Of all the trans-Atlantic slaves brought from Africa across the Atlantic only 6% were to America. Prior to the opening of land through the Louisiana purchase, the availability of indentured service (a better deal than slaves), and the cotton gin, there just wasn't much need for slaves.
They don't teach that slavery was an "inferior" option to indentured servants because of the lifetime requirement to care for slaves versus the use 'em, abuse 'em, and discard them practice with indentured servants. Bacon's rebellion woke the South up to the danger of this practice.
That lack of need for slaves in the North, probably contributed to the anti-slavery sentiment in those colonies, since it is easier to condemn something that does not affect you personally. And the moral argument is easier, makes you feel virtuous even as the wealthy factory workers abused their workers. Interesting how virtue signaling is not a new thing.
By the time slavery took off in the United States, the importation of slaves had been banned as the first step to ending slavery. Many northern states had already passed laws establishing mandatory ages of emancipation for slaves or outright emancipation.
The Southern elite sidestepped this restriction by setting up "breeding" farms. An equally horrible practice but allowed slavery to continue in the South long after it was intended to end. This clear ideological struggle highlights that slavery was much more of a white vs white struggle (since blacks had very little political power) and when teaching the history of slaving, it is important to teach both the horrors of it (when measured against our core values as a nation expressed in the Declaration of Independence), but also, that the institution was condemned by more than half the nation.
Would blacks have condemned slavery if they were in control of the South? The best evidence that they would is Haiti, since that was the only colony that ex slaves dominated. And they did end it in 1804. Sadly, Haiti failed to institute many of the other freedoms that were considered basic human rights and so even today Haiti remains a disaster with human rights violations common.
This highlights the danger of looking at slavery in isolation. Either you advocate equal treatment of all human beings and embrace the unalienable rights of people, or you don't. Slavery stands at the extreme of end of the spectrum of human rights violations, but any law that attempts to impose different rights to people based on which identity group they belong to contributes to racism and discrimination.
Haiti, a country established by ex-slaves whose rights were violated continues deny other identity groups including gays the same rights. Separatism or tribalism tends to do that. Killing people that don't "belong" to your "gang" is no less awful if skin color is not the motivation.
So, when someone finds themselves fighting on behalf of their identity group rather than humans as a whole, they are promoting separatism.
Shelby Steele made an interesting observation on this behavior. Echoing the earlier point, that perhaps Affirmative Action was needed when institutional and systemic racism were prevalent, he went on to say, that putting the "beast" of separatism back in its cage is difficult because so many African American leaders have their "power" tied to separatism.
You would think knowing that separatism operates on a spectrum ranging from slavery and genocide, gang targeting of members of another tribe, to laws that favor one group over another, to different schools for different races. Perhaps Affirmative Action and DEI are some of the more benign forms of separatism.
But allowing separatism to flourish in our laws (you can never eliminate racism among individuals) perpetuates identity group conflict. That conflict can be expressed as outright violence or attempts to create "advantage" in our legal system. But there is no evidence, that it will end with peaceful co-existence. Hence my condemnation of any form of separatism, good intentions can lead to bad outcomes.
Finally, understanding how we got to where we are should make clear that separatism is wrong. Yet it seems to be used to promote advantages to make up for past sins. The saying "two wrongs don't make a right" applies and yet the reason we have that saying is because people tend to think they can.
