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Do you think that the average black American knows that slavery was common practice all around the world just a few hundred years ago, and that today in many other parts of the world their is a very vibrant slave trade that is still in existence?

Now to say that slavery was a common practice and that every people group was enslaved at some point or the other in history does not mean that it was not an evil institution?

That is just to point out that this was the norm, plus there are some nuances in any honest discussion of slavery.

To hear black Americans talk about slavery, one would think than the only people who were ever enslaved were black Americans, and whites were the only slave masters.

Do they know that the first person to hold a life long slave in America was black? Do they know that some former black slaves even owned slaves themselves and that there were quite a few black slave owners in America during that time? Do they know that Native Americans owned slaves who they did not free until more than a decade after the emancipation proclamation?

Don’t get it wrong. Slavery in America was one of the most brutal forms in the world, and even after the abolition of slavery; it was a long arduous road for black people to get to where we are today.

Perspective is important though. Of course it is good to look back so that you can avoid the mistakes of the past, but it is much more important to live in the here and now, applying whatever lessons were learned, with the goal of forging a better future.

All of this constant harping on the past to make people in the present who had nothing to do with slavery feel guilty is tiresome, especially considering that only a small number of present day white Americans have any ancestral connection to slavery.

So in any discussion of slavery, may we have all of the facts please, including the fact that white people were not going into the interior of African nations and capturing black people to bring back to America.

They simply showed up on the shores of African nations and Africans brought other captive Africans who they sold to the white man.

In addition to all of this, during the time of slavery in America, Western Europe was the only place in the world that had no slaves at that time, even though some people from that part of the world had slaves in other parts of their colonies.

It was Europeans though who introduced to the rest of the world the idea of freeing slaves en masse.

First the French freed their slaves, then the British freed their slaves. Mexico had a black President and they freed their slaves, then Americans freed their slaves, and all of these nations outlawed the practice after that, leading to the attitudes about slavery today in Western civilization.

These were mostly white nations that got the ball rolling on the abolition of slavery.