Very good overview! It’s a myth, ie. a lie, created by propagandists to serve a narrow political agenda. The more the facts get out there, the weaker a hold the propaganda will have. Keep it up.
This, while doing a good job of possibly dispelling some propaganda, is propaganda itself, insofar as it omits one of the most influential texts that expresses support for slavery and understandably had thus been used to support it, the Bible. The Bible doesn’t only advocate at times chattel slavery (such as when Jehovah commands Moses to have his followers variously commit genocide and enslave all female virgins of conquered people) and never explicitly condemns all forms of it--it actually depicts Jehovah and Jesus as slave masters that humans must obey and swear submission to lest they be punished with torture or existential destruction -- which is a much more evil idea than even the Hammurabi law that punished a slave for denying they had a master by cutting off their ear. Thank goodness Jehovah is just a superstition invented by ancient genocidal lunatics.
I did my best to isolate "chattel slavery" from other forms of slavery (e.g. debt slavery), which accounts for my focus on some examples and not others. I would be delighted to read a paper on hereditary racial chattel slavery as described in the Bible!
You didn't only discuss hereditary racial chattel slavery. Babylonian slavery as described by Hammurabi seems inconsequentially and morally no different than the slavery that is described as acceptable to Jehovah in the bible. Can you tell me why the Babylonian slavery is worth mentioning in context to American slavery while the slavery practiced by ancient Israelites is not, when America is a country where its inhabitants are mostly Christians, which is partially directly derived from the religion of the ancient Israelites and there are no inhabitants I am aware of that still claim to worship any Babylonian gods?
When Moses committed genocide to conquer the land he believed was promised to him by the god he worshipped, he at times enslaved all the female virgins. If we are going to talk about the awful history of slavery before America, thats certainly an incident that should be included. Its in Numbers. Its not hidden. What should we call the kind of slavery where your family and your tribe is all murdered and you are made a possession of those who murdered your family and tribe and then all your children are made to be required, at the threat of death, to worship the god that supposedly killed your family? Maybe there should be a special word for that; its arguably more morally obscene than "hereditary racial chattel slavery". Although it may be irrelevant to weigh such evils.
Furthermore, you discuss the Romans and the Greeks and their slavery, and that is the slavery that Paul -- a Greek -- was referring to when he told *Christian Greek / Roman* slave masters to be "good masters" and he told *Christian Greek / Roman* slaves to be obedient to those masters? Yet in the context of Romans and Greeks and their slavery you do not point out that the primary founder and inventor of the religion of the people who enslaved black people commanded Greco-Roman slaves to be obedient to their masters. And of course, he demanded all of humanity to be absolute obedient slaves to the great slave master in the sky that he thought especially picked him to be his emissary -- and if they didn't: torture and destruction.
The bible absolutely belongs in your overview. I'll do my best to give you the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't intentionally left out. I appreciated the article overall, other than that omission. I learned some things I did not know before reading it that I think is valuable. I hope that in the future, when discussing this history, you remember those Roman slaves who were commanded by Paul to be obedient to their tormentors to supposedly please Jesus.
Jesus as a slave master? You seem to be going full Nietzsche with that one, the concept of 'slave morality', but by doing so actually erasing real life social distinctions of the time. If everyone is a 'slave', then no one is. I am far from being well versed in what the Bible says, but will just offer, for what it's worth, what Paul famously writes in the Epistle to the Galations 3:28
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." -New King James Version
“ Jesus as a slave master? You seem to be going full Nietzsche with that one, the concept of 'slave morality', but by doing so actually erasing real life social distinctions of the time. If everyone is a 'slave', then no one is.”
If everyone is a slave but the master, then everyone is a slave but the master. And even among slaves, such as when America had slaves, distinctions still were formed. If all black people were slaves in southern United States before the civl war, it doesn't mean that there were no black people who were slaves in the southern United States. There were slaves in the house, there were slaves in the fields; and the house slaves sometimes had authority over the field slaves. This doesn't mean the house slaves weren't slaves. If there is a hierarchy of expected absolute obedience, it’s a slave hierarchy, with a slaver at the top. In the case of Christianity, it is Jesus.
As for Nietzche, he was correct about Christianity being a slave morality. Christianity is certainly not alone with that though.
“I am far from being well versed in what the Bible says, but will just offer, for what it's worth, what Paul famously writes in the Epistle to the Galations 3:28
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." -New King James Version
How to read that? Take it away!”
How to read that? Well first I’d take into consideration that Paul admits in a letter that he consciously deceives the people he is preaching to to gain their trust, and he lies about himself in order to win slaves for the god he believes in so that the god he believes in will reward him.
"To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. 21 To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. 23 I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings." 1 Corinthians 9:20-23
Then I’d bother to read the next line following what you quoted. What you quoted though happens to be very pertinent to the fact that Christianity is a religion of slavery and that Jesus is presented as a slaver. The next line:
“And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” -Galatians 3:29
If a person is a possession of Jesus (are Christ's) aka, a slave, then they are going to be rewarded. Those distinctions that don’t matter in the previous line are in reference to being “heirs of the promise.” That promise being if a person obeys the Demon Lord who claims to be Love itself, then they will get eternal life, regardless of whether they are currently a slave, or they are poor or they are a woman. Obeying the Demon Lord is open to people of all status in this life; it’s the next life that ultimately matters, where the Demon Lord will reward those who loved him and punish those who did not. Unfortunately, in this life, if one is a slave, one should still obey one’s current master. In other words Paul doesn’t care to challenge the Roman system of slavery. His biggest concern seems to be convincing people to be obedient and deferent to him.
Paul explicitly refers to himself as a slave in Romans. He begins his letter - “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus”. Romans 1:1. He uses the word duolos, which is variously translated as slave, servant, or bond servant, but is a standard word used in Greek literature to refer to chattel slaves.
He is Christ’s. He is a slave of Jesus. And all people are essentially slaves of Jesus according to Paul. If we are obedient, he says, we will be rewarded with eternal life, if we are disobedient, we will be punished with torture and destruction.
"Do you not know that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? 5 But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. he will render to every man according to his works: 7 to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; 8 but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. 9 There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, 10 but glory and honor and peace for every one who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. 11 For God shows no partiality." Romans 2 4-11
Frankly I think that is an evil and stupid doctrine. No one should obey Paul or revere a god that resembles the one Paul describes. I personally could never love or revere such a god as such a god naturally repulses my soul. Paul’s equality is one of everyone equally being slaves of the same tyrant. Except, specifically, himself, because he claims he is special, and particularly selected by the tyrant to give instruction. He's a proud house slave. A unique and special house slave of his god. He claims he has a special connection to "God" and claims that he has the authority to tell everyone else that if they disagree with his claims they will face wrath and fury. But if they obey him and accept his authority, they will be rewarded with honor, peace, glory, and immortality.
Paul though isn’t the only one to share the religious idea that it is most honorable and righteous to submit absolutely to a cruel, capricious, tyrannical god, and of course, his representative(s) here on earth. He is just responsible for a particular flavor that is largely responsible for the Christianity we know today that got standardized throughout the first 4 centuries. The gospels of course present a very similar conception, largely influenced by Paul and the Torah. The gospels present multiple parables, such as the parable of the wicked tenants (Mk 12:1-9, Mtt 21:33-39, Lk 20:9-15), the DoorKeeper(MK 13:34-37, Mtt 24:42-51), the Talents(Mtt 25:14-30, Lk 19 12-27), the unworthy Servant(Lk 17:7-10), the unmerciful servant(Mtt 18:23-35) and the unjust Steward(Lk 16:1-13) that present a master that is angry at his slaves for misbehavior and disobedience. Jesus allegedly was executed by Rome for sedition, claiming to be the Jewish messiah and king. Kings had chattel slaves; Jesus plausibly had chattel slaves himself. Regardless, I'd consider spiritual slavery potentially more an evil than chattel slavery. A person who is enslaved out of fear for their soul is in a worse state than a person who is enslaved out of fear of their body. A person whose soul is enslaved will have their body enslaved along with it.
The Bible preaches that humans are slaves to Jehovah-- a cruel, capricious imaginary god invented by genocidal rapists, and that those who obey that god are virtuous and will be rewarded with good things and those who disobey that god are wicked and will be punished with bad things. Its preached in both the old and new testaments. This is a fact. And it is an evil fiction that should be denounced.
Thanks for your reply! It's hard to argue with much of what you say. I'm sure Christopher Hitchens would agree! And I cannot comment really on Paul's character. However, I would say the following as a sort of rebuttal, if only as a matter of perspective. The point about 'if everyone is a slave, no one is', I meant to be literally every 'human', including Jesus, ie. Jesus as a man. The analogy with black slavery in the US doesn't work because obviously there were actual masters distinguished from slaves. It's a purely social institution of this world. In Christianity, the so-called 'master', Jesus or Jehovah, is not of this world. That may be your premise, in that if one thinks of it as a mere fiction, a human construct, then your logic follows. In the world, masters exploit slaves for their own ends, demand obedience so that they benefit. How does Jesus *as God* benefit? Where is the exploitation? By definition, the religious premise, Jesus is pure love. As a human, exploitation might be simply for ego or a megalomaniac desire for power over others. That was apparently the Roman's fear, that they would lose their 'slaves' to him. But God, a pure divinity, literally has no need of slaves. There is no 'human' exploitation involved. In fact, I would say that is the meaning of the crucifixion, Jesus the God-man sacrificing one 'life', the fallen mortal life of a man, for the 'true' life of divine salvation. In an actual slave society, no master would ever sacrifice his own life so that the slaves follow him and become 'master-like'. It makes no sense at all. As I say, if you start from the premise that it is all a fiction, you can read the story as one of masters and slaves, but to a person of actual faith, any notion of slavery just disappears altogether. It's incomprehensible. None of this, of course, means that the so-called servants of Christ, the churches etc, could not be guilty of such treatment of other human beings. That's because they are human, they are not Jesus or Jehovah. Much of history attests to this, as I am sure you'd agree. But the divine Christ himself? He would just be sad at how benighted and sinful fallen humanity can be.
I did my best to isolate "chattel slavery" from other forms of slavery (e.g. debt slavery), which accounts for my focus on some examples and not others. I would be delighted to read a paper or published article on chattel slavery as described in the Bible: is there something scholarly you can recommend? I am not well enough versed in Biblical slavery but acknowledge your point as well taken.
I wish I had a book or paper that I knew off the top of my head. Most of my knowledge comes from reading the bible itself and random scholarly articles in academic journals on the internet. I did at one point read a scholarly book about it, but that was almost 20 years ago and I dont recall the name or the author. I'll actually give myself an hour or two to try to look it up and see if I can find it again this weekend. I'll get back to you.
If you want the quotations from the New Testament when Paul encourages slaves to be obedient to their masters I can provide that pretty quick. As fast as a google search allows. I must admit, I have not put much time into memorizing where the exact location of bible verses are. When it comes to Paul, remember, he was a Greek. During the first century. Thus, if we want to know the slavery that Paul was discussing, we must look up not "biblical slavery" but slavery of the Roman empire during the first century. And that included chattel slavery, as you yourself point out:
"Moreover, the Romans and the Byzantine Empire expanded chattel slavery geographically into Africa, particularly in North and Northeast Africa."
I think this "assumptions" comment is meant for Jeffrey [end of thread]. This is my first time on this discussion board, but I'm noticing that our comments sometimes appear in the wrong place on a thread.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to read and comment on my essay. As a teacher, I always looked for but could never find a concise account of the world history of chattel slavery (as opposed to other forms of slavery) before 1619. I was also interested in the historical relationship between chattel slavery and ethno-racial difference in the centuries before the black/white color line came to define slavery in the US. My conclusion: The British colonies and later the United States were participants in a transcultural system of exploitation and forced labor rooted in the ancient and medieval past and pervasive throughout the Atlantic world by the 1600s. Chattel slavery in the United States was less remarkable for its differences from other slave systems than for its striking resemblances. Thanks again for reading and commenting.
You're a brave man. You'll be out of a job within the month. Jk.
It was nothing unusual. It was usual, perfectly normal, in the 1500s and the 1800s. It wasn't acceptable by the 1850s, because of the Enlightenment, not because of one book by Frederick Douglass, though he quite rightly showed people the way.
It was only a 'sin' if you think in terms of first, Christian notions, then post-Enlightenment, post UN Human rights, post 1960s 'equity' ideology. If there were 50-100k people shipped, enslaved through those centuries, as there were, and horrible as it was by our 2000s standards, there were far more than that dying every year in civil wars, religious wars, in Europe, in Africa, in Asia, all over. Everywhere on this planet.
It was just human behavior to enslave/oppress, from the Portuguese in the 1480s to the British in 1806, yes, the year before THEY abolished it, to the chagrin if rulers of color worldwide.
The 1619 mythology is more of a lie than the exceptionalist 1776 one: the only difference is the latter, the supposed 'White Supremacy' narrative for decades annoyed African Americans, pushing them to become Obamas, Currys, Le Brons, Baldwins, Morrisons, Haleys, McWhorters, Winfreys etc etc.
The first, the new 1619 SocJus, post George Floyd, 'White Privilege' even greater ahistorical myth, is creating a generation of lost black kids. No hope, no point. No actual contextual history. We are just victims, always, forever. Its inane, its untrue, and it is a joke.
See this: this is the 'truth' for black people, if people can have one truth based on skin color, that is:
One of my few clear memories from grammar school was the cover of the History book from grammar school.
It was picture of a landscape with a large flat plane with mountains in the far background. It had a long line of people receding into the background and by their clothes you could tell the farther back in line the farther in the past was being represented. Of course everyone in the line was White.
I sat there in my little desk staring at that picture thinking, "So the only people who matter in history are White people."
One of the things I try to show is that the global history of chattel slavery was transcultural and ethno-racially heterogeneous and existed even before the invention of modern racial categories.
So that means slavery is no big deal because everybody did it and racial stratification did not exist until Europeans had superior technology to convince themselves that they belonged at the top of the heap?
How much of history is merely circumstantial combined with human stupidity and random instances of brilliance? Science is sequential, in order to figure out C then B had to be figured out first. But A had to be known before B. If a cultural group got ahead there would be a tendency to get further ahead faster. But if advantages are used to steal lots of land then economic advantages will compound.
Of course that still leaves historical curiosities. The Chinese could have colonized Australia 300 years before Europeans. Why didn't they?
And there is absurd self sabotage. I asked BW Booktuber about Afrofuturism containing realistic science. She said "that feels racist". Technology and science made the last 300 years. How societies were handling slavery 3000 years ago is "academic".
No, the opposite: slavery was a huge deal because everybody did it and because it still exists. A world history textbook cover illustrating the history of slavery would have to look very different from the one you described, since slavery was transcultural and ethno-racially heterogeneous. On racial stratification, I'm not sure if Bernier and Blumenbach were thinking of technology, but it's an interesting question to look into. How the Spanish and Portuguese were handling slavery is especially crucial to understanding the development of American slavery. I appreciate your comments.
Did everbody do it because of the lack of technology and consequent low productivity of those times? The Catholic Church dividing up the world is just one of the random cultural idiocies. If a hurricane had sunk Columbus would that really be significant to global socio-economic evolution? Nations matter to nationalists and distort history to suit nationalistic delusions.
There were different reasons at different times: to put war captives to work, to punish a crime or debt, to use people as soldiers or household servants or mine workers or concubines. In some places, some people were sold into slavery by family members; others sold themselves into slavery. Usually it was a labor shortage.
Depends on what a big deal is? Isn't much of history a big deal? The other slaveries, all the other violence and genocide? We are not only obsessing over this one slavery, but the 5% that ended up in the US. Nobody even knows 95% of slaves from W Africa went elsewhere.
There is a continuity in enslaving. The years 1619-1865 are part of that continuity, yet they receive all the press and attention.
Of course it was a big deal. It was horrific. It was also in tune with the global zeitgeist. The Holocaust was not, but who cares about those Jews right?
Many stakeholders benefited from the cotton economy — plantation owners in the South, banks in the North, shipping merchants, and the textile industry in Great Britain. Cotton transformed the United States, making fertile land in the Deep South, from Georgia to Texas, extraordinarily valuable. Growing more cotton meant an increased demand for slaves. Slaves in the Upper South became incredibly more valuable as commodities because of this demand for them in the Deep South. They were sold off in droves. This created a Second Middle Passage, the second largest forced migration in America’s history.
To feed “King Cotton,” more than a million African Americans were carried off into the Deep South. That’s two and a half times the number that were brought to the United States from Africa.
Secondly, so what? This now half a century old complaint, which has been rectified to the point that EVERY ad, cover, show, actor is not just non-white, but African American, is just not of any relevance to todays world.
And what culture, anywhere, did not represent itself through the dominant lens.
That depends on how one chooses to analyze reality. I don't give a damn about ads. I regard planned obsolescence as a high technology form of slavery. I have noticed that European culture does not make 700 year old double-entry accounting mandatory in the schools. Really Dumb!
Try: The Screwing of the Average Man (1974) by David Hapgood
Two things: that was probably 50 years ago. Much has changed; which White? Whatever was being depicted, you think that those white people who are Irish, Italian, Slovenian, Pole, Finnish, low class anywhere, are represented. The very claim anything is 'white' is dubious.
I don't give a damn. I probably care about different European nations about as much as you care about African tribes. Have you noticed that the Laws of Physics don't care about anybody.
