Mukul Oberoi

Elon , you’re retweeting something that, on paper, sounds accurate, but in reality is highly misleading. Yes, Europeans were enslaved in North Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries. That is historically documented. Estimates often place the number at roughly 1 to 1.25 million over several centuries. That should not be erased. But context matters. The transatlantic slave trade involved the forced transport of approximately 12 to 13 million Africans. Of those, roughly 10 to 11 million survived the Middle Passage and arrived in the Americas. Between 1 and 2 million died during the ocean crossing alone. Millions more died during raids, forced marches to the coast, imprisonment in holding forts, and other stages of capture and transit. So when we discuss “brought” versus “taken,” precision matters. Africans were not immigrants. They were captured, commodified, and transported in a system with catastrophic mortality before and during shipment. Scale is one distinction. Permanence is another. In the Americas, slavery became racialized and hereditary chattel slavery. Enslaved Africans and their descendants were legally defined as property for life. Their status passed automatically to their children. It became a permanent, race-based caste system embedded in law. There was no built-in expectation of ransom, no structural pathway back home, and no generational reset. Once transported across the Atlantic, for nearly all, it was a final and permanent severance. By contrast, while European captives in North Africa endured brutal conditions, many were ransomed, exchanged, or eventually freed. Their enslavement was not generally codified as a hereditary racial status automatically imposed on their descendants for generations. It was not constructed as a permanent, biologically inherited legal condition. Slavery in any form is wrong. That is not in dispute. But collapsing these systems into a numerical comparison without discussing scale, mortality, heredity, and structural permanence distorts history. One was a large-scale, transoceanic, racialized, hereditary labor system foundational to New World economies. The other, while violent and real, operated under different legal and structural conditions. Accuracy requires more than a headline comparison. It requires context.