On June 8, several Democratic congressional leaders, including Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Shumer, knelt in the visitor’s center of the U.S. Capitol building. They were wearing facemasks and Kente cloths.
What is a Kente cloth? It is a colorful African textile made of interwoven strips of silk and cotton. Kente is associated with the historic Ashanti (or Asante) Empire of west Africa, which included what is now Ghana. According to legend, two lowly artisans who created the Kente cloth presented it to Asantehene (king) Nana Osai Tutu, the first emperor of the Ashanti Empire. Tutu (1660-1717, r. 1701-1717) conquered several smaller kingdoms, taking the people as slaves, and selling those slaves to British, Dutch, French and Portuguese merchants in return for firearms and other manufactured goods. The Ashanti then used the firearms to expand their empire and take more slaves, many of which they traded for more guns and other manufactured goods.
Wait, what?
Yes, you read that right. Chuck and Nancy, in their ham-fisted cultural appropriation, managed to appropriate something associated with an African empire that got rich selling their fellow Africans into slavery. Oops.
Readers of certain age will remember that scene in the miniseries “Roots” in which white slavers lurking in the jungle catch Alex Haley’s fictional ancestor, Kunta Kinte, with a net, like a butterfly or a fish. That scene was propaganda; the white slavers didn’t go out and capture their own slaves, they traded with African states such as the Ashanti Empire, which sold them an estimated 7,000 slaves a year.
In a period of less than four centuries, west Africans sold about 24 million of their fellow Africans as slaves. But slavery in Africa was not just a response to the demand generated by the Atlantic slave trade; slavery existed throughout Africa long before the Atlantic slave trade began, and continued long after it ended. Slavery was simply a part of African life throughout the continent, going back at least to Roman times. And, in fact, African slave trading on a massive scale did not begin with the Atlantic slave trade; long before then, African kingdoms sold slaves to the Arab Muslims and later to the Turkish Muslims.
Contrary to what America’s Marxist professoriate (which multiplies like cockroaches but does not fill a similarly useful environmental niche) wants you to believe, slavery is not the special sin of white, Christian Americans. Slavery has been so ubiquitous in human history that it was long considered part of the human condition. It was widespread in Babylon, Medo-persia, Greece, Rome, and most of the mixture of iron and clay in the feet—the whole statue. It still exists today, and it will exist until the stone carved without human hands smashes the statue to dust.
There was slavery in China, Japan, Vietnam, and the rest of southeast Asia (Cambodia is doing it right now, trafficking in sex slaves and forced laborers), Malaysia, etc. Last year I read an historical novel in which the protagonist takes an unscheduled detour to the island kingdom of Madagascar during the reign of Queen Ranavalona I. The Queen put much of her population into forced labor—the type of slavery Israel experienced in Egypt—and worked many thousands of them to death. By some estimates, Queen Ranavalona managed during her reign to halve her population, from 5 million to 2.5 million.
Islam was always pro-slavery, following the example of Muhammad, who traded in slaves. The young United States did not want a navy, just like we didn’t want a standing army; north African Muslim pirates forced us to build one, because they kept taking our ships and enslaving crews and passengers. Thomas Jefferson hesitated to send his daughter to school in France for fear that she would be taken by Muslim pirates in transit. Muslim raiders once carried off a whole Irish village, Baltimore, into slavery. Slavery continued in Saudi Arabia until 1962, when JFK convinced the Saudis it looked bad to the international community.
America’s historical slavery is one of the cudgels far-Left groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter are trying to use to destroy our civilization, in order to erect a Leftist utopia in its place. A good example of this ideological abuse of history is the New York Times’ “1619 Project,” 1619 being the year the first slave was brought to the Jamestown Colony in Virginia. But that was not the first slave in North America, or in the Western Hemisphere; native American tribes practiced slavery extensively before Europeans ever showed up. Sacajawea, the famous Indian woman who was with Lewis & Clark on their expedition, was a Shoshone held a slave by the Hidatsa, who sold her to Toussaint Charbonneau, a French trapper. She became his second wife. The Aztecs and Incas, the most civilized peoples of the pre-Columbian Western Hemisphere, practiced slavery and forced labor, respectively, on a massive scale.
