Quoting the Pointer Sisters song, “I'm so excited!” Black pop icon Snoop Dogg's comments about the remake of the “Roots” TV series, in essence, is what I have been preaching to fellow blacks for decades (without his profanity).
Snoop said, “I'm sick of this s---. They are going to just keep beating that s--- into our heads about how they did us, huh?” Snoop spoke against new shows and movies such as “12 Years a Slave” which “keep showing the abuse we took hundreds and hundreds of years ago.”
Snoop said, “I ain't watching that s---, and I advise you motherf—ers as real n------ like myself; f--- them television shows. Snoop continued, “Let's create our own s--- based on today, how we live and how we inspire people today. Black is what's real. F--- that old s---.”
I say, “Right-on bro! (in my 1970s lingo)” Folks, for decades, I have been frustrated; trying to get through to fellow blacks that continuing to view themselves as victims and using slavery as an excuse for bad and trifling behavior only weakens them. America is the greatest land of opportunity on the planet for all who choose to go for it. My reward has been to be trashed in black and liberal media; called a traitorous self-hating Uncle Tom.
I pray that the truth coming from a hip black celeb like Snoop Dogg will help to remove the scales from the eyes of black youths.
The last thing the Democratic Party wants is real black empowerment/independence. The Democratic Party's very existence is rooted in convincing as many voters as possible that they are forever victims of America in some way.
This is why when Oprah came out with her movie, Selma, I said I hoped the movie failed.
I knew her movie was propaganda to convince blacks that not much has changed in America since the 1950s and that only their continued monolithic voting for Democrats will keep eternally evil and racist white America at bay. Sure enough, in a press conference promoting Selma, Oprah ranted about how in America, blacks still suffer the injustices portrayed in her movie on a daily basis. Meanwhile, Oprah is an American Ga-zillionaire with enormous power and influence due to her millions of white fans.
Upon seeing commercials for the upcoming “Roots” remake TV series, my reaction was pretty much the same as Snoop Dogg, “I'm not watching that crap.” Like everything Leftists produce today, I know the “Roots” remake is a political tool to promote Democratic Party narratives: America sucks, government must become bigger and more controlling, blacks should be paid reparations. I also wondered how the producers would include the LGBT agenda in the remake. Would the Kunta Kinte character in the “Roots” remake be transgender?
As a young black man in 1977, I remember the original “Roots” TV series viewed by 130 million Americans. I was elated because I thought “Roots” presented slavery in a human context that decent people of all races could relate to; bringing people together. The first Rocky movie achieved the same universal humanity. It was such an eye-opener hearing my radical black power, whitey sucks, fellow black college student buddies excitedly raving about their new “Italian Stallion” hero after seeing the movie, Rocky.
In 1977, some feared the “Roots” TV series would cause riots in the streets. The American Left/Democrats of today are so divisive and so crazy with hatred for their country that they probably hope the remake of “Roots” will spark riots.
Riots in the streets would equal a crisis. The Left's golden rule is “never let a crisis go to waste”; an opportunity to implement more government control and infringements on personal freedom.
Things Democrats label a crisis (typically fake) provide Democrats with ammo to propose more government control; more government handouts, which equals more government dependency, which equals more loyal Democrat voters. It is all a scam, folks. And Democrats/Leftists have been playin' blacks for decades.
So, I agree with Snoop. Enough with the Left's relentless efforts to fill black heads with victimhoodism, constantly rehashing how America did us wrong.
I also refuse to watch the “Hate in America” TV mini-series. The series focuses solely on white racism against blacks. If the TV series seriously sought to address hate, it would include the Black Panthers and Black Lives Matter declaring open season on killing whites and cops.
Again, the TV mini-series is another Leftist tool to sell blacks the message that America is eternally racist so vote for Democrats to watch your backs.
I learned years ago, that the Left does not view Black History Month as an occasion to showcase black contributions to our country. The Left uses it to instill guilt in white Americans; instill that America still sucks and still owes blacks reparations, big time. With the Left's true purpose in mind, I renamed February, “Annual White America Sucks Month.”
