Thomas Sowell, Slavery, and the Problem With Cherry-Picked History

Truth can be used to lie.

I’m never gonna tell a Black person how to feel about slavery or racism.

At least not on purpose, all right? Sometimes I get excited and swerve outside my lane. Let’s be real.

It’s not my job to police Black folks on anything, much less the legacy of American chattel slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow.

But I am also not one to tell you that bullshit doesn’t stink, and I’ve been seeing more and more people, including Black Americans, looking to Thomas Sowell as some sort of intellectual icon and even repeating his rhetorically slippery garbage like it’s something other than propaganda.

And that’s why I feel empowered to correct the record before the problem gets worse.

I’m Tao Joannes, coming to you from the Dog Shack deep in the heart of Texas.

We’re gonna look at one of Thomas Sowell’s quotes that’s been making the rounds lately:

“More whites were brought as slaves to North Africa than blacks brought as slaves to the United States or to the 13 colonies from which it was formed.”

Now, I could do a video on nearly every line in the essay this comes from, but to quote another great Black American, “Ain’t nobody got time for that.”

The quote and surrounding essay often come up in discussions minimizing the impact of American chattel slavery, claiming to share the truth about slavery that was hidden from Black Americans: that they didn’t have it so bad, that they should stop complaining and start achieving, and, most importantly, voting Republican.

They will blame Africans for starting slavery to shift blame away from the Europeans who financed and incentivized slave-catching operations.

They don’t want to acknowledge that European demand industrialized the process, intercepted ships at sea and took the crew and passengers, and raided coastal towns to enslave people of many different ethnicities: British, Irish, Dutch, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Scandinavian, and later even American sailors.

That’s worth making a note of.

The most generous estimate, an extrapolation based on one academic’s understanding of their labor needs, placed the total number of humans captured and forced into bondage at around 1.25 million souls between 1500 and 1780.

Put a pin in that 1.25 million.

We’ll come back to it.

Sowell’s statement is therefore accurate if you accept that number and limit your count to the Africans brought explicitly to the 13 colonies and the United States of America between 1619 and 1808, the official end of the legal transatlantic slave trade, which best estimates place at around 400,000 people.

About 460,000 if you count the ones that were illegally smuggled after that.

Now, what is dishonest about this framing is that the 13 colonies were just one small part of the Atlantic plantation slavery system.

12.5 million Africans were sold and packed onto ships like cordwood, bound for North, Central, and South America and the Caribbean.

Of those 12.5 million, only around 10.7 million survived the passage.

So let’s consider that figure for a second.

An estimated 1.8 million people died during the Middle Passage alone, more than even the highest widely cited estimate—that 1.25 million I told you to remember—for European Christians enslaved in North Africa.

But wait, there’s more.

10.3 million enslaved Africans were shipped to the sugarcane plantations of the Caribbean and South America.

Conditions there were so dangerous and the work was so brutal that they often died from overwork, malnutrition, accident, violence, and disease faster than they could be replaced through births.

A constant influx of fresh lives to sacrifice at the altar of profit was required to maintain an effective workforce.

In North America, from the 400,000 imported Africans, approximately 9.5 million Black children were born into bondage.

Four million of their descendants were declared free by the ratification of the 13th Amendment.

So even if we accept Sowell’s framing, the importation of 400,000 Africans in no way captures the vast scope and extent of the American chattel slavery system, which simply dwarfs the number of Europeans taken to North Africa.

The last point I’ll make is about the racial framing Sowell chooses.

If you’ve been around internet racism discourse for longer than five seconds, you’ve surely seen the division of the continent into North Africa and sub-Saharan Africa, usually as a way to remove the accomplishments of Egyptian and Arabic from those of the darker-skinned Africans below the desert, which made up the population of purchased slaves.

They often even discuss North Africans as white for that same purpose.

When discussing the slavery practices of the Ottoman Empire and the Barbary pirates, however, they often pull a bit of racial sleight of hand by declaring them all Africans and bemoaning their enslavement of whites.

So the second part of the criticism there is that the concept of whiteness didn’t even exist until the mid-1600s, and even then it was primarily a legal status designed to prevent servant-class solidarity and make slavery easier to administer legally.

Ireland, Holland, France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Iceland, and Scandinavia would have felt nothing approaching racial solidarity between them.

It was a legal fiction and scientific curiosity, not anything that sailors and common folk would have considered had much at all to do with them.

It wasn’t even until the late 1800s and early 1900s that Irish and Italians were granted full social access to the privileges of the caste in America.

In fact, one of the largest lynching events in the United States was an 1891 murder by hanging of 11 Italian men in New Orleans.

The grouping of these disparate ethnic identities into a singular block of white people is a modern retrofit of period attitudes designed to serve the narrative of white racial grievance, whataboutism, and the minimization of the brutality of American chattel slavery.

They will grant or revoke whiteness according to what best serves the narrative of the moment: claiming credit, diminishing contributions, or assigning blame or victimhood.

Now, none of this is to say that the enslavement of Europeans in North Africa was good or nothing to worry about.

We aren’t comparing suffering to win some sort of prize.

I’m just placing that carefully selected and separated fact back into the context of the much larger system surrounding it, instead of pretending our cherry-picked example tells the whole story.

What do you think?