Telling history how it was is not a relentless attack.,
We aren't telling history "how it was"...people are simply telling a new myth that appeals to their own racist sentiments. History of black people in the US, if we begin with the slave trade, goes something like this...
Slavery was endemic in Africa by the time European traders set up ports on the western shores. An estimated 2-5 million African tribal people were enslaved by other African tribes. Some of these were traded to Europeans...some were kept as slaves. Though slavery may have varied some from tribe to tribe, we don't have to doubt that the brutality of the practice was every bit as horrific as it was in the western hemisphere. We have, after all, some remaining accounts from the ancestors of African slavers as well as the accounts of those they traded with. The idea of European raiders carrying off hundreds of docile and friendly Africans is almost entirely myth. The average European life expectancy in the interior of Africa was 1 year....as they had no more defense against tropical diseases than the natives they would encounter in the colonies had against European diseases like smallpox. Europeans as a rule stayed out of Africa as much as possible. Slaves became one if the most valuable commodities of Africans because apart from some basic staples, they had little else of any value to either the Europeans or Arabs they traded with. This of course, caused a period of increased enslavement of weaker African tribes by stronger African tribes that would last over a century, as the strong enslaved the weak and then sold them for profit.
This is where the story picks up for most Americans. This is the point we start at because frankly, it's probably a little degrading to imagine your ancestors were basically the weak group of Africans who got enslaved by other African tribes. Nevertheless, that's "how it was".
We typically go onto talk about the plantations, conditions of slavery, people sold as property, underground railroads, Fredrick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, etc.
Then we magically skip to the Civil War as if there's not much else to say...but that's not true. The schism that erupted into the Civil War began at the very beginning of the nation's founding. Abolitionist movements began in the white Christian community (almost exclusively, imagine that, at one point only white people fought for the freedom of black people) as soon as slavery reached colonial shores. The movement grew and by the time of the nation's founding, many wanted slavery outlawed entirely. The discussion of this possibility was argued over by the founders and they ultimately decided that the US would lose the Southern colonies if it tried to end slavery, and thereby weaken the union they sought.
The effects of this argument are visible in the 3/5ths compromise whereby the freedom loving anti-slavery northerners sought to reduce the political influence of the south by regarding slaves as 3/5ths a person in matters of congressional representation. The slavery loving southerners, wanted slaves to be counted as whole people, which of course, later contradicted their racial beliefs which had not only not existed....they had not yet spread nor been popularized by academia. It would be more accurate at this time to say the slaves were seen as people, property, but human. The subhuman characterizations that were only being proposed would popularize later.
What else can be said?? Without going into the practice of slavery amongst the natives of North America....Black slave owners would become a more common sight than the average American knows. By the decade before the Civil War, many slave owning states had thousands of black slavers enslaving black slaves in many times their own number. Their treatment was no less harsh. Even newer slave states had hundreds of black slavers.
Why is this important? Because it should change your view of society back then. If you thought white people were bad or uniquely immoral....You're just racist. Slavery was normal. Why leave it out? To spare the feelings of black people today. I don't think we should....let's tell it how it was.
Stuff like this shows how black people are being treated differently so one can't help but be conscious of it.
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https://mn.gov/mdhr/assets/Investigation into the City of Minneapolis and the Minneapolis Police Department_tcm1061-526417.pdf
Someone made a thread, I commented.
