“Our nation was born in genocide when it embraced the doctrine that the original American, the Indian, was an inferior race. Even before there were large numbers of Negroes on our shores, the scar of racial hatred had already disfigured colonial society. From the sixteenth century forward, blood flowed in battles over racial supremacy. We are perhaps the only nation which tried as a matter of national policy to wipe out its indigenous population. Moreover, we elevated that tragic experience into a noble crusade. Indeed, even today we have not permitted ourselves to reject or to feel remorse for this shameful episode.” --The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.”
In 1500, Columbus wrote to a friend:
"A hundred castellanoes (a Spanish coin) are as easily obtained for a woman as for a farm, and it is very general and there are plenty of dealers who go about looking for girls; those from nine to ten (years old) are now in demand."
A substantial amount of the money used by Queen Isabella to finance the explorations of Columbus came from the seizure and sale of properties owned by Spanish Jews and Muslims. On March 30, 1492, she issued an edict demanding that Jews either convert to Catholicism, leave the country, or be executed.
Quoted from We Were Not the Savages
"The event that led European Nations to destroy many of the civilizations of two continents, and drastically diminish the remainder, resulted from what was an almost impossible accident of fate. If it had not already occurred, it would be virtually impossible to envision.
In 1492, Christopher Columbus, on a sea voyage to chart a shortcut to the Indies, funded by Queen Isabella of Spain, set the stage for the rape of American civilizations by going astray at sea. By chance he eventually landed on a small island in the Caribbean sea populated by a defenseless and friendly pacifist race of people, the Taino. These people were ripe for picking by unscrupulous men, and Columbus and his crew pillaged with impunity. The blind luck that led him to land on this small defenseless island instead of somewhere else along the thousands of miles of North and South American coastline-where people wouldn't have been so complacent-is akin to finding a needle in a haystack.
In retrospect, if he had instead landed in a non-pacifist country, such as that of the Iroquois or Maya, history would have turned out differently. Their Warriors would have fought back ferociously, very probably ending his voyage on the American side of the Atlantic. If this had happened, and no Europeans had appeared for another century, population growth and technology development would have reduced the possibility of European colonization considerably. However, history turned out the way it did and no amount of fantasizing can change that.
Columbus, thinking he was in the Indies, did not waste time paying lip service to the pretence that he was importing "shining" European ideals to the people he mistakenly labelled Indians. Instead he wrote in his journal: "We can send from here, in the name of the Holy Trinity, all the slaves and Brazil wood which could be sold." True to the intent of these words, he initiated the Amerindian slave harvest on his first voyage. When he embarked from the Americas for Spain, it was with a cargo of five hundred Native Americans to be sold on the continental slave markets. Upon landing at Seville, only about three hundred of these unfortunate souls were still alive. These and booty were turned over to Queen Isabella.
The news of the riches offered by Hispaniola and surrounding islands soon spread across Europe. The notion of fabulous wealth for the picking was like a magnet for other European Nations. Within a few years, harvesters from Spain and other European countries were travelling from island to island seeking artifacts, precious metals, spices, and human beings for enslavement. The cruel assault mounted by these people against the defenseless and non-aggressive Taino, who had numbered in the millions in 1492, was so effective that forty years later they were virtually extinct."
