I have to say…what the fuck? Is there anything I wrote that in any way condoned slavery?
It’d be helpful to see Obama’s entire speech to see if he thought the slaves were dreaming of a better life for their decendents instead of, say, getting the hell outta there and back home.
Even better than the opportunity to demonstrate absolutely nothing about Kobal2’s point, your article shows Ben Carson changed his views in light of the criticism:
He differentiates slave from immigrant and involuntary and voluntary. Or as I showed in my first post with the brilliant analogy, he differentiates immigration from commerce. Good on him! If Obama made a speech similar to Carson’s then he was wrong to do so as well.
Looks like the outrage served its purpose after all.
Kobal2 implied that Carson should not have used the word in connection with slaves. I simply pointed out that Obama too had used it similarly which demonstrated that this was not an unheard-of thing for a politician to do. The comment was in no way intended as a criticism of Kobal2, whose point I in fact agree with. Carson should have been more aware of the consequences of using the term as he did.
The fact that there was no such outrage when Obama used it is interesting. Would you not agree? (I could well have missed it though.)
Uh, no, it’s not interesting. Read the two excerpts again, this time without desperately seeking a gotcha. Do you notice a difference in how the words are used?
I trust you’re a good reader and will notice the rhetorical attention the word gets in Obama’s usage; but if you’re unable to figure it out, lemme know, and I’ll help!
I’m going to guess it has something to do with the qualified use Obama makes of the term, using “in their own way” to indicate that while the slaves were immigrants in the broadest sense any comparison with voluntary immigrants would be limited due to key differences between the groups.
Or, as octopus put it, “Well, that’s different!”. But I suppose apples and oranges are both fruit, therefore one could say they’re the same “in their own way”…
Thanks for the clarification. The difference between being transported as living cargo and immigration is so distinct that it is advisable to avoid confusing them in speeches.
On the other hand, judging from the thread, many people wouldn’t worry too much about conflating the two as Obama and Carson have. Perhaps the degree of outrage caused by Obama’s versus Carson’s statements has more to do with contextual factors such as:
- As Bryan Ekers has wondered, what point was Obama making versus the silly point Carson made about hopes for the future and implying personal failings on the part of those who died. In other words, Obama tailored his message for liberals, Carson for conservatives, but only liberals would become outraged by the comparison, particularly when it involves such a gross distortion of how slaves probably felt about their circumstances.
- People who are most likely to be pissed off by statements like this lean liberal, Obama is one of them, and so his statements get more of a pass because…
2a) …the thoughtless social statements of a conservative usually turn into callous policy and he runs HUD.
2b) …in group bias.
“Well, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist or brain surgeon to do anything besides rocket science and brain surgery.”
Not my expression, but I love it. Applies quite well in this case, I think.
You got it. Obama’s “in their own way” explicitly recognized that this wasn’t a normal use of the word; he was stripping it of its connotations with that phrase, but saying that in a way even enslaved people met the denotation of the word. “Who had not come there voluntarily” called out the important connotation he was setting aside.
Carson made no such distinction in his speech.
Because you used a derogatory slur based on race.
No, because it was hateful and racist. You assumed that, since he is successful, he could not possibly have achieved what he has on his own efforts, but relied on catering to the white establishment. Because, after all, he’s black. Obviously everything has to be given to them - Those People can’t actually achieve anything without being given it.
That’s not actually the problem. It isn’t what you see, it’s what you don’t see except thru the filter of prejudice. You thought Carson came from a privileged background, and this explained his success in becoming one of the most respected surgeons in the world. But that isn’t the case - you just assumed so, and thirty seconds on Google showed that. And now that you have been corrected, you state that you wish to continue with your non-factual characterizations of Dr. Carson.
There’s no need for me to try to make you look bad. You’re doing just fine on your own.
The overwhelming majority of slaves were sold away by coastal African kingdoms (and, later, Carribean slave breeders). Those would, in turn, raid further inland for fresh bodies ; but another effect of the ever-present, ever-growing European demand for negroes was that these kingdoms’ justice systems became a lot more stringent over time and their penalties turned to one verdict fits all. Steal a chicken ? Slavery. Punch someone ? Slavery. Roger a married woman ? Slavery. Diss the king’s embrace of slavery as an open ploy for self-enrichment to the detriment of his own people ? You better believe that’s double slavery.
(I snipped out a lot of the above post.)
Interestingly, it turns out he’s fairly ignorant about how the brain works, too. According to this Washington Post article Carson said about the brain:
So is the United States of America so awesomely awesome that it’s wholeheartedly loved even by people who didn’t want to go there and were subject to dying of disease before arriving and even if they survived the voyage were worked to death as well as tortured and raped and had their children sold away from them? That’s the gist of Carson’s message, no? That America is so amazingly amazing that everyone on Earth wants to go there, even if they have to travel as cargo, even if they have to suffer the occasional inconvenience of an overseer’s whip.
America’s great for everybody unless you’re Muslim, liberal or lazy, in which case - get the fuck out. And by the way, that notion of “come to America, work hard, and make a better life for your children” expired around 1946, so too fucking bad for anyone who wants to give it a shot nowadays. Country’s full; fuck off.
Here’s the infamous 3/5ths clause:
If slaves weren’t considered people, then they must not be the people mentioned in the 3/5ths clause. But of course they were. They are the “all other persons”. So the modern notion that slaves weren’t considered people in 1787 doesn’t make sense.
Also note that racial attitudes in 1787 when the Constitution was drafted were not the same as in 1861 when the Civil War broke out. Beliefs about the inherent inferiority and subhuman status of Africans weren’t nearly as hardened. Originally of course the justification for enslavement of Africans was that they weren’t Christians. The conversion of African slaves to Christianity put an end to that notion, and so some other justification had to be invented, and so racism was invented.
I hadn’t seen that but am not shocked. Surgery is largely a mechanical process where you use structural knowledge of the body along with high levels of manual dexterity to do difficult work on a living human. While I think a typical surgeon is probably intellectually curious enough to be a bit better informed, I don’t doubt there are guys out there like Carson who were smart enough to get through medical school but whose real talent was in their hands.
The whole thing is typical political silliness. Carson obviously wasn’t saying that these slaves came here to pursue their dreams. He meant that once they were here they dreamed of a better life for their descendants, and eventually it came true.
I would think they were more focused on not being torn away from their descendants (children) and not being killed or raped, or brutalized. I think dreaming about the grandkids having a nice life here was not on the forefront of their minds as they were led off of the boat in shackles and brought to the auction grounds to be sold. What would they have had to look at in their new homeland to make them think “Hey, it’ll take some time, but maybe we can make it work here!”.
He didn’t say specifically that they were thinking this “as they were led off of the boat in shackles”. You’re adding this to his words.
But in any event, you can certainly disagree with Ben Carson. I just don’t think what he said is particularly objectionable. Unless you take it out of context, and pretend he was saying something other than what he said.
I expect a few of them were dreaming about getting out of this awful “America” place and back to Africa.
If that’s what he was saying, then he was saying something of such an utterly trivial nature when taken literally that it invites this very kind of scrutiny into his motives for saying it, given the context of the history of black people in this country.