History is only important in understanding how we got to the present. Who had technology vs who didn't.
"Low Class" ain't that getting into Economic Power Games and economic servitude. Curious how 700 year old double-entry accounting is not mandatory in the schools. Who controls that?
Its amazing how 90% of conversations on the thorny issue not of race, but of specifically African-Americans/race, always end up with I dont give a damn. Ok.
And nobody else has to give a damn about this tiresome issue. The great irony is how many white devils are on the side of reparations/BLM/soc jus etc, but mark this memory, the huge demographic transition the US is going through will have millions of conservatives of color, yes all those other people of color, who just don't care about one groups 'generational trauma'...they have their own, as do most whites.
The laws of physics are certainly above skin color, but I know precisely who figured them out so y'all could use this technology.
White people are not monolithic. Just like black people.
End of this thread: US Afr Am slavery was terrible, but it was just another day. Read about other cultures of the time, all much the same.
You compare a text book given to children to ads in magazines and expect to be taken seriously. You radiate "it was a long time ago, shove it under the rug" vibes.
I worked for IBM dealing with model changes in addition to non-IBM brands. Wading thru social nonsense cannot be a high priority.
But ultimately economics comes down to who "owns/controls/stole" the land. It is really funny how capitalists do not advocate mandatory accounting in the schools. But I haven't heard any so called Black leaders suggesting it either.
Both the absurd textbook (which my two very woke mixed race kids thought was appalling and noted it turned other kids into conservatives!) and those ads are actually pure capitalism: instead of addressing inequality and the last vestiges of real racism, corporations give a few beautiful pretty privileged afr ams jobs. So American.
The book is part of the great Race Ind Swindle of making money off Floyds murder. Kendi should pay for reparations himself with the money he and his joke partners have made.
Who stole the land? Who stole all land or just this land? Who stole Turkey? Ghana? Who were the Bantu? Ono? Dahomey? You think only whites stole land. Stealing land is a postcolonial leftwing concept. It wasn't stealing land. Again. It was, what ALL humans had always done.
I agree students should learn accounting, or do you mean personal finance.
Again this articles premise is sound. All historians would agree.
The fact it hurst the feelings of one small group in the US does not make it true.
“Christian notions”? It took almost 2000 years for some Christians to consider slavery sinful. There were philosophers, or people, who had considered it wrong even before Christians though because Aristotle makes an argument in defense of it; meaning he was aware of arguments against it. They weren’t obviously made by the powerful though, by those whose words would be retained through history.
Christianity rests itself on the Bible, whose main character is an imaginary god that encourages at various times his followers to commit genocide and enslave people, but also demands absolute obedience and submission--aka slavery--from all of humanity. Indeed both Jehovah and Jesus are depicted as slavers and humans as their slaves. Paul revels in his slavery. Paul tells slaves to be obedient to their masters;and the best he can do is tell the masters to be “good” masters, which is an oxymoron if I’ve ever seen one.
Abolition is not a Christian notion; it is quite anti Christian. But that didn’t stop some Christians, who turned out better than their religion, from embracing it--good for them. And they were able to irrationally rationalize it. Just like now some Christians accept homosexuality, even though it is clearly depicted as an abomination in the book they idolize. Fortunately Christians nowadays are typically better than the book they say they follow.
Late 18th century abolition stems from the minds of white European Enlightenment secularists and even atheists.
It also comes from the likes of evangelicals, Quakers and Wilberforce etc.
I am no Christian, but the tenets of Protestant Christianity were key to shaping that revolutionary (at that time insane) notion of abolishing what humans had always done, and still do.
There are 50 million slaves today. You are using their goods. So am I.
And what forces gave birth to the "tenets of Protestant Christianity"? Certainly nothing "Christian"; again quite the latent force to take almost 2000 years. The thing about humans, while many humans can get their greatest joy from enslaving other innocent humans, some of us don't like authority, especially unjust authority, either exerted upon ourselves or others. And as the grip of political authoritarian Christianity loosened slightly due to the natural rebellious human spirit, people, Christian and not, were given more breathing room to think and communicate ideas that were heretical to ruling ideology; the growing technological abilities to spread ideas and general greater connection of the world allowed more ideas to travel and some people began to sympathize with notions of material political liberty. Many of those people were Christian, some of them were not. Most Christians(and I suspect non-christians) actually rejected it out of fear or complacency, or simply didnt even think about it. The Christians who embraced it, did so *despite* the bibles general acceptance of slavery, and found ways to rationalize their moral sense that slavery was wrong by selecting particular passages and interpreting the bible that were in fact radical; and they did their best to try to convince other Christians and other people using the bible itself as an authority. In the American south, while there were people, including Christians who helped slaves escape, there were more who would have felt it wrong--and their conscience pain them--to help a slave escape. Attributing abolitionism to Christianity at all, is again, like attributing homosexual marriage rights to Christianity; many Christians today now interpret the bible to support homosexual marriage as well, and many did before it became standard law. And likewise, Christians today interpret the bible to support transgenderism. Heck; Jesus said there is no male and female in Christ, so therefore he must have been non-binary and people can choose whatever sex they want.
Because we cannot run experiments on history, we cannot look at how human civilization would have turned out if, for example, Emperor Julian wasn't assassinated and Christianity didn't capture the Roman Empire. I'd wager though, things would have been better, sooner. Although, something worse than Christianity could have popped up still.
"There are 50 million slaves today."
Abeit its essentially illegal slavery. That is, before the abolitionism of the 19th century, much of the slavery was legal. That of course doesn't mean those slaves today should be ignored by the world. Their conditions can be worse than the conditions black slaves faced in the US.
"You are using their goods. So am I."
Possibly. It is indeed entangled in the global supply chain. I wish I had a solution minus destroying world trade and plunging the world into poverty and starvation. An individual could live totally outside civilization and not trade with the world, but that wouldn't end the slavery; and if all people of the developed world did it, it would destroy the economies of societies that slavery flourishes in. The solutions that could potentially work would probably not be approved by international legal bodies. Right now, all Im aware of is pressures on businesses to police their own supply chains and "Fair Trade"-like certifications for a few products known for having greater problems with slavery, such as cocoa.
It is definitely true; how well known is questionable.
Its a tragic irony that enslaved people used the bible to escape from one form of slavery, that of their American, typically Christian masters, to another form slavery-- that of the cruel imaginary deity of those previous slave masters. Uncle Tom's Cabin is one grave depiction of that. Tom, rather than shown to heroically kill his earthly master and his overseers and liberate his family, he rather accepts his brutal murder, acting as another vain human sacrifice to please Jehovah and win the enslavement of more souls to a god of slavery.
See Tom Cruise for a different take on Scientology.
I think that his Appeal was a very powerful criticism of Jefferson's and America's hypocrisy at the time. But its not especially relevant in understanding Christianity, other than the fact that despite all of them claiming to receive inspiration from the message of Jesus, individual Christians don't all agree on what that message was. Its just unfortunate that they all didn't agree with Paul that it was most noble not to have sex; Christianity would have died out thousands of years ago probably if they had.
“ The 1619 mythology is more of a lie than the exceptionalist 1776 one” WHAT?
Hold up… I gotta call Richard Pryor because you… Sean Lovejoy, sent from the ecclesiastical Central Casting have landed the title role of the film version of Richard Pryor’s Bicentennial N*gger. The title track is YOU! It is it is You! Congratulations. By placing the year 1619 and “mythology” together has triggered an algorithm that awards you with the greatest role of a lifetime. Although it’s a historical drama, you’ll be portraying the 200 year old Negro, that they bring up on stage to speak at the 4th of July celebration of our exceptional nations 200th Birthday! Your script is the same shit that you just wrote down here. Isn’t life fortunate? Condragulations! Luckily you don’t have concern yourself with the refined and meta-nuances that Pryor originally wrote into the role. That would be to Rio and mythological. But go on with your bad self.
Just a very simple reply to MADAZHELL, not a rebuttal even, but something to consider. I know what it’s like to feel rage and fury in response to something someone says or writes. We don’t really have much say in that gut level reaction. It just happens, and it happens quickly. But we have a choice afterwards. We can ask ourselves: does my reaction tell me something about my adversary? Or does it tell me something about myself? It’s a private question. I have learned a lot from answering it honestly over the years in the stillness of my heart.
Now, the frontier thesis, and the 'conventional,' shall we say most older white persons, version of US history is biased, I agree for sure, but it was/is perfectly in sync with all other nations views of their history until say the 90s. Self serving, and biased, but, well much of it accurate enough. We won kind of thing. We oppressed others. 1850s? Compared to China? Arabia? Ottomans? Wahhabism? LatinAmerica? In your view the world was full of Ibram Kendis/Ta Nehisi fools walking around offering peace and joy? The British abolished slavery!! Not anybody else. By choice. Nobody was any different in those centuries. Its because of western rights/ liberties/tech you get to write this spew for free.
As for the rest of it, I doubt even Mr Pryor would have any idea what you're talking about, unless its the same amount of coke writing this post.
To wit: 1619 is irrelevant, a convenient, chosen point of departure to write a black power, contradictory 'we are victims always/ we are the best people on earth' ahistory (you can't be both at once).
In fact, people like Pryor, Chappelle, Thomas Sowell (man do Afr Ams on the Left need some Sowell) and most black people who ever lived understand that there is nothing unusual about the sins of the past - in context. Get over it. The rest of the world has. Funny huh?
Thank you for the Sowell excerpt. His global history of slavery covers a lot of the same ground as my more narrowly focused history of hereditary racial chattel slavery. He was way ahead of the rest of us.
My pleasure. Nobody knows him. I am a historian and I didn't. I got through 50 courses not so long ago and heard of him through my only centrist acquaintance! He is simply correct. This is where the right are right, for once, in that academia is not giving many views of history. I'm left, but boy is it slanted to the left. Kids know it.
That is the trouble with school. By selecting the books they just about controlwhat one thinks. Look in Sowell's Basic Economics and see what he says about depreciation.
I would add to this Justin. 1 - The ONLY society in history that found slavery worthy of critique was post Enlightenment European society. See the Middle East, Asia and Africa today for ongoing, uniform attitudes to disregarding human rights that predate any Europeans going anywhere near those areas. 2 - The choice between a: an 'it was terrible, but it was then' approach and b: all of history is white supremacy and still is? The first is better for any group that have been oppressed. The second is a ticket to eternal mental slavery, which is ironic.
Wow. Pulitzer envy is an abhorrent thing. Looks what it’s done to you. When anyone places, James Baldwin, in the same sentence with Libertarian hack McWhorter it has Got to be an end to a means. Tossing off a hit to Richard Pryor is in as bad taste as saying the same twoddle about Robin Williams in front of his wife and children.
You’re a sellout and you would most certainly be like Don King, the Negro Trump MAGA sad fascists pull out and have represent 300 hundred years of all the derision and hate in your smiling shining face! Chuckling as your lips vshine and teeth sparkle- ‘“cause you is happy. Happy you been here 300 years!!” Mel Brooks had his thousand year old man. Tommy Tuberville and his compadres pull out you.
So all those black Americans, and the millions of poc who love and vote for Trump. They are idiots? No agency? No brains? Mistakenly voting for him (I loathe him, thats not the point). They should listen to you?
There is one continuity in your addled reasoning: "black people throughout history never had brains or success and still don't." Which is ironic given your apparent views.
Black people sold black people, just like all people oppressed those with similar melatonin levels, and still do. Black people won, ran kingdoms, negotiated, fought, hurt others, got hurt. Just like all people of all skin colors. Because, um, we are all much the same. That is the point of the post, to which you rarely seem to veer near.
I don’t veer. You’ve sold out by clumping chuckleheads like John McWhorter with James Baldwin. I’m shocked you didn’t toss in Ta Nehesi Coates and Sonia Sanchez! SHIPPING kidnapped BLACK BODIES across OCEANS was not achieved by African/Black men. They didn’t have banks, and mortgage houses, and factories investment statutes. Slavery in Africa throughout time was a by product of wars, village conflicts, and oftentimes Slaves were free and their progeny. NOT The enslaved Africans that survived the middle passage. You’re a sell out because you reside in a “whataboutism” bubble.
to talk up all slavery as being the same thing and it’s been going on it will continue to go on is a copout, it’s a sellout. And showcases your own Mediocrity of endeavor. Sit down, sir.
You know. I can offer ten scholarly accounts on the origins of the slave trade, often by non white scholars fwiw.
Black bodies were kidnapped. Yes, they were captives of very different tribes/states in Africa. They were sold to Europeans who could barely step foot in west africa. You know, the fact no wokies know this doesn't mean its not clear and true. Start with Gates Jr. See Falola. Black scholars y know?
I actually agree that by 1700ish the Atl Slave Trade was pernicious and out of scale of other 'slaveries.' But that was then.
Its not whataboutery. Its context. Why should any argument (ie. the pity party BLM worldview) not be contextualized?
Slavery is not all the same thing no. But oppression of people predates the atl slave trade, continues through it, and is practiced MORE today all over the world in places with no European, christian, white, male, rights and liberties based traditions or conventions.
Sorry. The sob story is wrong. Its also not good for black kids to hear.
McWhorter is a genius. See his Musicology Racist article this week. I mean, this BLM view is doing harm to black people!
Please continue to feed your racism with fantasy and propaganda. At least I work at something joyful for me. The fact that you had to resort to some snarky remark which you imagined would hurt me (I would have to respect you to make that possible) demonstrates that I got to you. I have peeled back the shallow veneer that attempts to hide the small, petty, unfulfilled , unexamined and narrow world that race-baiters inhabit. Please continue to worship frauds like Kendhi who make considerable for writing trendy, sociological pap and think that makes them someone important. Someday you will discover how much damage such self-important, faddish celebrities have harmed your race by capitalizing on it. Somehow BLM has millions of dollars and mansions in LA but people of color in my old neighborhood in Minneapolis are poorer, less safe, and less likely to succeed than before George Floyd became your anointed Patron Saint. Marcus Garvey??? Please.
If the Left had said from the beginning this is a horrific murder, which it was, and also he was a troubled, troublemaking antisocial fool, we might have just had welcome police reforms and proper insight into police brutality and the last vestiges of racism.
If they'd acknowledged all those cops/merchants of color in the story, and not fallen back on the ridiculous notion it was 'racism' as always, we might have avoided a r/wing backlash that will yet again punish the Dems and social justice advocates.
If they'd organized peaceful protests, we would move forward as a country. Yet they enable or allow/encourage riots and well, as usual, we get nowhere.
WHOA! Karen, down girl! I don’t think you got to me, Slick. I think, au contraire.
You just bloviated some seriously presumptuous twoddle. Ibram Kendhi, who I never brought up, but since you did, is a fellow student of my mentor and received his PhD in African American Studies and is a cancer survivor and best selling author, who you meant to demean because, while you have been working “mostly with oils” he has been in the vanguard of creating pathways forward in fortifying communities in fighting mounting fascist attacks and dismantling education, LGBTQIA RIGHTS, and voting rights, while you dawdle about trying to decide if water colors will be de riguer for your canvas like Joan Plowright in “Enchanted April.”
A close colleague of mine is the co-founder of BLM-LA and they most certainly DO NOT live in a mansion. Their lives and the lives of their children have been relentlessly threatened. So whatever bullshit Newsmax, Fox News wormhole, you paint yourself into with oils, has proven you to be a liar and a scoundrel and a white supremacist.
And imagine all I wrote to you was that you should continue to consider “working with oils” and that, my dear Karen, is that. Bloody cheers!
Not to mention all the indigenous Americans ALSO captured and sold into slavery, to serve as exotic servants for European aristocracy, and also in North Africa and elsewhere. Nobody counted them, but it was thousands. – The ethnical aspect is, in my opinion, even older than the Greeks: the same concept can be observed in the Indian caste system, to this very day, which also can be seen as a form of hereditary slavery, in Chinese, Korean and Japanese philosophy AND among tribal people of West Africa.
Agreed. It should be noted that Indigenous Americans captured and enslaved not only White settlers, but captured peoples from other tribes. The Comanche were particularly brutal. Captives who lived were expected to assimilate unto the culture of the Comanche—-not the other way round—-“ minority rights” not being much recognized during the capturing of ter ritoty.
All American indigenous cultures from North to South knew forms of bondage and what we can call slavery, but it was no chattel slavery. That was introduced with the economic system the cotton trade and earlier coffee and cocoa and other produce native to the Americas brought along. The form of slavery typical for indigenous American civilizations was quite similar to what we know from Greece and especially Rome, where slaves could actually gain quite a standing and even free themselves and become respected citizens. One of the major differences between Greece and Rome was that for the Greeks, ethnical origins were deciding. The Romans however didn't care much about that, they cared about whether a person was a Latin speaker or not. For them, it was a question of culture and education, which can also be said about many indigenous American societies. The Inca were most leaning to the Greek model (which in itself can be called the Indoeuropean model, as we can see it applied all the way through India and even farther east). The brutality of later tribal cultures in North America (ca. from 18th century onwards) can to a large degree be attributed to their fight for survival against wave after wave of new people coming into their territories from the east – who also introduced new forms of cruelty, alongside new weapons. One of the biggest cultures of the North American east, the Cherokee, assimilated to a huge degree to the lifestyle of the European immigrants, including adopting cotton farming and chattel slavery, only to be eventually disowned and pushed off of their lands, to move westward. The arrival of the Europeans first in Mexico and then ca. 100 years later in what is now the US and Canada was a huge impact that, alongside with introducing new and deadly diseases, also triggered a lot of movement and migration among the original cultures, which is a traumatic experience for any population. And such traumata can cause tremendous havoc to a society.
