6 ms·

>It can only mean one thing, the elephant in the room, black-on-asian violence Is there anywhere I can read about this elephant in the room? I'm not sure why t

>It can only mean one thing, the elephant in the room, black-on-asian violence Is there anywhere I can read about this elephant in the room? I'm not sure why the label is important here; is the implication that black people are ideologically motivated to attack Asians? Are you sure this was a hate crime (the driver was attacked because was Asian) or a crime of oppurtunity (the driver was attacked because he was an easy target)? Unless you are sure it was the former, the rhetoric sounds awfully close to the 13/52 dog whistle.

casefields 5y ago
It's what some would call Coulter's Corollary: >Named after a 2015 tweet from provocative conservative political commentator, Ann Coulter, Coulter's Law states that the longer it takes the news media to identify a mass shooter in the United States, the less likely it is to be a white male.
- nemothekid 5y ago
  That seems like a useless corollary, nor does it answer my question. I can't tell if you are intentionally trying to erase the motivations and replace them with skin color. There is an ideological difference between a white teenager shooting up a black church and a black teenager shooting a gang. Only in one did race play a motivation in the shooting. Coming back to my point, the GP is claiming there is an ideologically motivated uptick in crime where black people, specifically, are attacking asians. I'm not even arguing that he might be wrong, but I'm seeing this trope a lot more and I want to find out if there's any actual theory behind it or if I'm just going to find more 13/52.
  - arionhardison 5y ago
    Yes, this is HN so you are 100% correct. Asians and whites are the majority here so blacks are constantly demonized even though anti-blackness is literally a fundamental part of asian culture. HN has a very "high-brow" intelligent crowd, if this was reddit they would just go ahead and use a slur. Intrestengly enough, even though this comment will be down voted and flagged, my asian friends are the ones that explained these things to me. Here is a video one of my asian friends sent to me, its a bit long but actually quite informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXo2ub_nZFc&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXo2ub_nZFc&t=1s Unlike in America, its actually 100% accepted and seen as the norm to be "anti-black": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Few8kJ0zfnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Few8kJ0zfnY. This is also why Asia/India are the largest market for skin lightning cream. Objectively, I find it quite fascinating and it was very interesting for me to learn about. The book: Blacks And Asians: Crossings, Conflict And Commonality goes much deeper into the topic if you are interested.
    - arionhardison 5y ago
      Ironically, banning comments and perspectives like mine is not seen as the same thing as banning this person from telling their story.
  - haram_masala 5y ago
    Just to explore this: what exactly is your objection to the often-cited observation that black people, who are 13% of the population, commit 52% of the violent crimes? I don’t even know if that’s accurate - if not, then surely that’s the biggest problem with it. But if it’s true, then why is it a dog whistle? I’m not challenging you here, I’m trying to understand why it’s wrong to state it in this kind of context.
    - nemothekid 5y ago
      Because most people who use that rhetoric will always imply the disparity exists because of genetic disposition rather than a social one. The logic tree goes from "black people commit a lot of violent crime" to "black people are dangerous" (then from there to other various racist tropes), while ignoring the mountain of other socioeconmic issues. Consider this, if I told you Koreans only make 1% of Japan but they make up 70% of the Yakuza, what would you take away from that? The observation is true. But do you think I'm making a fair implication about Koreans in general? What if I said next that the Japanese police should be free to treat Koreans anyway they fit? Would you agree to that? I hope you would see that as insane, but that is line of reasoning that always happens with 13/52. So currently when I read "black on asian violence is increasing" I'm not sure yet whether I can believe the author is making a fairly reasoned observation about black people ideologically attacking asians, or if they are calling for a "force" to "take a closer look at those black people".
      - haram_masala 5y ago
        You make a very good point. Regarding the Korean example, I’d conclude that Koreans are more likely to get involved in organized crime in Japan because of structural factors of Japanese society and economy.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        rkk3 5y ago
        They are factually incorrect about 70% of the Yakuza being Korean. "While ethnic Koreans make up only 0.5% of the Japanese population, they are a prominent part of Yakuza ... The Japanese National Police Agency suggested Koreans composed 10% of the Yakuza proper" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza#:~:text=According%20to%20a%202006%20speech,percent%20are%20from%20non%2Dburakumin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza#:~:text=According%20to%...