1619 is not even when the first slave was brought by Europeans into colonies that would later become part of the United States. De Soto brought African slaves to Florida in 1539. DeSoto’s slaves included both Moors from north Africa and sub-Saharan Africans. Over the next decades, slaves helped build the Spanish colonial infrastructure, including the city of St. Augustine, founded in 1565, the oldest city in what is now the United States.
So why not the “1539 Project”? Because the Leftists behind the “1619 Project” are not interested in Spain or the Spanish colonial period; indeed, they are not even interested in slavery. What they are very interested in is de-legitimizing the English-speaking colonies and the American nation that those colonies produced, and they think the taint of slavery will accomplish that. They wish to render the American nation a people without the shared values of freedom and limited government deeply rooted in our founding and subsequent history, making us easy pickings for radical revolutionaries. Their ultimate target is the United States Constitution of 1787, which has always been the main obstacle to fundamentally transforming this country into the Leftist utopia they envision and fervently wish to bring about.
Currently, Leftist revolutionaries are promoting the view, eagerly accepted by many, including many in the SDA Church, that the white race is uniquely evil and deserving of special censure and punishment. But it is only a cartoon version of history promulgated by Marxists like Howard Zinn that supports this view. When one knows the true history of slavery—that every race practiced slavery (or something very similar to it, such as forced labor or serfdom)—it is obvious that history provides no support for the belief that some races are better than others.
We might inquire as to whether the Bible supports the idea that some races are better than others, but it turns out that race is not even a biblical category. As someone who has written extensively about origins, I wish the Bible had something to say about the origins of racial diversity. As things stand, we are left to speculate about how certain biological changes arose, apparently during the post-Flood, post-Babel diaspora, out of the abundant genetic potential in Noah’s family, the only family to span the antediluvian and post-diluvian epochs. Perhaps these changes were beneficial given the various climates to which the various language-groups moved. But, alas, the Bible writers did not think race was worth talking about. Or, rather, the Holy Spirit did not inspire them to expound on this issue. Perhaps we Christians should take our cue from Scripture and stop obsessing about something that God apparently does not care much about.
All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God (Rom 3:23; Eccl. 7:20; 1 Kings 8:46; 2 Chron. 6:36; Psalm 143:2). All blacks and all whites have sinned. The solution is for each individual to take hold by faith of the grace of Christ. In the Bible, sin and redemption are all handled on an individual basis. It isn’t about being a Jew or a gentile, or a member of any group: “Or is God the God of Jews only? Is He not the God of Gentiles also? Yes, of Gentiles also, since indeed the God who will justify the circumcised by faith and the uncircumcised through faith is one God” (Rom. 3:29-30). On judgement day, it will not matter whether you are black or white, only whether your sinful life is covered by the perfect life of Christ.
Speaking of judgment, the importance of every individual is highlighted by the sanctuary doctrine. The investigative judgment in heaven has been underway for almost 176 years, because God is carefully reviewing the case of every individual person in the history of the planet who might be saved. Each case is considered with comprehensive thoroughness for the angels and the inhabitants of un-fallen worlds. There is no rush to judgment, nothing hasty or lightly considered about this process. Likewise, during the thousand years in heaven, the case of every lost individual will be reviewed, and all will be satisfied that God’s judgment was fair and just in every individual case. We are not judged in races, but only as individuals.
As I’ve written before, the really remarkable thing about slavery is how comprehensively attitudes about it were changed. Centuries ago, most people accepted slavery as a fact of life, but today, most of us are so revolted by slavery that the revolutionary Left believes, with good reason, that the fact that slavery existed at America’s founding will cause today’s Americans to defenestrate the entire founding, including the constitution of 1787.
How did that decisive change in attitude come about?
