The British Royals: The 'OGs of Racism?' | Opinion

In his Netflix special that debuted earlier this month, comedian Chris Rock took on a wide range of subjects, from widespread victim culture to the Will Smith slap heard round the world.

Rock earned some well-earned laughs at Smith's expense, which he had every right to do—one of the jobs of comedians is challenging the rich, famous, and powerful.

The comedian unloaded a few jokes about Meghan Markle and the British royal family, too, at one point claiming—quite correctly—that "some of that s*** she went through was not racism. It was just some in-law s***."

"They're so racist, they wanted to know how brown the baby was going to be?" Rock said. "I'm like, that's not racist, cause even black people want to know how brown the baby's gonna be. S***. We check behind their ears."

Rock wasn't finished with the royal family, and what followed got laughs because everyone in the audience presumed that what he was saying was true.

Markle, Rock continued, should have known the royal family was racist. "It's the royal family, they're the original racists," he said. "They invented colonialism. They're the OGs of racism. They're the Sugarhill Gang of racism." He also accused the royal family of "investing in slavery like it was Shark Tank."

Unfortunately, Rock's joke wasn't just untethered from reality. It had reality backwards. "Empire was the least original thing that the West did," explained Hoover Institution's Niall Ferguson in a Ted Talk he gave many years ago. "Everybody did empire."

Indeed, the British were simply one in a long line of nations that tried it. Persia, Rome, India, China, Japan, Ethiopia, France, Portugal, Russia, and the Ottomans all tried their hand at empire long before the British gave it the old college try.

Worse than that historical inaccuracy, the British weren't the original racists—they were the original abolitionists, outlawing the slave trade in 1807 by an act of the British Parliament. Slavery itself was later made illegal in the U.K. in 1833.

In Andrew Roberts' book The Last King of America: The Misunderstood Reign of George III, we learn that when George was the Prince of Wales in the 1750s, he was a fierce abolitionist. In an essay he wrote after reading Montesquieu's classic enlightenment tract, The Spirit of the Laws, George advanced a critique of slavery that went further than Montesquieu's. "What shall we say for a European trafficking black slaves?" wrote George. "The very reasons urged for it, will be perhaps sufficient to make us hold such practice in execration. For an inhuman custom, wantingly practiced by the most enlightened, polite nations in the world, there is no occasion to answer for them, for they stand self-condemned."

King George III, Roberts notes, never bought or sold a slave in his entire life, never invested in any of the companies that traded slaves and signed the legislation that abolished the slave trade.

Rock is a comedian, not a historian, but his joke revealed how little most Americans know about the practice of slavery around the world. And what too many Americans know is just enough to believe that the British, and America itself, invented and mastered the practice.

But facts are stubborn things. When Europeans landed in the Americas in 1492—and when slaves landed on our shores in 1619—slavery was an accepted practice in nearly every corner of the globe: Arabs, Spaniards, Russians, Chinese, Aztecs, and American Indian tribes all held slaves. None thought twice about the legitimacy of slavery.

"The astounding thing, after all, is not that some of our Founders were slaveholders," Dr. Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, once observed. "There was a lot of slavery back then, as there had been for all of recorded time. The astounding thing—the miracle even, one might say—is that these slaveholders founded a republic based on principles designed to abnegate slavery."

One additional fact most Americans don't know is the complicated history of slavery in the continent of Africa. "Very few Americans know that slavery was common throughout the world as well as in Africa," according to Sandra Greene, professor of African history at Cornell and author of Slave Owners of West Africa. Her research focuses on the history of slavery in Ghana, where in the 18th and 19th centuries warring political groups would often enslave their enemies.

"Slavery in the United States ended in 1865," Greene said, "but in West Africa it was not legally ended until 1875, and then it stretched on unofficially until almost World War I. Slavery continued because many people weren't aware that it had ended, similar to what happened in Texas after the United States Civil War."

Greene says that an estimated 11 million to 12 million people were exported as slaves from West Africa during the slave trade, but millions more were kept in slavery in Africa. "It's not something that many West African countries talk about. It's not exactly a proud moment because everyone now realizes that slavery is not acceptable," she said.

That African leaders profited from the sale of their own people—and that they sold their own people willingly—only complicates the preconceived notions of slavery and its antecedents.

Americans know far too little about the history of slavery, but even less about the abolition movement. "While slavery is as old as humanity, abolitionism is a relatively recent phenomenon," historian Katie Kelaidis wrote. "It's not difficult to trace the explosion of the worldwide abolition movement to the decade the Declaration of Independence was signed."

Some nations would abolish slavery later than others: Cuba (1886), Brazil (1888), Korea (1894), China (1910), Russia (1917), Afghanistan (1923), Iraq (1924), Iran (1929), Ethiopia (1942), Kuwait (1949), Niger (1960), and Saudi Arabia and Yemen (1962) all did so after the United States. Legalized slavery, it turns out, endured the longest in Middle Eastern, African, and Asian nations. Slavery persists today, with more than 40 million people enslaved—more than at any time in human history.

That it was mostly Western nations that drove the abolition movement—and Christians like England's William Wilberforce and William Lloyd Garrison in America—and propelled a revolutionary change in laws and attitude about slavery is an additional story far too many Americans don't know, but should.

Why aren't these things taught? Why did Rock's audience laugh at that joke about the royal family?

The study of history shouldn't whitewash the ills of slavery around the world. But to get history so wrong—so backwards—is an indictment not of a single comedian but of how we teach the history of slavery: without context. And with the goal of making racism and slavery itself the invention of white Europeans—and their relatives in America.

Lee Habeeb is vice president of content for Salem Radio Network and host of Our American Stories. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi, with his wife, Valerie, and his daughter, Reagan.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.