Candace Owens took former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick and his fellow left-wing ideologues to school on the history of slavery, pointing out it did not originate in America and still exists in Africa to this very day.
During her address to the Conservative Political Action Conference outside of Washington, D.C., on Friday, Owens argued that Kaepernick is emblematic of the left’s ignorance, or purposeful obfuscation, about the record of slavery in America and beyond.
“The left has no idea that the world did not begin in 1776,” Owens said. “Three years of traveling the country and facing off with hysterical liberals, and that is my scientific conclusion, that they haven’t the slightest idea that anything exists or that anything ever existed outside of the United States of America.”
As I previously wrote, The New York Times far-left 1619 Project at least acknowledged that slavery was introduced into the British American colonies over 150 years before they claimed independence. However, The Times went on to falsely claim that protecting slavery was a “primary” reason the colonies declared their independence.
Kaepernick clearly is of the 1619 Project way of thinking, with America being a land of injustice toward black people.
Owens pointed to a pair of Fourth of July tweets the liberal activist posted that illustrate how his hatred for the United States is based on a distorted view of the place of slavery in the nation’s history.
First, Kaepernick shared a quote from the abolitionist Frederick Douglass from his speech “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”
“What have I, or those I represent, to do with your national independence? This Fourth of July is yours, not mine … There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the people of these United States at this very hour,” Kaepernick tweeted last July 4.
What he failed to mention is the year Douglass spoke those words: 1852, a decade before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation and 13 years before the 13th Amendment ending slavery was passed.
Douglass argued powerfully for the end of slavery in the years leading up the Civil War and then recruited black soldiers, including his own sons, to fight for the Union during the conflict.
Kaepernick also failed to mention the abolitionist delivered his speech in the free state of New York.
Almost all the states north of the Mason-Dixon Line had voted to abolish slavery by the end of the Revolutionary War in 1783.
By 1804, all the Northern states had passed legislation ending slavery.
In 1838, Douglass, then approximately 20 years old, successfully escaped from slavery in Maryland, first making it to New York via Philadelphia. Eventually, he settled in Massachusetts.
As many as 100,000 slaves escaped to the North, while slavery remained legal in the Southern states.
In a July 4, 2017 tweet, Kaepernick wrote, “How can we truly celebrate independence on a day that intentionally robbed our ancestors of theirs? To find my independence I went home.”
The tweet featured video from a trip he took to Ghana, a choice Owens found ironic.
“In lieu of celebrating his independence in America, Colin got on a plane and went to Africa, a continent upon which he found better grounds for celebration, which is interesting,” Owens said.
“It’s interesting because currently, today in Africa, there are close to 700,000 slaves,” she continued, noting they are being enslaved by other Africans.
The conservative highlighted that in Ghana itself, CNN reported last year 20,000 children work as slaves in the fishing industry.
Owens also argued that white men should be given credit for taking the lead to end slavery beginning in the 1800s.
“The first nation to abolish the practice of slavery was Great Britain,” Owens said. “They were then followed by the French colonies, who were then followed by the United States. Centuries of slavery and three countries of white men led the world in ending it.”
As an aside, slavery was abolished in Great Britain in 1833 — over a half-century after the founding of the United States — further proving that The New York Times’ claim the colonies declared their independence to protect slavery is not grounded in reality.
“Slavery was not brought to this continent by white Europeans as the left would have us imagine,” Owens contended, noting that indigenous peoples enslaved each other.
“Slavery existed everywhere in the world including here since the dawn of humanity,” she said.
Owens stated that brown and black peoples have enslaved each other in numbers far greater than white men ever have enslaved them, offering the examples of ancient Persian, Egyptian, the Chinese Qing and Ming, Mongol empires, as well as the Muslim caliphate of the middle ages, the Ottoman and Japanese empires of more modern times.
“My purpose here is to simply tell the truth: the truth about the history of all men of days past — a history that is complex, ugly, brutish, immoral, and leaves no man regardless of his skin complexion, guiltless,” she said.
“But the left wants us to believe otherwise. To them, imperialism, cannibalism, murder, slavery, all of these undeniably sinful acts are forgiven in a historical context, so long as they were not committed by white men.”
Overall, Owens gave a much-needed historical perspective of America’s original sin of slavery.
What other nation in the late 1700s even came close to setting the bar the U.S. did in the Declaration of Independence: That all men are created equal, with certain God-given unalienable rights?
America then set out to fulfill this ideal in the decades and centuries that followed, providing a beacon of liberty the world over.
The proof is in the pudding.
Each year over 1 million people — who happen to be primarily brown and black — immigrate to the United States.
If America were the racist dystopia Kaepernick and the left would have us believe, why do so many want to be here?
The reason is clear: because regardless of your skin color, creed or national origin, you can obtain that blessed status of being an American.
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