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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 20, 2026

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The US will be increasingly black, and it's not as if black people will choose to enslave their own tribe

The transatlantic slave trade was largely Africans enslaving other Africans then selling those slaves to Europeans for transport.

Yes, true. But the culture of preindustrialized African societies is not the same as US blacks. Unless you are thinking that the propensity to enslave is genetic, rather than sociocultural, economic, and political opportunism. From the perspective of the Africans selling slaves back then, they were mostly selling the populations of rival tribes who were enemies. The romans enslaved the gauls, and they probably had a similar skin tone too. Selling off slaves of enemy populations was both profitable and weakened them in potential future conflicts. It was a good idea to sell them to distant strangers if possible, so the slaves would be unlikely to return for revenge.

So, the colonial age Africans who sold rival Africans were just doing what all of warring humanity had always done until the modern age. It does not mean US blacks will be more likely than average to sell other US blacks into slavery.

I don't think anyone is bringing back chattel slavery, since the economic conditions that made it useful no longer exist. The closest thing we have to modern chattel slavery, human trafficking, is mostly same race people victimizing each other. I don't think any US race is interested in enslaving any other race; it follows that the relative population of whites vs blacks is irrelevant to slavery in modern terms.

Somehow the question of who evil whitey was buying the slaves from gets forgotten. For example, Biden’s apology to African leaders for America’s “original sin” of slavery. One summary made by wrongthinkers: “sorry for buying what you were selling.”

I've concluded that most people think Americans caught them in Africa with big butterfly nets.

Well, it's fair to say the original sin of slavery is probably held by any large states that exist today, and thus indirectly by all modern populations except maybe the tiny islanders like the Sentinelese. Rome, Chinese dynasties, pretty much everywhere that won wars used some form of slavery.

America's slavery was in more recent memory and the ex-slaves have not fully genetically mixed into the descendants. Also Biden wanted to score some points with his voting base, so that was just tossing red meat (blue meat?) to the base.

Other than that, the justification for slavery, uplifting from barbarism, is bad from a modern Christian perspective. So a constant Christian apology must be given for the original sin of the past. The apologies will continue until the US is gone or until all of the US could be considered black.