Years ago, a friend of mine who is white determined that an ancestor of was, upon coming to America, an indentured servant. I wonder how common white indentured servitude was in the 17th and 18th century?
In “Why Does Hollywood Ignore White Slavery?“, Jim Goad discusses the historical reality of white indentured servitude, a subject largely ignored by Hollywood and mainstream culture… for obvious reasons:
… I can count at least one distant ancestor who was transported to the New World as an indentured servant. I’ve dealt with the white-hot topic of white slavery in my book The Redneck Manifesto and in a magazine article that was factually correct yet allegedly cost the magazine in question significant ad revenue from disgruntled White Slavery Deniers. And every time I’ve dared to raise the subject, I am shouted down, scoffed at, spat upon, pooh-poohed, and falsely accused of trying to say “Black slavery wasn’t bad.” My true motive is to say, “Hey, numskulls—you’re missing the big picture and creating poisonous levels of misunderstanding and resentment.” I’m only trying to show the similarities between white and black slavery, while others seem compelled to deny the similarities and focus exclusively on the differences. Interestingly, black people generally seem far more receptive to my humble mission. Then again, the false narrative that white people have never suffered is usually peddled by white people who have never suffered. Funny how that works.
Why don’t we see Hollywood films about white slavery? Probably for the same reason we don’t see Hollywood films about communist atrocities, nor any films that focus on the tens of millions of white civilians who died in World War II.
Knowing my suggestions will be ignored, I will stubbornly sally forth and suggest two possible Hollywood adaptions of real-life white slavery. The first would involve the Barbary Coast and the estimated million-plus white Christians who were kidnapped by African Muslims and forced to endure hardships and torture that rival and may surpass what black slaves in America experienced.
The second would be based on the book White Cargo. One in a long series of books and essays that have exhaustively documented this otherwise whitewashed phenomenon, White Cargo goes into great detail regarding the brutality of the white slave trade to America and how English and Irish adults and children were kidnapped, beaten, tortured, and worked to death in the New World.