Greece and Rome make for interesting comparisons for many reasons. One is that an estimated 15-35% of the population of Athens and 10-20% of the Roman Empire were enslaved. In 1860, slaves were 12.5% of the US population. At the time of the American Revolution, one-fifth of the population was enslaved.
American Indian/Indigenous slaveowners and African American slaveowners are rarely mentioned in histories of North American slavery. Native American slavery often diverged significantly from chattel slavery but is an interesting subject!
Part of the value in documenting the typical component of ethno-racial otherness in the broad history of slavery is that it helps disentangle our sense of the unique and distinctly beautiful African-sourced elements of our modern culture from the institution of colonial/post-Revolution slavery itself. To be American today is to be culturally part African, whatever your skin color. Obviously the institution of slavery shaped that blending, but it is a sadly constricted view of ourselves which can see in blackness only “descendent of slavery.” I hope for a time when the gift of the culture which the African slaves brought with them is correctly recognized as everyone’s heritage.
No, I haven't read Ellison's book, or even heard of it before. I just went on Amazon to buy a copy and found its status "Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock." That doesn't happen often! I noticed it's subtitled "The American Artist and His Audience" I'll find a way to buy it.
I recently became aware of Albert Murray from an essay about his life and work. Murray seems to have directed a lot of attention to the subject of cultural formation in a way that struck me as both particularly rich and particularly neglected. And particularly missing, I should add. It's a little bit of a puzzle to me that contemporary intellectuals don't take more interest in the way that culture - and especially what people think of as "black culture" - is a stream that flows in many directions and not reductively an attribute of only particular individuals. This may not be a concern of Ellison's TLMACS but I look forward to finding out. Thank you for taking time to make the recommendation.
I didn’t realize that in Mesopotamia they had the technology to build ships with cargo holds to fit 350-500 captured Africans chained together and that they set sail for lands that hadn’t yet been discovered, to completely separate these black skinned savages from their land, language, and cultural identity, and to see the majority of them die of disease and be dumped in the Ocean to sink into sea bottom of bones. Only to be beaten and raped and sold into a system where they snd their progeny would live generationally enslaved to a system of greed, ignorance snd anger only to languish for 400 years. Those Mesopotamians were so prescient.
This is the white men talking yo themselves about slavery existing before. NO. Slaves weren’t mortgaged in Mesopotamia, Slaves weren’t insured against land holdings or the most expensive commodity at the height of the cotton boom. Slaves weren’t used as currency and used to barter with Native's for more land.
When white men/women try their “whataboutism” on each other it reeks of denialism. They’ll do anything to puff up their mediocrity to deny anything that would impact their sense of entitlement or lack of accountability that our white male patriarchal heteronormativity society holds in its DNA.
There has been NOTHING in our global history as insidious and deadly and inhumane as the Atlantic Slave Trade and Destruction and Genocide of Indigenous Natives of the Americas and the Caribbean Isles. Never.
There is no conundrum for white folks. For me, the great grand child of a slave born in 1847 I have to be grateful for my life which I wouldn’t possess if it wasn’t for the horror of the Atlantic slave trade. I have to reconcile that every day. You don’t. You can write this bullshit about Mesopotamia. And all the readers are going to come down on me like an anvil. Your fellow white readers, and maybe some black ones American exceptionalism is only, an extension of what initiated the crusades in 1048.
The pure blood of Europeans should not ever be mixed with the blood of Jews, or moors. The slaughter and the journey to find and purify the blood of Europe established white supremacy 1000 years ago. American exceptionalism is a simple extension of white might. This author is a descendant of that fault.
In closing, The 1619 Project was simply “wildly read” like Prince Harry’s recent memoir “Spare” it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. It is a piece of journalism that is held high with distinction. Your opening sentence distinguishes you and this attempted dilution as mediocre. I’m glad I read it. It’s too bad that from Ernest Hemingway to Norman Mailer white men will always find a way to take any topic and turn it into something that’s all about them.
It's often claimed today that hereditary racial chattel slavery was unique to the US. But chattel slavery and ethno-racial inequality were deeply intertwined long before 1619.
I'm always looking for other sources that make the argument that chattel slavery and ethno-racial inequality were deeply intertwined before the 1600s. If you can recommend any, I'd be grateful for the suggestions.
This is the unfortunate hazard(and resulting embarrassment) of mistaking Kendhi’s agit-prop and the 1619 fantasy for serious work or actual history. The author further continues to expose his lack of acquaintance with legitimate history books or historians by displaying no knowledge of the surprisingly advanced civilizations that were Ancient Greece and Rome. Topping this all off with a hint of racism and ad-hominems only confirms the author’s over-reliance on emotion and under-reliance on facts. Usually this is the direct result of having no actual argument to offer.
Kendi and Coates have put us back 25 years on racism. They've also invited tens of millions of non African-American people of color to literally vote conservative. Well done rich black theorizers! Move in next to BLM's founders.
Kendi's influence has been considerable. You might appreciate this review I wrote of the YA version of his book.
Racialism Remixed
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by YA author Jason Reynolds, calls itself a “remix” of Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Since its publication last year, Stamped has become a mainstay of summer reading lists for middle- and high-school students. Written in sharp, witty prose, the book alerts readers to racist (more specifically, anti-Black) as well as antiracist ideas throughout US history. Along the way, Stamped discusses major figures such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis.
History teachers are always on the lookout for history books that students won’t cast aside as boring. Reynolds knows how to hold the interest of young readers, but Stamped plays fast and loose with historical facts. Most readers will neither care about nor notice the errors and inaccuracies, but they are significant. It’s worth looking at one example from the first chapter.
If there’s an archetypal villain in the story, it is the 15th-century Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara, dubbed “the world’s first racist.” It’s a provocative claim to make, but Zurara checks many of the boxes: he was a European man of letters and Christian apologist for the Portuguese slave trade. His writings popularized crude and often demeaning descriptions of Africans and suggested that enslaving and civilizing Africans was Europe’s religious duty.
The problem with this bold assertion is that Zurara was not the world’s first racist, not in any meaningful sense. Equally strong cases can be made for a long list of historical texts and figures who came before (and after) him. For example, early and medieval Christian writers equated black skin color in general and Africans in particular with monstrosity and sinfulness. Long before Zurara, Muslim scholars and Arab slave traders linked color and culture and propagated racist ideas about black inferiority.
The emergence of racial hierarchies in world history is a more complicated and more interesting story than Stamped leads us to believe. One can back-date racist— and more specifically, anti-Black-- ideas to the ancient world. But disputing Stamped’s historical accuracy does not get to the heart of what the book is about. The author himself insists that Stamped is “not a history book.”
To be sure, Stamped should not be read as history. It is a political manual, instructing by historical example. Starting with the Puritans and ending with #BlackLivesMatter, Stamped analyzes US history by sorting Black and White “assimilationists” (whom the book calls “racists”) from bona fide “antiracists.” Stamped is particularly contemptuous of Black people who embraced or adapted pragmatically to America’s mainstream culture and institutions: “assimilationism,” the book argues, is both cowardly and racist. Stamped gives credit to the boxer Jack Johnson for “[breaking] the backs of White people” but jabs at the NAACP for being “an organization of ‘refined’ folks . . . whose mission was to go before courts and politicians to persuade White judges and legislators to end racial discrimination.”
Elsewhere, Stamped writes off W.E.B. Du Bois’s academic career as “keeping up with White people.” (The Marxist intellectual Angela Davis— one of the book’s exemplary antiracists— gets a pass in spite of her studies at the Sorbonne and the University of Frankfurt.) Similarly, Barack Obama comes off as a huge disappointment, someone who “always seemed to assimilate under pressure.” On occasion critical of the Black community (e.g. when he urged Black people to take more responsibility for their own destinies), Obama failed to live up to the book’s antiracist ideal despite “flashes—true moments—of antiracist thought.” Instead, “Obama fell in line with the [assimilationist] likes of Lincoln, Du Bois, [Booker T.] Washington, [Frederick] Douglass, and many others.”
It’s worth noting that one of the book’s exemplary antiracists is the Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who advocated voluntary separation of the races and what he called racial “pride and purity.” For Garvey, social separation was necessary to achieve Black self-reliance and economic development. To that end, he worked to create a Black homeland in Africa to which Black people could return. Although Garvey gained many followers in the 1920s, other Black leaders saw his ideas as bizarre and counterproductive.
Although the labels Black and White are used frequently in the book, Stamped offers little insight into the ubiquitous construct of “race.” Like the multiculturalists of the 1980s and 1990s, the new antiracists are at ease sorting individuals into color-coded groups and assigning those groups to race-specific cultures. But to paraphrase the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, we can simultaneously resist racism and the color-based identities exploited by racists. Stamped misses that opportunity. Like Garvey’s nationalist movement a hundred years ago, this book urges us to see the world as a collection of more or less distinct communities defined by color, fixed and self-evident, each striving to get ahead in what Garvey called “the great race for existence.”
I am not going to “come down on you like an anvil.” However I insist on pointing out that I was born in 1963. I neither participated in nor even stood passively by as the Crusades, the Inquisition or the vicious system of chattel slavery imposed barbarous acts of cruelty on helpless people. I accept my responsibility to act responsibly and decently in the actual world in which I now live. I deny all moral accountability for the actions and inactions of people who were born, lived and died before me. Their life is on them; mine is on me.
Yes but as a citizen of the United States of America, you continue to benefit as a white person to the systems, and laws that have perpetuated the ongoing oppression of BIPOC people in this country. German citizens born after 1945 until to the day or part of a system that pays reparations to Israel they weren’t personally and valved in the holocaust but their nation continues to pay.
No. The enduring effects of racist laws and racist systems hurt black Americans much more severely and directly than they hurt non-black Americans, but no one “benefits.” Everyone loses.
I agree with you that BIPOC people living today (as a whole, obviously) suffer today from the residual effects of racist laws and racist systems in the past. I take that as a given. I believe that it can and has been demonstrated rigorously and empirically by scholars and others.
What I disagree with is your assertion that non-BIPOC people (as a whole, obviously) “continue to benefit” from these past injustices. The truth is quite the opposite. Racism corrupts, diminishes, and makes poorer everyone, including its practitioners. We are losing the human value of everyone whose life and contribution is diminished by the residual costs of our shared history. The life of a nation is not a see-saw, in which harm to some automatically surfaces as benefits to others. This is self-evident in a moral sense. It is less self-evident in an economic sense, but it is true nonetheless. I am aware of no serious analysis that demonstrates the aggregate benefit to non-BIPOC people living in the US today from the residual effects of racist laws and systems in the past. This is not a small point, and I am open to correction. However it is very sloppy reasoning to claim that because members of the BIPOC community suffer residual harm disproportionately, then members of the non-BIPOC community must experience a gain. What is the gain?
Germany, the case you cite, provides a fine example. Does any serious person imagine that the Holocaust benefitted non-Jewish Germans? That Germans today are somehow better off because the Nazis murdered millions of their fellow German men, women and children eighty years ago? Germany lost a vibrant and irreplaceable part of itself, and in so doing made not only Germany but the entire human community poorer and more wretched. There is no enduring “benefit”, whether Germany pays reparations to Israel or not.
Whether we agree about the residual effect of horrors which occurred decades or even centuries ago is moot at a certain point. Someone who wins the lottery and has no idea how to manage the money is soon poor and more resentful of his poverty than he was is the first place. If he doesn’t learn what he needs to know and doesn’t take some responsibility for his choices he has no power. Still.
Efforts to “help” minorities, such as the welfare state, relegated generations to fatherless homes, incentivized single parenthood and destroyed the family system that offers security as a basis for success. Black families were upwardly mobile and closing the income gap in the 30s through 50s, despite the real and persistent prejudice that existed. We are now rightfully recognizing pioneers such as the black women mathematicians who helped launch the first rockets at NASA. Such incredible talent only found its way through persistence, study, and honestly having to be better at what they did than their White and male counterparts. It wasn’t achieved through handouts or extortion. Do you honestly think this will be possible for black women or black men in a few decades if DEI continues? There are medical schools which are now admitting based on race and want to do away with the MCAT—- because black students fall behind on the scores. Would you rather that your future doctor get a pass, or be required to go back and get the education required?
We have seen this before under different names such as Affirmative Action. I don’t care if my Feminist Studies teacher ever got an “A”. I do care if my Neurosurgeon did, and that it stood for achievement and merit, not “equity”.
If one actually looks up the income stats in the United States, Whites are third in income earned behind Asians and East Indians. Conveniently, they are probably labeled “White” for the sake of race hustling but they’re successful because their societies don’t buy in to DEI requirements. They value education, punctuality, merit, work ethic, and family. DEI is the antithesis of that.
Because of our upside-down priorities, China will be eating our lunch while we quiver and quibble about which pronouns to use or which new item is “racist” today.
When our dumbed down educational system starts producing doctors who lose patients, pilots who can’t fly, air traffic controllers who were hired because “diversity” and social workers instead of police officers, people will die.
This will do nothing to help mend any relationships between races, and, in fact, may irreparably harm them.
No amount of wailing about the past, about “generational trauma”, reparations, or toppling statues will fix that. It just hurts everyone, as you so rightly pointed out.
Squirrel friend- hunty, white prople benefit from a system, a government, that has placed white people vastly far ahead in earnings, old money, power and agency.., our military was segregated giphy until AFTER the Second World War…. if a citizen of Denmark was to emigrate to the United States and at the same time a citizen of Sierra Leon (A shit hole country) you believe they’ll both experience life in America, equally? Y’all are too funny.
We can’t change what happened. But all should equally be accountable snd reconcile this countries past.
I am a descendant of a slave. I know his name I know where he was born and I know where he raised his family. I’m his great grandson. I have to reconcile that if it wasn’t for slavery I wouldn’t be here. I’m proud.
But you Yuks… twist yourselves inside out to bemoan so many that have endured to inspire and you slander snd pander to be contrary, well, it’s a color of ambivalence that is abhorrent.
I have fought to piece together my families history so that I can learn and teach. I joined this Free Black Thought thing and boy did I turn a wrong corner.
How do you think about the non-white ethnic groups that are doing so much better economically than white people? What is your understanding of how that has happened?
I’d need some very specific data and evidence of this and non-white ethnic groups can be a very large number. You also don’t provide any specifics regarding nationality, immigration status, and to what degree is doing “SO much better.” If you want to compel discourse present some specific data. If you want to be a Karen, congrats!
Apparently, tens of millions of Asians, Jews, Arabs are doing fine in this country. Seems BIPOC is not monolithic. In fact, Caribbean blacks do very well too.
How are modern Germans paying for the Holocaust?
If anything the state acknowledged it, which the US does incessantly, but the people have moved on, German and Jew.
Thats the point.
Move on. Best country in the world to be oppressed, but as per the thesis of this article, there is a delusion that the specific, particular Afr Am experience is unique, globally, forever, before and after endlessly.
Thank you. Well put. I do believe that Germany has mostly moved on. I wouldn’t begrudge some payment to any slave still living, even relatives directly and provably descended from slaves.
After that, where does it stop? Are White people still “born racist”? Do we still have to walk on eggshells and mince our words and degrade ourselves and America’s institutions to keep paying some debt which never ends? If I’m “born racist”, why should I even care? No amount of DEI Struggle Sessions can UN-birth me. I am who I am solely because of my skin color. Isn’t that the very definition of racism? Apparently Abraham Kendhi means this when he says we need to fight racism with racism. Well, that sounds healthy. Give that guy a PhD.
Many people, even White folk, surprisingly, did not have easy lives, intact families, affordable education or higher incomes. We don’t . Ask anyone in Appalachia.I am most grateful to my public grade school, who still taught the basics of English, Phonics, Reading, Math, Art, Music, and Civics. Without that, I don’t know where I’d be, and I didn’t have to deal with inner-city violence, drugs, and demoralization. I know that’s real. I just don’t think “equity” is the answer. Neither is reparations. Neither is violence and public destruction.
We spent lots of class time on other cultures. We just called it Social Studies, not DEI and it was not political. I had black friends and the black family who lived next door had a nicer house and were better educated than my parents were. I babysat their son, taught him drawing, and he grew up to be a graphic designer. This was well before BLM and DEI and CRT told me that I was really his “oppressor” should avoid using certain phrases or words, internalize intense guilt for even existing and make it thoroughly impossible for himand I to be anywhere near comfortable around each other. Gosh, I’m sure his life would have been so much more fulfilling and “equitable” had I just avoided him like the plague for fear of offending him.
Same with all the inner city kids I helped paint a mural with and start a community garden and listened to about their abusive family members during craft time. I guess I should not have exposed them to the glare of my evil White Privilege and told them to go loot a Walgreens. The Boys and Girls Club may not know all those donations I made were from a White lady. I guess I won’t give more in the future.
OK, sarcasm isn’t pretty but it illustrates the sad fact that there are plenty of people like me. Sincere people who didn’t care much about the color of someone marginalized but tried to help, or were naturally drawn into friendship with a person they liked—regardless of color. I am told I can’t be “colorblind” now. The result is that now my interactions with people of color are much more likely to be studied, measured, superficial and slightly uncomfortable where they weren’t before. This might be interpreted as “racism”, but it is actually the result of the extensive cultural and sometimes physical bullying known as “Social Justice”.
