When actress Jameela Jamil took to TalkTV recently and declared British white people “the most evil people in history” for their role in colonization and the slave trade, she may have expected applause from progressive corners. Instead, she walked into a history lesson—one that, according to a new essay by James Zumwalt in American Thinker, she badly needs.
Zumwalt, a Marine Corps veteran and commentator, doesn’t deny the horrors of slavery or the British role in it. But he argues that Jamil’s sweeping condemnation—and the broader reparations movement she represents—ignores a deeper, uncomfortable truth: the transatlantic slave trade was not a simple story of white villains and black victims. It was, in his telling, a complex web in which African tribal traders were indispensable participants.
“For the most part, European slave traders had no need to penetrate deep into the African continent to capture their slave ‘cargo,’” Zumwalt writes. “A ‘delivery’ service was available by which the slaves Europeans bought were brought to various African port cities for sale.” That delivery service, he argues, was the engine of the entire enterprise—and it was run by Africans.
According to Zumwalt, the system worked like this: warring African tribes took battlefield prisoners, initially enslaved them for their own labor, and then realized they could profit far more by selling them to European buyers. “Thus, but for black tribal slave traders, slavery would never have exploded as it did,” he writes.
The timing matters, too. The Transatlantic Slave Trade began around 1500 and peaked in the 1780s. And who led the charge to end it? The very Brits Jamil vilifies. Britain outlawed the trade in 1807 and, in 1833, passed the Slavery Abolition Act, freeing more than 800,000 enslaved Africans in its colonies. The United States banned slave importation in 1808 and abolished the institution entirely with the 13th Amendment in 1865.
Zumwalt doesn’t stop there. He points to the case of Sunny Hostin, a co-host on The View and a frequent critic of American traditional values. Hostin is biracial—her mother is Puerto Rican, her father Black. When she had her DNA analyzed, she discovered she was largely of Spanish ancestry and that her fourth great grandfather was a merchant “likely involved in the slave trade” in 1800s Spain who owned at least one enslaved person.
Hostin, Zumwalt notes, had what he calls a “eureka moment,” acknowledging, “I guess it’s a fact of life that this is how some people made their living, on the backs of others.” But he wonders whether she—and other activists—grasp the full picture. While most of the world has banned slavery, he writes, “one of the regions where it still remains active is in the land of her father—Africa.”
A Global, Multiracial Institution
Zumwalt’s broader argument is that slavery is not a uniquely Western or white crime. It has, he writes, impacted nearly every race and ethnicity throughout history. The Mali Empire had the highest slave rate—one in three. Ancient Rome claimed a staggering 160 million slaves. The very word “slave” derives from “Slavs,” reflecting a time when they were the slaves of choice. And, he argues, the unequivocal leader in sheer volume of people enslaved was the Arab world, with five Islamic empires ranking in the top ten.
This historical sweep leads Zumwalt to a pointed critique of modern activism. “While the black race is seemingly singled out today as the only one to have been burdened with the yoke of slavery,” he writes, “no focus is directed at the fact that what America’s slaves endured was largely a result of hostility by black African traders who had defeated them on the battlefield.”
He also highlights a stark irony: descendants of slaves in America today enjoy a quality of life far superior to what descendants of African slave traders experience in Africa. Yet, he says, reparations activists promote a “LIFO” approach—last in, first out—when it comes to compensation, focusing only on the final chapter of a centuries-old global institution.
“An uncomfortable truth for compensation activists is that the slave trade existed in Africa long before the colonies and, thus, any American (or British) involvement,” Zumwalt writes. “And, while it was abolished long ago in America, it still remains in Africa.”
Echoes of ‘Yes, Virginia’
Zumwalt draws his title from the famous 1897 New York Sun editorial, “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus,” which responded to an eight-year-old girl’s question about the mythical figure. That editorial, he notes, allowed Virginia to hold on to a comforting myth. But for Jamil and Hostin, he argues, the myth of slavery as exclusively a white man’s evil is not comforting—it’s dangerous.
“Those sharing the naivete of Jamil and Hostin—clinging to the mythical belief slavery is an evil of the white man in which only minorities suffered—must be dispossessed of that illusion,” he writes.
Zumwalt acknowledges that slavery was and is a horrible institution. But he insists it must be understood in full context—as a practice that evolved as nomadic societies gave way to agrarian ones, that enriched every race and culture that embraced it, and that has contributed, however painfully, to human advancement—though always “on the backs of others,” as Hostin put it.
Jamil, who was born in Britain to an Indian father and Pakistani mother and moved to the U.S. in 1996, has built a career on playing characters she is not—a fact Zumwalt wryly notes. But playing a world history professor, he says, would be a “career-ending experience,” given her incomplete grasp of the subject.
Whether Jamil will respond to Zumwalt’s critique is unclear. She has not publicly commented on the essay. But the debate it raises—about who bears responsibility for slavery, who should be compensated, and how we teach this history—is not going away. And Zumwalt’s central question remains: Can activists confront the full, uncomfortable truth of slavery, or will they continue to view it through a lens that serves a modern narrative rather than historical accuracy?
Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/08/yes-jameela-there-was-and-still-is-slavery/