Well, don't keep us in suspense: what was he trying to fool you about??

Stephen, I appreciate your reply, all these years later. While most of human history has, indeed, been one of grinding poverty for most individuals, the enslavement of others has often resulted in dramatic inequality, with much higher levels of wealth for those who enslave others. And this was never more apparent than in the case of U.S. slavery, which vastly enriched the slave-owning and slave-trading classes, as well as bringing greater prosperity to the majority of citizens, who benefited directly or indirectly from the slave economy. As an example, consider the early industrialization of the U.S., which occurred in New England through the development of textile mills. This industry, in places like Lawrence and Lowell, brought tremendous wealth to owners and investors, and generated greater prosperity for many others in the North. And it depended critically on a vast supply of cotton as a raw input, produced primarily by enslaved laborers in the South. This is why the phrase "Lords of the Loom and Lords of the Lash" gained such currency: because, in the antebellum U.S., everyone knew well how dependent the industrial North was on southern slavery.

It is simply an error to attribute the strength of the U.S. economy, and its rise to become the largest economy in the world, to the Gilded Age. By that time, the U.S. had already managed to industrialize, thanks in large part to our dominance of the global cotton market at a time when cotton was the primary raw input for industrialization and few regions outside of Europe were able to industrialize. And the U.S. economy only overtook that of Great Britain, launching a century of dominance as the world's largest economy, after the Gilded Age and well into the Progressive Era, at a time when most regions of the world outside Europe had not even industrialized and would be unable to do so for generations.

I will happily stay out of your feud with "blood-drenched" and "nihilist" communists and leftists.

I'm afraid that all I know about the process is in this post. If anyone else reading this knows more, I do hope they'll post a reply!

Yolanda, as you can see above, the process appears to depend on where your uncle lives. There was a class-action lawsuit for residents of the U.S., which required them to contact the nearest Mexican consulate to file a claim. Mexican residents needed to contact the Mexican government to pursue a claim. However, it's been more than a decade, and I don't know whether these avenues are still open.

There were Jewish slave traders, yes. But they were a tiny minority. The vast majority of European and American slave traders were Christian. So I have to question why you would mention Jewish slave traders here.

Slavery has historically been widespread on all inhabited continents, and not just Africa. So why note that fact? Similarly, it is a basic historical fact that African societies were deeply involved in the transatlantic slave trade.

So what? What does this have to do with a blog post about the end of U.S. slavery? I don't want to assume what point you might be making, but it almost sounds as though you're dismissing the history of U.S. chattel slavery by noting that there were other perpetrators who shared responsibility for it. Isn't this a bit like noting that southern U.S. slavery couldn't have existed without the active participation of many white northerners? It's true that many African societies were complicit in slavery—but many of those countries are ahead of the U.S. today in acknowledging that history.

Thank you for offering this comment, Jerry. Certainly you're right that Jewish merchants did NOT dominate the transatlantic slave trade, as is often claimed, and baseless allegations that they did are anti-Semitic.

However, there is no such claim here. Instead, it is noted that a Spanish slave trader has been described as "the Rothschild of slavery." This is a claim that his influence in the slave trade was akin to the extraordinary success of the Rothschild family in international banking.

This would be like saying that a Hollywood producer is "the Bill Gates of movie making." It wouldn't imply that Gates is involved, at all, in movie making, but that the producer's prominence in movie making is similar to Gates' influence in the tech industry.

You're absolutely right that the historical truth is vital in conversations like these. And that people often have a hard time accepting historical truths that don't fit their preconceived narratives.

To that end, yes, Africans taken across the Middle Passage were predominated enslaved by other Africans. But they were generally not "their own countrymen," but people from other societies entirely. This wasn't a coincidence, but is fundamental to how slavery has worked in most times and places in human history. We usually enslave the "other," foreigners if you will, and Africa was no exception. (There is also the fact that the enslavement of Africans was primarily driven by organized demand from abroad, but that's another matter.)

You're also correct that the history of Liberia is a painful one, although historians generally attribute that to a natural conflict between the area's longstanding inhabitants and the arrival of large numbers of strangers from across the ocean looking to colonize the land. It isn't as if family members were returning home, now is it? That sort of thinking would suggest that all inhabitants of an entire continent, and all of their descendants from anywhere else in the world, are fundamentally close kin, simply because of the social construct of "race."

Finally, there were no Irish slaves sent to the Americas by Great Britain. That's a myth. But as you yourself suggest, myths like this tend to persist because they fit preconceived narratives that people want to promote.

You're right, Homer does describe himself as being Greek. He also describes himself as being part black ... so that sounds like his ancestry includes both. 🙂

Thank you for ignoring my other incorrect statements.

Vi, what that episode proves is that Homer *thinks* of himself as white ... or finds it convenient to *talk* about himself as white ... or at least to do so when it's appropriate to be self-deprecating.

This doesn't mean he doesn't have a black ancestor--which, by the "one drop rule," would traditionally have him and his family classified as black. And as the episode discussed above makes plain, the Simpsons *do*, in fact, have a black ancestor who was enslaved.

Naturally, this is also just a television show, and its particulars can't be taken too seriously. But the social issues it touches on certainly can be!