Martin Luther King is rolling in his grave, while I shed some tears for all the good that the current “equity” regime will never know it prevented from ever happening at all.
You have a very monolithic case of malignant narcissism. I lived in Germany for 11 years and speak the language in as far as your understanding of “moving on” how do you know this.? And as I said, where is all this data about all these people doing well, your presumptuousness and the arrogance of your ignorance is disturbing.
And your broad stroking regarding what the US government has relentlessly addressed, is a pile of horseshit.
Germany has paid Israel many billions of dollars in reparations. Why do you think Israel has such a powerful military?
You have no fax you have no data. You have no statistics so you can’t create your own facts although obviously, you feel that you can’t and with that… I am over your trolling.
If you can’t back up all of these platitudes about how everyone is doing so well, and what’s good or not good for Black people then keep your own free, black thoughts to your own white self.
your skills that rhetorical persuasion are limited, and you should reconsider your broad stroking, and how it bring to absolutely no merit or value to a discussion of this magnitude. Best of luck. Since the last thing you want is to be “awakened“ from your coma, we on this side of the living are on moved by your “everything’s and everybody is doing just fine” or better yet…
Weird that you came to a publication named “Free Black Thought” and had a meltdown when you found out that “”Free Thought” includes other opinions and data than your own. MSNBC is still on, though. You can still catch Joy Reid.
If what you say is true, then California's Asians are either superhuman or Blacks are inferior. We had Chinese Exclusion Act and massacres. We sent Japanese to Internment camps and stole all their property but made reparations to those specifically injured only after they had already worked their way back to the top despite discrimination. Vietnamese came here with nothing and faced hatred because they were "gooks," but they worked their way to the top. Millions of Blacks overcame and thrived. Those Blacks, who had all the doors opened to them with the Poverty Programs and Affirmative Action but who chose to stick with the pity party, are at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder and it has nothing to do with White Privilege. It has to with either bad choices or inherent inferiority. I like to think it was due to making bad choices by listening the faux friends, but maybe I'm wrong.
There are still Holocaust survivors left today, though the numbers are dwindling. Their trauma is still alive—- not “generational.” Huge difference.
I would also point out that the majority of hate crimes, both here and abroad, are committed against Jews.
Somehow, I don’t see Jews burning down buildings , looting stores-or demanding that entire educational structures be dumbed-down to make them “equal”. Maybe it is because Jews value education—-real education more than anything else.
You can’t keep labeling all the tools which help any human being become more successful as “Too White”, replace hard work with welfare and expect a future that resembles the future of those who made different choices.
Personal responsibility is everything. It is the only real power you have.
Ain’t nobody stopping you. Just remember that the concept of pure white blood started in 1048 with the Crusades… thats a millennia of white supremacy. The Black skinned slaves arrived in 1619. By the time the Civil War ended there were 4 Million African slaves in America. Even before 1619 Natives were doomed. I don’t label facts. They speak for themselves.
Ignoring the Holocaust as usual. 50 million dead Chinese under Mao. I don't think you know much about 'global history.' You know about one strand of your 'peoples' history. You need to learn actual history. Is Polish, Armenian, Irish, Jewish, German history all just 'the whites.' My lord.
American slavery was not unique, but it was different. With the European conquest of North and South America an economic opportunity of historic proportions opened. With the decimation of native populations by disease, land, the source of the majority of wealth in Europe, vast tracts of agricultural land were open for the taking. However, without a labor force, the land was of very limited value. The importation of poor English and Irishmen into Barbados in the early 1600’s to undertake indentured work in the sugarcane fields wasn’t panning out. The tropical heat was too much for the white laborers, so the English began to bring captured Africans into Barbados, where they worked alongside the indentured Brits and Irish. Since the Africans were not Christians the British plantation owners, eyeing the great wealth they anticipated lay within their grasp, could set aside their Christian values and conveniently conclude that Black Africans were not human beings at all and had no more rights than livestock. Barbadian plantation owners grew rich, but Barbados is a very small island, and the younger sons of the plantation owners had no more land to grab as their own, though the supply of enslaved Africans was seemingly infinite. Thus they set off to the wilds of South Carolina with their slaves, essentially establishing South Carolina as a sub-colony of Barbados, establishing the first “get fabulously rich quick” land/slave scheme in what would become the United States. The scale of the wealth made South Carolina the fiercest, most deranged, defenders of the slave system. They were the Billionaires of their age, and emancipation would largely wipeout their fortunes, so they created a total ideology that reduced their slaves to dangerous, wildly sexualized animals who must be imprisoned on plantations lest they run free and rape every white woman and kill every white man. We live with the after effects of this defamation and propoganda to this very day. THAT is what makes American slavery different.
You’re talking about dehumanization. Of course it was done in a particular way in America, but do you think other slave states didn’t do all they could to dehumanize their slaves in their own way? Arab slave states castrated their African slaves to control their sexuality and ensure they could never reproduce. One reason we never hear about that story, there being no ‘generational trauma’ to deal with. Which is ‘worse’? Or more ‘unique’? Dehumanization is a precondition of all slavery and genocide.
In Africa and in the Middle East, slavery continues to this day. Let us note, also, that even in the case of the Mid-Atlantic slave trade it was fellow blacks who sold their brethren into slavery. The majority went to Brazil.
I would suggest that readers explore the concept of “dhimmitude”, still practiced widely in Islam. Non-Muslims, or Apostates, are systematically dehumanized, seen as “unclean”, inferior, and historically have been forced to pay taxes to their Muslim overlords as well as be forbidden to share the same sidewalks. Constantinople was a Christian city before the Crusades. ( The brutality didn’t start with the West.) Non-Muslims were not only enslaved but executed. I mention this as part of man’s long history of demonizing those he hopes to conquer. It is not exclusive to Caucasian races or religious beliefs.
“Generational Trauma”, as I believe you understand, is a myth in the way that it is presented today. There is no scientific evidence, none at all, to support the concept that emotional trauma is literally and genetically passed on to future generations. Anyone versed in the hard sciences at all recognize this newly-invented attempt to validate the cultural extortion of CRT is, to put it succinctly, baloney. However, considering the current politicized state of science and our educational system which awards PhDs to shoddy scholars such as Kendhi, I am not surprised that this is taught and believed. It is part of the current cycle of “Professors” who teach emotion-driven pap devoid of critical thinking skills to students who are emotion-driven and devoid of critical thinking skills. ( Example: the gentleman who called me “Karen” implied that I was not allowed to criticize Kendhi’s work because Kendhi had a PhD and was a “cancer survivor.” We could argue the validity of the PhD, but surviving cancer has zero to do with that or with the strength of one’s political theory.) “Lived Truth” as is the mode today replaces actual fact because facts refute the claims necessary to continue the cultural Marxist’s favorite tactic: emotional terrorism.
The Social Justice Industrial Complex requires copious amounts of White Liberal Guilt to keep its wheels greased. I have utterly none. I think any smidgen I might have hidden somewhere was erased when Minneapolis was left looking like Beirut on behalf of St. George Floyd.
No one I have ever met is a proponent of slavery. Everyone reviles this practice, as they should, but those who insist that the problem was unique to America in some way forget the fact that it was America (with the help of other Western Allies) who fought a war to end it. The casualties of that war, including blacks but predominantly White soldiers and civilians, were larger than all of WWI and WWII combined. Despite the easy ( and ignorantly simplistic) taunts about Jefferson having had slaves or the childish tantrums of Antifa destroying public works, anyone who delves seriously into early American history knows that the Founders laid the foundation for the abolition of slavery within the Constitution. Conflicts within government were no easier to solve then than they are now. This process took decades, culminating in an extremely destructive war and the assassination of a sitting President.
As long as race hustlers like Al Sharpton, Benjamin Crump, BLM, Ibrahim Kendhi and their White counterparts keep cashing in on tripe such as “White Fragility” and “DEI”, black people will continue to forfeit their safety, a meaningful education, and their future while the people who claim to “help” get rich off the terrible history they claim to hate.
It's certainly true that slave societies differed in many particulars. What's not true is that America was the origin of hereditary racial chattel slavery.
You remind me of one of my favorite lines in a play: “ You are an overexcited little man, whose need for self-expression far exceeds your natural gifts.”
Of course you lack the insight to be thoroughly embarrassed by what you wrote, so I will just wish you well. It is hard to be so angry, unhappy, defensive, and myopic and remain trapped in that self-made prison. Blaming everyone and everything else for that is the very definition of giving up any power you have.
I am not even sure I replied to who I imagine I did, but your input has been valuable and my comments were meant for someone whose input was not. Thank you.
I find this really annoying since this is a paper book that I got from the library and I am having to read it with my actual eyeballs. I have normally been using text-to-speech from e-books for years. It is just so......Primitive!
This book is unusual in that it got a bad review from The Economist, which they withdrew and apologized for. It is without doubt the best book on the subject I have seen. To quote a famous White man to emphasize the difference of enslavement of Africans in the Americas:
Quantity has a quality all its own. - Joseph Stalin
I searched that essay for 'technol' to see if Justin Suran mentioned technology, or technologies, or technological but those words made no appearance. This entire issue is connected to Europeans developing technologies enabling intercontinental transport and superior weaponry. This is what made the QUANTITY possible.
European intellectualism makes a big deal about words in my opinion. Yeah, slavery existed for thousands of years. Steam Engines did not. The world population did not reach One Billion until 1800. When was the Cotton Gin invented?
I am more of a science/tech individual and have noticed that the humanities types seem to look at reality somewhat differently. It ain't just me, The Two Cultures essay by C P Snow is quite enlightening in my opinion.
I think that the power that technology gave White people went to their heads and racism is a rationalization after the fact. Black Americans concentrate on race too much instead of on the technology that empowers the people accused of racism.
But these word games are important because people allow words guide their thoughts. Slavery was driven by economics. What percentage of labor, and therefore slavery, was driven by agriculture to grow food more than 1000 years ago? What percentage of cotton was eaten by Americans before 1860?
Technology may have some role, but education has a larger one. There are countries outside of America and Europe who are poor, superstitious, tribal and devoid of most modern conveniences where slavery still exists. One could argue that they need more manual laborers ( in whatever manner they are obtained) than places which have replaced humans with technology. This will be even truer when factories replace low-level or line workers with machines.
I agree: technology was and is hugely important-- e.g. Portuguese maritime/navigational technology in the 1400s and 1500s. My essay ends around 1600, so I did not discuss later changes. (Steam power was still in its infancy,) But I tried to give a sense of the numbers of people involved, where I could, although many of these statistics are approximate ranges and estimates by necessity. There's an older book by Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (1989) that makes a similar point about technology. I found this recent review that speaks to your point: https://brill.com/view/journals/nwig/96/1-2/article-p133_6.xml?language=en
The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist does not start until the late 1700s. Cotton and technology created conditions different from previous history. Is there any objective interpretation of history?
I don't believe so. But check out the reference above to Michael Adas's 1989 book and the review of The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean.
Thanks, I copied it to my phone. I'll do text-to-speech later.
But is the issue economic servitude with lots of different tactics.
As an electrical engineering drop out gone electronics hi-fi, computer and network tech, I see planned obsolescence as a new form of economic servitude. Go into debt for junk designed to become obsolete while economists ignore the depreciation and say nothing about planned obsolescence.
The term e-waste did not exist when I started college.
I found this interesting journal article. The subtitle reminds me of your point about planned obsolescene and economic servitude: "Henry George on Chattel and Wage Slavery: The American Social Philosopher Condemned Both Forms as Immoral, Irrational Denials of Equality."
Hello, Justin Surand. The fact that any celebrity author has “influence” doesn’t mean that influence is either valuable or positive. It means that there are a lot of gullible people out there who have been specifically conditioned by media and educational institutions to be empty receptacles for all manner of agenda-driven nonsense.
Oh, OK, you are the person who sent me the review of Kendhi’s book. You write much better than he does, and I have seen some of his recorded lectures. He does not strike me as particularly scholarly in either his method or his presentation. I can accept your review and still remain unimpresssed by either his work or the discipline in which he “studies”. This goes for all the other”fill-in-the-blank”—————-Studies that are disappointingly faddish within Liberal Academia. (“Liberal Academia” being basically redundant.”) I will read your sources. You seem earnest and serious.
A fairly good examination of the inaccurate and hyperbolic view that American slavery was meaningfully exceptional. What was meaningfully exceptional was the war that was fought that ultimately freed former slaves.
One thing you seemed to have either accidentally or intentionally ignored in history was that the Bible repeatedly condones slavery and never explicitly condemns it in all its chattel forms. There are instances in the Old Testament when Jehovah supposedly encouraged his followers to enslave people, such as when Moses, at the behest of Jehovah, commands his followers to variously commit genocide and enslave female virgins. And there are passages that state it is okay for followers of Jehovah to possess slaves if they are not fellow followers of Jehovah.
In fact the Bible depicts both Jehovah and eventually Jesus as slave masters, and like Hammurabi’s code, essentially asserts that if a person denies that Jehovah and Jesus are their “master” they are deserving of punishment, even torture. Paul, the primary inventor of Christianity, masochistically revels in being a “slave to Christ.”Christianity, the primary religion of the US, is ultimately a religion that promotes and exults spiritual slavery to a cruel, crazy, and capricious god that supposedly required the execution and torture of his son to quench his wrath for humanity’s disobedience, yet even after the perverse spectacle, demands obedience at the threat of torture and existential destruction.
No, slavery in the US was not surprising or peculiar--the ending of it was.
James MacPherson wrote a book called What They Fought For, which uses letters and diaries to get into the heads of the soldiers who fought the Civil War. I haven't read it but have always wanted to.
The author herself has basically admitted that it was a fable—-“her truth”, not actual historical truth. This is how Cultural Marxists erase truth and history itself to impose their brave new world. We are obsessed with race now, but none of this is actually about rac e. I suggest reading some of David Horowitz’s account of his time with the Black Panthers in the 60s and a book called “Days of Rage” by Bryan Burrow about the Weather Underground. Very well researched. Everything old is new again.
Very good overview! It’s a myth, ie. a lie, created by propagandists to serve a narrow political agenda. The more the facts get out there, the weaker a hold the propaganda will have. Keep it up.
This, while doing a good job of possibly dispelling some propaganda, is propaganda itself, insofar as it omits one of the most influential texts that expresses support for slavery and understandably had thus been used to support it, the Bible. The Bible doesn’t only advocate at times chattel slavery (such as when Jehovah commands Moses to have his followers variously commit genocide and enslave all female virgins of conquered people) and never explicitly condemns all forms of it--it actually depicts Jehovah and Jesus as slave masters that humans must obey and swear submission to lest they be punished with torture or existential destruction -- which is a much more evil idea than even the Hammurabi law that punished a slave for denying they had a master by cutting off their ear. Thank goodness Jehovah is just a superstition invented by ancient genocidal lunatics.
I did my best to isolate "chattel slavery" from other forms of slavery (e.g. debt slavery), which accounts for my focus on some examples and not others. I would be delighted to read a paper on hereditary racial chattel slavery as described in the Bible!
You didn't only discuss hereditary racial chattel slavery. Babylonian slavery as described by Hammurabi seems inconsequentially and morally no different than the slavery that is described as acceptable to Jehovah in the bible. Can you tell me why the Babylonian slavery is worth mentioning in context to American slavery while the slavery practiced by ancient Israelites is not, when America is a country where its inhabitants are mostly Christians, which is partially directly derived from the religion of the ancient Israelites and there are no inhabitants I am aware of that still claim to worship any Babylonian gods?
When Moses committed genocide to conquer the land he believed was promised to him by the god he worshipped, he at times enslaved all the female virgins. If we are going to talk about the awful history of slavery before America, thats certainly an incident that should be included. Its in Numbers. Its not hidden. What should we call the kind of slavery where your family and your tribe is all murdered and you are made a possession of those who murdered your family and tribe and then all your children are made to be required, at the threat of death, to worship the god that supposedly killed your family? Maybe there should be a special word for that; its arguably more morally obscene than "hereditary racial chattel slavery". Although it may be irrelevant to weigh such evils.
Furthermore, you discuss the Romans and the Greeks and their slavery, and that is the slavery that Paul -- a Greek -- was referring to when he told *Christian Greek / Roman* slave masters to be "good masters" and he told *Christian Greek / Roman* slaves to be obedient to those masters? Yet in the context of Romans and Greeks and their slavery you do not point out that the primary founder and inventor of the religion of the people who enslaved black people commanded Greco-Roman slaves to be obedient to their masters. And of course, he demanded all of humanity to be absolute obedient slaves to the great slave master in the sky that he thought especially picked him to be his emissary -- and if they didn't: torture and destruction.
The bible absolutely belongs in your overview. I'll do my best to give you the benefit of the doubt that it wasn't intentionally left out. I appreciated the article overall, other than that omission. I learned some things I did not know before reading it that I think is valuable. I hope that in the future, when discussing this history, you remember those Roman slaves who were commanded by Paul to be obedient to their tormentors to supposedly please Jesus.
Jesus as a slave master? You seem to be going full Nietzsche with that one, the concept of 'slave morality', but by doing so actually erasing real life social distinctions of the time. If everyone is a 'slave', then no one is. I am far from being well versed in what the Bible says, but will just offer, for what it's worth, what Paul famously writes in the Epistle to the Galations 3:28
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." -New King James Version
How to read that? Take it away!
