Black Pirates, "Social Justice Warriors," and Sad Puppies

[chris_gerrib]

One of the many, many fine whines emitted at volume complaints of the Sad Puppies is that "social justice warriors" keep insisting on changing the races of people in order to advance the cause of social justice.

Then I was referred to this interesting article: black men and the black flag. Turns out that during the Age of Sail, lots of black men were pirates. Like, for example, Blackbeard's crew was 60% black!

Nor were these blacks just grunt labor. There was Diego el Mulato Martin (el mulato = "mixed race" in Spanish) who ended up a commissioned officer in Spanish service. Or Diego de Los Reyes, aka Diego el Mulato Lucifer. Or Black Caesar, who spent a decade terrorizing the Caribbean from his base on Elliot Key, then hooked up with Blackbeard.

In short, what happened is that history whitewashed (literally) the pirates of the Age of Sail. The "social justice warriors" are merely restoring historical accuracy to that era.

Comments

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Well, when you look at how many such pirates were press-ganged in the first place, and how cosmopolitan their experiences and make-up were, it's not surprising; they HAD had walked a mile in the other guy's shoes - or manacles, in this case.  So their natural sympathies were with the cargo, when they took a blackbirder.

That's not to say they embraced them with Sixties™ lovingkindness, singing “We Shall Overcome,” which is what you're intended to think.  There were several occasions where a slave ship was overrun, its crew killed, the slaves freed, and the pirate ship sailed on, leaving a shipload of bewildered Africans who hadn't the slightest idea what an ocean was, let alone how to sail on it.  That wasn't the pirates' problem, was it?  In manu tua, Domine…