Why Does Hollywood Ignore White Slavery?
10th March 2014
Jim Goad is not afraid to ask the hard questions.
There are two types of ignorant people: those who don’t know, and those who know but choose to ignore. While nary a day goes by when our pink snouts aren’t rubbed in black slavery and the Holocaust, I can’t remember the last time the media made a peep about white slavery in the American colonies—nor even its more benign term, white indentured servitude. Then again, one can’t forget—nor even remember—what you don’t know about in the first place.
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.
Indeed it is.
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. For a touch of personal pathos, the screenplay might focus on the tale of a skeleton that was discovered in a Maryland basement in 2003 “in a hole under a pile of household waste.” The remains are presumed to be those of a 16-year-old so-called white indentured servant who’d been worked to death and cast aside as white trash rather than given a proper burial. Let’s see that poor soul’s story up on the silver screen, Mr. Weinstein.