“WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES: RESEARCH SUGGESTS WHITE SLAVERY WAS MUCH MORE COMMON THAN PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED” Robert Davis, Research Ohio State. Jan 14

This piece was extremely eye opening in the fact that it talked all about how much European Culture has ignored the idea of white enslavement. This notion was brought up rarely in the education that I have had on slavery. Yet, why have another article on slavery, and more importantly why on slavery of those that were from America and/or Europe? What does this topic have to do with the concept of gender and power? One of the conclusions that can be drawn from this is that not everything is, as it seems in the eyes of American studies of the history of discrimination against a certain race, a certain culture, and a certain gender. Opening up one’s mind to the way world is truly, not the way society and one’s own culture teaches one to see it is a true challenge for the average, educated American. This piece, if anything, has taught me that one must be open to challenged stereotypes and may have to realize the way the world is through one’s eyes may be much different from how the world truly works and all of it’s history. When reading of how enslaved Europeans were treated just as inhumanly as those that were enslaved from Africa, the image of slavery did not change in my mind, and I still saw the African slave trade as so much worse. Yet why I do not see these slave trades as equal is because images and countless information just focusing on African slavery has been engraved into my head for years and years, just as the image of what a man is in American society versus a woman in American society. It goes to show that the complexities of repeated information and repeated stereotypes could be a hard thing to see differently, but is necessary if one wants to know the world better.