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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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Their origins date back centuries ago to African Muslim migrants settling in Saudi Arabia, and to the Arab slave trade.

Be careful not to interpret a Wikipedia article as saying more than its literal words. Wikipedia editors carefully word the things they say as much as newspaper writers do.

Notice the lack of numbers, or even the lack of "the primary reason their ancestors came is..."? If it doesn't say "a lot of their descent is from slaves", don't read it to mean "a lot".

There is also this article from refworks. ... Sources indicate that many black African Saudi nationals are the descendents of slaves

The word "many", without being quantified, is a sign of someone trying to pull the wool over your eyes. If they had any evidence for "most", they would have said it, so they don't.

Afro-Saudis constitute 10% of the population. How many of those are descendants of slaves isn't clear, but I would not doubt they exist, because Islam bans castration, and that made the price of a eunuch much higher (they were castrated elsewhere and then brought over, it seems). It's possible, I suppose, that literally no slave in Saudi Arabia was allowed to exist unless castrated, but I don't think they would have cared as much if the job didn't put the slave in charge of protecting the elites or their harems.

Secondly, if we agree that there exist slavery-descended Afro-Saudis who can and do experience discrimination, then we've already warped the original argument to "there aren't enough people left over to complain". But that has hardly stopped anyone else - even if they're alone, people certainly don't have problems demanding what they think they are owed.

I maintain that the reason Saudi Arabia doesn't have a reparations question is that their culture and government would never tolerate such a thing. Trying to use it as an example of the success of a mass removal/extermination campaign like the original comment was making is folly.