tryonenow 5y ago
It is critically important in a political climate where one side is using the spectre of white supremacy as a political cudgel. When a complicit media makes a consistent effort to paint a false picture. This censorship is not an isolated incident. News articles regularly leave out the perpetrator's race unless it's white. Reddit regularly deletes and locks threads on inconvenient articles/videos such as this, including on default subs. Right leaning sources are effectively forbidden from wikipedia and stackexchange. A dangerous narrative is being manufactured across the social, news, and entertainment media sphere.
- knowaveragejoe 5y ago
  Thank goodness we have... Fox News? Newsmax? OAN? Breitbart? to give us the real scoop. The company you keep and all that.
  - juandora 5y ago
    Those, like CNN or MSNBC, are [mostly vapid and useless] boomer-tier news sources. I doubt you'll find too many posters here who see much more than passing glances of those types of sources. Someone posting here is more likely to be a NYT junkie or even more likely a scavenger feeding from multiple sources in an effort to assemble a more rounded understanding. >The company you keep and all that. This is rather rude response, btw. You did not address their post, you just yelled 'trumper!'. I mean, come on. You can do better, I have faith in you. :P They aren't wrong though, and there is nothing necessarily partisan about their viewpoints. When it comes to the media and politics in much of the western world there is the innocent-until-proven-guilty 'people of color', and then there is the guilty-regardless-of-innocence whipping race aka 'white'. This kind of dehumanization presages genocides. Read Jean Hatzfeld's fantastic works on the Rwandan Genocide(1) and you cannot help but see the parallels. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Hatzfeld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Hatzfeld
  - tryonenow 5y ago
    If fox, newsmax, and OAN are the only ones willing to report on certain topics earnestly, like, say patterns in black on asian violence, or other ethnically sensitive issues, then yes, their voices are critical to a functioning democracy. The way that news, entertainment, social, and "fact checking" media all effectively collude to discredit these sources for political leaning is dangerous, and in effect disenfranchises about 50% of the populace who do not lean left, in the online public sphere. This is an unstable configuration. Dismissal of these sources conflates political bias with unreliability. It's disingenuous, especially when outlets biased to the same degree but in the other direction are de facto approved on Wikipedia, reddit, stackexchange, Twitter, etc. You notice the growing hyperpolarization in this country? This is one of the main contributors. The left has monopolized public discourse and implicitly and increasingly colludes to keep right leaning sources discredited and silenced. YouTube's removal of the video in the OP is one of many examples which consistently align with the sort of progressive policies that are now sweeping the corporate sphere - and rural Americans are losing their voice, while being slandered as ignorant bigots. Go to the talk page for any remotely political article and you'll see a minority of right leaning editors consistently bullied and their sources outright disregarded. That's on top of the chilling effect which this consistent behavior has on the expression of what have become politically taboo opinions. It's an unspoken, incestuous club, and denying this pervasive bias is gaslighting.
mdoms 5y ago
I don't see how it's any more of a dog whistle than to mention the race of the victim in the title, regardless of the race of the perpetrator.
- anonymouse121 5y ago
  It's so weird how opposing the male gender was accepted with the #MeToo movement against men (based on flimsy evidence regarding widespread sexual assault), but having a #MeToo against blacks (for their well-documented extraordinary crime rates) is a "dog whistle".
  - tolbish 5y ago
    It's obvious which comments are made in cowardice, as they will generally be from brand new accounts. Your premise is pretty flawed, as it would be ridiculous to blame all men during MeToo, much like it would be ridiculous to blame all members of a race.
    - anonymouse121 5y ago
      Why mention men at all in the "MeToo" movement? Why aren't we allowed to mention black people committing more crime? Stereotyping men and some races is perfectly acceptable, stereotyping blacks is not. It's pathetic that people flag comments instead of giving any reasonable response.
      - tolbish 5y ago
        No, it's not acceptable to stereotype all men and it never has been.
        anonymouse121 5y ago
        It's always been acceptable in ways that would never pass if men were replaced by "black people". What else is #MeToo doing, if not a form of stereotyping? Why are men constantly mentioned and blamed? Why is it ok to say that there is a problem only affecting women caused by men? It's not even close to as evidence based as the problems with black people committing crime. I'm not blaming all black people for violent crimes from their community, but they have a serious issue and I don't see why it doesn't deserve to be called out in the exact same way.
anonymouse121 5y ago
