Revisiting Rutgers Professor Brittney Cooper’s Claim That Whites Were the Only Slavers

Among the crazed claims made by anti-white racists is that only whites engaged in the slave trade. The greatest slavers in human history have been not white Europeans or Americans, but Muslim Arabs who carried out slaving raids up and down the coasts of Europe, enslaved Christians in Spain and North Africa, took Slavs from eastern Europe to be slaves in the Middle East, and carried on a vast trade in black Africans seized from east and central Africa by Arab slavers who took them back to the slave markets of Islam, in Jeddah, Muscat, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, and Istanbul. Because Muhammad himself, the Perfect Man, bought, sold, and traded slaves, slavery has always been considered by Muslims to be forever legitimated. There never was a Muslim William Wilberforce. Slavery was stamped out late in Arab countries, and only under severe pressure from the West: the practice ended officially in Saudi Arabia and Yemen only in 1962, and in Oman in 1970. Even today, despite slavery being officially abolished, Arab masters possess hundreds of thousands of black African slaves in Mauritania, Mali, and Niger.

Several years ago, a Rutgers professor named Brittney Cooper — who is convinced that whites were the only slavers — called upon people to “take out” white people, to whom she referred as “motherf*****s.” Her case is worth revisiting, and can be found here.

In her most recent [September 2021] tirade, Dr. Brittney Cooper, 41, a tenured professor at Rutgers University, told The Root’s Michael Harriot in an online segment for the publication last month that white people are ‘villains’ – and even celebrated a statistic depicting a decline in white birth rates.

What’s more, when primed by Harriot as to what her solution for addressing white supremacy would be, the educator vehemently replied that she would ‘take them out.’…

Cooper candidly responded: ‘The thing I want to say to you is, “We got to take these motherf*****s out,” but like we can’t say that,’ before noting that she ‘doesn’t believe in a project of violence’.

Despite her claims of rejecting violence, Brittney Cooper was clearly and openly calling for the murder of all “white people,” for what else could she have meant when she said that she would “take them out,” referring to white “motherf*****s”? Why didn’t the Rutgers administration dismiss someone who called for genocide? What would they have done about a professor who described blacks as “motherf*****s” and called upon people to “take them out”? That professor would be fired the same day. But nearly two years have gone by since Cooper’s astonishing rant, and nothing has happened to her. The Rutgers administration did not even open an investigation into Cooper’s remarks. Why not?

Cooper had more to say as well:

She described conversations she claimed to have had with white people who allegedly tried to excuse historical sins by saying black people would do the same thing.

“If you all had this power, you would have done the same thing,” she said they told her.

“No, that’s what WHITE humans did,” Cooper exclaimed. “White people said there’s a world here, and we own it. Prior to them, black and brown people had been sailing across oceans, interacting with each other for centuries without total subjugation, domination and colonialism.”

First, her claim about “black and brown people” sailing across oceans is untrue. It was white Europeans who travelled the globe, discovering new lands from America to Australia. The Age of Exploration is entirely a European affair. The exploration and settlement in the New World, both of North and South America, was undertaken entirely by Europeans — mainly the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English. So was the discovery of Australia. And so was the discovery of much of sub-Saharan Africa. A Nigerian historian, Michael Omolewa, noted in 1991:

Where did the supply of slaves come from? First, the Portuguese themselves kidnapped some Africans. But the bulk of the supply came from the Nigerians. These Nigerian middlemen moved to the interior where they captured other Nigerians who belonged to other communities. The middlemen also purchased many of the slaves from the people in the interior . . . . Many Nigerian middlemen began to depend totally on the slave trade and neglected every other business and occupation. The result was that when the trade was abolished [by England in 1807] these Nigerians began to protest. As years went by and the trade collapsed such Nigerians lost their sources of income and became impoverished.

The Atlantic Slave Trade would not have been possible without black Africans capturing other black Africans and bringing them to the coast of west Africa, where they were sold to white slavers who would have been unable to penetrate into the hinterland themselves, given the prevalence of tropical diseases and terrific heat. Instead, the whites relied on blacks to provide them with other Africans whom they had conquered for this express purpose. The Atlantic slave trade was completely dependent on the collaboration between white slavers stationed on the coast and black Africans in the interior who supplied them with — that is, sold to them — other black Africans for the American slave market. Cooper is apparently ignorant of the role of black Africans in selling fellow blacks to the white slavers. For her, whites were the only people involved in the African slave trade, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

Today, there are about 100,000 blacks enslaved by Arab masters in Mauritania. In Mali, the estimates of the number of black slaves held by Arab masters range from 200,000 to 800,000; in Niger, there are 43,000 black slaves. In addition, blacks have enslaved other blacks in South Sudan, Burundi, Eritrea, and the Central African Republic. All of that Arab-on-black, and black-on-black slavery practiced today is apparently unknown to Professor Brittney Cooper, who reserves her hatred exclusively for the white “mother******s” from whom all evil flows.

In the New World, Native Americans were murdering each other for centuries long before the Europeans arrived and settled here. Cooper doesn’t even mention the savage internecine warfare among the American Indians. She reserves her venom only for the White Man, the single source for all the world’s woe. Get rid of the whites, is her solution — she wants to “take them out” — and all manner of things shall be well.