“ Jesus as a slave master? You seem to be going full Nietzsche with that one, the concept of 'slave morality', but by doing so actually erasing real life social distinctions of the time. If everyone is a 'slave', then no one is.”
If everyone is a slave but the master, then everyone is a slave but the master. And even among slaves, such as when America had slaves, distinctions still were formed. If all black people were slaves in southern United States before the civl war, it doesn't mean that there were no black people who were slaves in the southern United States. There were slaves in the house, there were slaves in the fields; and the house slaves sometimes had authority over the field slaves. This doesn't mean the house slaves weren't slaves. If there is a hierarchy of expected absolute obedience, it’s a slave hierarchy, with a slaver at the top. In the case of Christianity, it is Jesus.
As for Nietzche, he was correct about Christianity being a slave morality. Christianity is certainly not alone with that though.
“I am far from being well versed in what the Bible says, but will just offer, for what it's worth, what Paul famously writes in the Epistle to the Galations 3:28
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus." -New King James Version
How to read that? Take it away!”
How to read that? Well first I’d take into consideration that Paul admits in a letter that he consciously deceives the people he is preaching to to gain their trust, and he lies about himself in order to win slaves for the god he believes in so that the god he believes in will reward him.
"To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. 21 To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. 22 To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. 23 I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings." 1 Corinthians 9:20-23
Then I’d bother to read the next line following what you quoted. What you quoted though happens to be very pertinent to the fact that Christianity is a religion of slavery and that Jesus is presented as a slaver. The next line:
“And if you are Christ’s, then you are Abraham’s seed, and heirs according to the promise.” -Galatians 3:29
If a person is a possession of Jesus (are Christ's) aka, a slave, then they are going to be rewarded. Those distinctions that don’t matter in the previous line are in reference to being “heirs of the promise.” That promise being if a person obeys the Demon Lord who claims to be Love itself, then they will get eternal life, regardless of whether they are currently a slave, or they are poor or they are a woman. Obeying the Demon Lord is open to people of all status in this life; it’s the next life that ultimately matters, where the Demon Lord will reward those who loved him and punish those who did not. Unfortunately, in this life, if one is a slave, one should still obey one’s current master. In other words Paul doesn’t care to challenge the Roman system of slavery. His biggest concern seems to be convincing people to be obedient and deferent to him.
Paul explicitly refers to himself as a slave in Romans. He begins his letter - “Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus”. Romans 1:1. He uses the word duolos, which is variously translated as slave, servant, or bond servant, but is a standard word used in Greek literature to refer to chattel slaves.
He is Christ’s. He is a slave of Jesus. And all people are essentially slaves of Jesus according to Paul. If we are obedient, he says, we will be rewarded with eternal life, if we are disobedient, we will be punished with torture and destruction.
"Do you not know that God’s kindness is meant to lead you to repentance? 5 But by your hard and impenitent heart you are storing up wrath for yourself on the day of wrath when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed. he will render to every man according to his works: 7 to those who by patience in well-doing seek for glory and honor and immortality, he will give eternal life; 8 but for those who are factious and do not obey the truth, but obey wickedness, there will be wrath and fury. 9 There will be tribulation and distress for every human being who does evil, the Jew first and also the Greek, 10 but glory and honor and peace for every one who does good, the Jew first and also the Greek. 11 For God shows no partiality." Romans 2 4-11
Frankly I think that is an evil and stupid doctrine. No one should obey Paul or revere a god that resembles the one Paul describes. I personally could never love or revere such a god as such a god naturally repulses my soul. Paul’s equality is one of everyone equally being slaves of the same tyrant. Except, specifically, himself, because he claims he is special, and particularly selected by the tyrant to give instruction. He's a proud house slave. A unique and special house slave of his god. He claims he has a special connection to "God" and claims that he has the authority to tell everyone else that if they disagree with his claims they will face wrath and fury. But if they obey him and accept his authority, they will be rewarded with honor, peace, glory, and immortality.
Paul though isn’t the only one to share the religious idea that it is most honorable and righteous to submit absolutely to a cruel, capricious, tyrannical god, and of course, his representative(s) here on earth. He is just responsible for a particular flavor that is largely responsible for the Christianity we know today that got standardized throughout the first 4 centuries. The gospels of course present a very similar conception, largely influenced by Paul and the Torah. The gospels present multiple parables, such as the parable of the wicked tenants (Mk 12:1-9, Mtt 21:33-39, Lk 20:9-15), the DoorKeeper(MK 13:34-37, Mtt 24:42-51), the Talents(Mtt 25:14-30, Lk 19 12-27), the unworthy Servant(Lk 17:7-10), the unmerciful servant(Mtt 18:23-35) and the unjust Steward(Lk 16:1-13) that present a master that is angry at his slaves for misbehavior and disobedience. Jesus allegedly was executed by Rome for sedition, claiming to be the Jewish messiah and king. Kings had chattel slaves; Jesus plausibly had chattel slaves himself. Regardless, I'd consider spiritual slavery potentially more an evil than chattel slavery. A person who is enslaved out of fear for their soul is in a worse state than a person who is enslaved out of fear of their body. A person whose soul is enslaved will have their body enslaved along with it.
The Bible preaches that humans are slaves to Jehovah-- a cruel, capricious imaginary god invented by genocidal rapists, and that those who obey that god are virtuous and will be rewarded with good things and those who disobey that god are wicked and will be punished with bad things. Its preached in both the old and new testaments. This is a fact. And it is an evil fiction that should be denounced.
Thanks for your reply! It's hard to argue with much of what you say. I'm sure Christopher Hitchens would agree! And I cannot comment really on Paul's character. However, I would say the following as a sort of rebuttal, if only as a matter of perspective. The point about 'if everyone is a slave, no one is', I meant to be literally every 'human', including Jesus, ie. Jesus as a man. The analogy with black slavery in the US doesn't work because obviously there were actual masters distinguished from slaves. It's a purely social institution of this world. In Christianity, the so-called 'master', Jesus or Jehovah, is not of this world. That may be your premise, in that if one thinks of it as a mere fiction, a human construct, then your logic follows. In the world, masters exploit slaves for their own ends, demand obedience so that they benefit. How does Jesus *as God* benefit? Where is the exploitation? By definition, the religious premise, Jesus is pure love. As a human, exploitation might be simply for ego or a megalomaniac desire for power over others. That was apparently the Roman's fear, that they would lose their 'slaves' to him. But God, a pure divinity, literally has no need of slaves. There is no 'human' exploitation involved. In fact, I would say that is the meaning of the crucifixion, Jesus the God-man sacrificing one 'life', the fallen mortal life of a man, for the 'true' life of divine salvation. In an actual slave society, no master would ever sacrifice his own life so that the slaves follow him and become 'master-like'. It makes no sense at all. As I say, if you start from the premise that it is all a fiction, you can read the story as one of masters and slaves, but to a person of actual faith, any notion of slavery just disappears altogether. It's incomprehensible. None of this, of course, means that the so-called servants of Christ, the churches etc, could not be guilty of such treatment of other human beings. That's because they are human, they are not Jesus or Jehovah. Much of history attests to this, as I am sure you'd agree. But the divine Christ himself? He would just be sad at how benighted and sinful fallen humanity can be.
I did my best to isolate "chattel slavery" from other forms of slavery (e.g. debt slavery), which accounts for my focus on some examples and not others. I would be delighted to read a paper or published article on chattel slavery as described in the Bible: is there something scholarly you can recommend? I am not well enough versed in Biblical slavery but acknowledge your point as well taken.
I found the book I had read years ago:
Slavery, Abolitionism, and the Ethics of Biblical Scholarship by Hector Avalos, associate professor of Religious Studies at Iowa State University
https://www.amazon.com/Slavery-Abolitionism-Ethics-Biblical-Scholarship/dp/1909697184/ref=sr_1_70?crid=1YJ0NXTL0J7IQ&keywords=Slavery+in+the+Bible&qid=1684710140&sprefix=slavery+in+the+bibl%2Caps%2C150&sr=8-70
I think I may read it again. I remember it being a treasure.
That looks reallly interesting.
Well, Justin, you are a scholar and a gentleman.
I wish I had a book or paper that I knew off the top of my head. Most of my knowledge comes from reading the bible itself and random scholarly articles in academic journals on the internet. I did at one point read a scholarly book about it, but that was almost 20 years ago and I dont recall the name or the author. I'll actually give myself an hour or two to try to look it up and see if I can find it again this weekend. I'll get back to you.
If you want the quotations from the New Testament when Paul encourages slaves to be obedient to their masters I can provide that pretty quick. As fast as a google search allows. I must admit, I have not put much time into memorizing where the exact location of bible verses are. When it comes to Paul, remember, he was a Greek. During the first century. Thus, if we want to know the slavery that Paul was discussing, we must look up not "biblical slavery" but slavery of the Roman empire during the first century. And that included chattel slavery, as you yourself point out:
"Moreover, the Romans and the Byzantine Empire expanded chattel slavery geographically into Africa, particularly in North and Northeast Africa."
Roman slavery *is* "biblical slavery".
I think this "assumptions" comment is meant for Jeffrey [end of thread]. This is my first time on this discussion board, but I'm noticing that our comments sometimes appear in the wrong place on a thread.
Sorry about that!
No worries.
Thanks to everyone who took the time to read and comment on my essay. As a teacher, I always looked for but could never find a concise account of the world history of chattel slavery (as opposed to other forms of slavery) before 1619. I was also interested in the historical relationship between chattel slavery and ethno-racial difference in the centuries before the black/white color line came to define slavery in the US. My conclusion: The British colonies and later the United States were participants in a transcultural system of exploitation and forced labor rooted in the ancient and medieval past and pervasive throughout the Atlantic world by the 1600s. Chattel slavery in the United States was less remarkable for its differences from other slave systems than for its striking resemblances. Thanks again for reading and commenting.
Thank you very much for writing this article. It is definitely needed.
You're welcome. Thanks for your comment.
You're a brave man. You'll be out of a job within the month. Jk.
It was nothing unusual. It was usual, perfectly normal, in the 1500s and the 1800s. It wasn't acceptable by the 1850s, because of the Enlightenment, not because of one book by Frederick Douglass, though he quite rightly showed people the way.
It was only a 'sin' if you think in terms of first, Christian notions, then post-Enlightenment, post UN Human rights, post 1960s 'equity' ideology. If there were 50-100k people shipped, enslaved through those centuries, as there were, and horrible as it was by our 2000s standards, there were far more than that dying every year in civil wars, religious wars, in Europe, in Africa, in Asia, all over. Everywhere on this planet.
It was just human behavior to enslave/oppress, from the Portuguese in the 1480s to the British in 1806, yes, the year before THEY abolished it, to the chagrin if rulers of color worldwide.
The 1619 mythology is more of a lie than the exceptionalist 1776 one: the only difference is the latter, the supposed 'White Supremacy' narrative for decades annoyed African Americans, pushing them to become Obamas, Currys, Le Brons, Baldwins, Morrisons, Haleys, McWhorters, Winfreys etc etc.
The first, the new 1619 SocJus, post George Floyd, 'White Privilege' even greater ahistorical myth, is creating a generation of lost black kids. No hope, no point. No actual contextual history. We are just victims, always, forever. Its inane, its untrue, and it is a joke.
See this: this is the 'truth' for black people, if people can have one truth based on skin color, that is:
https://freeblackthought.substack.com/p/teaching-hopelessness-to-kids-of?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=414210&post_id=113448387&isFreemail=true
One of my few clear memories from grammar school was the cover of the History book from grammar school.
It was picture of a landscape with a large flat plane with mountains in the far background. It had a long line of people receding into the background and by their clothes you could tell the farther back in line the farther in the past was being represented. Of course everyone in the line was White.
I sat there in my little desk staring at that picture thinking, "So the only people who matter in history are White people."
One of the things I try to show is that the global history of chattel slavery was transcultural and ethno-racially heterogeneous and existed even before the invention of modern racial categories.
So that means slavery is no big deal because everybody did it and racial stratification did not exist until Europeans had superior technology to convince themselves that they belonged at the top of the heap?
How much of history is merely circumstantial combined with human stupidity and random instances of brilliance? Science is sequential, in order to figure out C then B had to be figured out first. But A had to be known before B. If a cultural group got ahead there would be a tendency to get further ahead faster. But if advantages are used to steal lots of land then economic advantages will compound.
Of course that still leaves historical curiosities. The Chinese could have colonized Australia 300 years before Europeans. Why didn't they?
And there is absurd self sabotage. I asked BW Booktuber about Afrofuturism containing realistic science. She said "that feels racist". Technology and science made the last 300 years. How societies were handling slavery 3000 years ago is "academic".
No, the opposite: slavery was a huge deal because everybody did it and because it still exists. A world history textbook cover illustrating the history of slavery would have to look very different from the one you described, since slavery was transcultural and ethno-racially heterogeneous. On racial stratification, I'm not sure if Bernier and Blumenbach were thinking of technology, but it's an interesting question to look into. How the Spanish and Portuguese were handling slavery is especially crucial to understanding the development of American slavery. I appreciate your comments.
Did everbody do it because of the lack of technology and consequent low productivity of those times? The Catholic Church dividing up the world is just one of the random cultural idiocies. If a hurricane had sunk Columbus would that really be significant to global socio-economic evolution? Nations matter to nationalists and distort history to suit nationalistic delusions.
Everybody did it because its always existed. We're still doing it.
You are doing it now on this computer, on your clothing and in your food. So am I...
https://freetheslaves.net
There were different reasons at different times: to put war captives to work, to punish a crime or debt, to use people as soldiers or household servants or mine workers or concubines. In some places, some people were sold into slavery by family members; others sold themselves into slavery. Usually it was a labor shortage.
Depends on what a big deal is? Isn't much of history a big deal? The other slaveries, all the other violence and genocide? We are not only obsessing over this one slavery, but the 5% that ended up in the US. Nobody even knows 95% of slaves from W Africa went elsewhere.
There is a continuity in enslaving. The years 1619-1865 are part of that continuity, yet they receive all the press and attention.
Of course it was a big deal. It was horrific. It was also in tune with the global zeitgeist. The Holocaust was not, but who cares about those Jews right?
Right! Try to push buttons all you want.
Many stakeholders benefited from the cotton economy — plantation owners in the South, banks in the North, shipping merchants, and the textile industry in Great Britain. Cotton transformed the United States, making fertile land in the Deep South, from Georgia to Texas, extraordinarily valuable. Growing more cotton meant an increased demand for slaves. Slaves in the Upper South became incredibly more valuable as commodities because of this demand for them in the Deep South. They were sold off in droves. This created a Second Middle Passage, the second largest forced migration in America’s history.
To feed “King Cotton,” more than a million African Americans were carried off into the Deep South. That’s two and a half times the number that were brought to the United States from Africa.
https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/video/the-cotton-economy-and-slavery/
Secondly, so what? This now half a century old complaint, which has been rectified to the point that EVERY ad, cover, show, actor is not just non-white, but African American, is just not of any relevance to todays world.
And what culture, anywhere, did not represent itself through the dominant lens.
That depends on how one chooses to analyze reality. I don't give a damn about ads. I regard planned obsolescence as a high technology form of slavery. I have noticed that European culture does not make 700 year old double-entry accounting mandatory in the schools. Really Dumb!
Try: The Screwing of the Average Man (1974) by David Hapgood
Absolutely.
Two things: that was probably 50 years ago. Much has changed; which White? Whatever was being depicted, you think that those white people who are Irish, Italian, Slovenian, Pole, Finnish, low class anywhere, are represented. The very claim anything is 'white' is dubious.
I don't give a damn. I probably care about different European nations about as much as you care about African tribes. Have you noticed that the Laws of Physics don't care about anybody.
History is only important in understanding how we got to the present. Who had technology vs who didn't.
"Low Class" ain't that getting into Economic Power Games and economic servitude. Curious how 700 year old double-entry accounting is not mandatory in the schools. Who controls that?
Its amazing how 90% of conversations on the thorny issue not of race, but of specifically African-Americans/race, always end up with I dont give a damn. Ok.
And nobody else has to give a damn about this tiresome issue. The great irony is how many white devils are on the side of reparations/BLM/soc jus etc, but mark this memory, the huge demographic transition the US is going through will have millions of conservatives of color, yes all those other people of color, who just don't care about one groups 'generational trauma'...they have their own, as do most whites.
The laws of physics are certainly above skin color, but I know precisely who figured them out so y'all could use this technology.
White people are not monolithic. Just like black people.
End of this thread: US Afr Am slavery was terrible, but it was just another day. Read about other cultures of the time, all much the same.
You compare a text book given to children to ads in magazines and expect to be taken seriously. You radiate "it was a long time ago, shove it under the rug" vibes.
I worked for IBM dealing with model changes in addition to non-IBM brands. Wading thru social nonsense cannot be a high priority.
But ultimately economics comes down to who "owns/controls/stole" the land. It is really funny how capitalists do not advocate mandatory accounting in the schools. But I haven't heard any so called Black leaders suggesting it either.
Both the absurd textbook (which my two very woke mixed race kids thought was appalling and noted it turned other kids into conservatives!) and those ads are actually pure capitalism: instead of addressing inequality and the last vestiges of real racism, corporations give a few beautiful pretty privileged afr ams jobs. So American.
