Apparently Yvette Clarke of the New York 11th said on the Colbert Report that the Dutch owned slaves in Brooklyn in 1898. Is this at all plausible? Most folks on the website that featured the clip are immediately laughing at her stupidity, but I figured I’d get the straight dope before instantly assuming she’s wrong about a subject I know nothing about.
Perhaps that should be 1798?
No one legally owned slaves in the US in 1898.
The Dutch gave New York back to the English in 1674 (after originally giving it to them in 1665 and then taking it back). So they hadn’t been in charge of things for over two centuries in 1898.
There were slaves under the Dutch, but New York started abolishing slavery in 1799. It was a slow process – slaves weren’t automatically freed, but their children were (after time as indentured servants, though). There was full emancipation in 1827 (pretty much: the indentured servant rule theoretically could have allowed slaves until the 1850s).
By 1898, there were no slaves in New York, nor anywhere else in the US.
I saw that interview and thought that Colbert was gently trying to point out her inaccuracy.
Dutch rule may have been over, but there were still plenty of ethnic Dutch in New York, many of them quite rich and influential. Perhaps that’s who she was referring to (assuming she meant 1798 or 1698).
I guess it could be parsed to mean some Dutch in Brooklyn owned slaves in some other country at the time. Seems like a pretty unlikely interpretation though. Don’t know who Yvette Clarke is, but it’s either a mistake, or she’s not too bright.
No one anywhere in the Western Hemisphere, nor anyone in any Dutch colonies, legally owned slaves in 1898. The Netherlands abolished the slave trade by 1818, and abolished slavery in their colonies in 1863. Brazil was the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, in 1888.
From the clips I saw, it doesn’t seem like she meant some other date. There is no reason she would attribute owning slaves to just the Dutch if she meant any time after New Amsterdam was a Dutch colony. Nor does it really look like she was joking, as she now claims. It seems as if she just had no clear idea of when slavery was abolished, or when Dutch rule ended.
She is a member of Congress from Brooklyn and was being interviewed as part of Colbert’s ongoing series, “Better Know a District.” Per this Daily News article, her office claims that she was joking. (Possible, given that Colbert’s segment is not terribly serious, but she didn’t appear to be kidding.)
Or the Dutch are very sneaky.
Dutch givers.
Did you actually read any of the reports? The exchange went as follows:
She was clearly stating that the Dutch owned slaves in Brooklyn in 1898.
U.S. Representative from New York’s 11th Congressional District since 2007.
I would vote for “astonishingly ignorant.”
While she claims to have been joking, I can’t really believe that any politician would feign that degree of stupidity on national television without making it clear that they were kidding.
Nope. Didn’t expect my absurd interpretation to be taken seriously either.
Like Clarke, you gave no indication that you were joking.
Sorry, deadpan delivery is my style. At least you understood the idea was ridiculous.
Yes. He gave her several chances to either correct herself or make quite clear that she was joking; she did neither.
Still, “astonishingly ignorant” may be a bit too harsh. She was correct that Brooklyn and New York had once been Dutch, and had once had slavery. Both these facts are, shall we say, underknown.
She was just wildly off on the dates. While this is at a certain level inexcusable, I have realized that for quite a lot of people the relative timing of events in history before their own lifetimes is remarkably vague. Errors of a hundred years or more are flat common.
Ok, had it on DVR. I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and call it a major brain fart. She’s probably not experienced in answering questions without canned responses. Colbert does that to a lot of people. I’d guess she’s pretty ignorant and not too bright though.
It’s still not clear to me that you did. But if you want to claim that, go ahead.
Unable to parse that. Unclear that I did what?
Jesus Christ, dude.
He even said it’s a “pretty unlikely interpretation.”
I think she screwed up the date, realized it about halfway through, and tried to play it off as kidding (starting with “uh… I’m pretty sure there were”, where she seems to be copping a bit of a wink/nod expression).