I never heard of the Tulsa race massacre of 1921 until this week.

[Igel]

33. The US did something to stop it, that's what. Why wonder? Just read history.

We had the Barbary Wars. That was the first few years of the 19th century, but for a lot of the time the US was occupied with the British and its own internal problems ... And didn't have a navy worth crap for projecting force and bringing the human piracy to a halt. There was a genre of Americans taken as white slaves with the concomitant outrage, but not much to do about it but be outraged. Until we had a navy.

But that wasn't a new thing. It affected Americans more than most because we were weak at the time and didn't put an end to it--or institutionalize the payment of ransom. Did you know that Miguel Cervantes was held as a prisoner, and the options were to sell him as a slave or treat him nicely in exchange for ransom? Again, the Barbary "pirates" (who made it a point of faith--jihad, they called it--to not attack Muslim ships, just Xians.) Or that there were slave raids up into Ireland? Slavs are called "Slavs" because they were a frequent target of raids for slaves. There are books on the history of Europeans and Americans being taken as slaves in North Africa. (People are very careful at this point to not confuse black sub-Saharan Africa with Africa that was Muslim, largely Berber and Arab by ancestry.) There was nothing special about whites that kept them from being enslaved. (More than a few Slavs were held as slaves by whites. Racializing the practice came late in the slave "game." Before that there was superiority of culture or of religion or just taking slaves because they could with no justification except might and "need". American exceptionalism has more than one application.)

They were mostly men who were held, but it stands to reason some were raped. And some women, depending on the circumstances, were certainly captured and carried along--sometimes few, if ships were raided, sometimes more if villages were rounded up and either killed or hauled away as booty. That would have included kids.

Life was brutish.


Then again, if you count pressing sailors into military service as "kidnapped and enslaved", then we had one contributing cause of the War of 1812.