It looks like that is exactly what you were saying
Can you explain better?
I can explain it, but I doubt I can make you understand it. Blue_Max posted a link about how most young Americans believe that slavery began in America and was in fact a purely American institution.
For 11 years, Professor Duke Pesta gave quizzes to his students at the beginning of the school year to test their knowledge on basic facts about American history and Western culture.
The most surprising result from his 11-year experiment? Students’ overwhelming belief that slavery began in the United States and was almost exclusively an American phenomenon, he said.
“Most of my students could not tell me anything meaningful about slavery outside of America,” Pesta told The College Fix. “They are convinced that slavery was an American problem that more or less ended with the Civil War, and they are very fuzzy about the history of slavery prior to the Colonial era. Their entire education about slavery was confined to America.”
My post was highlighting the irony that not only was slavery very much NOT an American invention, but slavery affected people living in America (or trying to get to America) well before we had slavery IN America*. Not only that, but the slavers were Africans preying on white Christians. That has absolutely no connotations implying that slavery in America was somehow caused by North African slavers; I can't imagine that anyone would make that claim. Certainly not anyone with any understanding of history, since slavery is as ancient as civilization, at the least.
* Here I'm obviously excepting slavery among Native American peoples - another subject about which young people typically remain blissfully ignorant - not only because the narrative here is about the lingering effects of white Colonial American slavery on black Africans, but because slavery among Native American tribes was generally much less pernicious as it was not genetically defined, not hereditary, and often (perhaps usually) not necessarily for life. Not applicable for those slaves who were mutilated or ritually sacrificed, of course, but generally speaking we think most slaves of Native American tribes (in pre-Colonial times) were treated well, often adopted into the tribe or repatriated/exchanged for enslaved tribal members, and often allowed to marry into the enslaving tribe. And certainly, children born to the enslaved Native Americans were seldom if ever considered slaves. (Obviously this changed during the Colonial period, but that's just the native people adopting the customs of the conquering people, not necessarily indicative of their pre-historic behavior.) The plight of people who are allowed to own wealth, marry at will, sire free children, and earn their way out of slavery really cannot be compared to the plight of people who (generally speaking) are considered automatically slaves by virtue of birth, whose slavery is most typically eternal unless manumitted, whose children are born slaves, and whose marriages (or at least conjugal lives) are subject to their owners' whims. (And yes, I know there were certainly plenty of black Africans who earned their way out of slavery, but they were very much the exception, whereas for pre-Colonial slaves of Native American tribes this was the rule. Or so we think.)
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