March 4, 2023

For Black History Month 2022, Disney released a Proud Family episode asserting that slaves built America, and Hulu began streaming the 1619 Project docuseries. The latter builds on The New York Times’s 1619 Project, which presents American slavery as the cruelest in the world. This is nonsense and, even as Black History Month 2023 is in the rear-view mirror, it must be countered because it serves as the basis for a never-ending, society-corrupting shakedown.

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Both productions assert that, in addition to the basic immorality of slavery itself, whites were unrelievedly cruel to black slaves. From that foundation, leftists insist that the world’s most prosperous and educated black population are still victims of white oppression, justifying economy-busting reparations. It’s a shakedown.

In fact, the uncontested winners for “world’s cruelest slavery” exist outside America’s borders and history. In Haiti, for example, slaves were treated so poorly that they died after a few years. It was cheaper to purchase new slaves than to treat slaves humanely.

Non-American slave owners discouraged reproduction because children often died before they were productive. In 1802, the U.S. black population was 1 million. If the US had duplicated conditions in the Caribbean, the black population would have been 186,000—and that attrition rate would still have been better than in Middle Eastern nations. A thousand years of black slavery are concealed by the virtual absence of black people.

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In the Middle East and Africa, it was normal to castrate young boys without pain reducers. The greatest demand, though, was for female sex slaves—”mats of pleasure.” When women became old, say 40, they were often left to die. The immorality of slavery in America, notwithstanding, American enslavers were, uniquely, required to care for their slaves until they died.

Image: Illustrations from the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, 1849. Public domain.

The 1619 Project’s cruelty narrative has endless stories about an inhumane planter class taking pleasure in whipping slaves, dividing families like livestock, and raping slave women without consequence. These stories aren’t fiction, but they are exaggerated. More importantly, they are only a slice of the history of black slavery in America—which, again, while inherently cruel and immoral, was not extraordinarily cruel.

Before the 1970s, cruelty narratives were largely uncontested. Then, cliometricians analyzed mountains of historical data to refine and, sometimes, refute accepted slave history. This data showed that whipping slaves, dividing families, and raping slave women were not as common as portrayed and that these actions had consequences.

Cliometrician Robert Fogel won a Nobel prize for his work, but was savaged by historians and activists. They didn’t find fault with his data; they objected to the updated narrative.

Fogel went on the defensive and created a tome to respond to his critics. He showed that slave historians could create just about any narrative they wanted using anecdotal data sources from abolitionists or pro-slavers. The problem was that there was no generic slave environment. Instead, there were large and small plantations; tobacco, cotton, indigo, or sugar, plantations; and field hands, craftsmen, drivers, managers, or domestics. Life for a field hand on a sugar plantation was unrelated to life as a blacksmith for hire.

These cliometric analyses, though, are ignored because anyone contesting the “extreme cruelty” narrative is presumptively “racist.” However, those with common sense and open minds would find Fogel’s and other cliometricians’ conclusions logical because they reflect the planters’ overriding motive: making money. Cruelty cut into profits.