Despicable. An Un-Thanksgiving from them, ungrateful spoiled brats who have all the freedom and resulting wealth that America has given then, yet take it for granted and spend the holiday denigrating their country.

Americans paid our "reparations" over 100 years ago, in a bloody Civil war to free the slaves. Slavery, by the way, is as old as history. It was not invented by our Founding Fathers. As you point out, many more slaves were sent to the Caribbean and to Brazil. We don't hear about that.

It was England and then America which first decide to put an end to slavery, beginning with the slave trade. Christians, often of very conservative bent, men like William Wilberforce and Henry Ward Beecher, spearheaded the crusade to abolish slavery. Christianity, capitalism, and Western imperialism put an end to slavery in most of the world.

It was the 20th century, the century of the socialist Utopias made real, that revived slavery on the most massive scale, the slave labor camps of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.

This is a very nice catch. I'm linking to this, it deserves broader exposure. And yes, stupidity and malice are not self-exclusive. Feynman was simply exhorting us not to subscribe to convoluted conspiracy theories.

Eric, I'm glad you are bringing this article to light, revealing as it does the typical liberal penchant for moral preening and posturing when an opportunity to score points at America arises. Your criticims were so spot on I had to take a look at the original article myself and can add little but the following:

1) The article sez:
Slavery was not confined to the South, as generations of Northerners have been taught. Indeed, the peculiar institution, as it often was called, was especially prevalent in New York City, where it was a matter of explicit colonial policy, far-ranging financial investment and personal practice.
This is hardly news to any Junior High Student of American History with a good textbook. Of course the North had slavery. This is a revelation to some New Yawkers? My Junior High school textbook in the mid 1970s said that, and it even had a dramatic picture of black Crispus Attucks falling to the ground under British shots. This is news? Whatever happened to decades of "multi-cultural" education since then that people are "surprised"? Are they really, or are the exhibit organizers just trying to pump up the PR and their exhibits importance?

2) the article sez:
As the exhibition reveals, New York from its founding was a city wholly dependent on African slavery. Slaves built the road to Harlem that would become Broadway, the palisades of Wall Street, the first City Hall, and the docks that would berth generations of immigrants to the New World...
Fine, but the examples given hardly show a city "wholly dependent" on slavery. So the slaves did some public works, fine, but in what way were these works more significant than say the public works erected by white laborers at the same time? Also what was the population of the black slaves versus white residents? A quick Google search reveals they were a small minority. One excellent "progressive" website puts the number in 1698 at around 2,000 people. Hardly an earth-shattering number. By comparison, in the 1600s and 1700s, Black kingdoms in various parts of Africa were deploying armies numbering in the tens of thousands, including cavalry. It is true that the NY figure may have been big compared to other states like say Rhode Island or something, but overall, the numbers involved here are not of earth-rumbling significance. See:
http://www.newsday.com/community/guide/lihistory/ny-history-hs313a,0,5978045.story?coll=ny-lihistory-navigation

3) The article sez:
New York was second only to Charleston, S.C., as an urban slave-holding center. In 1703, 42 percent of New York households owned slaves, compared with 6 percent in Philadelphia and just 2 percent in Boston.
OK, fine, but this is really "chump change" compared to slave-holding in the South. The "progressive" web link above indicates that over half-a-million slaves were in the Southa round the time NY was oppressing a few thousand. Quote: "Slavery in the New York colony was unlike that on the plantations of the Deep South, where close to a half-million slaves lived in servitude by the time of the Revolution.." Scholar Thomas Sowell points out that slavery was less harsh in places like NY, not because the white folks were any nicer, but because of the its dispersed and small-scale nature. This meant no large plantation system with its brutal slave drivers and overseers, or its mass sales and breakups of entire families scattered hither and yon in the South. The "progressive" website avoids making mention of this, naturally.

4) Eric mentions a reference that most black slaves were sent to the Caribbean and Brazil, rather than America. This is partially true , but many slaves were then "re-exported" to America from these locations. Indeed, it was common practice for slaves to be shipped to the Caribean for "seasoning" before coming to Amerikka. As Thomas Sowell points out in "Ethnic America", things were harsher there than in the US. The life expectancy of slaves was a lot less in places like the Caribbean where there was more absentee ownership and overseers drove more ruthlessly. It was considered cheaper in the Caribbean to import new slaves than to maintain existing populations. That was the harsh calculus of the times. In America, the situation was a bit less harsh, because owners typically lived with their land and slaves, and the "missus" was often active in organizing care for sick slaves. There was thus greater incentive to maintain slave health than in the more brutal "seasoning" grounds.

5) The article sez:
John Allen, who brought his 9-year-old son, Miles, to the exhibition, found it revealing. "When I was a kid," Allen said, "they would talk about how Washington, D.C., was built by slaves. They didn't talk about New York."
Good for Mr. Allen, but the politically correct spin is typical- "slaves 'built' NY". A further extension to "they owe us" is not too far down the road, and indeed this is the exact same illustration used by assorted "reparations" activists. It would be more accurate to say, that black slaves (and not all blacks were slaves, there were thousands of free blacks in the US), were part of NY's population, and contributed to the building of the city. But of course, such modest statements will not attract much grant funding, press attention, or provide a platform for assorted "activists" to morally preen, and demand "reparations". And so it goes.

I must add that there were also white slaves in the colonial period, the "indentured servants". Precisely because their term of servitude was limited, they were often treated worse than the Negroes who were enslaved for life, for the same reason that you treat a car you rent with less care than a car you own. Get all the work out of them while you can, and if they drop dead, so what? Jim Goad has a harrowing chapter on white slavery in his The Redneck Manifesto.

They also leave out the millions of Africans who were forcibly transported across the Sahara, most of whom died. But it's Politically Incorrect to mention the Arab slave trade.

Yes, and they leave out ancient slavery, as well as modern, current-day slavery. Any slavery but American (hopefully meaning the big bad U.S.).

Correct in part Steve. But said white slaves were an insignificant number in the Western Hemisphere. Books like M. Hofman's "White Slavery" discuss the topic way back to ancient Greece, where of course, mostly whites were involved on both sides. In American terms, white slavery was insignificant. In comparison over 12 million blacks were shipped across the Atlantic to be slaves Also to keep in mind, while indentured servants may have had rougly the same STANDARD OF LIVING as slaves, (food, housing, etc, as Thomas Sowell points out) they had several rights forbidden to slaves. The greatest right of all, of course, was to walk free at the end of their indentured term. Just one example of the difference, is that in the 1600s as slavery grew, places like Virginia decreed that all FREE blacks were to be enslaved for life. White indentured servants were of course, exempt.