, Mauritania, a former French colony and a majority black nation finally abolished slavery in 1981 but apparently it still exists there.
I guess It’s tough to break with tradition. The French tried to outlaw slavery there, but they had no success convincing the locals.
“It’s really cumbersome to have to annotate every post so you get it when you’re in a contentious mood.”
Now you know what it feels like.
Mike
I think saudi arabia ended it in 1962 around the time malcolm x visited
Don’t be a Bunge.
Eight or nine years ago, I listened to two 20something coworkers having a pretty formulaic ‘woke’ dialogue: slavery, America is evil, white people are evil, and so forth. I casually pointed out that:
1.Slavery of some sort was a common practice in virtually all cultures throughout history, up until a few hundred years ago.
2. Black Africans enslaved other Black Africans and many Africans captured and sold slaves to white slave traders.
3. Arab slave traders enslaved hundreds of thousands white Europeans, as well as Black Africans.
4. The word slave likely derives from the same root word for Slav, because Slavs (thus white Europeans) were taken as slaves so frequently .
They were genuinely astonished at all of the above. They had no rejoinder and they knew it. Of course, I had learned all of these simple facts in middle and high school (as I’m sure most people on this blog did as well); and I went public school in a very liberal college town…yet they still taught basic history in those ‘olden days’ (the 80s and early 90s).
Lemon is ten years my senior, so presumably he was likely exposed to the above basic facts at some point in his education. But after decades of immersion in PC culture, he may have genuinely forgotten.
As an aside, I would not so freely engage with 20somethings on any woke topic today, as I did in 2013-14. The odds that I’d be ‘canceled’ are fairly high
“My point was that she is not paid to defend the royal family. It’s really cumbersome to have to annotate every post so you get it when you’re in a contentious mood.” Art Deco
Had you acknowledged the validity of her assertions and then pointed out her resume, there would have been no need for the question.
PS: when someone points out a possible implication in your words, it isn’t necessarily based in hostile feelings. Only the insecure respond with passive/aggressive ‘suggestions’ that question motives without evidence of such.
This was a joy to watch! I first saw it yesterday and have watched it 4? times since, and will certainly watch it a few more times.
It is so much fun to watch a snob taken down a peg, or three. I suppose that’s why I’m such a Marx Brothers fan. Margaret Dumont was a much better “straight man” than Don Lemon. Lemon was left speechless.
And Ms. Fordwich did such a great job! I can’t imagine she knew the question was coming, but she was so well prepared for it and did such a great job of walking the very fine line of rattling off facts without lurching into pedagogy, sarcasm or condescension. Although she obviously thought Lemon’s question was moronic and immature, she played her answer straight.
She reminds of Nigel Farage.
A brilliant performance! Brava, Ms. Fordwich!!
Had you acknowledged the validity of her assertions and then pointed out her resume, there would have been no need for the question.
Other people ‘acknowledged the validity’ of her remarks, to which I did not object. The moderator’s description of her made it sound as if she was a palace spokesman. She is not.
Ackler: “I had learned all of these simple facts in middle and high school (as I’m sure most people on this blog did as well) …”
And perhaps Ms. Fordwich did, too.
But it appears you had better history instruction than some of us. While I considered my education in American and world history by or before 1967 as being decent enough, we did not happen to cover the numeric details on slavery nor much about the specific roles of the various Arab and African perpetrators, or the enslavement of Europeans from either the Atlantic coastal towns or the Caucuses or Balkans. I must have picked up such knowledge from Sowell’s articles or other sources.
Like so many things, some selected knowledge stays with you, while the rest just drifts away without additional reinforcement or need.
To understand the longevity, depth, and the (then known) world-wide scope of Muslim slavery, which was the template for the later and much smaller in time and scope Atlantic slave trade, I recommend reading physician Dr. Andrew G. Bostom’s well written, extremely well researched and footnoted book, which quotes many primary Muslim written documents, entitled, “The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims.”
Here is another good book about Arab / Muslims taking slaves; WHITE slaves.
https://www.amazon.com/White-Gold-Extraordinary-Thomas-Million/dp/0374289352
Very interesting book.
Diversity [dogma] denies individual dignity, individual conscience, intrinsic value, and normalizes color blocs (e.g. “people of color”), color quotas, and affirmative discrimination.
Hutu vs Tutsi, Mandela’s Xhosa vs Zulu, Kenyan elite vs deplorables, and so on and so forth. Lemon looked into the back… black hole… whore h/t NAACP and saw himself looking back. A “burden” h/t Obama of his own conception.
Diversity did not work out so well in the former Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the USSR.
Speaking of the USSR, how many of the 15 quasi-independent republics of the USSR decided to join the new Russian Federation upon the demise of the USSR??
If diversity is so great, why did all these former republics get out of Dodge the first opportunity they had??
And check out what’s going on in Scotland and maybe Wales where there is agitation for independence from the UK.
Scotland is interesting because 7 PM’s of the UK were Scottish so it’s hard to claim they do not have a voice in the UK govt.
Perhaps the Scottish need to be reminded that diversity is good.
John Tyler, you read my mind! I’ve been saying the exact same thing since this “reparations” nonsense started. Someone might want to tell these PC virtue signaling morons that there were blacks throughout the colonies who owned slaves in the US prior to the Civil War.
Newsreaders used to just read the news. You’d see more of them on election night or when there was a space shot or a foreign crisis, but otherwise they usually had only very limited opportunities to show how stupid they were. 24 news/opinion has changed all that.
It’s hard to know how much people like Lemon know and hope the audience doesn’t.
Bit of Royal Navy doggerel from the West Africa Station–anti slavery.
“Beware and take care
Of the Bight of Benin.
There’s one comes out
For forty goes in.’
Wasn’t that bad, but far worse than other duties. Inshore work before the development of quinine was dangerous as hell.
It was said that Kwame Nkrumah suggested a giant statue of an Anopheles mosquito in downtown Accra to honor who kept them, more or less, free.
This is little different from the whole “The Constitution ruled that Black people are only 3/5 of a human being.”
The reality is in 1787 that the South wanted Blacks to count as a WHOLE person (for representative purposes), while granting them NO political voice. While the North wanted Blacks to NOT COUNT as a person (for representative purposes) because they had no political voice.
Does this mean the North was somehow more racist than the South? Or that the South was actually MORE willing to recognize the humanity of Black people?