reply to post by Roland Deschain
I don't know about the website itself, but, yes, there were white slaves in America. I didn't know either, but I followed the link (thank you,
RexxCrow) and read the article. The author,
Michael A. Hoffman, is quite a
character. He's been characterized both as a revisionist historian and a "Holocaust denier." I take most of what he says with the proverbial
grain of salt, but, since even a broken clock is right twice a day, I decided to look into it.
Salon.com had a good article by another author, Stephan Talty. I hadn't heard of him before, but he's a journalist who writes about race and
American culture. He also co-authored a book,
Mulatto
America: At the Crossroads of Black and White Culture: A Social History. Haven't read it, but it looks interesting.
Anyway, on the topic of white slaves, he says that he came upon the idea by mistake, searching through a dusty library, but he did some more research,
and this is what he found.
The numbers are impossible, so far, to pin down, but some white bondage clearly occurred. In an era when human beings were the most valuable
commodities available to thieves and slave traders, greed occasionally trumped the crucial myth that there was a strict dividing line between the
races. And while there were instances of what appeared to onlookers as "purebred" whites being sold on auction blocks, those Anglo-Saxons were being
sold as "blacks." One had to become physically or socially accepted as black to be legally sold into chattel slavery and enter into the full
degradation of American bondage.
As light-skinned blacks sometimes gained their freedom by "passing" as white, so did hapless Caucasians make the
reverse journey -- proving that race and bondage were even more fluid concepts in antebellum America than we would like to believe.
Slaves of a different color
It's a very good article. If you're interested in the topic, I'd strongly suggest you start there, but if you need to be convinced, here are some
teasers: Talty goes on to talk to white historians, black historians, black writers, and regular people, both black and white, asking what they think
about this new information. Their reactions may surprise you.
Happy hunting!
