This is the point. I literally can't write an article where I mention the word "slavery", however tangentially, however clear I am that I'm talking about the Atlantic slave trade, despite the fact that I've never once mentioned it to demonise white people, without some white people diving into the comments to remind me that other people were enslaved too. Or that Africans were involved in the slave trade.
I've written 1500 word essays, where I mention the word slavery once, as an aside, and still people dive into the comments with links and references about totally unrelated froms of slavery as if I'm unaware.
As you say, not only is it beside the point, it points to a bizarre defensiveness that I think really needs to be examined. I've never seen anybody feel the need to cry #notallgermans when somebody mentions the holocaust. Or point out that some Jews assisted the Nazis in hunting down other Jews (some Jews even fought alongside the Nazis). We're all clear that despite those facts, the Nazis were the ones culpable. And also that today's Germans aren't responsible for those sins
The Atlantic slave trade was far more inhuman and brutal than anything that was happening in Africa. If Americans merely wanted to replicate the slavery they found in Africa, it would have been easy for them to use white criminals to do that work instead. Indeed, for a brief period, there were white slaves in America.
But instead, they transported Africans by the millions, in conditions so unbearable that many of them died before they even reached America, and enslaved the survivors along with their children and their children. Inventing the idea of race as justification for doing so.
Not a single white person today is complicit in any of this. So I truly don't understand the defensiveness that this topic generates. Sadly, slavery still exists today. But we don't see it. It's not a normal, accepted part of life as it was back then. This, as you say, is progress. Rejecting the need to defend the worst historical deeds of anybody with the same colour skin as us would also be progress.
I get that there are those who try to blame white people past, present and future, for slavery . But a) I'm not one of them, and b) they're wrong. Don't allow yourself to buy into it.
