Plurk paste

The British colonizers/Americans weren’t actually the ones who invented slavery, as many people think.
Slavery is a practice that has spanned down thousands of years, and has existed since way before the United States was created, or even before the British colonizers arrived in the US.
Slavery became popularized at the end of the 1500s and early 1600s, and originally was not something used for racial oppression/discrimination, but it was a classist system.
It mostly started in Africa, where kingdoms and tribes enslaved other African people that they considered “lower.” The British colonizers soon caught onto this and began a trade with African kingdoms where they would essentially sell enslaved Africans to the colonizers, and as this was the easiest route, it quickly became a racial act and not simply just a cruel one.
At the start, enslaved people were not treated as terrible as how they came to be. The first enslaved Africans in the South were actually nearly drowned in gold, and it became a sort of thing to essentially see who could treat their slaves better, like parading them around town in excessive gold jewelry, and even having slaves that worked for other slaves. It may sound rather lavish but it was a cruel, dehumanizing act.
In the late 1600s to 1800s, the slave trade boomed. They forced the enslaved Africans inside cramped ships with no lighting, stripping them of their clothes and chaining them to walls to further dehumanize them.
These trips were months long, and they were a thousand times more terrible than you could ever imagine.
They were chained to the walls in a pitch black room, and starved, dehydrated, beaten, and it was made almost intently so that they could perfectly hear each other’s screams and cries - women, children, men alike.
Most enslaved people aboard those ships did not survive the trip to the US. Disease and death got to most quickly. And the people who survived usually did not make it very long once they got to land.
And unlike how white Americans paint history, they did not give in and let this happen, no one would. There were countless rebellions aboard these ships, as well as in the plantations. But unfortunately, most of the white colonizers aboard the ships were armed with guns and much more weapons that outnumbered the rebellions greatly.
On the plantations, they did not sit quietly and allow this suffrage to happen either. They constantly banded together and attempted to overthrow the colonizers, and although there were times when people escaped, it was very rare. Entire search parties were made in dedication to hunting down and capturing the runaways, and there were terrible prices to pay if they caught you. Your tongue could be cut off, you could be decapitated, and in most cases this ended in the colonizers parading the decapitated’s head on a stake around town. But this did not stop uprisings. Plantations were burnt to the ground overnight by the enslaved people working there, as well as many times when slaves killed the colonizers they were forced to work for.
But one thing we need to take from this terrible history is the acknowledgement of the fact that it happened. Our country as it is today would never be around without the forced labor of millions of enslaved Africans, immigrants, etcetra. America does not exist without the work of Black, Hispanic, Asian, South/Latin American people. Our country was built by the hands of the oppressed, and we must never forget that and continue to strive to make it a place where all can be free.