The New Observer reports:
The transatlantic slave trade was dwarfed by the Arab or Muslim slave trade, which lasted from 650 AD to 1900 AD. It is estimated that a minimum of 18 million Africans were enslaved by Arab slave traders, and that over one million Europeans were enslaved by the Muslim world during the same period.
The Muslim slave trade saw Africans exported to regions throughout the Middle East and even to India, while the Europeans were captured in raids in Spain, Italy, France, Britain, and Ireland. These raids were launched from North Africa, and during the Islamic occupation of Iberia and southern Italy, from the latter regions as well.
The invasion of southeastern Europe by the Ottoman Turks saw even more Europeans enslaved into the Muslim world—but their numbers are unknown.
The Muslim trade in slaves, both black and white, was therefore longer lasting and far more extensive than the transatlantic slave trade—but there are today no cries of “Arab guilt” or demands for reparations against Muslim nations.
There's more:
In 1860 only a small minority of whites owned slaves. According to the US census report for that last year before the Civil War, there were nearly 27 million whites in the country. Some eight million of them lived in the slaveholding states.
The census also determined that there were fewer than 385,000 individuals who owned slaves. Even if all slaveholders had been white, that would amount to only 1.4 percent of whites in the country (or 4.8 percent of southern whites owning one or more slaves).
The figures show conclusively that, when free, blacks disproportionately became slave masters in pre-Civil War America. The statistics outlined above show that about 28 percent of free blacks owned slaves—as opposed to less than 4.8 percent of southern whites, and dramatically more than the 1.4 percent of all white Americans who owned slaves.
Just a reminder , the next time Social Justice Warriors talk about white privilege.
