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Oh, well this is a new one. You are absolutely correct in your assessment of the article: the only thing it's rigorous about is distorting the historical record to advance a private agenda. The claims presented here are gross distortions of the historical record, at times presented in refutation of positions no rational person even argues for, and they should be disregard. I have tried to address each of the claims without getting off into too much detailed discussion on any singular one, but do feel free to ask follow-up questions about anything specific have raised. Where I have older detailed answers to hand, I have tried to link to them.

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Claim 1: "Black slavery in America was pretty bad, kids, but it wasn't anything special. Throughout history, every color of the rainbow has owned slaves and been enslaved."

Goad is certainly right that slavery is something that appears time and time again in the historical record; that it has appeared in a wide range of cultures and environments since the neolithic revolution. What makes slavery in the New World so unique in the historical record, though, is that it is a system of forced labour based not only on the aggressive and relentless depopulation of a continent over the course of many centuries, but that it is based upon a system of racial hierarchy in which millions and millions of people were held to be inherently inferior essentially for the colour of their skin. The transatlantic trade is without parallel in terms of the enormity of its scope, being sustained for four centuries and involving millions and millions of victims, with devastating consequences for African society (we had a thread discussing this recently here).

This was an institution that did more than target social outsiders for enslavement; it constructed a complex and sophisticated series of rationalisations that enabled the degradation and dehumanisation of millions of people along racial lines. Quite simply, before the transatlantic slave trade, we did not have the concept of 'race' in the same way that we do today; people were certainly aware of different skin tones and of different ethnic characteristics, but before the slave trade there was simply no such thing as white (or black) identity, either culturally imposed or self-declared. If you look to many of the racist stereotypes that persist about African American people today, you can very often trace them through the historical record back to at least the experience of slavery earlier in the history of the United States, and very often back to early European encounters with Africa and early rationalisations for the transatlantic trade. That's not a coincidence; it reflects how essential the experience of the slave trade and of slavery has been in shaping the concept of race and racial identity. See this thread for some discussion by me and /u/sunagainstgold on the history of race as a category.

Racial slavery as it existed in the transatlantic system is utterly unique in the historic record not only for its contemporary character but for its lasting, painful legacy. More than 150 years after the abolition of racial slavery in the United States, it still has a profound political, social and economic legacy - not just in the United States but around the world.

Claim 2: "No, kids—the blacks, Arabs, and Jews were involved, too [as well as white Europeans]."

You know, as a general rule of thumb if someone takes the view that 'the Jews' exist as a racial category alongside 'the blacks', they probably aren't arguing in good faith.

It's absolutely true that there was significant African involvement in the transatlantic slave trade, and that this involvement is an important part of the story of transatlantic slavery. But as some of our African experts have already remarked on in the thread I linked to earlier, the trade had an absolutely devastating impact upon West Africa politically, socially and economically. The complicity of certain West African elites in slave trading does not translate to widespread benefit of it; on the contrary, this was a system that caused significant and widespread misery and suffering. Nor does that complicity mean the transatlantic system was an extension of existing practices of enslavement in Africa; the two systems connect, but they are not the same.

With regards to the slavery in the Arab world, one of my older answers here puts this into perspective somewhat, as does this older answer by my slavery studies colleague /u/textandtrowel. Jewish involvement driving slavery is a popular myth in some black nationalist circles, though it also gets some traction in white racist groups too. Eli Faber's book Jews, Slaves, and the Slave Trade: Setting the Record Straight (1999) thoroughly refutes the claim that Jewish people had a particular and significant role to play in the slave trade or slavery, and that is something so uncontentious among historians that when he published it, reviewers questioned why he had bothered to write a book proving something everyone already knew to be true!

Claim 3: "Of the 10 to 15 million Africans who were transplanted to the New World, no more than 6 percent—around 400,000—went to the Northern Hemisphere. Almost all of them went to South America."

This simply isn't true. The only way you can reach this figure is by being comically and agonising ignorant of global geography. About 6million men, women and children were taken from the coast of Western Africa to Southern America (not all of which is in the southern hemisphere, incidentally) during the course of the transatlantic slave trade; that figure might be slightly higher when adding in slave vessels whose ultimate destination we're uncertain of, but it means that the slave trade to South America constituted about half of the wider transatlantic trade. About 2.8million people left the coast of West Africa for the British Caribbean alone, which is very much in North America. I rather suspect that this distortion of the record is part of a ploy to try and make slavery look like something the 'not quite really white', as southern Europeans are often seen, powers of Spain and Portugal have almost exclusive responsibility for.

The 400,000 figure the author cites refers to the number of people who arrived in continental North America, rather than the entire northern hemisphere. Whilst it is certainly true that continental North America accounts for only a small volume of the slave trade, by the eve of the Civil War there were approximately 4million people of African descent held in bondage in the United States - contrast that to Jamaica, which receives 1million people from Africa between 1607 and 1807, but has an enslaved population of just over 300,000 by 1832. The US is remarkable because it does not need the transatlantic slave trade and develops its own internal trade in enslaved persons born within its territory; I wrote a little about this recently here. The United States is far from a foot note in the history of transatlantic slavery; whilst it's certainly true that popular histories of slavery can be US-centric, the United States is absolutely a key player in transatlantic slavery's story.

The United States also stands out for how incredibly invested it becomes in the institution of slavery - not just economically, but psychologically and socially. It is from the United States that we see the most aggressive pro-slavery ideology emerge; although there are defences and rationalisations of racial slavery wherever it exists, in the southern United States these rationalisations are carried to their logical extremes, in the form of social belief systems that cast racial slavery as a righteous and moral good - a divinely ordained social order in which the violent dehumanisation and exploitation of African and African American people is held up to be somehow uplifting and empowering to them. That, unsurprisingly, is something Goad opts not to engage with in his misguided refutation of the notion that America is unique.