When the movie, The Pursuit of Happyness starring leftist Will Smith came out, I thought, “Here we go again; another movie about how America sucks, is racist and blacks can't catch a break.” I am not going to watch that crap. Well folks, I was wrong. The movie was great. It featured the true inspiring life story of Chris Gardner, a highly successful black American entrepreneur.
Surprisingly, the movie even showed how white businessmen (typically portrayed as racist, greedy SOBs) helped Gardner to pursue his dream. I related to Gardner's story because throughout my careers, white businessmen helped me pursue my ambitions, as early as high school.
The movie, The Pursuit of Happyness was recently added to Netflix. Check it out. I think Snoop Dogg would approve.
Lloyd Marcus, The Unhyphenated American
Chairman: The Conservative Campaign Committee
LloydMarcus.com
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The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves
The Slaves That Time Forgot
They came as slaves; vast human cargo transported on tall British ships bound for the Americas. They were shipped by the hundreds of thousands and included men, women, and even the youngest of children.
Whenever they rebelled or even disobeyed an order, they were punished in the harshest ways. Slave owners would hang their human property by their hands and set their hands or feet on fire as one form of punishment. They were burned alive and had their heads placed on pikes in the marketplace as a warning to other captives.
We don’t really need to go through all of the gory details, do we? We know all too well the atrocities of the African slave trade.
But, are we talking about African slavery? King James II and Charles I also led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.
The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World. His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies. By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.
Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.
From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves. Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade. Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic. This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.
During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder. In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.
Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish. However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.
As an example, the African slave trade was just beginning during this same period. It is well recorded that African slaves, not tainted with the stain of the hated Catholic theology and more expensive to purchase, were often treated far better than their Irish counterparts.
African slaves were very expensive during the late 1600s (50 Sterling). Irish slaves came cheap (no more than 5 Sterling). If a planter whipped or branded or beat an Irish slave to death, it was never a crime. A death was a monetary setback, but far cheaper than killing a more expensive African. The English masters quickly began breeding the Irish women for both their own personal pleasure and for greater profit. Children of slaves were themselves slaves, which increased the size of the master’s free workforce. Even if an Irish woman somehow obtained her freedom, her kids would remain slaves of her master. Thus, Irish moms, even with this new found emancipation, would seldom abandon their kids and would remain in servitude.
In time, the English thought of a better way to use these women (in many cases, girls as young as 12) to increase their market share: The settlers began to breed Irish women and girls with African men to produce slaves with a distinct complexion. These new “mulatto” slaves brought a higher price than Irish livestock and, likewise, enabled the settlers to save money rather than purchase new African slaves. This practice of interbreeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed “forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.” In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company.
England continued to ship tens of thousands of Irish slaves for more than a century. Records state that, after the 1798 Irish Rebellion, thousands of Irish slaves were sold to both America and Australia. There were horrible abuses of both African and Irish captives. One British ship even dumped 1,302 slaves into the Atlantic Ocean so that the crew would have plenty of food to eat.
There is little question that the Irish experienced the horrors of slavery as much (if not more in the 17th Century) as the Africans did. There is, also, very little question that those brown, tanned faces you witness in your travels to the West Indies are very likely a combination of African and Irish ancestry. In 1839, Britain finally decided on its own to end its participation in Satan’s highway to hell and stopped transporting slaves. While their decision did not stop pirates from doing what they desired, the new law slowly concluded THIS chapter of nightmarish Irish misery.
But, if anyone, black or white, believes that slavery was only an African experience, then they’ve got it completely wrong.
Irish slavery is a subject worth remembering, not erasing from our memories.
But, where are our public (and PRIVATE) schools???? Where are the history books? Why is it so seldom discussed?
Do the memories of hundreds of thousands of Irish victims merit more than a mention from an unknown writer?
Or is their story to be one that their English pirates intended: To (unlike the African book) have the Irish story utterly and completely disappear as if it never happened.
