Another irony was that when I visited the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, our guide told me that all of the white slaves were given to the men, but all of the black slaves were castrated and given to the women.
There's this fantasy in the west that all of the people of color are united against the oppressive whites. But the reality is that anti-black racism exists in the non-SSA/non-European countries and cultures too.
Slavery still exists in Saudi Arabia, and the slaves are largely Black Africans, but no one talks about it.
As for slavery in the Ottoman world, I once saw a document which listed the prices for female slaves. The European female captives were the most expensive, then Circassians, down the list to African women, who were the cheapest. Apparently, the children of the European and Circassian women were allowed to live, but many of the children of the African women were aborted or killed at birth.
Is that the fault of Europeans? Did they learn that from us? Is the blatant racism one can see in Korean or Japan the fault of Europeans?
Some of the coverage of Queen Elizabeth's death shows the same blindness. First of all, by the time she became Queen, the Empire was falling apart. She presided over its death, not its creation. Why blame her for it?
The mantra is that everything that has ever gone wrong with the former British colonies is Britain's fault. Strange how well the U.S., also a colony, has done. South Asian apologists insist the caste system was introduced by the British. That's absurd; it's been part of the religious and institutional history of South Asia since the arrival of steppe people. Likewise, the "colorism" which plagues India existed long before the British arrived, and in fact there's less colorism in the U.S. and Britain than in India. Not to mention that neither Pakistan nor India has a really functioning democracy. One is a backward theocracy, and the other just shifts power among a couple of families.
All of Africa is a complete disaster zone in every possible way. The people were infinitely better off under the British.
That's one place where the Neo-Cons went wrong: some people aren't capable of democracy. Indeed, they're not even capable of setting up a decent economy despite sitting on a wealth of raw materials. It's true even in Europe: all those millions of Russians are quite happy to live under a dictatorship. For how long have they ever NOT lived under authoritarian rule? A few years? That's why despite the disaster of the last year you don't hear a peep of protest.