The book is part of the great Race Ind Swindle of making money off Floyds murder. Kendi should pay for reparations himself with the money he and his joke partners have made.
Who stole the land? Who stole all land or just this land? Who stole Turkey? Ghana? Who were the Bantu? Ono? Dahomey? You think only whites stole land. Stealing land is a postcolonial leftwing concept. It wasn't stealing land. Again. It was, what ALL humans had always done.
I agree students should learn accounting, or do you mean personal finance.
Again this articles premise is sound. All historians would agree.
The fact it hurst the feelings of one small group in the US does not make it true.
“Christian notions”? It took almost 2000 years for some Christians to consider slavery sinful. There were philosophers, or people, who had considered it wrong even before Christians though because Aristotle makes an argument in defense of it; meaning he was aware of arguments against it. They weren’t obviously made by the powerful though, by those whose words would be retained through history.
Christianity rests itself on the Bible, whose main character is an imaginary god that encourages at various times his followers to commit genocide and enslave people, but also demands absolute obedience and submission--aka slavery--from all of humanity. Indeed both Jehovah and Jesus are depicted as slavers and humans as their slaves. Paul revels in his slavery. Paul tells slaves to be obedient to their masters;and the best he can do is tell the masters to be “good” masters, which is an oxymoron if I’ve ever seen one.
Abolition is not a Christian notion; it is quite anti Christian. But that didn’t stop some Christians, who turned out better than their religion, from embracing it--good for them. And they were able to irrationally rationalize it. Just like now some Christians accept homosexuality, even though it is clearly depicted as an abomination in the book they idolize. Fortunately Christians nowadays are typically better than the book they say they follow.
Late 18th century abolition stems from the minds of white European Enlightenment secularists and even atheists.
It also comes from the likes of evangelicals, Quakers and Wilberforce etc.
I am no Christian, but the tenets of Protestant Christianity were key to shaping that revolutionary (at that time insane) notion of abolishing what humans had always done, and still do.
There are 50 million slaves today. You are using their goods. So am I.
So that point stands.
And what forces gave birth to the "tenets of Protestant Christianity"? Certainly nothing "Christian"; again quite the latent force to take almost 2000 years. The thing about humans, while many humans can get their greatest joy from enslaving other innocent humans, some of us don't like authority, especially unjust authority, either exerted upon ourselves or others. And as the grip of political authoritarian Christianity loosened slightly due to the natural rebellious human spirit, people, Christian and not, were given more breathing room to think and communicate ideas that were heretical to ruling ideology; the growing technological abilities to spread ideas and general greater connection of the world allowed more ideas to travel and some people began to sympathize with notions of material political liberty. Many of those people were Christian, some of them were not. Most Christians(and I suspect non-christians) actually rejected it out of fear or complacency, or simply didnt even think about it. The Christians who embraced it, did so *despite* the bibles general acceptance of slavery, and found ways to rationalize their moral sense that slavery was wrong by selecting particular passages and interpreting the bible that were in fact radical; and they did their best to try to convince other Christians and other people using the bible itself as an authority. In the American south, while there were people, including Christians who helped slaves escape, there were more who would have felt it wrong--and their conscience pain them--to help a slave escape. Attributing abolitionism to Christianity at all, is again, like attributing homosexual marriage rights to Christianity; many Christians today now interpret the bible to support homosexual marriage as well, and many did before it became standard law. And likewise, Christians today interpret the bible to support transgenderism. Heck; Jesus said there is no male and female in Christ, so therefore he must have been non-binary and people can choose whatever sex they want.
Because we cannot run experiments on history, we cannot look at how human civilization would have turned out if, for example, Emperor Julian wasn't assassinated and Christianity didn't capture the Roman Empire. I'd wager though, things would have been better, sooner. Although, something worse than Christianity could have popped up still.
"There are 50 million slaves today."
Abeit its essentially illegal slavery. That is, before the abolitionism of the 19th century, much of the slavery was legal. That of course doesn't mean those slaves today should be ignored by the world. Their conditions can be worse than the conditions black slaves faced in the US.
"You are using their goods. So am I."
Possibly. It is indeed entangled in the global supply chain. I wish I had a solution minus destroying world trade and plunging the world into poverty and starvation. An individual could live totally outside civilization and not trade with the world, but that wouldn't end the slavery; and if all people of the developed world did it, it would destroy the economies of societies that slavery flourishes in. The solutions that could potentially work would probably not be approved by international legal bodies. Right now, all Im aware of is pressures on businesses to police their own supply chains and "Fair Trade"-like certifications for a few products known for having greater problems with slavery, such as cocoa.
It's well known that slaveholders often used the Bible to justify slavery and that enslaved people used the Bible to seek freedom.
It is definitely true; how well known is questionable.
Its a tragic irony that enslaved people used the bible to escape from one form of slavery, that of their American, typically Christian masters, to another form slavery-- that of the cruel imaginary deity of those previous slave masters. Uncle Tom's Cabin is one grave depiction of that. Tom, rather than shown to heroically kill his earthly master and his overseers and liberate his family, he rather accepts his brutal murder, acting as another vain human sacrifice to please Jehovah and win the enslavement of more souls to a god of slavery.
Jeffrey, Walker's Appeal is a good place to go for a different take on Christianity (different from Uncle Tom's Cabin).
https://docsouth.unc.edu/nc/walker/walker.html
See Tom Cruise for a different take on Scientology.
I think that his Appeal was a very powerful criticism of Jefferson's and America's hypocrisy at the time. But its not especially relevant in understanding Christianity, other than the fact that despite all of them claiming to receive inspiration from the message of Jesus, individual Christians don't all agree on what that message was. Its just unfortunate that they all didn't agree with Paul that it was most noble not to have sex; Christianity would have died out thousands of years ago probably if they had.
“ The 1619 mythology is more of a lie than the exceptionalist 1776 one” WHAT?
Hold up… I gotta call Richard Pryor because you… Sean Lovejoy, sent from the ecclesiastical Central Casting have landed the title role of the film version of Richard Pryor’s Bicentennial N*gger. The title track is YOU! It is it is You! Congratulations. By placing the year 1619 and “mythology” together has triggered an algorithm that awards you with the greatest role of a lifetime. Although it’s a historical drama, you’ll be portraying the 200 year old Negro, that they bring up on stage to speak at the 4th of July celebration of our exceptional nations 200th Birthday! Your script is the same shit that you just wrote down here. Isn’t life fortunate? Condragulations! Luckily you don’t have concern yourself with the refined and meta-nuances that Pryor originally wrote into the role. That would be to Rio and mythological. But go on with your bad self.
Just a very simple reply to MADAZHELL, not a rebuttal even, but something to consider. I know what it’s like to feel rage and fury in response to something someone says or writes. We don’t really have much say in that gut level reaction. It just happens, and it happens quickly. But we have a choice afterwards. We can ask ourselves: does my reaction tell me something about my adversary? Or does it tell me something about myself? It’s a private question. I have learned a lot from answering it honestly over the years in the stillness of my heart.
First. This was edited?? :-)
Now, the frontier thesis, and the 'conventional,' shall we say most older white persons, version of US history is biased, I agree for sure, but it was/is perfectly in sync with all other nations views of their history until say the 90s. Self serving, and biased, but, well much of it accurate enough. We won kind of thing. We oppressed others. 1850s? Compared to China? Arabia? Ottomans? Wahhabism? LatinAmerica? In your view the world was full of Ibram Kendis/Ta Nehisi fools walking around offering peace and joy? The British abolished slavery!! Not anybody else. By choice. Nobody was any different in those centuries. Its because of western rights/ liberties/tech you get to write this spew for free.
As for the rest of it, I doubt even Mr Pryor would have any idea what you're talking about, unless its the same amount of coke writing this post.
To wit: 1619 is irrelevant, a convenient, chosen point of departure to write a black power, contradictory 'we are victims always/ we are the best people on earth' ahistory (you can't be both at once).
In fact, people like Pryor, Chappelle, Thomas Sowell (man do Afr Ams on the Left need some Sowell) and most black people who ever lived understand that there is nothing unusual about the sins of the past - in context. Get over it. The rest of the world has. Funny huh?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWj2zx3ZlRk&list=PL7s6piXiFK-Q5PoPxMQ2maPPIwcBX7ssF
Thank you for the Sowell excerpt. His global history of slavery covers a lot of the same ground as my more narrowly focused history of hereditary racial chattel slavery. He was way ahead of the rest of us.
My pleasure. Nobody knows him. I am a historian and I didn't. I got through 50 courses not so long ago and heard of him through my only centrist acquaintance! He is simply correct. This is where the right are right, for once, in that academia is not giving many views of history. I'm left, but boy is it slanted to the left. Kids know it.
That is the trouble with school. By selecting the books they just about controlwhat one thinks. Look in Sowell's Basic Economics and see what he says about depreciation.
I would add to this Justin. 1 - The ONLY society in history that found slavery worthy of critique was post Enlightenment European society. See the Middle East, Asia and Africa today for ongoing, uniform attitudes to disregarding human rights that predate any Europeans going anywhere near those areas. 2 - The choice between a: an 'it was terrible, but it was then' approach and b: all of history is white supremacy and still is? The first is better for any group that have been oppressed. The second is a ticket to eternal mental slavery, which is ironic.
Wow. Pulitzer envy is an abhorrent thing. Looks what it’s done to you. When anyone places, James Baldwin, in the same sentence with Libertarian hack McWhorter it has Got to be an end to a means. Tossing off a hit to Richard Pryor is in as bad taste as saying the same twoddle about Robin Williams in front of his wife and children.
You’re a sellout and you would most certainly be like Don King, the Negro Trump MAGA sad fascists pull out and have represent 300 hundred years of all the derision and hate in your smiling shining face! Chuckling as your lips vshine and teeth sparkle- ‘“cause you is happy. Happy you been here 300 years!!” Mel Brooks had his thousand year old man. Tommy Tuberville and his compadres pull out you.
Selling what out?
So all those black Americans, and the millions of poc who love and vote for Trump. They are idiots? No agency? No brains? Mistakenly voting for him (I loathe him, thats not the point). They should listen to you?
There is one continuity in your addled reasoning: "black people throughout history never had brains or success and still don't." Which is ironic given your apparent views.
Black people sold black people, just like all people oppressed those with similar melatonin levels, and still do. Black people won, ran kingdoms, negotiated, fought, hurt others, got hurt. Just like all people of all skin colors. Because, um, we are all much the same. That is the point of the post, to which you rarely seem to veer near.
I don’t veer. You’ve sold out by clumping chuckleheads like John McWhorter with James Baldwin. I’m shocked you didn’t toss in Ta Nehesi Coates and Sonia Sanchez! SHIPPING kidnapped BLACK BODIES across OCEANS was not achieved by African/Black men. They didn’t have banks, and mortgage houses, and factories investment statutes. Slavery in Africa throughout time was a by product of wars, village conflicts, and oftentimes Slaves were free and their progeny. NOT The enslaved Africans that survived the middle passage. You’re a sell out because you reside in a “whataboutism” bubble.
to talk up all slavery as being the same thing and it’s been going on it will continue to go on is a copout, it’s a sellout. And showcases your own Mediocrity of endeavor. Sit down, sir.
You know. I can offer ten scholarly accounts on the origins of the slave trade, often by non white scholars fwiw.
Black bodies were kidnapped. Yes, they were captives of very different tribes/states in Africa. They were sold to Europeans who could barely step foot in west africa. You know, the fact no wokies know this doesn't mean its not clear and true. Start with Gates Jr. See Falola. Black scholars y know?
I actually agree that by 1700ish the Atl Slave Trade was pernicious and out of scale of other 'slaveries.' But that was then.
Its not whataboutery. Its context. Why should any argument (ie. the pity party BLM worldview) not be contextualized?
Slavery is not all the same thing no. But oppression of people predates the atl slave trade, continues through it, and is practiced MORE today all over the world in places with no European, christian, white, male, rights and liberties based traditions or conventions.
Sorry. The sob story is wrong. Its also not good for black kids to hear.
McWhorter is a genius. See his Musicology Racist article this week. I mean, this BLM view is doing harm to black people!
Pure sophistry, which I am certain the author has mistaken for humor and insight.
Please continue to “work mostly in oils”
Please continue to feed your racism with fantasy and propaganda. At least I work at something joyful for me. The fact that you had to resort to some snarky remark which you imagined would hurt me (I would have to respect you to make that possible) demonstrates that I got to you. I have peeled back the shallow veneer that attempts to hide the small, petty, unfulfilled , unexamined and narrow world that race-baiters inhabit. Please continue to worship frauds like Kendhi who make considerable for writing trendy, sociological pap and think that makes them someone important. Someday you will discover how much damage such self-important, faddish celebrities have harmed your race by capitalizing on it. Somehow BLM has millions of dollars and mansions in LA but people of color in my old neighborhood in Minneapolis are poorer, less safe, and less likely to succeed than before George Floyd became your anointed Patron Saint. Marcus Garvey??? Please.
If the Left had said from the beginning this is a horrific murder, which it was, and also he was a troubled, troublemaking antisocial fool, we might have just had welcome police reforms and proper insight into police brutality and the last vestiges of racism.
If they'd acknowledged all those cops/merchants of color in the story, and not fallen back on the ridiculous notion it was 'racism' as always, we might have avoided a r/wing backlash that will yet again punish the Dems and social justice advocates.
If they'd organized peaceful protests, we would move forward as a country. Yet they enable or allow/encourage riots and well, as usual, we get nowhere.
WHOA! Karen, down girl! I don’t think you got to me, Slick. I think, au contraire.
You just bloviated some seriously presumptuous twoddle. Ibram Kendhi, who I never brought up, but since you did, is a fellow student of my mentor and received his PhD in African American Studies and is a cancer survivor and best selling author, who you meant to demean because, while you have been working “mostly with oils” he has been in the vanguard of creating pathways forward in fortifying communities in fighting mounting fascist attacks and dismantling education, LGBTQIA RIGHTS, and voting rights, while you dawdle about trying to decide if water colors will be de riguer for your canvas like Joan Plowright in “Enchanted April.”
A close colleague of mine is the co-founder of BLM-LA and they most certainly DO NOT live in a mansion. Their lives and the lives of their children have been relentlessly threatened. So whatever bullshit Newsmax, Fox News wormhole, you paint yourself into with oils, has proven you to be a liar and a scoundrel and a white supremacist.
And imagine all I wrote to you was that you should continue to consider “working with oils” and that, my dear Karen, is that. Bloody cheers!
Yep
Slavery had been the norm, not the exception, long before the American colonies existed
It was part and parcel of the economic/social system
Extensively documented in the bible/old testament
The buying and selling of people seen as ethno-racially "other" has a very long history as well.
Not to mention all the indigenous Americans ALSO captured and sold into slavery, to serve as exotic servants for European aristocracy, and also in North Africa and elsewhere. Nobody counted them, but it was thousands. – The ethnical aspect is, in my opinion, even older than the Greeks: the same concept can be observed in the Indian caste system, to this very day, which also can be seen as a form of hereditary slavery, in Chinese, Korean and Japanese philosophy AND among tribal people of West Africa.
Agreed. It should be noted that Indigenous Americans captured and enslaved not only White settlers, but captured peoples from other tribes. The Comanche were particularly brutal. Captives who lived were expected to assimilate unto the culture of the Comanche—-not the other way round—-“ minority rights” not being much recognized during the capturing of ter ritoty.
All American indigenous cultures from North to South knew forms of bondage and what we can call slavery, but it was no chattel slavery. That was introduced with the economic system the cotton trade and earlier coffee and cocoa and other produce native to the Americas brought along. The form of slavery typical for indigenous American civilizations was quite similar to what we know from Greece and especially Rome, where slaves could actually gain quite a standing and even free themselves and become respected citizens. One of the major differences between Greece and Rome was that for the Greeks, ethnical origins were deciding. The Romans however didn't care much about that, they cared about whether a person was a Latin speaker or not. For them, it was a question of culture and education, which can also be said about many indigenous American societies. The Inca were most leaning to the Greek model (which in itself can be called the Indoeuropean model, as we can see it applied all the way through India and even farther east). The brutality of later tribal cultures in North America (ca. from 18th century onwards) can to a large degree be attributed to their fight for survival against wave after wave of new people coming into their territories from the east – who also introduced new forms of cruelty, alongside new weapons. One of the biggest cultures of the North American east, the Cherokee, assimilated to a huge degree to the lifestyle of the European immigrants, including adopting cotton farming and chattel slavery, only to be eventually disowned and pushed off of their lands, to move westward. The arrival of the Europeans first in Mexico and then ca. 100 years later in what is now the US and Canada was a huge impact that, alongside with introducing new and deadly diseases, also triggered a lot of movement and migration among the original cultures, which is a traumatic experience for any population. And such traumata can cause tremendous havoc to a society.
Greece and Rome make for interesting comparisons for many reasons. One is that an estimated 15-35% of the population of Athens and 10-20% of the Roman Empire were enslaved. In 1860, slaves were 12.5% of the US population. At the time of the American Revolution, one-fifth of the population was enslaved.
American Indian/Indigenous slaveowners and African American slaveowners are rarely mentioned in histories of North American slavery. Native American slavery often diverged significantly from chattel slavery but is an interesting subject!
I sometimes wonder what is wrong with the human race, that we do such terrible things to other human beings.
