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Slavery: Racist: How?
Loren Michael
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
What is a rhetorically efficient and/or easily cite-able means of showing that slavery, as practiced in America, was racist and that people in the American South felt that blacks were subhuman?
Loren Michael on
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Chapter 2: Drawing the Color Line appears to be exactly what you are looking for.
Fuck off. I'm having an argument. I'm not sure how to confront holocaust denial-like denial of slavery in the American South being racist.
Monolithic_Dome, that was interesting, but not quite helpful re: blacks being regarded as subhuman.
edit* WHoa that was ban worthy...okay, this one is better:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFJQ-XHcUGg
What part of the process - from buying them like cattle from African warlords in exchange for beads, to shipping them for weeks across the ocean in conditions worse than those afforded a veal calf, to being sold at auctions in America as basic commodities, to being forced into a life where they have no freedom of choice and their complete existence revolves around doing what they are told for no pay and no option to leave - isn't indicative of their masters considering them subhuman?
The occasional 'humane' owner who might toss them a blanket on a cold night or not beat them savagely every time they did something wrong doesn't really count much towards proving the statement 'people who owned black slaves weren't racist'.
Alternatively, how many white slaves were there in America?
It's pretty rare that you find this kind of wisdom down here in H/A.
It's typically therapeutic for me. I don't normally get tripped up like this. I appreciate the ability to crowdsource when I do though.
But are their any reliable statistics on what the average plantation was like? I mean we've all read the horror stories about slaves being made an example of, poor nutrition, etc etc. I'm not here to argue that conditions were great. I'm just very curious what it was like in a typical plantation. How much free time was a slave given, how much of their own culture were they allowed to keep, etc etc.
Thanks.
Defending views beyond the limit of reason can help you understand them better. That's assuming you go in to an otherwise pointless discussion with that goal. Arguing for the sake of argument is dumb.
Pretty much. I do this both to enhance my own understanding and to better my rhetorical ability.
It's actually normally pretty damn good. Brainfart today.
The whole 3/5ths of a person is a good place to start.
If I had to guess, not that it was okay, but that it wasn't inherently racist, since every culture and every race has had/been subject to slavery at some point.
The systemic reliance on black slaves in the US doesn't exactly make it a typical example of the practice.
It wasn't until later that raids on Africa became more prominent as more workers were needed. Racism in the practice became much more common after they were seen more as cattle than as workers. I'd imagine it also evolved as a defense mechanism for justification as the practice started to become seen as less appealing.
Slavery of course goes beyond African slaves (heck, the word is derived from the Slavs of Easter Europe), but I would imagine that race has always played a strong element in it - much easier to enslave someone if you can see them as an "other".
But what I'm trying to say though is that at some point most other examples of slavery vanished (at least in Europe) until slavery became so closely associated with slaves from Africa - so I think your source for why that was seen as perfectly acceptable, hundreds of years ago and as recently as the 1860's in the American south - dates back to then. Possibly something the church said about the practice during the Renaissance of something like that.
I mean, they gave people a disease and then did not treat them for it because they seemed to not care about their condition. Using people as lab animals without telling them seems to me to be a pretty clear sign that they are sub-human.
And really all you need to bring up is the concept that slaves counted, once they were free, as what? Three-fifths of a vote compared to white people. Pretty blatant that they were considered to be not human, when given the Constitution was created for all people and they did not even get a fair shake.
....what? Just because every race has been subject to slavery (don't know if that's true) doesn't make the practice any less racist.
Any action where race is used as a criterion for discrimination/lesser treatment is racist. That's sort of the definition.
As far as I know, once they got the vote, it was still a whole vote. The 3/5ths of a person was in relation to the census data, and obtaining more power in the Congress and getting more representatives by counting the slaves in the represented population.
The point is, slavery in a broader sense divorced from the American practice wasn't always about using race as a criterion. It was largely about collecting defeated enemies/tribes and whoever you could get your hands on.
Ah... hmm. Interesting idea. I've never really considered slavery in non-racist terms before.
It's a bit of a moot point in the context of this thread though, since OP specifically is looking at American slavery.
Yeah, the 3/5ths rule is actually not a good example of racism. The South wanted slaves counted as a whole person, which would give them many more votes in Congress. It's the North that wanted slaves counted less, or not at all. The 3/5ths rule was a compromise. It didn't have anything to do with thinking that blacks were only 3/5ths of a person. The same issue would have arisen no matter what race the slaves were. Slave owners would have been ecstatic to have their slaves counted as a whole person—that would mean a huge Southern contingent in Congress, and much less likelihood that slavery would ever become illegal.
That might depend on how you view indentured servitude. But ultimately, it's not the same thing.
Do not engage the Watermelons.
Most slaveowners in the American South (at least pre cotton gin, but I think through to the Civil War) only had 1 or 2 slaves. They were a very precious commodity and often treated pretty well (as one would treat a horse then or perhaps a nice car today) because owning a slave was a substantial investment and if a slave should die there was no insurance to collect. Plantation owners who could afford to starve and kill their slaves were a small fraction of the small fraction of people who could afford any slaves at all.
Slaves were still property, of course, and I'm certainly not condoning slaveholder's actions.
This is the "Jim Crow Museum of Racism", which is kind of a travelling museum exhibit (or something) of racist Americana. There's also a lot of interesting articles to supplement it which trace back various kinds of racist charicatures and their origins in the slave period (even to the point of tracing back modern stereotypes to their slave-era equivalents). It's also well-written and very interesting, so I highly recommend it.
Nor do I, but that's what I figured. Thanks.