None of the Irish victims ever made it back to their homeland to describe their ordeal. These are the lost slaves; the ones that time and biased history books conveniently forgot.
‘Irish slaves’: the convenient myth
It was with a heavy heart and no small amount of anger that I decided it was necessary to write a public refutation of the insidious myth that the Irish were once chattel slaves in the British colonies. The subject of this myth is not an issue in academic circles, for there is unanimous agreement, based on overwhelming evidence, that the Irish were never subjected to perpetual, hereditary slavery in the colonies, based on notions of ‘race’. Unfortunately this is not the case in the public domain and the ‘Irish slaves’ myth has been shared so frequently online that it has gone viral.
The tale of the Irish slaves is rooted in a false conflation of indentured servitude and chattel slavery. These are not the same. Indentured servitude was a form of bonded labour, whereby a migrant agreed to work for a set period of time (between two and seven years) and in return the cost of the voyage across the Atlantic was covered. Indentured servitude was a colonial innovation that enabled many to emigrate to the New World while providing a cheap and white labour force for planters and merchants to exploit. Those who completed their term of service were awarded ‘freedom dues’ and were free. The vast majority of labourers who agreed to this system did so voluntarily, but there were many who were forcibly transplanted from the British Isles to the colonies and sold into indentured service against their will. While these forced deportees would have included political prisoners and serious felons, it is believed that the majority came from the poor and vulnerable. This forced labour was in essence an extension of the English Poor Laws, e.g. in 1697 John Locke recommended the whipping of those who ‘refused to work’ and the herding of beggars into workhouses. Indeed this criminalisation of the poor continues into the 21st century. In any case, all bar the serious felons were freed once the term of their contract expired.
“White indentured servitude was so very different from black slavery as to be from another galaxy of human experience,” as Donald Harman Akenson put it in If the Irish Ran the World: Montserrat, 1630-1730. How so? Chattel slavery was perpetual, a slave was only free once they they were no longer alive; it was hereditary, the children of slaves were the property of their owner; the status of chattel slave was designated by ‘race’, there was no escaping your bloodline; a chattel slave was treated like livestock, you could kill your slaves while applying “moderate correction” and the homicide law would not apply; the execution of ‘insolent’ slaves was encouraged in these slavocracies to deter insurrections and disobedience, and their owners were paid generous compensation for their ‘loss’; an indentured servant could appeal to a court of law if they were mistreated, a slave had no recourse for justice. And so on..
A dangerous myth
The prevalence and endurance of this myth is partly due to the fact that it is buttressed by two long-standing narratives. The first narrative comes from the arena of Irish nationalism, where the term 'slavery' is used to highlight the political, social and religious subjugation or persecution that the Irish have historically suffered. In this narrative, the term ‘Irish slaves’ refers specifically to those who were forced onto transport ships and sold into indentured servitude in the West Indies during the Cromwellian era. The 'innocent' usage of this phrase is, to a degree, understandable and its conflation with chattel slavery generally occurs due to a mixture of ignorance and confusion. More objectionable is the canon of pseudo-history books like O'Callaghan's To Hell or Barbados or Walsh and Jordan's White Cargo, which knowingly conflate indentured servitude and chattel slavery. The ‘Irish slaves’ myth is also a convenient focal point for nationalist histories as it obscures the critically underwritten story of how so many Irish people, whether Gaelic, Hiberno-Norman or Anglo-Irish, benefited from the Atlantic slave trade and other colonial exploits in multiple continents for hundreds of years.
