I’m going to modify Mahatma Gandhi’s classic aphorism on the course of dissident politics.
First they ignore you.
Then they mock you.
Then they pathologize you.
Then they attack you.
Then you win.
The term “whiteness” has become a key term in the word salad of modern progressive duckspeak.
It it feels like the terms is a narrative “MacGuffin”, designed to be a little bit of everything as well as just nothing enough to be flexible?
To anyone not predisposed to conversion, the gospel of whiteness obfuscates more than it reveals about the American experience. To begin with, we never really know exactly what whiteness is. This promiscuous concept sometimes appears as just another word for racist ideas, while other times it connotes power, material benefit, social opportunity, or just about anything else its adherents desire. In his book’s introduction alone, Roediger defines whiteness as a “racial identity,” an “ethnicity,” “status and privileges conferred by race,” “racism,” “white supremacy,” and “a way in which white workers responded to a fear of dependency on wage labor and to the necessities of work discipline.” This grab bag of meanings suggests that whiteness is little more than a deus ex machina lowered onto the historical stage to wondrously resolve a tangle of problems. Too wondrously.
Moreover, we seldom see how whiteness actually works in the real world. This reified concept hovers above lived experience, mysteriously bending the arc of history. The underlying problem is a paucity, or distortion, of supporting facts, which leaves Saxton and Roediger pounding many evidentiary square pegs into explanatory round holes. For example, Saxton excoriates the Whig Party in the 1830s and 1840s for its combination of capitalist bias and elitist racism, but cites as his main example John Quincy Adams, one of America’s staunchest opponents of slavery. Roediger misleads similarly with his jaundiced analysis of “freeman.” This term and its partner, “free labor,” indeed took on a racialized meaning in antebellum America that contrasted with the bound labor of African-American slaves. But it also became the central feature of the anti-slavery movement as it fueled growing denunciations of slave labor, prompted opposition to its expansion into the western territories, and inspired the founding of the anti-slavery Republican Party in the 1850s.
Both historians suffer the same blind spot. They portray a 19th-century America in which citizens either embraced black freedom and equality without reservation or embraced whiteness. This produces not a gathering of information and fair-minded analysis that leads to a measured judgment, the historian’s task, but a process where evidence is cherry-picked or twisted to buttress a predetermined conclusion. It oversimplifies the messy, tangled, multifaceted development of the American republic, replete with ambiguous motivations and unintended consequences, and replaces it with a simplistic morality play where all whites are racists outright, or racist dupes. The monocausal steamroller of whiteness history, lumbering about amid historical complexity, simply flattens the American past.
Last week, one of Ben Shapiro’s podcasts pointed out that among the modern left’s greatest sins is its reductionism – the need it has to try, not to boil down and condense this complicated world, but to just oversimplify it, to turn all problems, causes and solutions into absurdly oversimplified bromides – suitable more for sorting the world into believers and heretics than actually addressing anything.
Beyond that? “Whiteness” is to today’s woke mob what “Counterrevolutionary” was to the NKVD: a malleable, one-charge-fits-all that could mean whatever the inquisitor wanted it to mean to justify a verdict that had been decided in advance.
When everything is about “whiteness” (or any misbegotten “-ness”) and “privilege”, then nothing really is.
Chattel slavery was the worst thing the West ever adopted.
Slavery as practiced by the Greeks and Romans was completely different, and until the English took note of the slave trade going on between the Portuguese and Middle Eastern Kingdoms, indentured servitude of poor and criminal whites was practiced rather than chattel slavery (although in practice there wasn’t a lot of difference).
It denigrated Africans, sure, but from a historical and cultural perspective, it did as much, or more harm to white masters than black slaves.
Somewhere, Dr. King is doing a double face-palm.
Herr Doktor Professor Strunk wrote:
“Slavery as practiced by the Greeks and Romans was completely different, . . . ”
It gave the owner the right to have sex with his slaves, male and female, and this was not an uncommon occurrence. Romans, esp., conceived of sex as penetration with the male organ. They did not really believe that lesbianism was a thing, since whatever the girls were doing with each other, it wasn’t sex.
And in same sex relations between men, a profound difference was made between the catcher & the receiver. No shame was attached to acting the male part, but the stain of acting the female part spread across generations. For this reason merely to have had a male ancestor who was a slave was a blot that could never be cleansed.
The Romans justified their holding of slaves by way of the right of the victor. There was nothing in there philosophy that said the powerful owed anything to the weak.
In contrast,Christian slave keeping was always on shaky moral ground, especially slavery that was a condition of birth, and not punishment for an act. Before Darwin, it was justified on shaky biblical grounds, after Darwin, on shaky biological grounds.