It was a sort of perversion of Evolution - wherein God had tried and failed several times to create mankind, and each race was a sort of iteration, with whites naturally being at the top. It would go something like
Asians
Native Americans
So on and so forth
And so on and so forth. Thus, the slave owners justified their slavery believed they were doing the slaves a great service by taking them in and exposing them to white culture. Sort of an early White Man's Burden before we actively began colonizing Africa.
Take a look at Fitzhugh's Universal Law of Slavery:
"Whilst, as a general and abstract question, negro slavery has no other claims over other forms of slavery, except that from inferiority, or rather peculiarity, of race, almost all negroes require masters, whilst only the children, the women, and the very weak, poor, and ignorant, &c., among the whites, need some protective and governing relation of this kind; yet as a subject of temporary, but worldwide importance, negro slavery has become the most necessary of all human institutions."
So, in some eyes they were sort-of human, but certainly less-developed and therefor worth less than white people.
Huh, I didn't know that. Then again, maybe I did and I just forgot, as most of what I know comes from high school AP US History. Nevertheless, I'm pretty sure I do remember hearing everything else.
which is why they were worked to death in the West Indies, especially
It likely doesn't matter much. At the basest level, people considered slaves to be no more than tools. And some people just treat their tools like shit. Usually because, to them, they are easy to replace. It's probably likely that anywhere that had a high turnover in slave labour probably didn't bother with insurance of any sort.
And besides, sooner or later, no insurance company will continue doing that kind of business if they have to keep paying out. No matter how high the premiums get.
Do not engage the Watermelons.
I'm worried that your insane debating partner would, rather than understanding this as a rock-bed of racism that almost every American shared, they'd use it to explain that abolitionists were the real racists.
In regards to your specific question regarding racism and it's relationship to slavery, the book makes the following argument, well supported by historical evidence:
- In the beginning, when white Europeans met Africans and Native Americans, the Euro's writings regard them as intelligent and helpful with a rich, magnificent culture. The native Africans and Americans were generally helpful and indeed usually helped the European "settlers" and "explorers" survive. During these initial stages, the vast majority of historical evidence suggests that Europeans held them in very high esteem.
- As the white Europeans moved from initial settlements and explorations to colonies and exploitation of resources, including that of enslaving natives, the attitude summarily changes. This is exasperated in the Americas by the quick spread of European diseases, such as smallpox, measles, bubonic plague, and influenza, which decimated the native American population and led the Europeans to believe that God was "on their side." The general European zeitgeist slowly degenerates into viewing both Africans and Native Americans as inferior: stupid, slow, and backwards. This is heavily backed up by historical evidence from the times.
- As you move from the 1500s to the time of the Civil War in the United States, the general viewpoint towards blacks has changed dramatically. African-Americans have been enslaved for centuries in the Americas by this point, and in the minds of most Americans, the two ideas have become inexorably linked. Part of the rhetoric in favor of slavery romanticizes the institution as keeping the black man happy and fed, for he could do no good elsewhere. He's just not smart enough. God didn't make him that way.
And so on.
There's a really easy and obvious explanation for the racism. White Europeans first recognized the obvious: the native Africans were intelligent and well-cultured. But they explored for a reason: wealth. And there is a great deal of wealth in slavery. It's especially useful for cultivating more wealth, in cotton fields and gold mines. So they enslaved them. And once you have someone under your control, it's very easy to think much less of them. Look at the 1971 Stanford Prison experiment. One's mind justifies one's actions, and it quickly leads one to believe that the other person you're exploiting is less than human. And when all those people you're exploiting share something in common - like, say, race - your mind links race and the sub-humane regard you have for them. Add in a few hundred years of this and millions upon millions of slaves, and the general zeitgeist changes into the pervasive, destructive racism that has tore this nation apart for it's entire history, and continues to irradiate the current cultural landscape.
So there you go.
Read that book.
You want to read about the nadir.
"The "nadir of American race relations" is a phrase referring to the period in United States history from the end of Reconstruction to the beginning of the 20th Century, when racism was deemed to be worse than in any other post-bellum period. During this period, African Americans lost many civil rights gains made during Reconstruction. Anti-black violence, lynchings, segregation, legal racial discrimination, and expressions of white supremacy increased."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nadir_of_American_race_relations
If you don't mind, could you briefly expand on this?
in that some states really wanted the right to own slaves
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Southern States (read: Slave Owning States) felt they were being unfairly stacked against. At that time, it was a subtle, 'unsaid' requirement that new states must have laws in their proposed Constitutions outlawing slavery. The idea was to gain a large enough voting bloc in Congress to pass an anti-slavery law or amendment since sentiment was largely drifting that way.
The South believed that according to the rules, they should've been able to do whatever they wanted within their own borders and that a national law eliminating the sale and possession of people was unfair.
Do not engage the Watermelons.
Insurance companies figured out in the early days of New World colonization and high seas piracy that anything that's worth money to somebody else is worth money to them, too. Just like today, you could insure just about anything that was worth money back then, and if it was a major part of your livelihood, it was in your best interest to do so. Slaves could be insured against damage, death, escape, just about anything that would cause you to lose your investment before their expected lifespan.
Not to say everyone did. Not everybody insures their house or life today, either, but there have always been people with more prudence than money who would rather be safe and broke than rich and sorry. Just like shipping accross the ocean, how much loss you can afford to eat out of pocket would influence your decision. Many plantation owners could afford high turnover, but others would risk losing their land if they came up short and cotton rotted in the fields because there wasn't enough hands to harvest it.