Don’t Equate Real Slavery with Snowflake Oppression

Recently, as all of America no doubt already knows, Kanye West has said some things which have upset the left, particularly the black race-baiting industry. And it is an industry. 

Kanye professed his love of President Trump and said they were both “Dragon Energy.” I have no idea what that means, but really, who cares. It sounds like a compliment. He said he likes a lot, but not all, of what Trump is doing. He even took a poke at Obama by tweeting that he was president for eight years and nothing changed in Chicago. 

Not to defend Obama, but the city of Chicago is not the federal government’s concern. 

But I think it was Kanye’s rant about slavery being a choice that really put the left over the edge. He said during a TMZ interview: “When you hear about slavery for 400 years. For 400 years?! That sounds like a choice. Like, you were there for 400 years and it’s all of you all? Like, we’re mentally in prison. Like, slavery goes too direct to the idea of blacks,” he said. “So prison is something that unites us as one race, blacks and whites being one race. We’re the human race.” 

May I dispel the myth of 400 years of slavery. The slave trade began in America in 1619 and ended in 1865. That’s 246 years – not 400. And actually, the first black man to be declared a “slave for life” in America happened in 1654 (or '55). His name was John Casor, and coincidentally, his owner was tobacco farmer Anthony Johnson, who was also black. 

Anyway, a TMZ staffer was quick to respond, saying that Kanye was entitled to his opinion. However, it’s quite obvious, as a black American, he is not. He is only entitled to black collective group-think. The staffer insists that while Kanye is doing his thing, the rest of us, “have to deal with these threats to our lives. We have to deal with the marginalization that has come from the 400 years of slavery that you said, for our people, was ‘a choice’… Frankly, I’m disappointed, I’m appalled and, brother, I’m unbelievable hurt by the fact that you have morphed into something, to me, that’s not real.” In other words – an Uncle Tom. 

Oh really. Evidently, the TMZ staffer knows little of black history and the history of slavery in America. 

So while leftist blacks whine about how oppressed they are in 21st century America, allow me to enlighten him and others of how far we as a nation have come, by means of the “Alabama Slave Code of 1852.” If it doesn’t turn your stomach, you are not human. 

All white males between the ages of “eighteen and forty-five years,” were required “to perform patrol duty.” And what were they patrolling for? For slaves who were not where they were supposed to be. 

Slaves had to acquire a written pass from their “master” to go anywhere. If they were caught out without a pass, these patrols had the power to punish slaves… “by stripes, not exceeding thirty-nine.” Care to guess what a stripe was? That’s right. The mark made by a lash or a whip. And then they were returned to their owner, probably for more of the same. And if the owner was unknown, the slave was jailed. 

Slaves were not permitted to remain in the master’s house for more than four hours without him present. No more than five slaves could gather together without the express consent of the owner. Slaves were not allowed off the plantation without a written pass. If caught, the slave would be punished… “not exceeding twenty stripes, at the discretion of any justice before whom he may be taken.” 

“…unlawful assemblies, trespasses, and seditious speeches by a slave are punished, by the direction of any justice before whom he may be carried, with stripes not exceeding one hundred.” 

I could go on for paragraph after painful and abhorrent paragraph, but instead, I urge you all to read the Alabama Slave Code of 1852, to see just how far we’ve come and get an accurate idea of what is it was like to be an actual slave. Then compare that to what the “black community” is complaining of today. 

This, in my opinion, is what Kanye meant – that we’ve come so far in the 153 years since the slaves were freed, and that 21st-century blacks are doing a disservice to the term slavery. If you think yourself a slave in America today, it is by choice and not by virtue of your skin color.