White People and Black Slavery: a Very Brief Overview

The ethnicity and the treatment of the other ethnicity have a somewhat unusual relation.

First, the European culture of the Caucasian ethnicity, as some have liked to call it, abolished slavery at least twice.

• White people, from Queen St. Bathilde to the mayor or whatever of Ragusa, came to socities with white slaves, and ended slavery in them, all over the Middle Ages.
• Wilberforce and Pope Gregory XVI were huge fans of abolishing Black Slavery, and in some cases this had to do with trying to end Arabs and Blacks of Africa targetting white people as slaves, and trying to be consistent (1830 Algiers was taken, after having tried to lay claim to France over a war debt incurred by a Régime considered as criminal by the then French régime, and part of the French war case was accusing Algiers of slave hunt).

Between these two major events, there was however a somewhat discordant event, or a very discordant event. It was White people on the other side of the Atlantic holding Black slaves.

Note, it ended through mainly white men feeling there was something off about slavery. But before that, it had come about by reconciling irreconcilable things.

What were these irreconcilable things?

• White men cannot be slaves, because Queen St. Bathilde said so (she did not specify this applied only to white people, but she pronounced this in a country where the inhabitants were in fact white) because of Christian principle.
• Black men can be slaves, because we bought them (in Cameroon, for instance), and in retaliation for Africans targetting Europeans.

The upshot (which no one had really planned) was an unprecedented division between White and Black into "non-enslavables" and "enslavables" (and usually also slaves).

Racism came from this unfortunate event, which started in the times which in places were already Renaissance, but which did not quite affect Europeans all that much prior to the Enlightenment.

Racism was not ended by Enlightenment philosophers, it was ended by devout Christians. Wilberforce, an Evangelical, who had one son oppose Huxley, and who had two other sons convert to Catholicism. King Charles X of France. Pope Gregory XVI whose rule began the year after Charles X's ended, and then some more, like Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza or the Emperor of Brazil, Peter II. None of these was pureblooded from the Atlantic and Colonial powers, apart from Wilberforce. King Charles X had a grandmother from Poland and one from Austria. Gregory XVI was from Italy. Pierre Savorgnan de Brazza was from Italy. Peter II of Brazil had a mother from Austria.

Wilberforce, on the other hand, did not hail from countries where slavery had already ended long ago, and never began again, he relied only on the Bible. And the Bible led himself to Abolitionism, and two of his sons to Catholicism, and another one of his sons to combat Evolutionism.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Paris
Our Lady of Guadalupe
12.XII.2023