The label is important because the media has been going on about anti-asian hate crimes and "#AsianLivesMatter", while blaming white supremacy. Of course the violence is actually by blacks (who are somehow immune to all criticism). The pattern of black-on-anything violence isn't unusual, but of course any un-PC facts like FBI crime statistics are buried in the media and on places full of liars like HN.
bpodgursky 5y ago
I don't think it's constructive to talk about ideological motivation; the elephant is that most of the increase in anti-Asian violence over the past year _is_ black-on-asian. Which is a narrative incompatible with pinning it on white supremacy. A lot is clearly crime of opportunity, but a lot of the high-profile cases appear to be completely unmotivated by theft (ie, the assaults on elderly asians are often just sucker-punches by a suspect who leaves immediately without taking anything).
- nemothekid 5y ago
  >I don't think it's constructive to talk about ideological motivation; It is. If you are going to label the problem as black-on-asian, I'd like to at least know what black people, specifically, are attacking asians. When the media uses labels about white supremacy it's usually because white mass shooters are usually ideologically motivated; they aren't killing people to steal money or eliminate competition, they are committing these crimes specifically because the victims aren't white. What I'm trying to see if there is a common motivation (rooted in, lack for a better-term "black" supremacy), or if this just an uptick in crime by an economic class that skews black. I'm not even saying its false, and I'm passing no judgement; but I've seen this rhetoric increase and I'm wondering what the source of it is.
  - haram_masala 5y ago
    One proximal but surely insufficient explanation is that assaulting Asian people has become a trope in hip-hop over the past couple of years (e.g. “ling-ling boppin’”).
    - nemothekid 5y ago
      >assaulting Asian people has become a trope in hip-hop over the past couple of years (e.g. “ling-ling boppin’”). It's hard for me not to believe you just made this up. "ling-ling boppin" doesn't return any Google results. Secondly, a trend in hip-hop would be a trend in American pop culture. Hip hop, is currently the biggest music genre in America - if what you say is true I can't imagine how I would have missed it. A quick Google search doesn't mention anything from the top Spotify artists about it.
andyxor 5y ago
It’s just stats, easily searchable on FBI website, check them out if you’re interested in the topic. Also pls leave these “dog whistle” or “gaslighting” labels to ideological moshpits and echo chambers. It’s considered a bad tone to use agitprop language in civil conversation.
271828182846 5y ago
The problem is that the BLM movement is unnecessarily built on an idealized view of black people. This is neither useful nor essential but many people (many of them white) feel better and more entitled with this idealized narrative. It's also a taboo to mention that it's not just white corporations f'ing over African people but that they are actually doing business with local criminals and those are the ones actually f'ing over their peers. Same thing with slavery. Which was totally accepted in Africa and partially still is. Black people sold other black people to white people. It seems to me that the RAM available to many people is too small to fit in a complexer perspective. That's why public discussions seem to stabilize with time on some dumbed down equilibrium that can be expressed in maximum three barely grammatically complete sentences.
- bingbong70 5y ago
  >Black people sold other black people to white people. Slavery was banned in the major kingdoms in Africa, the slave trading minority were empowered, funded, and armed by foreigner traders. They were able to take control of a large portion of the continent this way. Just like opium trading was banned in China, the drug trading minority were empowered, funded, and armed by foreigner traders...etc Much of the 'slavery' in Africa was actually mislabeled, it is better described as 'human adoption'. These so called slaves lived and ate in the same house as 'owners', had wives/children (sometimes more than the 'owner'), were not forced to work, and would intermarry with the adoptive family freely. Many rose to prominence and wielded tremendous power/influence in the families/communities/tribes they were adopted into. This form of 'adoption' (which includes adults) is still common in war torn countries in Africa where families are broken apart and family members lost prematurely. In America, the modern day equivalent would be going to a homeless tent city, moving some of the individuals into your home and sharing resources. Chattel slavery was considered abhorrent and only arrived in certain parts of the continent after a certain point. There were also POWs that were treated poorly and initially they were the people sold to foreign traders... preferable to leaving enemies of a tribe in jail, which posed a security risk and caused many other problems. "The black people sold black people" line is popular in the US because it sidesteps the details and on some level freed slave owners and their descendants from moral/social burden and guilt. This retort was/is also useful in denying the case for reparations when African Americans raised/raise it.