Part of the value in documenting the typical component of ethno-racial otherness in the broad history of slavery is that it helps disentangle our sense of the unique and distinctly beautiful African-sourced elements of our modern culture from the institution of colonial/post-Revolution slavery itself. To be American today is to be culturally part African, whatever your skin color. Obviously the institution of slavery shaped that blending, but it is a sadly constricted view of ourselves which can see in blackness only “descendent of slavery.” I hope for a time when the gift of the culture which the African slaves brought with them is correctly recognized as everyone’s heritage.
Do you know Ellison's "The Little Man at Chehaw Station"?
No, I haven't read Ellison's book, or even heard of it before. I just went on Amazon to buy a copy and found its status "Currently unavailable. We don't know when or if this item will be back in stock." That doesn't happen often! I noticed it's subtitled "The American Artist and His Audience" I'll find a way to buy it.
I recently became aware of Albert Murray from an essay about his life and work. Murray seems to have directed a lot of attention to the subject of cultural formation in a way that struck me as both particularly rich and particularly neglected. And particularly missing, I should add. It's a little bit of a puzzle to me that contemporary intellectuals don't take more interest in the way that culture - and especially what people think of as "black culture" - is a stream that flows in many directions and not reductively an attribute of only particular individuals. This may not be a concern of Ellison's TLMACS but I look forward to finding out. Thank you for taking time to make the recommendation.
Here's a link to Ellison's essay, which is often anthologized: https://integral-life-home.s3.amazonaws.com/Ralph%20Ellison%20-%20The%20Little%20Man%20at%20Chehaw%20Station.pdf
I didn’t realize that in Mesopotamia they had the technology to build ships with cargo holds to fit 350-500 captured Africans chained together and that they set sail for lands that hadn’t yet been discovered, to completely separate these black skinned savages from their land, language, and cultural identity, and to see the majority of them die of disease and be dumped in the Ocean to sink into sea bottom of bones. Only to be beaten and raped and sold into a system where they snd their progeny would live generationally enslaved to a system of greed, ignorance snd anger only to languish for 400 years. Those Mesopotamians were so prescient.
This is the white men talking yo themselves about slavery existing before. NO. Slaves weren’t mortgaged in Mesopotamia, Slaves weren’t insured against land holdings or the most expensive commodity at the height of the cotton boom. Slaves weren’t used as currency and used to barter with Native's for more land.
When white men/women try their “whataboutism” on each other it reeks of denialism. They’ll do anything to puff up their mediocrity to deny anything that would impact their sense of entitlement or lack of accountability that our white male patriarchal heteronormativity society holds in its DNA.
There has been NOTHING in our global history as insidious and deadly and inhumane as the Atlantic Slave Trade and Destruction and Genocide of Indigenous Natives of the Americas and the Caribbean Isles. Never.
There is no conundrum for white folks. For me, the great grand child of a slave born in 1847 I have to be grateful for my life which I wouldn’t possess if it wasn’t for the horror of the Atlantic slave trade. I have to reconcile that every day. You don’t. You can write this bullshit about Mesopotamia. And all the readers are going to come down on me like an anvil. Your fellow white readers, and maybe some black ones American exceptionalism is only, an extension of what initiated the crusades in 1048.
The pure blood of Europeans should not ever be mixed with the blood of Jews, or moors. The slaughter and the journey to find and purify the blood of Europe established white supremacy 1000 years ago. American exceptionalism is a simple extension of white might. This author is a descendant of that fault.
In closing, The 1619 Project was simply “wildly read” like Prince Harry’s recent memoir “Spare” it was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. It is a piece of journalism that is held high with distinction. Your opening sentence distinguishes you and this attempted dilution as mediocre. I’m glad I read it. It’s too bad that from Ernest Hemingway to Norman Mailer white men will always find a way to take any topic and turn it into something that’s all about them.
You haven't rebutted a single factual claim made by the author.
Thanks for your comment, Douglas.
So? He didn’t argue his thesis to make it at all interesting for me to do so. I’ve read it all before.
Perhaps, American Blacks are not the center of the universe as Wokers would have us believe.
You wouldn’t know that by the latest series of TV commercials or the cringeworthy pandering of Disney remakes.
Nobody ever mentions this. Every ad, every show, every Victorian actor (!) is now black.
As if that will change anything?? All it does is take jobs from other ethnic groups and create more antipathy toward....black people.
Oh look a black person in an ad. I will now go and challenge the criminal justice system, reform the police and pay for reparations. Yay!
If it wasn’t for Africa Snoozy… you wouldn’t be here either. I’d rather be woke than in your white coffin comatose. #SleepersAreTheWalkingDead
It's often claimed today that hereditary racial chattel slavery was unique to the US. But chattel slavery and ethno-racial inequality were deeply intertwined long before 1619.
I'm always looking for other sources that make the argument that chattel slavery and ethno-racial inequality were deeply intertwined before the 1600s. If you can recommend any, I'd be grateful for the suggestions.
I highly recommend Sven Lindqvist’s "Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide
Also, Raoul Peck’s extraordinary HBO 4-Part Docuseries of the same title.
Thank you! I appreciate the suggestions.
This is the unfortunate hazard(and resulting embarrassment) of mistaking Kendhi’s agit-prop and the 1619 fantasy for serious work or actual history. The author further continues to expose his lack of acquaintance with legitimate history books or historians by displaying no knowledge of the surprisingly advanced civilizations that were Ancient Greece and Rome. Topping this all off with a hint of racism and ad-hominems only confirms the author’s over-reliance on emotion and under-reliance on facts. Usually this is the direct result of having no actual argument to offer.
Kendi and Coates have put us back 25 years on racism. They've also invited tens of millions of non African-American people of color to literally vote conservative. Well done rich black theorizers! Move in next to BLM's founders.
Kendi's influence has been considerable. You might appreciate this review I wrote of the YA version of his book.
Racialism Remixed
Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, by YA author Jason Reynolds, calls itself a “remix” of Ibram X. Kendi’s 2016 book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. Since its publication last year, Stamped has become a mainstay of summer reading lists for middle- and high-school students. Written in sharp, witty prose, the book alerts readers to racist (more specifically, anti-Black) as well as antiracist ideas throughout US history. Along the way, Stamped discusses major figures such as Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Angela Davis.
History teachers are always on the lookout for history books that students won’t cast aside as boring. Reynolds knows how to hold the interest of young readers, but Stamped plays fast and loose with historical facts. Most readers will neither care about nor notice the errors and inaccuracies, but they are significant. It’s worth looking at one example from the first chapter.
If there’s an archetypal villain in the story, it is the 15th-century Portuguese chronicler Gomes Eanes de Zurara, dubbed “the world’s first racist.” It’s a provocative claim to make, but Zurara checks many of the boxes: he was a European man of letters and Christian apologist for the Portuguese slave trade. His writings popularized crude and often demeaning descriptions of Africans and suggested that enslaving and civilizing Africans was Europe’s religious duty.
The problem with this bold assertion is that Zurara was not the world’s first racist, not in any meaningful sense. Equally strong cases can be made for a long list of historical texts and figures who came before (and after) him. For example, early and medieval Christian writers equated black skin color in general and Africans in particular with monstrosity and sinfulness. Long before Zurara, Muslim scholars and Arab slave traders linked color and culture and propagated racist ideas about black inferiority.
The emergence of racial hierarchies in world history is a more complicated and more interesting story than Stamped leads us to believe. One can back-date racist— and more specifically, anti-Black-- ideas to the ancient world. But disputing Stamped’s historical accuracy does not get to the heart of what the book is about. The author himself insists that Stamped is “not a history book.”
To be sure, Stamped should not be read as history. It is a political manual, instructing by historical example. Starting with the Puritans and ending with #BlackLivesMatter, Stamped analyzes US history by sorting Black and White “assimilationists” (whom the book calls “racists”) from bona fide “antiracists.” Stamped is particularly contemptuous of Black people who embraced or adapted pragmatically to America’s mainstream culture and institutions: “assimilationism,” the book argues, is both cowardly and racist. Stamped gives credit to the boxer Jack Johnson for “[breaking] the backs of White people” but jabs at the NAACP for being “an organization of ‘refined’ folks . . . whose mission was to go before courts and politicians to persuade White judges and legislators to end racial discrimination.”
Elsewhere, Stamped writes off W.E.B. Du Bois’s academic career as “keeping up with White people.” (The Marxist intellectual Angela Davis— one of the book’s exemplary antiracists— gets a pass in spite of her studies at the Sorbonne and the University of Frankfurt.) Similarly, Barack Obama comes off as a huge disappointment, someone who “always seemed to assimilate under pressure.” On occasion critical of the Black community (e.g. when he urged Black people to take more responsibility for their own destinies), Obama failed to live up to the book’s antiracist ideal despite “flashes—true moments—of antiracist thought.” Instead, “Obama fell in line with the [assimilationist] likes of Lincoln, Du Bois, [Booker T.] Washington, [Frederick] Douglass, and many others.”
It’s worth noting that one of the book’s exemplary antiracists is the Black nationalist Marcus Garvey, who advocated voluntary separation of the races and what he called racial “pride and purity.” For Garvey, social separation was necessary to achieve Black self-reliance and economic development. To that end, he worked to create a Black homeland in Africa to which Black people could return. Although Garvey gained many followers in the 1920s, other Black leaders saw his ideas as bizarre and counterproductive.
Although the labels Black and White are used frequently in the book, Stamped offers little insight into the ubiquitous construct of “race.” Like the multiculturalists of the 1980s and 1990s, the new antiracists are at ease sorting individuals into color-coded groups and assigning those groups to race-specific cultures. But to paraphrase the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, we can simultaneously resist racism and the color-based identities exploited by racists. Stamped misses that opportunity. Like Garvey’s nationalist movement a hundred years ago, this book urges us to see the world as a collection of more or less distinct communities defined by color, fixed and self-evident, each striving to get ahead in what Garvey called “the great race for existence.”
Justin Suran
I am not going to “come down on you like an anvil.” However I insist on pointing out that I was born in 1963. I neither participated in nor even stood passively by as the Crusades, the Inquisition or the vicious system of chattel slavery imposed barbarous acts of cruelty on helpless people. I accept my responsibility to act responsibly and decently in the actual world in which I now live. I deny all moral accountability for the actions and inactions of people who were born, lived and died before me. Their life is on them; mine is on me.
Amen. The first step toward personal responsibility is the first step away from the learned helplessness of perpetual Victimhood.
Yes but as a citizen of the United States of America, you continue to benefit as a white person to the systems, and laws that have perpetuated the ongoing oppression of BIPOC people in this country. German citizens born after 1945 until to the day or part of a system that pays reparations to Israel they weren’t personally and valved in the holocaust but their nation continues to pay.
No. The enduring effects of racist laws and racist systems hurt black Americans much more severely and directly than they hurt non-black Americans, but no one “benefits.” Everyone loses.
I agree with you that BIPOC people living today (as a whole, obviously) suffer today from the residual effects of racist laws and racist systems in the past. I take that as a given. I believe that it can and has been demonstrated rigorously and empirically by scholars and others.
What I disagree with is your assertion that non-BIPOC people (as a whole, obviously) “continue to benefit” from these past injustices. The truth is quite the opposite. Racism corrupts, diminishes, and makes poorer everyone, including its practitioners. We are losing the human value of everyone whose life and contribution is diminished by the residual costs of our shared history. The life of a nation is not a see-saw, in which harm to some automatically surfaces as benefits to others. This is self-evident in a moral sense. It is less self-evident in an economic sense, but it is true nonetheless. I am aware of no serious analysis that demonstrates the aggregate benefit to non-BIPOC people living in the US today from the residual effects of racist laws and systems in the past. This is not a small point, and I am open to correction. However it is very sloppy reasoning to claim that because members of the BIPOC community suffer residual harm disproportionately, then members of the non-BIPOC community must experience a gain. What is the gain?
Germany, the case you cite, provides a fine example. Does any serious person imagine that the Holocaust benefitted non-Jewish Germans? That Germans today are somehow better off because the Nazis murdered millions of their fellow German men, women and children eighty years ago? Germany lost a vibrant and irreplaceable part of itself, and in so doing made not only Germany but the entire human community poorer and more wretched. There is no enduring “benefit”, whether Germany pays reparations to Israel or not.
Whether we agree about the residual effect of horrors which occurred decades or even centuries ago is moot at a certain point. Someone who wins the lottery and has no idea how to manage the money is soon poor and more resentful of his poverty than he was is the first place. If he doesn’t learn what he needs to know and doesn’t take some responsibility for his choices he has no power. Still.
Efforts to “help” minorities, such as the welfare state, relegated generations to fatherless homes, incentivized single parenthood and destroyed the family system that offers security as a basis for success. Black families were upwardly mobile and closing the income gap in the 30s through 50s, despite the real and persistent prejudice that existed. We are now rightfully recognizing pioneers such as the black women mathematicians who helped launch the first rockets at NASA. Such incredible talent only found its way through persistence, study, and honestly having to be better at what they did than their White and male counterparts. It wasn’t achieved through handouts or extortion. Do you honestly think this will be possible for black women or black men in a few decades if DEI continues? There are medical schools which are now admitting based on race and want to do away with the MCAT—- because black students fall behind on the scores. Would you rather that your future doctor get a pass, or be required to go back and get the education required?
We have seen this before under different names such as Affirmative Action. I don’t care if my Feminist Studies teacher ever got an “A”. I do care if my Neurosurgeon did, and that it stood for achievement and merit, not “equity”.
If one actually looks up the income stats in the United States, Whites are third in income earned behind Asians and East Indians. Conveniently, they are probably labeled “White” for the sake of race hustling but they’re successful because their societies don’t buy in to DEI requirements. They value education, punctuality, merit, work ethic, and family. DEI is the antithesis of that.
Because of our upside-down priorities, China will be eating our lunch while we quiver and quibble about which pronouns to use or which new item is “racist” today.
When our dumbed down educational system starts producing doctors who lose patients, pilots who can’t fly, air traffic controllers who were hired because “diversity” and social workers instead of police officers, people will die.
This will do nothing to help mend any relationships between races, and, in fact, may irreparably harm them.
No amount of wailing about the past, about “generational trauma”, reparations, or toppling statues will fix that. It just hurts everyone, as you so rightly pointed out.
The stats on Black progress before 1970 have always interested me. I wish I knew more about that.
Squirrel friend- hunty, white prople benefit from a system, a government, that has placed white people vastly far ahead in earnings, old money, power and agency.., our military was segregated giphy until AFTER the Second World War…. if a citizen of Denmark was to emigrate to the United States and at the same time a citizen of Sierra Leon (A shit hole country) you believe they’ll both experience life in America, equally? Y’all are too funny.
We can’t change what happened. But all should equally be accountable snd reconcile this countries past.
I am a descendant of a slave. I know his name I know where he was born and I know where he raised his family. I’m his great grandson. I have to reconcile that if it wasn’t for slavery I wouldn’t be here. I’m proud.
But you Yuks… twist yourselves inside out to bemoan so many that have endured to inspire and you slander snd pander to be contrary, well, it’s a color of ambivalence that is abhorrent.
I have fought to piece together my families history so that I can learn and teach. I joined this Free Black Thought thing and boy did I turn a wrong corner.
Please “Kill Your Idols”
How do you think about the non-white ethnic groups that are doing so much better economically than white people? What is your understanding of how that has happened?
Hey, this dude called you “Karen”, too. Proving once again the theory that ad hominems are for those who cannot produce a cohesive argument.
I’d need some very specific data and evidence of this and non-white ethnic groups can be a very large number. You also don’t provide any specifics regarding nationality, immigration status, and to what degree is doing “SO much better.” If you want to compel discourse present some specific data. If you want to be a Karen, congrats!
Apparently, tens of millions of Asians, Jews, Arabs are doing fine in this country. Seems BIPOC is not monolithic. In fact, Caribbean blacks do very well too.
How are modern Germans paying for the Holocaust?
If anything the state acknowledged it, which the US does incessantly, but the people have moved on, German and Jew.
Thats the point.
Move on. Best country in the world to be oppressed, but as per the thesis of this article, there is a delusion that the specific, particular Afr Am experience is unique, globally, forever, before and after endlessly.
Its not true and its bad for black people.
Thank you. Well put. I do believe that Germany has mostly moved on. I wouldn’t begrudge some payment to any slave still living, even relatives directly and provably descended from slaves.
After that, where does it stop? Are White people still “born racist”? Do we still have to walk on eggshells and mince our words and degrade ourselves and America’s institutions to keep paying some debt which never ends? If I’m “born racist”, why should I even care? No amount of DEI Struggle Sessions can UN-birth me. I am who I am solely because of my skin color. Isn’t that the very definition of racism? Apparently Abraham Kendhi means this when he says we need to fight racism with racism. Well, that sounds healthy. Give that guy a PhD.
Many people, even White folk, surprisingly, did not have easy lives, intact families, affordable education or higher incomes. We don’t . Ask anyone in Appalachia.I am most grateful to my public grade school, who still taught the basics of English, Phonics, Reading, Math, Art, Music, and Civics. Without that, I don’t know where I’d be, and I didn’t have to deal with inner-city violence, drugs, and demoralization. I know that’s real. I just don’t think “equity” is the answer. Neither is reparations. Neither is violence and public destruction.