The second narrative is of a more sinister nature. Found in the websites and forums of white supremacist conspiracy theorists, this insidiously claims that indentured servitude can be equated with chattel slavery. From Stormfront.org, a self-described online community of white nationalists, to David Icke’s February 2014 interview with Infowars.com, the narrative of the ‘White slaves’ is continuously promoted. The most influential book to claim that there was ‘white slavery’ in Colonial America was Michael Hoffman’s They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America. Self-published in 1993, Hoffman, a Holocaust denier, unsurprisingly blames the Atlantic slave trade on the Jews. By blurring the lines between the different forms of unfree labour, these white supremacists seek to conceal the incontestable fact that these slavocracies were controlled by—and operated for the benefit of—white Europeans. This narrative, which exists almost exclusively in the United States, is essentially a form of nativism and racism masquerading as conspiracy theory. Those that push this narrative have now adopted the ‘Irish slaves’ myth, and they use it as a rhetorical ‘attack dog’ which aims to shut down all debate about the legacy of black slavery in the United States.
In the wake of the Ferguson shooting, both of these narratives were conjoined in a particularly ugly fashion. Many social media users, including some Irish-Americans, invoked this mythology to chide African-Americans for protesting against the structural racism that exists in the United States (see a collection of tweets on ‘Irish slaves’, gathered by the author). Furthermore, they used these falsehoods to mock African-American calls for reparations for slavery, stating “my Irish ancestors were the first slaves in America, where are my reparations?” Those that share links to spurious ‘Irish slavery’ articles on social media have also been appending their posts with the hashtags #Ferguson and #NoExcuses. No excuses? This myth of convenience is being utilised by those who are unwilling to accept the truth of their white privilege and the prevalence of an entrenched racism in their societies. There is clearly comfort to be found in denialism.
The conflation present in both narratives has been abetted by the deliberate use of a limited vocabulary. The inclination to describe these different forms of servitude using the umbrella term “slavery” is a wilful misuse of language. It serves to diminish the reality of the chattel slave system that existed in the New World for over three centuries. It is also a reminder that the popular use of such a simplistic term as ‘modern-day slavery’ can reduce clarity and hinder our collective understanding of both the present and the past.
In response to Marilyn Calkins who claimed that the Irish coming to this country were enslaved as well, I think the more accurate term or description of their situation was "indentured servants." They weren't technically "owned" by anyone, but they came to America in the hulls of the ships and were "indentured" to a business or businessman or factory owner or whatever to work for peanuts for years until their ship's passage and other settlement details were finally repaid. They had very little choice and virtually no "wiggle" room - much like actual slaves who were OWNED by someone else - but they voluntarily entered into a contract of "indentured servitude" for years until their debts were repaid and they were fully settled in the new world (the USA; or, before that, the British Colonies of North America). I think I may have had such an ancestor in my family tree, but there were only a few vague clues in a county registry that possibly reflected this situation/condition for my Irish ancestor, a woman named Mary!
if a show is made today , it should be called "modern day judases" . it would focus on those who have exploited the suffering of the civil rights movement for personal gain . it would feature the usual suspects : jesse Jackson [and his family] , mlk's kids, al Sharpton, and the congressional black caucus
I'm waiting for someone to make a movie showing how many blacks owned slaves. And how come they never say anything about the Irish slaves, who were treated worse than blacks because they were considered less valuable because they didn't think they had as much stamina? They totally disregard there were white slaves too. How convenient...
Liberals have to keep this narrative alive so as to keep the black vote. I can't believe they continue to vote to be enslaved with the democrat party.
Thank you for a most excellent post~
Unfortunately, yelling "We were slaves" still gets blacks what they want. Remember, Dr. Martin Luther King was killed for going against that concept. A white man may have pulled the trigger but, I believe it was the other black leaders of the day that had him killed. Why? Because Dr. King believed in and was pushing for everybody working for what they got and earning their way in this country. The other black leaders wanted everything handed to them with protection under the law. They had Dr. King killed and they got what they wanted.
I never watched the new Roots, the commercials about it were all violent. Much worse
than the first one. Just another race baiting movie to agitate people. Very violent movie.
I thought the first Roots was done well, and the actors/actresses were wonderful.
I'm not a fan of rap. Half the time I can't understand what they're saying anyway. But it appears I may have to take a second look at this particular rapper because what he says makes sense. Next time I will listen closely to the words in his songs. I would only ask that he leave out some of his foul language.
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