The Forgotten White Slavery by People of Color

Recent emphasis on the Marxist historical ideology known as Critical Race Theory (CRT) in American schools from kindergarten through post-secondary classrooms has led to the mistaken belief that whites only enslaved persons of color and that other races never enslaved whites. Such historical errors are the result of contemporary western writers and historians concentrating primarily on the trans-Atlantic slave trade while ignoring the history of slavery as a global phenomenon. Overemphasis on the historical errors of CRT has led some researchers to now offer well-known accounts of slavery that differ from the CRT narrative. Leaving aside the many examples of Native American tribes enslaving white Americans during the colonial and Early National Periods of our history, these researchers have brought new attention to the vast numbers of white European slaves who were captured and sold as chattel property in Africa. In a work published in the United States in 2021, Simon Webb once again reminds us that slavery was an institution common to all civilizations and that white Europeans had been enslaved to Africans and Middle Easterners for many hundreds of years. From the dawn of Viking raids in the ninth century until white Christian slavery was finally brought to an end along the Barbary Coast of Africa in 1816, the sale of white Christian slaves to African and eastern “peoples of color” continued for almost one thousand years.  

     Two open and download a PDF file featuring the salient points of this article, go "HERE" . . .   

     For additional information related to the enslavement of white Europeans, readers are encouraged to read: “The Biggest Lie of Critical Race Theory”. There are seven key concepts related to to controversial topic of slavery that few textbooks acknowledge today. (go "HERE")

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Jack Bovee

Fort Myers, FL 
The writer has been a social studies educator, founder of Rho Kappa--the National Social Studies Honor Society--past president of the Florida Council for the Social Studies, and a former Elementary School Principal of the Year in Lee County, Florida. He may be reached at: jsbovee@aol.com.