Even in Europe, it was the same story. Remember: it was the Muslims who invaded Europe, not the other way round. It was the Muslim Arabs who, having arrived from North Africa, conquered Spain, slaughtered the men and carried off the women to be used as sex slaves. The Muslim invasion was only stopped by Charles Martel at Tours in 732 A.D., when his army defeated the Arabs, stopped their advance into France, and caused them to return to Islamic Spain. It took the Spanish Christians almost 800 years, from 711 when the Muslims first crossed over the Mediterranean into Spain, to 1492, when the last Moorish kingdom, Granada, fell to the Christians, to successfully complete their “Reconquista.” While the Muslims were occupying Spain, according to the historian Dario Fernandez-Morera, Christians were sometimes required to furnish — beyond the money paid as the jizyah — sex slaves for the harems of the Umayyad rulers in Damascus, consisting of the one hundred most beautiful Christian girls. Is that ghastly sex slavery, imposed by non-white Muslims, of any interest to Professor Cooper? Apparently not; she never mentions it.

In Asia Minor, darker-hued Turkic tribes from Central Asia conquered the “white” Greeks. Their savagery during and after their conquest is well known: they turned churches into stables for their horses, raped girls and women, set priests on fire during Holy Communion to terrify the worshippers, subjected young men to painful circumcisions, and snatched Christian infants away from their mothers. They plundered cities of everything of value, and razed churches throughout Anatolia. But for Brittney Cooper, the “white” Greeks undoubtedly had it coming.

The Turks did not merely conquer vast lands in Anatolia, southeastern, and central Europe that eventually were incorporated into the Ottoman Empire, but engaged in slaving raids that yielded huge numbers of European slaves. 300,000 Hungarian Christians were seized and enslaved, and another 100,000 from Serbia and Transylvania, led back to Turkey in “iron betters tied to the backs of horses.” Women and children were herded like animals by dogs; any woman who could not keep up the pace was promptly sliced in two. Many white Slavs were tortured and murdered, while the lucky ones lived to be enslaved by the non-white Muslim Tatars. So vast were the numbers of Europeans being fed into the Ottoman slave markets that their prices decreased to the point where children could be bought for pennies, beautiful women for the Turkish harems could be exchanged for a pair of boots, and four Serbian slaves could be traded for a horse.

Up and down the coasts of Europe Muslims raided, suddenly seizing coastal towns, taking away anything of value, and bringing back from each raid hundreds of Europeans — men, women, and children– to be enslaved in North Africa. The white women whom the Muslim raiders brought back from their European raiding parties were used as sex slaves by the Muslim Arabs, and inevitably the children of these mothers were not as dark as the Muslim Arab fathers. The number of those children increased, so as to noticeably affect — lighten — the average complexion of the North Africans.

None of this fits Cooper’s narrative of “whites only” being responsible for history’s atrocities, including slavery. As Raymond Ibrahim points out:

Then there was the abysmal treatment meted out to European slaves. As Robert Playfair (b.1828), who served for years as a consul in Barbary, explained, “[i]n almost every case they [European slaves] were hated on account of their religion.” Three centuries earlier, John Foxe (b.1516) had written in his “Book of Martyrs” that “[i]n no part of the globe are Christians so hated, or treated with such severity, as at Algiers.”

In the old days words were not minced; there was no fear of being labelled an “Islamophobe” or a “racist” Truths could be told about Muslims and about Islam. In his celebrated “Book of Martyrs,” John Foxe in the 16th century describes the atrocities visited upon Christian slaves in Algiers where, he claims, Christians were hated, and mistreated, more than in any other part of the world. In the 19th century Robert Playfair, who had been a British consul in North Africa (“Barbary”), noted the “hatred” of the Muslims for their Christian slaves. Neither observation could be made so easily today.

Is there the slightest bit of evidence to support Brittney Cooper’s claims about the achievements of “black and brown people” as explorers who, unlike the whites later on, did not engage in subjugating, dominating, and colonizing? No, there is none.

But there is overwhelming evidence that black Africans in West Africa seized other blacks and brought them to the coast to be sold to white slavers involved in the Atlantic Slave Trade. The whites never penetrated the interior — it was too hot for them, and they greatlly feared the tropical diseases. Hence the need to buy the slaves from other Africans who had captured them and taken them to the coast.

There is a great deal of evidence that the slave trade carried on by Muslim Arabs in black Africa began centuries earlier, and lasted centuries longer, and claimed millions more victims, than did the Atlantic Slave trade.

There is a great deal of evidence to show that Muslim Arabs over many centuries, seized white villagers living along the coasts of Western Europe, conducting raids all the way up to Ireland and, in at least one case, in Iceland, and brought back as many as 1½ million whites to be enslaved in North Africa.

Between 650 and 1900, 18 million black Africans were enslaved by Arabs, far more than the number who were brought in the Atlantic Slave Trade to the New World. Many of these Africans were young boys, castrated in the bush by their Arab captors, and then brought by slave coffle all the way to the Red Sea, where they were then transported by dhow to the entrepot of Zanzibar, and from there to the slave markets of Arabia and Islam, including Jeddah, Muscat, Baghdad, Damascus, and Istanbul. Only 12% of those boys survived both the castration and the long march from the bush to the sea with suppurating wounds. (See The Hideous Trade by J. Hogendorn.) The boys who survived became eunuchs in the Arabs’ harems. The African men, who were also castrated to make sure the black population in Arabia did not increase, were used as menial laborers and farm workers. The women became concubines — sex slaves — in the harems.

Does any of this long history of Arabs enslaving both 1½ million white Europeans and 18 million black Africans mean a thing to Brittney Cooper? Of course not. Her mind was made up long ago. The “white men” in her view are the only villains in all of human history. No one else matters. It is the whites who are history’s “mother******s,” as she so delicately calls puts it, and Cooper — a professor, for god’s sake, at Rutgers — wants her friends and allies to “take them out.” To me that sounds like a murderous threat. After two years, it is clear what the administration at Rutgers thinks.