casefields 5y ago

It's what some would call Coulter's Corollary: >Named after a 2015 tweet from provocative conservative political commentator, Ann Coulter, Coulter's Law states that the longer it takes the news media to identify a mass shooter in the United States, the less likely it is to be a white male.

nemothekid 5y ago
That seems like a useless corollary, nor does it answer my question. I can't tell if you are intentionally trying to erase the motivations and replace them with skin color. There is an ideological difference between a white teenager shooting up a black church and a black teenager shooting a gang. Only in one did race play a motivation in the shooting. Coming back to my point, the GP is claiming there is an ideologically motivated uptick in crime where black people, specifically, are attacking asians. I'm not even arguing that he might be wrong, but I'm seeing this trope a lot more and I want to find out if there's any actual theory behind it or if I'm just going to find more 13/52.
- arionhardison 5y ago
  Yes, this is HN so you are 100% correct. Asians and whites are the majority here so blacks are constantly demonized even though anti-blackness is literally a fundamental part of asian culture. HN has a very "high-brow" intelligent crowd, if this was reddit they would just go ahead and use a slur. Intrestengly enough, even though this comment will be down voted and flagged, my asian friends are the ones that explained these things to me. Here is a video one of my asian friends sent to me, its a bit long but actually quite informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXo2ub_nZFc&t=1s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXo2ub_nZFc&t=1s Unlike in America, its actually 100% accepted and seen as the norm to be "anti-black": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Few8kJ0zfnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Few8kJ0zfnY. This is also why Asia/India are the largest market for skin lightning cream. Objectively, I find it quite fascinating and it was very interesting for me to learn about. The book: Blacks And Asians: Crossings, Conflict And Commonality goes much deeper into the topic if you are interested.
  - arionhardison 5y ago
    Ironically, banning comments and perspectives like mine is not seen as the same thing as banning this person from telling their story.
- haram_masala 5y ago
  Just to explore this: what exactly is your objection to the often-cited observation that black people, who are 13% of the population, commit 52% of the violent crimes? I don’t even know if that’s accurate - if not, then surely that’s the biggest problem with it. But if it’s true, then why is it a dog whistle? I’m not challenging you here, I’m trying to understand why it’s wrong to state it in this kind of context.
  - nemothekid 5y ago
    Because most people who use that rhetoric will always imply the disparity exists because of genetic disposition rather than a social one. The logic tree goes from "black people commit a lot of violent crime" to "black people are dangerous" (then from there to other various racist tropes), while ignoring the mountain of other socioeconmic issues. Consider this, if I told you Koreans only make 1% of Japan but they make up 70% of the Yakuza, what would you take away from that? The observation is true. But do you think I'm making a fair implication about Koreans in general? What if I said next that the Japanese police should be free to treat Koreans anyway they fit? Would you agree to that? I hope you would see that as insane, but that is line of reasoning that always happens with 13/52. So currently when I read "black on asian violence is increasing" I'm not sure yet whether I can believe the author is making a fairly reasoned observation about black people ideologically attacking asians, or if they are calling for a "force" to "take a closer look at those black people".
    - haram_masala 5y ago
      You make a very good point. Regarding the Korean example, I’d conclude that Koreans are more likely to get involved in organized crime in Japan because of structural factors of Japanese society and economy.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - rkk3 5y ago
        They are factually incorrect about 70% of the Yakuza being Korean. "While ethnic Koreans make up only 0.5% of the Japanese population, they are a prominent part of Yakuza ... The Japanese National Police Agency suggested Koreans composed 10% of the Yakuza proper" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza#:~:text=According%20to%20a%202006%20speech,percent%20are%20from%20non%2Dburakumin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakuza#:~:text=According%20to%...

