We have a once in a lifetime opportunity for you. An all expense paid, leave your loved ones behind free cruise across the Atlantic. Noone can possibly refuse this offer! The incentives we offer to comply are whips, chains, rape, torture on the upside and murder by butchering, boiling or beheading for the least compliant.
Americans are now being taught the benefits of enslaving other human beings. It sounds like this.
‘Wow! We actually helped save the Africans from destroying themselves. After all, they were just laying around on African beaches and forests doing nothing but eating bananas and making babies. The European and American invaders actually did them a favor. They were just waiting for whipping and ready for rape. We tortured and murdered them for their own good. At least some of them became good, humble Christians. They had no skills, talents or morality until we good Christians taught them human decency like the rest of us. We tried it with the indigenous populations, but they died from starvation, and the multiple diseases with which we infected them.
This is revisionist history at its finest. Whenever the victim complained, the victor blames them for not accepting the benefits bestowed.
The enslaved people did not then nor do their descendants delight in the horrors inflicted nor the present obvious attempt to conveniently erase recorded history. We acknowledge that history is sometimes painful to read about. Then again, it is more painful to selectively ignore the struggles of any members of our society.
Baptizing in Jesus name did not render mutilating and maiming, starvation and beating any less physically, emotionally or psychologically less painful. Building the economy and physical infrastructure was not done in a air-conditioned skill trade school. Raping to produce more slaves was not modern invitro fertilization.
I would assert that anyone who believes or claims that enslavement of people made in the image of God was worth it for those enslaved has an agenda to erase history. That doesn’t change who we were, but who we become. Like a child who touches a hot flame and is not admonished to repeat that action, the child will be burned again.
If we don’t learn from history we are destined to repeat that history.