Did white slavery exist?

Slaves of a different color
BY STEPHAN TALTY (06/15/00)

I was both puzzled and bemused at Stephan Talty's article in which he reports the shocking -- shocking, I tell you! -- news that some whites were also enslaved alongside Africans in this country. Both scholars and casual readers of African-diasporan history have long been familiar with Talty's revelation through the works of Joel A. Rogers, whom the writer mercifully credits, and other writers who did not buy the standard line on this nation's peculiar institution. The information he is presenting is hardly new. Another open secret that the author may want to "discover" was the clandestine use of Filipinos as slaves in colonial Mexico. Around 100,000 of them were imported into Mexico via Manila to sate the Spaniard lust for more free labor.

I was disturbed by Talty's inability to articulate the central truth that so-called "white slavery" confirmed: that the primary criterion used to determine fitness for slavery (and consequently, the suitability for institutional exploitation) was blackness. Those European Americans would not have been enslaved if they had not been declared "black" first. Similarly, the greed of the Spaniards in Mexico forced them to circumvent their own laws and declare those Filipinos as "Africans" so that they could be legally enslaved. In both instances, slave owners condemned two non-African groups to the living hell of slavery. Yet both times, these people first had to undergo a racial transformation into "Africans" before their labor could be so callously exploited. Talty's piece hardly sets our knowledge of slavery on its head; it does little more than verify it in a mainstream forum.

Talty may yet regale us with other new discoveries after boning up on some more "obscure" African-diasporan history. Perhaps next, he will release a daring and controversial article on the phenomenon of African-American slaveholders in the Deep South. He might have crafted a more interesting read if he had tackled the well-documented story of "real" Africans and their descendants, first manumitted through their own enterprise or through the guilt of some dying slave owner, yet found themselves returned to the slave barracks due to the duplicity of various slave catchers and unscrupulous auctioneers.

-- Olayinka Fadahunsi

The belief that whites were never sold into slavery in America must be a Northern ignorance. As a child in southern Louisiana I knew about this, I was told by my grandfather. It was common enough that it was not talked about. They were usually immigrants, always poor. Often kidnapped, but sometimes they were children or wives sold to pay debts or just because they would fetch a good price. And they were sold as blacks. Even though everyone knew they were white. Because even in the selling of white slaves, slavery in America is a black thing.

-- Wahrena Brown

Americans oversimplify the characterizations of the divisions between the races, acting as though they have always been as they are right now. What about how different immigrants were treated in different eras? Just a little digging into the history of immigration reveals a "whitening" of particular ethnic groups, such as Jews, Irish, Italians, etc. These groups were not always considered "white." There was a big difference between Western Europeans and Eastern Europeans. The Anglo-Saxon defined what "white" was and everything else was inferior to that standard at some point or another. Many groups of immigrants, especially those that were poor, were treated and thought of as just as "subhuman" as blacks when they arrived in the U.S. But now they're all considered "white."

Look at the history of how Asian-Americans have been treated. When the transcontinental railroad was constructed in the late 1800s the Chinese laborers who were used to build the railroad where referred to as the "heathen Chinee" and compared regularly with blacks. At first they were thought of as "less than" blacks, but then they were thought of as better laborers because of language barriers and because the young male laborers had left their families in China. They weren't "owned" the same as blacks, but they were thought of as equal to or less than blacks. Now many Asian groups are considered "white" or a "model minority." There are other histories of "negroizing" undesirable whites and non-black people.

-- Hedda Kniess

The fact that there were cases of white slavery is a fascinating historical fact and further points out the barbarity and depravity of the entire slave trade. Just as we are told that we should never forget about the Holocaust, we should not forget this dark period in American history. The sad fact, however, is that we do not learn the lessons of these terrible events. Rather than try to stop the continuing acts of genocide and slavery (slavery continues in Mali and the Sudan) that exist right now in Africa and other parts of the world, Americans would rather fight the battles of 50 or 150 years ago. They are focused on extracting apologies and recompense from the descendants of those responsible for horrific past deeds and they do nothing about alleviating the suffering of their fellow human beings today.

-- Martin Kannengieser

Stephan Talty refers to my book "They Were White and They Were Slaves," as "a compendium of quotes pulled from 17th and 18th century documents." He then writes that "Hoffman's far-right followers need little hard evidence to get misty about injustices perpetrated on their kin ..."

If my book is documented, as Talty says that it is, then it is this documentation and not "far-right" convictions which persuade my readers that I have made a case for injustice perpetrated against poor and working class whites in servitude in early America.

-- Michael A. Hoffman II

Stephan Talty couldn't have done much research on "white slavery" in the antebellum South if he failed to read "The Forgotten Cause of the Civil War: A New Look at the Slavery Issue" by Lawrence R. Tenzer. If he had done so, Talty would know that "white slavery" was an important factor in increasing the tensions between North and South that ultimately led to the Civil War. Consider these issues that Talty failed to address: