The Jewish World Review
By Thomas Sowell
September 7, 2001

http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- PERHAPS Secretary of State Colin Powell's 
decision to pull the American delegation out of the so-called U.N. World 
Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, will be just a footnote in 
history. But we can at least hope that it may be a turning point toward a 
future time when "racism" will no longer be a magic word used to gain money 
or political concessions. 

Within the United States, Jesse Jackson and others have repeatedly scared 
millions of dollars out of big corporations, just by threatening to use the 
magic word "racism." Even the police have sometimes turned a blind eye to 
violations of the law, lest they be tarred with that magic word that will 
bring the whole liberal media crashing down on them. But letting criminal 
activity go on unimpeded and unpunished has hurt minority communities most of 
all. 

Against this background, it was to be expected that some African and Arab 
nations would hope that invoking this magic word might scare some money out 
of the United States as "reparations" for slavery and get some kind of United 
Nations condemnation of Israel as a bonus. But this time the magic didn't 
work... 

The real world-class chutzpah, however, was the demand of African and Arab 
nations for reparations of slavery. 

Just who do you suppose enslaved the millions of Africans who ended up in the 
Western Hemisphere? It was the Africans. 

And who enslaved the even greater number of millions of African slaves who 
ended up in the Islamic world? It was the Arabs. 

During the era of African slavery, Europeans died like flies in tropical 
Africa, where diseases flourished for which they had no biological immunity 
and for which medical science had yet to devise a cure. Capturing people to 
sell into slavery was the work of Africans in West Africa and of Arabs and 
Africans in East Africa. 

Europeans came in their ships, bought slaves from the Africans, and then left 
the scene quickly before they fell sick from African diseases. Even so, many 
white crewmen on the ships bringing slaves from Africa to the Western 
Hemisphere died on the way. The notion that it was white people who 
introduced slavery to Africa, or who captured most of the slaves themselves, 
may fit the mindset of those who thought that "Roots" was history, but this 
myth will not stand up to facts, logic or economics. 

Since it was the Africans and the Arabs who actually caught and sold slaves, 
do the African and Arab nations plan to send reparations over here to the 
descendants of enslaved Africans living in the Western Hemisphere? Of course 
not. They want the United States to lay some of those American dollars on 
them! We have fallen for so many other sucker plays in the past, why not try 
this one on us? 

When slavery is mentioned, too many people automatically think of whites 
enslaving blacks. That is not even one-tenth of the story of slavery, which 
existed on every inhabited continent. The very word "slave" derives from the 
word for some white people who were enslaved on a mass scale -- the Slavs -- 
for more centuries than blacks were enslaved in the Western Hemisphere. 

Moreover, slavery existed in the Western Hemisphere before the first black or 
white person ever set foot on these shores. The indigenous peoples of this 
hemisphere enslaved one another, just as Asians enslaved Asians, Europeans 
enslaved Europeans, and Africans enslaved Africans. Attempts to limit the 
discussion of slavery to slavery in the United States or in Western 
civilization make sense only as a strategy to get money or political 
concessions. 

Western civilization was the first civilization to regard slavery as morally 
wrong and it is the civilization with the most sense of guilt about it. To 
this very moment slavery continues in parts of Africa and the Islamic world. 
Very little noise is made about it by those who denounce the slavery of the 
past in the West, because there is no money to be made denouncing it and no 
political advantages to be gained. 

If the American delegation walking out of the U.N. Conference Against Racism 
represented a belated waking up to the scams being played, that could be a 
very healthy sign for the future -- not only on the international scene, but 
within the United States as well.  
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JWR contributor Thomas Sowell, a a fellow at the Hoover Institution, is 
author of several books, including his latest, Basic Economics: A Citizen's 
Guide to the Economy.