isn’t the reason so many african slaves were brought to america in large part because we killed too many natives who would’ve filled that role instead?
Keep in mind I’m super ignorant of this, but I couldn’t imagine Native Americans could have really been used as slaves. I’m sure you can find evidence of it, but the reason Africans were effectively used as slaves was because they were completely foreign to America and had no social connections. A native slave has a decent chance of escaping, knowing the land, finding someone who speaks their language etc. A black slave that escapes is completely lost in every aspect because their only source of social safety is back on the plantation.
From everything I’ve seen and read about it didn’t take long for settlers to decide genocide was the only option to consider for the native population.
I vaguely remember reading in high school that Native Americans were worked to death on sugar plantations, and African slaves were brought in to replace them. I can’t say for the contiguous US though.
Thousands of Indians were enslaved in Colonial New England, according to Margaret Ellen Newell. Alan Gallay writes that between 1670 and 1715, more Indians were exported into slavery through Charles Town (now Charleston, South Carolina) than Africans were imported. Brett Rushforth recently attempted a tally of the total numbers of enslaved, and he told me that he thinks 2 million to 4 million indigenous people in the Americas, North and South, may have been enslaved over the centuries that the practice prevailed.
Native Americans were not seen as suitable slaves because they were extremely rebellious and weren’t as socially isolated as imported blacks who were easier to control since they had nowhere to run to.
There was a recent discussion on the ZeroBooks YT channel about the connection between Marxism and the Black (American) struggle. Gist of it was essentially that African Americans as the primary discriminated racial/social group are essentially the reserve army of capitalism. That exchange was way more insightful than this reductive approach to race relations as a mere caste system.
You could switch around Black Americans with any of the other three and it makes as much sense.
Ida B. Not-wells
I had to come back to this. It is such a bad fucking take.
Someone in the replies said she has to adjust her view of race through the idea of capitalism being good and this is what she comes up with. That seems spot on.
She’s also incredibly defensive to anyone who calls her out in comments which is hilarious.
