this movie really makes you realize how completely racialized is the American understanding of slavery

JESUS CHRIST...YOU ARE SERIOUSLY FUCKED UP. NOEMOJI

the American system covers American history because, you guessed it ! its america

So in relation to the USA
1. black people were 99.99% of slaves
2. 99.999% of owners were white
3. who the hell ever said the civil war "didn't mean anything"?
4. um okay says who?
5.white saviours?
6. slavery is long lasting. sorry they decided to let a few more black people in a university due to a quota. is that threatening to you?
7. says who?
8. how wasn't it?
9. wow pushing more of the welfare stereotype. good job

I did not learn any of this in school. What kind of messed up school did you go to anyway?

LogicalLeftist,

First off, the transatlantic slave trade is not synonymous with American slavery. The vast majority of the transatlantic slave trade went to Latin America. And Latin American slavery was far more brutal than slavery in the American South. Latin American slavery had a much higher death rate than in the U.S. American slavery was not particularly brutal in comparison to slavery in other parts of the world and other parts of history.

And the relative brutality of American slavery, no matter how good or bad it was, does not explain the dominant American understanding of slavery that I described. This popular view of American slavery is not based on an exhaustive study of the relative brutality of American slavery in comparison to slavery in other parts of the world and other periods of history. It's based on a provincial view of the history of America's race relations. It's based on the historical differences in power and privileges between whites and blacks in America.

It's completely ignorant for you to deny the thoroughly racialized view of American slavery in contemopary America. Slavery is mostly seen as the beginning of the story of African Americans. It's seen as a continuum that went from slavery to Jim Crow to white privelege. That's why we have the 1619 Project. That's why contemporary police brutality against African Americans is blamed on slave catching and slave patrols. That's the reason for the recent American obsession with Confederate statues and monuments and the Confederate flag.

And even if there were any difference in brutality between American slavery and African slavery that would not explain a movie like The Woman King. Even if there were a difference that would not explain the choice of the filmmakers who made this movie. They didn't look at slavery in Dahomey and judge that the brutality of its slavery was sufficiently benign on its own merits to conclude it justified completely ignoring Dahomey's real involvement with slavery in a movie. They decided that such a historically inaccurate movie was justified because the non-racialized nature of Dahomey's slavery made it less offensive to them.

Race obviously had something to do with *American* slavery. But I'm talking about slavery as a whole *throughout world history*. For most of history slavery had nothing to do with race. But Americans view all of the world's historic slavery through the lens of American slavery and that racializes American understanding of all slavery. And that's how you end up with a movie like this that completely ignores the existence of slavery in Dahomey. We can't conceive of any instance of slavery as truly evil without a racialized component.

I didn't forget about the Muslim slave trade. It was actually foremost in my mind when I wrote the OP. I simply didn't see how mention of it would be relevant to this topic. After all, the Muslim slave trade is generally ignored by those who racialize their view of slavery in the way that I'm talking about.

try millions of white slave!! the word slave come from slav - million of slavs taken as slave by pirate. ask american retard what slave mean and they think it mean black man!! this is how retard american are - think entire history of human taking slave only counts in america hahahahahahahah. no wonder you have such race obsess society with this retardation.

arab raided europe as far north as icelands. empty entire village of men woman childrens. raid africa. arab very powerful and take long to be stopped.

slavery was not race. tell american that arab and euro had power and in this old times power people take slave.