To societies that tolerated or encouraged slavery, slaves eventually became the foundation of most wealth and the slave owners would go to bizarre lengths to justify it. Aristotle built a system of virtue that we follow today. It states that a thing is virtuous when used for its rightful purpose, and this rightful purpose is part of that thing. Money, wine, food, animals, all had an inborn natural purpose, and it was virtuous to use these things for that purpose. For example, wine was made to give elation and promote dialog and friendship, not to make you wallow in drunkeness.
Anyway, Aristotle punted on slavery. Some people, he said, were just born to be slaves, and so it was virtuous to make slaves of them.
Those who have organized the system to keep wealth and power flowing to them automatically are always loathe to see that system disrupted, so screw the slaves. It’s not really all that different for our “elites” today.
If you read the memoirs of people on the frontier in or near the ante-bellum south (as Lincoln was), their attacks on slavery were not distinguished from their concern for the common man, especially the small farmer.
Where Lincoln was raised, farmers had to compete on the price of their product with the price of the same product grown the neighboring slave states of Missouri and Kentucky. It makes it easier to understand the ante-bellum controversy between admitting states as slave states or as free states when you know that there were no slave states where small family farmers flourished. Slavery crushed the small farmer where it was introduced.
In his autobiography, US Grant (who did not like Texas or Texans), said that the reason Texas was so big was because Texas was admitted as a single state to keep its number of senators down. The Texans themselves wanted Texas to broken up into at lest four states for their admissions to the Union.
“Where Lincoln was raised, farmers had to compete on the price of their product with the price of the same product grown the neighboring slave states of Missouri and Kentucky. It makes it easier to understand the ante-bellum controversy between admitting states as slave states or as free states when you know that there were no slave states where small family farmers flourished.”
Hold up, MO.
In the 18th century, a slave destined and fit for agriculture cost between $1500 and $2000. There wasn’t a truck farmer in the country that could afford that.
Slaves were purchased to grow, pick and process commodities; cotton primarily, but also rice and indigo. That’s not to say they didn’t tend gardens, to the contrary, most enslaved people tended gardens large enough to supply themselves, and the plantation owners with fresh produce.
So, it’s true that in slave holding states, small commodities farmers were at a distinct disadvantage, but 99% were yeoman farmers to begin with. That being said, farmers of corn were producing a surplus, and had no competition from slave holders…they were doing quite well.
Lincoln lived in Springfield IL., a long, long way from the nearest slave holding state (Missouri, south of the 36º 30’ parallel). No one was hauling vegetables that far and Lincoln wasn’t producing commodities.
Just the facts, sir.
Oh, and one last thing.
The one commodity that small yeoman farmers *did* grow was tobacco. They could compete because it was not 1/2 as labor intensive, or as profitable as cotton farming…and as a result, cotton farmers never became big producers of tobacco because they couldn’t make their investment in human labor pay off at a profit.
For that reason, tobacco continued to be a major commodity in the South long after the cotton market had dried up.
Oh, and one last, last thing that speaks to my observation of the damage slavery did to slaveholders.
Because they didn’t make use slave labor (to the extent of cotton farmers), tobacco farmers had to innovate to increase their production. The tobacco planter, which dug a hole, planted and watered seedlings, was invented long before the cotton gin (which ironically increased the demand for slave labor).
By depending on the labor of others, cotton planters were dis-incentivized from modernizing their farming methods, which, since they were the men with the money, kept the entire region from jumping into the the industrial revolution until after re-construction….slavery itself contributed to the fall of the ante-bellum South.
Yes, yes, and yes, Doctor. Those comments agree with what I thought I knew as well. You might also mention, for the fun of it, what race the first slave owner was. And also that North America took in only a small, tiny even percentage of African slaves from 1500 – 1900; most went to Portuguese Brazil.
Pete,if slavery did not on the whole reduce the cost of labor, you’re going to have trouble explaining why mechanical planting and harvesting wasn’t done in slave areas, no? For that matter, you’re also going to have trouble explaining why all of the secession documents mentioned slavery, and why people fought to maintain it and spread it. Really, if it was comparable or less profitable than hiring free men, why bother buying slaves who could run away and hiring overseers (= thugs) to drive them to work?
My take is that the whole deal has, as MO notes, a lot to do with what socialism is today. It’s a great way for those in charge to accumulate a lot of property they would never be able to get in free markets and probably also take significant advantage of the female portion of the help.
In short, bike, the mechanization of cotton farming didn’t exist until the 20th century.
The economics of slavery versus freehold farming are too complex to debate in a blog comment section. I know that the people who were freehold farmers (aka yeoman farmers who owned the land that they farmed) could not compete with plantation farming by slaves. This was the reason why popular sentiment in the North was against admitting new states as slave states. Travelers, at the time, commented on the different economies of slave states versus free states. In free states, politics was dominated by the economy of small farms and the towns they supported. In slave states, politics was dominated by the large plantation owning families.
In free states, politics was dominated by the economy of small farms and the towns they supported. In slave states, politics was dominated by the large plantation owning families.
So in other words, NOTHING changed. Back to slavery, you sheeople!
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