Everyone knows that slavery was a dark spot on American history (pun intended). In school, most of us were taught about how Africans were rounded up and shipped over here to work on farms, for no pay under brutal conditions. They were bought and sold like farm animals. That's probably the sum-total of what we were taught. To say that our history was "white-washed" is an understatement.
This was the impetus for a bunch of writers at the NY Times to create a special issue named "
The 1619 Project" (after the year that the first boat of African slaves supposedly arrived on our shores). There were some quibbles with that date and the way it was couched. Sure we may have already been enslaving some of the natives already here. Sure there may have been slaves brought previously. Is that really that important? Slavery has been around since the beginning of civilization in Mesopotamia, but that wasn't the focus of the essays.
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