We spent lots of class time on other cultures. We just called it Social Studies, not DEI and it was not political. I had black friends and the black family who lived next door had a nicer house and were better educated than my parents were. I babysat their son, taught him drawing, and he grew up to be a graphic designer. This was well before BLM and DEI and CRT told me that I was really his “oppressor” should avoid using certain phrases or words, internalize intense guilt for even existing and make it thoroughly impossible for himand I to be anywhere near comfortable around each other. Gosh, I’m sure his life would have been so much more fulfilling and “equitable” had I just avoided him like the plague for fear of offending him.
Same with all the inner city kids I helped paint a mural with and start a community garden and listened to about their abusive family members during craft time. I guess I should not have exposed them to the glare of my evil White Privilege and told them to go loot a Walgreens. The Boys and Girls Club may not know all those donations I made were from a White lady. I guess I won’t give more in the future.
OK, sarcasm isn’t pretty but it illustrates the sad fact that there are plenty of people like me. Sincere people who didn’t care much about the color of someone marginalized but tried to help, or were naturally drawn into friendship with a person they liked—regardless of color. I am told I can’t be “colorblind” now. The result is that now my interactions with people of color are much more likely to be studied, measured, superficial and slightly uncomfortable where they weren’t before. This might be interpreted as “racism”, but it is actually the result of the extensive cultural and sometimes physical bullying known as “Social Justice”.
Martin Luther King is rolling in his grave, while I shed some tears for all the good that the current “equity” regime will never know it prevented from ever happening at all.
You have a very monolithic case of malignant narcissism. I lived in Germany for 11 years and speak the language in as far as your understanding of “moving on” how do you know this.? And as I said, where is all this data about all these people doing well, your presumptuousness and the arrogance of your ignorance is disturbing.
And your broad stroking regarding what the US government has relentlessly addressed, is a pile of horseshit.
Germany has paid Israel many billions of dollars in reparations. Why do you think Israel has such a powerful military?
You have no fax you have no data. You have no statistics so you can’t create your own facts although obviously, you feel that you can’t and with that… I am over your trolling.
If you can’t back up all of these platitudes about how everyone is doing so well, and what’s good or not good for Black people then keep your own free, black thoughts to your own white self.
your skills that rhetorical persuasion are limited, and you should reconsider your broad stroking, and how it bring to absolutely no merit or value to a discussion of this magnitude. Best of luck. Since the last thing you want is to be “awakened“ from your coma, we on this side of the living are on moved by your “everything’s and everybody is doing just fine” or better yet…
Nam myoho renge kyo
jeder hat so sein Ding
Weird that you came to a publication named “Free Black Thought” and had a meltdown when you found out that “”Free Thought” includes other opinions and data than your own. MSNBC is still on, though. You can still catch Joy Reid.
Excuse me, Slick, but I think you were the one that melted down when all I wrote “You should stick to working “mostly with oils”
Where is this bullshit article where the NYTimes covered for Stalin?
Yeah I made a huge mistake turning into this Free Black Thought. it’s a trap. A whole bunch of Trump supporters masquerading as Black folks. Lies.
You sure ain’t black snd clearly not free.
If what you say is true, then California's Asians are either superhuman or Blacks are inferior. We had Chinese Exclusion Act and massacres. We sent Japanese to Internment camps and stole all their property but made reparations to those specifically injured only after they had already worked their way back to the top despite discrimination. Vietnamese came here with nothing and faced hatred because they were "gooks," but they worked their way to the top. Millions of Blacks overcame and thrived. Those Blacks, who had all the doors opened to them with the Poverty Programs and Affirmative Action but who chose to stick with the pity party, are at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder and it has nothing to do with White Privilege. It has to with either bad choices or inherent inferiority. I like to think it was due to making bad choices by listening the faux friends, but maybe I'm wrong.
There are still Holocaust survivors left today, though the numbers are dwindling. Their trauma is still alive—- not “generational.” Huge difference.
I would also point out that the majority of hate crimes, both here and abroad, are committed against Jews.
Somehow, I don’t see Jews burning down buildings , looting stores-or demanding that entire educational structures be dumbed-down to make them “equal”. Maybe it is because Jews value education—-real education more than anything else.
You can’t keep labeling all the tools which help any human being become more successful as “Too White”, replace hard work with welfare and expect a future that resembles the future of those who made different choices.
Personal responsibility is everything. It is the only real power you have.
Then go with that if that’s what you believe.
Ain’t nobody stopping you. Just remember that the concept of pure white blood started in 1048 with the Crusades… thats a millennia of white supremacy. The Black skinned slaves arrived in 1619. By the time the Civil War ended there were 4 Million African slaves in America. Even before 1619 Natives were doomed. I don’t label facts. They speak for themselves.
I find your comments to me ironic, as a raccoon on meth has a better grasp of history than you do.
Ignoring the Holocaust as usual. 50 million dead Chinese under Mao. I don't think you know much about 'global history.' You know about one strand of your 'peoples' history. You need to learn actual history. Is Polish, Armenian, Irish, Jewish, German history all just 'the whites.' My lord.
Thank you. Excellent point.
Very informative
Thank you..
American slavery was not unique, but it was different. With the European conquest of North and South America an economic opportunity of historic proportions opened. With the decimation of native populations by disease, land, the source of the majority of wealth in Europe, vast tracts of agricultural land were open for the taking. However, without a labor force, the land was of very limited value. The importation of poor English and Irishmen into Barbados in the early 1600’s to undertake indentured work in the sugarcane fields wasn’t panning out. The tropical heat was too much for the white laborers, so the English began to bring captured Africans into Barbados, where they worked alongside the indentured Brits and Irish. Since the Africans were not Christians the British plantation owners, eyeing the great wealth they anticipated lay within their grasp, could set aside their Christian values and conveniently conclude that Black Africans were not human beings at all and had no more rights than livestock. Barbadian plantation owners grew rich, but Barbados is a very small island, and the younger sons of the plantation owners had no more land to grab as their own, though the supply of enslaved Africans was seemingly infinite. Thus they set off to the wilds of South Carolina with their slaves, essentially establishing South Carolina as a sub-colony of Barbados, establishing the first “get fabulously rich quick” land/slave scheme in what would become the United States. The scale of the wealth made South Carolina the fiercest, most deranged, defenders of the slave system. They were the Billionaires of their age, and emancipation would largely wipeout their fortunes, so they created a total ideology that reduced their slaves to dangerous, wildly sexualized animals who must be imprisoned on plantations lest they run free and rape every white woman and kill every white man. We live with the after effects of this defamation and propoganda to this very day. THAT is what makes American slavery different.
You’re talking about dehumanization. Of course it was done in a particular way in America, but do you think other slave states didn’t do all they could to dehumanize their slaves in their own way? Arab slave states castrated their African slaves to control their sexuality and ensure they could never reproduce. One reason we never hear about that story, there being no ‘generational trauma’ to deal with. Which is ‘worse’? Or more ‘unique’? Dehumanization is a precondition of all slavery and genocide.
In Africa and in the Middle East, slavery continues to this day. Let us note, also, that even in the case of the Mid-Atlantic slave trade it was fellow blacks who sold their brethren into slavery. The majority went to Brazil.
Very true. Slavery in Mauritania, for example, repeats the same historical patterns I described. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2018/jun/08/the-unspeakable-truth-about-slavery-in-mauritania
I would suggest that readers explore the concept of “dhimmitude”, still practiced widely in Islam. Non-Muslims, or Apostates, are systematically dehumanized, seen as “unclean”, inferior, and historically have been forced to pay taxes to their Muslim overlords as well as be forbidden to share the same sidewalks. Constantinople was a Christian city before the Crusades. ( The brutality didn’t start with the West.) Non-Muslims were not only enslaved but executed. I mention this as part of man’s long history of demonizing those he hopes to conquer. It is not exclusive to Caucasian races or religious beliefs.
“Generational Trauma”, as I believe you understand, is a myth in the way that it is presented today. There is no scientific evidence, none at all, to support the concept that emotional trauma is literally and genetically passed on to future generations. Anyone versed in the hard sciences at all recognize this newly-invented attempt to validate the cultural extortion of CRT is, to put it succinctly, baloney. However, considering the current politicized state of science and our educational system which awards PhDs to shoddy scholars such as Kendhi, I am not surprised that this is taught and believed. It is part of the current cycle of “Professors” who teach emotion-driven pap devoid of critical thinking skills to students who are emotion-driven and devoid of critical thinking skills. ( Example: the gentleman who called me “Karen” implied that I was not allowed to criticize Kendhi’s work because Kendhi had a PhD and was a “cancer survivor.” We could argue the validity of the PhD, but surviving cancer has zero to do with that or with the strength of one’s political theory.) “Lived Truth” as is the mode today replaces actual fact because facts refute the claims necessary to continue the cultural Marxist’s favorite tactic: emotional terrorism.
The Social Justice Industrial Complex requires copious amounts of White Liberal Guilt to keep its wheels greased. I have utterly none. I think any smidgen I might have hidden somewhere was erased when Minneapolis was left looking like Beirut on behalf of St. George Floyd.
No one I have ever met is a proponent of slavery. Everyone reviles this practice, as they should, but those who insist that the problem was unique to America in some way forget the fact that it was America (with the help of other Western Allies) who fought a war to end it. The casualties of that war, including blacks but predominantly White soldiers and civilians, were larger than all of WWI and WWII combined. Despite the easy ( and ignorantly simplistic) taunts about Jefferson having had slaves or the childish tantrums of Antifa destroying public works, anyone who delves seriously into early American history knows that the Founders laid the foundation for the abolition of slavery within the Constitution. Conflicts within government were no easier to solve then than they are now. This process took decades, culminating in an extremely destructive war and the assassination of a sitting President.
As long as race hustlers like Al Sharpton, Benjamin Crump, BLM, Ibrahim Kendhi and their White counterparts keep cashing in on tripe such as “White Fragility” and “DEI”, black people will continue to forfeit their safety, a meaningful education, and their future while the people who claim to “help” get rich off the terrible history they claim to hate.
It is also a product of being told that one race exists only to “oppress” your own.
It's certainly true that slave societies differed in many particulars. What's not true is that America was the origin of hereditary racial chattel slavery.
Your point about dehumanization made me think of this article: https://time.com/longform/african-slave-trade/
You remind me of one of my favorite lines in a play: “ You are an overexcited little man, whose need for self-expression far exceeds your natural gifts.”
Of course you lack the insight to be thoroughly embarrassed by what you wrote, so I will just wish you well. It is hard to be so angry, unhappy, defensive, and myopic and remain trapped in that self-made prison. Blaming everyone and everything else for that is the very definition of giving up any power you have.
I'm guessing this was directed at the contributor who goes by MADAZHELL?
I am not even sure I replied to who I imagine I did, but your input has been valuable and my comments were meant for someone whose input was not. Thank you.
Yes, you are correct. You have been respectful and tried to share some knowledge. Whether I agree or not, I appreciate your input.
I am in the process of reading a history book:
The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist.
I find this really annoying since this is a paper book that I got from the library and I am having to read it with my actual eyeballs. I have normally been using text-to-speech from e-books for years. It is just so......Primitive!
This book is unusual in that it got a bad review from The Economist, which they withdrew and apologized for. It is without doubt the best book on the subject I have seen. To quote a famous White man to emphasize the difference of enslavement of Africans in the Americas:
Quantity has a quality all its own. - Joseph Stalin
https://www.economist.com/books-and-arts/2014/09/05/our-withdrawn-review-blood-cotton
I searched that essay for 'technol' to see if Justin Suran mentioned technology, or technologies, or technological but those words made no appearance. This entire issue is connected to Europeans developing technologies enabling intercontinental transport and superior weaponry. This is what made the QUANTITY possible.
European intellectualism makes a big deal about words in my opinion. Yeah, slavery existed for thousands of years. Steam Engines did not. The world population did not reach One Billion until 1800. When was the Cotton Gin invented?
I am more of a science/tech individual and have noticed that the humanities types seem to look at reality somewhat differently. It ain't just me, The Two Cultures essay by C P Snow is quite enlightening in my opinion.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/an-update-on-cp-snows-two-cultures/
I think that the power that technology gave White people went to their heads and racism is a rationalization after the fact. Black Americans concentrate on race too much instead of on the technology that empowers the people accused of racism.
But these word games are important because people allow words guide their thoughts. Slavery was driven by economics. What percentage of labor, and therefore slavery, was driven by agriculture to grow food more than 1000 years ago? What percentage of cotton was eaten by Americans before 1860?
Technology may have some role, but education has a larger one. There are countries outside of America and Europe who are poor, superstitious, tribal and devoid of most modern conveniences where slavery still exists. One could argue that they need more manual laborers ( in whatever manner they are obtained) than places which have replaced humans with technology. This will be even truer when factories replace low-level or line workers with machines.
I agree: technology was and is hugely important-- e.g. Portuguese maritime/navigational technology in the 1400s and 1500s. My essay ends around 1600, so I did not discuss later changes. (Steam power was still in its infancy,) But I tried to give a sense of the numbers of people involved, where I could, although many of these statistics are approximate ranges and estimates by necessity. There's an older book by Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Ideologies of Western Dominance (1989) that makes a similar point about technology. I found this recent review that speaks to your point: https://brill.com/view/journals/nwig/96/1-2/article-p133_6.xml?language=en
The Half Has Never Been Told by Edward Baptist does not start until the late 1700s. Cotton and technology created conditions different from previous history. Is there any objective interpretation of history?
I don't believe so. But check out the reference above to Michael Adas's 1989 book and the review of The Reinvention of Atlantic Slavery: Technology, Labor, Race, and Capitalism in the Greater Caribbean.
This too speaks to your point, I think: https://mypages.unh.edu/hoslac/book/slavery-and-science-1500-1888
Thanks, I copied it to my phone. I'll do text-to-speech later.
But is the issue economic servitude with lots of different tactics.
As an electrical engineering drop out gone electronics hi-fi, computer and network tech, I see planned obsolescence as a new form of economic servitude. Go into debt for junk designed to become obsolete while economists ignore the depreciation and say nothing about planned obsolescence.
The term e-waste did not exist when I started college.
I found this interesting journal article. The subtitle reminds me of your point about planned obsolescene and economic servitude: "Henry George on Chattel and Wage Slavery: The American Social Philosopher Condemned Both Forms as Immoral, Irrational Denials of Equality."
Hello, Justin Surand. The fact that any celebrity author has “influence” doesn’t mean that influence is either valuable or positive. It means that there are a lot of gullible people out there who have been specifically conditioned by media and educational institutions to be empty receptacles for all manner of agenda-driven nonsense.
Oh, OK, you are the person who sent me the review of Kendhi’s book. You write much better than he does, and I have seen some of his recorded lectures. He does not strike me as particularly scholarly in either his method or his presentation. I can accept your review and still remain unimpresssed by either his work or the discipline in which he “studies”. This goes for all the other”fill-in-the-blank”—————-Studies that are disappointingly faddish within Liberal Academia. (“Liberal Academia” being basically redundant.”) I will read your sources. You seem earnest and serious.
Check out my review of the YA version of Kendi's book (previously posted on May 18). It does not recommend it.
A fairly good examination of the inaccurate and hyperbolic view that American slavery was meaningfully exceptional. What was meaningfully exceptional was the war that was fought that ultimately freed former slaves.
One thing you seemed to have either accidentally or intentionally ignored in history was that the Bible repeatedly condones slavery and never explicitly condemns it in all its chattel forms. There are instances in the Old Testament when Jehovah supposedly encouraged his followers to enslave people, such as when Moses, at the behest of Jehovah, commands his followers to variously commit genocide and enslave female virgins. And there are passages that state it is okay for followers of Jehovah to possess slaves if they are not fellow followers of Jehovah.
In fact the Bible depicts both Jehovah and eventually Jesus as slave masters, and like Hammurabi’s code, essentially asserts that if a person denies that Jehovah and Jesus are their “master” they are deserving of punishment, even torture. Paul, the primary inventor of Christianity, masochistically revels in being a “slave to Christ.”Christianity, the primary religion of the US, is ultimately a religion that promotes and exults spiritual slavery to a cruel, crazy, and capricious god that supposedly required the execution and torture of his son to quench his wrath for humanity’s disobedience, yet even after the perverse spectacle, demands obedience at the threat of torture and existential destruction.
No, slavery in the US was not surprising or peculiar--the ending of it was.
What percentage of southern White men did not own slaves or come from slave owning families? What were they fighting for? How dumb was that?
When do historians discuss that?
The estimates keep changing, but here's one mainstream source that has 3 out of 4 southerners owning no slaves and 0.1 percent of all southerners owning 100 slaves or more. https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teaching-resource/statistics-slaves-and-slaveholdings
So if 66% of those who had no slaves had refused to fight the war might have been shorter. Group Think is a bitch. Must have been Trump voters.
James MacPherson wrote a book called What They Fought For, which uses letters and diaries to get into the heads of the soldiers who fought the Civil War. I haven't read it but have always wanted to.
Thanks, never heard of it.
The book, "White Trash," by Nancy Isenberg, attempted to address some of these questions.
Thanks, she did YouTube videos.
The author herself has basically admitted that it was a fable—-“her truth”, not actual historical truth. This is how Cultural Marxists erase truth and history itself to impose their brave new world. We are obsessed with race now, but none of this is actually about rac e. I suggest reading some of David Horowitz’s account of his time with the Black Panthers in the 60s and a book called “Days of Rage” by Bryan Burrow about the Weather Underground. Very well researched. Everything old is new again.
Defactualization, Arendt called it.