The present is equally as barbaric. The fact that you easily dismiss the enslavement of human beings simply because white supremacists deemed it legal is a prime example of the continued dehumanization of Black life. Just because racist men in this country deemed treating human beings as property legal does not and will not ever justify their brutal and savage deeds. Not in a million years.

It’s also common knowledge that Africans sold other Africans into the slave trade. But the real hypocrisy is the number of white people who point that out as if that justifies what the Europeans did on American soil.

To be clear, ALL enslavement is wrong. But slavery in Africa resulted from people who were either prisoners of war, owed debts, etc. It was obviously not based on race as they enslaved their own. It was also not meant to be generational. The enslaved were able to marry, own property, and in some cases even owned their own enslaved humans. This does not justify but it is not the same as the race based chattel slavery imposed by Europeans.

The US did not invent chattel slavery but they put an insidious twist on it by literally BREEDING new generations of enslaved humans by the rape of African women. Why is it so hard for white Americans to comprehend that since slavery ended less than 200 years ago the condition of race relations in this country is directly related to this horrific event?

The past was barbaric and so is today. When a Black man can be brutally murdered on camera and shown on television for the entire world to see, I hardly call that a civilized society.