tryonenow 5y ago

It is critically important in a political climate where one side is using the spectre of white supremacy as a political cudgel. When a complicit media makes a consistent effort to paint a false picture. This censorship is not an isolated incident. News articles regularly leave out the perpetrator's race unless it's white. Reddit regularly deletes and locks threads on inconvenient articles/videos such as this, including on default subs. Right leaning sources are effectively forbidden from wikipedia and stackexchange. A dangerous narrative is being manufactured across the social, news, and entertainment media sphere.

knowaveragejoe 5y ago
Thank goodness we have... Fox News? Newsmax? OAN? Breitbart? to give us the real scoop. The company you keep and all that.
- juandora 5y ago
  Those, like CNN or MSNBC, are [mostly vapid and useless] boomer-tier news sources. I doubt you'll find too many posters here who see much more than passing glances of those types of sources. Someone posting here is more likely to be a NYT junkie or even more likely a scavenger feeding from multiple sources in an effort to assemble a more rounded understanding. >The company you keep and all that. This is rather rude response, btw. You did not address their post, you just yelled 'trumper!'. I mean, come on. You can do better, I have faith in you. :P They aren't wrong though, and there is nothing necessarily partisan about their viewpoints. When it comes to the media and politics in much of the western world there is the innocent-until-proven-guilty 'people of color', and then there is the guilty-regardless-of-innocence whipping race aka 'white'. This kind of dehumanization presages genocides. Read Jean Hatzfeld's fantastic works on the Rwandan Genocide(1) and you cannot help but see the parallels. (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Hatzfeld https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Hatzfeld
- tryonenow 5y ago
  If fox, newsmax, and OAN are the only ones willing to report on certain topics earnestly, like, say patterns in black on asian violence, or other ethnically sensitive issues, then yes, their voices are critical to a functioning democracy. The way that news, entertainment, social, and "fact checking" media all effectively collude to discredit these sources for political leaning is dangerous, and in effect disenfranchises about 50% of the populace who do not lean left, in the online public sphere. This is an unstable configuration. Dismissal of these sources conflates political bias with unreliability. It's disingenuous, especially when outlets biased to the same degree but in the other direction are de facto approved on Wikipedia, reddit, stackexchange, Twitter, etc. You notice the growing hyperpolarization in this country? This is one of the main contributors. The left has monopolized public discourse and implicitly and increasingly colludes to keep right leaning sources discredited and silenced. YouTube's removal of the video in the OP is one of many examples which consistently align with the sort of progressive policies that are now sweeping the corporate sphere - and rural Americans are losing their voice, while being slandered as ignorant bigots. Go to the talk page for any remotely political article and you'll see a minority of right leaning editors consistently bullied and their sources outright disregarded. That's on top of the chilling effect which this consistent behavior has on the expression of what have become politically taboo opinions. It's an unspoken, incestuous club, and denying this pervasive bias is gaslighting.

mdoms 5y ago

I don't see how it's any more of a dog whistle than to mention the race of the victim in the title, regardless of the race of the perpetrator.

anonymouse121 5y ago
It's so weird how opposing the male gender was accepted with the #MeToo movement against men (based on flimsy evidence regarding widespread sexual assault), but having a #MeToo against blacks (for their well-documented extraordinary crime rates) is a "dog whistle".
- tolbish 5y ago
  It's obvious which comments are made in cowardice, as they will generally be from brand new accounts. Your premise is pretty flawed, as it would be ridiculous to blame all men during MeToo, much like it would be ridiculous to blame all members of a race.
  - anonymouse121 5y ago
    Why mention men at all in the "MeToo" movement? Why aren't we allowed to mention black people committing more crime? Stereotyping men and some races is perfectly acceptable, stereotyping blacks is not. It's pathetic that people flag comments instead of giving any reasonable response.
    - tolbish 5y ago
      No, it's not acceptable to stereotype all men and it never has been.
      - anonymouse121 5y ago
        It's always been acceptable in ways that would never pass if men were replaced by "black people". What else is #MeToo doing, if not a form of stereotyping? Why are men constantly mentioned and blamed? Why is it ok to say that there is a problem only affecting women caused by men? It's not even close to as evidence based as the problems with black people committing crime. I'm not blaming all black people for violent crimes from their community, but they have a serious issue and I don't see why it doesn't deserve to be called out in the exact same way.

