1619 Was Not the Beginning of Slavery

4th of July Independence from Britain 1619 was not the beginning I was stuck that very little of the media coverage of the recent 4th of July mentioned that the day celebrates the American colonies’ independence from Britain. All the criticism of present-day America and its racism seemed to hypothesize that America emerged fully formed from some dark womb of non-history, when in fact it was many years old and had already formed much of its nature from its years of colonization before 1776. The hatred of the 1619 project should be directed at Britain, which ruled the colonies in 1619. The 4th of July marks the independence of the American colonies from the oppression of the British king and his rule. To ignore America’s colonial past is not just revisionist history, it is made-up history to justify hatred of the white race. Despite what blacks claim, the first slaves in North America probably did not come directly from Africa, but from trade with the existing Portuguese and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean and South America, which began in 1526, according to Wikipedia. Virginia Company records indicate that the 1619 slaves were taken by privateers from Portuguese or Spanish ships transporting them to Brazil or Mexico. Slavery did not start by American planters sending ships to Africa to bring back slaves. It was an unplanned spreading of what the Spanish and Portuguese had been doing for years. There may have been some slaves in the Spanish colony of Florida in the 1500s. Many of the slaves brought to the US in the 1700s were brought by British ships, until Britain outlawed the slave trade in 1807, the same year that the US banned the importation of slaves in the Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves of 1807, according to Wikipedia. The French also participated in the slave trade and allowed slaves in French colonies like Haiti. Slavery was not a uniquely American problem. It became an important aspect of the European colonization of the entire Western Hemisphere. To denote slavery as beginning in America in 1619 is misleading. There was no “America” in 1619, and slavery was endemic in all the other colonies surrounding those that eventually became the United States. The emphasis on slavery around the July 4, 2021, Independence Day celebrations was very misleading. It obscured the actual history of what happened on July 4, 1776, and was intended to foment anger and discontent in the United States. Mainstream and social media are selling black hatred of the US to the US population, just like they sold liberal hatred of Donald Trump to the US. Hatred sells, and the media will do anything for money.