One man, William Wilberforce, deserves more credit than most. Mark Steyn writes, in reviewing Eric Metaxas’ “Amazing Grace” and the eponymous motion picture,
"William Wilberforce," writes Eric Metaxas in his book Amazing Grace, "was the happy victim of his own success. He was like someone who against all odds finds the cure for a horrible disease that is ravaging the world, and the cure is so overwhelmingly successful that it vanquishes the disease completely. No one suffers from it again - and within a generation or two no one remembers it ever existed."
What did Wilberforce "cure"? Two centuries ago, on March 25th 1807, one very persistent British backbencher secured the passage by Parliament of an Act for the Abolition of the Slave Trade throughout His Majesty's realms and territories. It's not that no one remembers the disease ever existed, but that we recall it as a kind of freak pandemic - a SARS or bird flu that flares up and whirrs round the world and is then eradicated. The American education system teaches it as such - as a kind of wicked perversion the Atlantic settlers had conjured out of their own ambition.
In reality, it was more like the common cold - a fact of life. The institution predates the word's etymology, from the Slavs brought from eastern Europe to the glittering metropolis of Rome. It predates by some millennia the earliest laws, such as the Code of Hammurabi in Mesopotamia. The first legally recognized slave in the American colonies was owned by a black man who had himself arrived as an indentured servant. The first slave owners on the North American continent were hunter-gatherers. As Metaxas puts it, "Slavery was as accepted as birth and marriage and death, was so woven into the tapestry of human history that you could barely see its threads, much less pull them out. Everywhere on the globe, for 5,000 years, the idea of human civilization without slavery was unimaginable."
"What Wilberforce vanquished was something even worse than slavery," says Metaxas, "something that was much more fundamental and can hardly be seen from where we stand today: he vanquished the very mindset that made slavery acceptable and allowed it to survive and thrive for millennia. He destroyed an entire way of seeing the world, one that had held sway from the beginning of history, and he replaced it with another way of seeing the world."
Christians changed the age-old attitudes about slavery. The young Adventist movement was part of this change; before we even became a denomination, we were clear in teaching that slavery was sin. Ellen White wrote:
“At the Roosevelt conference, when the brethren and sisters were assembled on the day set apart for humiliation, fasting and prayer, Sabbath, August 3, the Spirit of the Lord rested upon us, and I was taken off in vision, and shown the sin of slavery. Slavery has long been a curse to this nation. The fugitive slave law was calculated to crush out of man every noble, generous feeling of sympathy, that should arise in his heart for the oppressed and suffering slave. It was in direct opposition to the teaching of Christ. God’s scourge now is upon the North, that they have so long submitted to the advances of the slave power. The sin of Northern pro-slavery men is great. They have strengthened the South in their sin, and sanctioned the extension of slavery, and acted a prominent part in bringing the nation into its present distressed condition.” Review & Herald, August 27, 1861.
“The law of our land requiring us to deliver a slave to his master we are not to obey; and we must abide the consequences of violating this law. The slave is not the property of any man. God is his rightful master, and man has no right to take God’s workmanship into his hands, and claim him as his own. . . . When the laws of men conflict with the Word and law of God, we are to obey the latter, whatever the consequences may be.” Testimonies for the Church, Vol. 1, pp. 201-2
Christians changed the entire world’s view of slavery, even the public attitudes of the non-Christian world, including the Orient and the Islamic world. The prevailing view changed so radically and comprehensively that no one can imagine, much less sympathize with, the mentality that supported slavery, a mentality that was nearly universal less than three centuries ago. Today, no one can be other than righteously indignant about slavery, a fact that, paradoxically, plays into the hands of the Leftist revolutionaries who would replace the biblical worldview with an atheistic, anti-religious worldview, and replace the constitution of limited government with an all-powerful state.
Christians must firmly reject the current enthusiasm for judging races and setting one race against another. It is time to return to first principles, including that song we learned in cradle roll:
Jesus loves the little children,
All the children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
All are precious in His sight,
Jesus loves the little children of the world.
All are precious in His sight. All lives matter. Do not be bullied off this ground. It was true when we learned it in cradle roll, it is true today, and it will be true throughout the ceaseless ages of eternity.