Tim Kaine lies: Of course we didn’t invent slavery

It should be hard to botch an explanation of slavery in America quite this badly. Sen. Tim Kaine rose to the challenge, boldly asserting that the United States invented the millennia-old practice of slavery.

It goes without saying that slavery is as old as civilization itself. It is globally outlawed today, but some 46 million people are still illegally enslaved.

Still, it’s worth unpacking the minutiae of the Virginia senator’s rank stupidity.

For starters, Kaine conveniently forgets that while the first slaves to arrive in the British colonies came in 1619, the Spanish had introduced slavery to American soil a century earlier. Although the Spaniards had established an encomienda system rife with slavery in the 15th-century Caribbean, it wasn’t until 1526 that we know they brought the first black slaves to either Georgia or South Carolina, both in the original 13 colonies and thus parts of the United States from the nation’s founding.

Kaine, of course, is being intentionally obtuse in his bid to become the last white man “canceled” by the New York Times. He knows that “the United States” didn’t exist in 1619, not even as an abstract concept, and that the British authorities he referred to already acknowledged slavery as a legitimate trade. The purchase of African slaves was prolific among the British for nearly a century before 1619, and at the same time, white Britons were in the midst of a three-century period of being enslaved by Barbary pirates from North Africa. The British government essentially let it happen, a grievance the people took so badly that it was included as an entry in the Grand Remonstrance, which eventually led to the English Civil War.

None of this is to mention centuries of slavery spanning from the ancient Exodus through the Roman Empire, the Ottoman enslavement of Christian Slavs to the slavery still occurring today. Kaine’s statement ignores all of this to act as though the British colonists invented slavery out of thin air rather than slavery being a practice encouraged and enabled by the African elite looking to enrich themselves by selling their subjects.

Yes, the chattel slavery of black people in America was an atrocity, infused with a specifically racial aspect and an added viciousness over other forms of slavery. It’s this nation’s original sin and one that we are rightly still atoning for today. But there is no need to whitewash the rest of history just to show how horrific American slavery was.