anonymouse121 5y ago

The label is important because the media has been going on about anti-asian hate crimes and "#AsianLivesMatter", while blaming white supremacy. Of course the violence is actually by blacks (who are somehow immune to all criticism). The pattern of black-on-anything violence isn't unusual, but of course any un-PC facts like FBI crime statistics are buried in the media and on places full of liars like HN.

bpodgursky 5y ago

I don't think it's constructive to talk about ideological motivation; the elephant is that most of the increase in anti-Asian violence over the past year _is_ black-on-asian. Which is a narrative incompatible with pinning it on white supremacy. A lot is clearly crime of opportunity, but a lot of the high-profile cases appear to be completely unmotivated by theft (ie, the assaults on elderly asians are often just sucker-punches by a suspect who leaves immediately without taking anything).

nemothekid 5y ago
>I don't think it's constructive to talk about ideological motivation; It is. If you are going to label the problem as black-on-asian, I'd like to at least know what black people, specifically, are attacking asians. When the media uses labels about white supremacy it's usually because white mass shooters are usually ideologically motivated; they aren't killing people to steal money or eliminate competition, they are committing these crimes specifically because the victims aren't white. What I'm trying to see if there is a common motivation (rooted in, lack for a better-term "black" supremacy), or if this just an uptick in crime by an economic class that skews black. I'm not even saying its false, and I'm passing no judgement; but I've seen this rhetoric increase and I'm wondering what the source of it is.
- haram_masala 5y ago
  One proximal but surely insufficient explanation is that assaulting Asian people has become a trope in hip-hop over the past couple of years (e.g. “ling-ling boppin’”).
  - nemothekid 5y ago
    >assaulting Asian people has become a trope in hip-hop over the past couple of years (e.g. “ling-ling boppin’”). It's hard for me not to believe you just made this up. "ling-ling boppin" doesn't return any Google results. Secondly, a trend in hip-hop would be a trend in American pop culture. Hip hop, is currently the biggest music genre in America - if what you say is true I can't imagine how I would have missed it. A quick Google search doesn't mention anything from the top Spotify artists about it.

andyxor 5y ago

It’s just stats, easily searchable on FBI website, check them out if you’re interested in the topic. Also pls leave these “dog whistle” or “gaslighting” labels to ideological moshpits and echo chambers. It’s considered a bad tone to use agitprop language in civil conversation.

271828182846 5y ago

The problem is that the BLM movement is unnecessarily built on an idealized view of black people. This is neither useful nor essential but many people (many of them white) feel better and more entitled with this idealized narrative. It's also a taboo to mention that it's not just white corporations f'ing over African people but that they are actually doing business with local criminals and those are the ones actually f'ing over their peers. Same thing with slavery. Which was totally accepted in Africa and partially still is. Black people sold other black people to white people. It seems to me that the RAM available to many people is too small to fit in a complexer perspective. That's why public discussions seem to stabilize with time on some dumbed down equilibrium that can be expressed in maximum three barely grammatically complete sentences.

bingbong70 5y ago
>Black people sold other black people to white people. Slavery was banned in the major kingdoms in Africa, the slave trading minority were empowered, funded, and armed by foreigner traders. They were able to take control of a large portion of the continent this way. Just like opium trading was banned in China, the drug trading minority were empowered, funded, and armed by foreigner traders...etc Much of the 'slavery' in Africa was actually mislabeled, it is better described as 'human adoption'. These so called slaves lived and ate in the same house as 'owners', had wives/children (sometimes more than the 'owner'), were not forced to work, and would intermarry with the adoptive family freely. Many rose to prominence and wielded tremendous power/influence in the families/communities/tribes they were adopted into. This form of 'adoption' (which includes adults) is still common in war torn countries in Africa where families are broken apart and family members lost prematurely. In America, the modern day equivalent would be going to a homeless tent city, moving some of the individuals into your home and sharing resources. Chattel slavery was considered abhorrent and only arrived in certain parts of the continent after a certain point. There were also POWs that were treated poorly and initially they were the people sold to foreign traders... preferable to leaving enemies of a tribe in jail, which posed a security risk and caused many other problems. "The black people sold black people" line is popular in the US because it sidesteps the details and on some level freed slave owners and their descendants from moral/social burden and guilt. This retort was/is also useful in denying the case for reparations when African Americans raised/raise it.