For instance, the very word “slave” stems from “Slav,” i.e. a reference to the experience of millions of (white) Slavish people who endured centuries of slavery at the hands of African Muslims. This, of course, is a most inconvenient truth, for it is a most Politically Incorrect truth. But it is the truth.
Yet the Slavish aren’t the only whites who spent centuries in captivity: Europeans of various backgrounds were enslaved by African Muslims as well. All of this is heavily documented in such neglected pieces of scholarship as Robert Davis’s Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 and Paul Baepler’s White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives.
Nor is it just that millions of whites in Europe were made to toil in bondage for hundreds of years. Don Jordan’s White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America and Michael Hoffman’s They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America impeccably establish that whites were enslaved in colonial America as well. Moreover, these brave authors show that the conditions that whites, including, most tragically, white children, had to endure both en route to the colonies as well as once they arrived were at least as dreadful as those experienced by Africans.
This last point would as well be included in an honest discussion of slavery. The word “kidnapping” that is so often, but erroneously, used to describe the circumstances that allegedly resulted in the transportation of Africans to the New World derives from the fact that British children—kids—were regularly “nabbed’ off of the streets of England and sold into slavery in America.
An honest discussion of race would mention what no less a figure than black Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates recently discovered: free blacks were in America before slavery. While researching the book and documentary The African-Americans: Many Rivers to Cross, Gates admits to having been shocked to discover that blacks freely came to America, to Florida, as early as 1513—over 100 years earlier than the standard date of 1619. And the one black man whose name is now known was a conquistador who came in search of the Fountain of Youth with Ponce de Leon.
The black man you are referring to is probably Esteban or Estevanico, one of the four survivors of the Narvaez expedition which landed in Florida in 1528—known about from the narrative written by Cabeza de Vaca after they got back to Mexico. They had been shipwrecked on the coast of Texas and were enslaved by local Indians for several years before finally escaping.