No, white people didn’t invent slavery and conquest by Becket Adams

Posted By on November 1st, 2021

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/no-white-people-didnt-invent-slavery-and-conquest

It’s unclear what, exactly, they’re teaching Africana studies professors these days, but it apparently isn’t world history.

Rutgers University Professor Brittney Cooper, whose area of expertise is in women’s and gender studies and Africana studies, believes subjugation and military conquest didn’t exist in the world between “brown and black” people until white people arrived on the scene with their colonialism and white supremacy.

“I think that white people are committed to being villains in the aggregate,” she said this week during an appearance at the Root Institute conference.

Cooper continued, launching into a wild, fact-free tirade about “white people,” saying, “It’s not that white people don’t know what they have done. They know. They fear that there is no other way to be human but the way in which they are human. So, you know, you talk to white people, and whenever you really want to have a reckoning about it, they say stuff like, you know, ‘It’s just human nature. If y’all had all of this power, you would have done the same thing, right?'”

“And it’s like, no, that’s what white humans did. White human beings thought, ‘there’s a world here and we own it.’ Prior to them, black and brown people have been sailing across oceans, interacting with each other, for centuries without total subjugation, domination, and colonialism,” Cooper added.

This is a lot to unpack.

For starters, to what oceans, exactly, is she referring? The Atlantic, Pacific, Indian, Arctic, or Southern? If she believes “black and brown” people regularly sailed across these oceans for “centuries” before white colonialism, interacting peacefully with each other, this would come as a shock to a great number of historians and archaeologists.

Secondly, the idea that white people invented conquest and slavery would be laugh-out-loud funny were it not for the fact Cooper is being dead serious.

As a brief reminder, I’m going to mention a few names and terms. Let me know if they ring any bells:

  • Babylonian Captivity
  • Ramesses II (Cooper and company can’t claim Egypt doesn’t count in the “brown and black” category because I distinctly remember the anti-racist crowd howled with rage in 2015 when white people were cast as Egyptians in the film Gods of Egypt.)
  • Xerxes
  • Carthage
  • The Aztecs
  • The Qin dynasty (To be fair, perhaps Cooper may have intentionally excluded Asians from her “black and brown” qualifier because Asians don’t count or whatever.)

There’s also the rather uncomfortable fact that, as far as chattel slavery in the West is concerned, a good number of African natives operated on the business end of things.
You know, for a political faction that puts such an emphasis on representation, it seems weird to erase the history of black and brown conquest. Don’t give white people all the credit!

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