Thread by @blackrepublican

"The Irish were slaves, too" amounts to an abuse of Irish American and African American history, nay it is an abuse of history itself, as it wilfully pits these diasporas and their tragic histories against one another to score political points.”

— Liam Hogan

#BlackLivesMatter

"This is what underpins the far-right's endless whataboutery and tendency to equate slavery in different contexts across different millenia. The goal is to empty the history of the transatlantic slave trade of its unique racial element and thus remove its legacy as a determinant"

FACT: "Earlier coerced labor systems in the Atlantic World generally differed, in terms of scale, legal status, and racial definitions, from the trans-Atlantic chattel slavery system that developed and shaped New World societies from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries."