Alex Haley Plagiarized 'Roots' from.... a White Guy

[Dellis0991]

This is old news, doesn't make the story's meaning any less significant, or its effect on American culture. Plagiarism and back room ghost writers isn't anything new, and yeah black slave owners, black overseers and black slave catchers were the lowest of the low. None of this is new.

[Teriz]

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Okay, I can roll with that I must have misread, I just get very fired up when it seems like people may be trivializing my culture. (I equally dislike when someone uses my culture to try and diminish other people's hardships looking at you up there Leothras.) Different people having different hardships doesn't diminish either hardship and I just feel all too often everyone plays things as a zero-sum game, using either side to diminish each other.

Unfortunately, that period of Irish history has been recently used by white supremacists as a way to diminish the horrors of African-American slavery and its lingering aftermath.

Here are some other tactics they use;

1. Africans selling slaves to Europeans, ignoring the fact that Europeans also kidnapped Africans from the interior without African support, and didn't exactly treat the Africans like rock stars after they captured them.

2. Black slave owners, ignoring the fact that the number of black slave owners was comparatively tiny, and they were confined to very specific areas of the South. Further, those black slave owners were typically mixed race individuals who had substantial amounts of European heritage.

3. Saying that slaves were too expensive to be mistreated, ignoring the fact that after the outlawing of the transatlantic slave trade, and the invention of the cotton gin, slave owners simply started breeding their own slaves. More insidious were women who became nothing more than baby factories, forced to have sex (read: RAPED) starting at a young age, and doing nothing more than producing children until they died. Those children in turn would be sold off like property, and in many cases, young girls were sold off to become breeders like their mother to further fuel the peculiar institution.

[Spiffums]

This is old news and Roots was never presented as fact, but an historical fiction based loosely on the experiences of an African-American. It's a still a powerful story which helped change American attitudes about race and ourselves. Also your concern about veracity doesn't seem to extend to your choice of a source of news. Townhall is complete shit.

So was Uncle Tom's Cabin and look how people reacted to that in the 1800s.

[shmee51]

"Doesn't count unless it happened to a black person."

Pretty much sums up race issues in the US.

[Endus]

Since we're pretty thoroughly derailed, I'm locking this here.