yeah, thats pretty much what I figured you’d say
Then why did you say all the idiotic things that you said? You’re not smart enough to have figured that out.
I don’t. I recently started doing genealogical research, because I knew almost nothing about my paternal ancestors. A cousin was also doing some research and found documentation that the farm of my three times g-grandfather was a stop on the Underground Railroad (in Ohio). I was elated.
Further research on my own found first one slaveowner (of one slave) in 18th C. North Carolina, but he ended up in Pennsylvania --without any slaves of course --by the time of his death. That was hard to find, but it wasn’t until I found a branch line of more distant cousins in Tennessee in the early 19th C with four slaves that I felt sick to my stomach and wanted to vomit. I feel no kinship (and wish I had none!) with those assholes…
I don’t either. I find it extremely hard to feel any sympathy for anyone who has treated people so poorly that they could literally be killed by them and I’d still feel more sympathy for the killer (e.g. the slave) then the dead person or their family. I couldn’t fault any slave for trying to escape, nor for killing their master if that master stood in the way of their escape, even if they weren’t regularly brutalized or raped.
According to my father’s genealogical research, we might have one ancestor in the late 18th or early 19th century who owned a single slave, but we haven’t confirmed this. According to our DNA ancestry (from 23andMe), my grandfather (poor white southerner) was about 1/8th black (so my dad is 1/16th and I am 1/32nd). The supposed explanation for his relatively dark skin (before we did the DNA tests) was a combination of full time farm labor in the sun as a child, and Native American ancestry, but now those ‘explanations’ seem like pretty clear fabrications meant to cover up his true ancestry (although it’s entirely possible he didn’t know it – the Native American story goes back a few generations). These were north Florida and south Georgia dirt poor ‘white’ southerners.
It’s not so much about sympathy as it is projection-when people imagine living there and then, who do they see themselves as? Without conscious attention/deliberate awareness, I think people tend to imagine themselves as a racial analogue.
I imagine so – another sign of how we’re socially conditioned to see race as somehow a more important or fundamental difference then, say, height, hair color, facial structure, hairiness, or other superficial differences.
I partly agree and partly disagree with this.
The university where i teach is in a relatively conservative area - not hard-core Southern evangelical or anything like that, but San Diego county has its fair share of relatively conservative folks. Plenty of my students come from Republican families, and plenty of them clearly support conservative economic policies as well as some conservative social and cultural positions. Over the last year, i’ve heard a number of students on our campus express open skepticism about the current existence of structural racism in American society, and about movements like Black Lives Matter.
And yet, when we deal with slavery, even the most conservative of them are clear and unequivocal in their complete rejection of the institution. None of them express any support for the slave-owners, and they are wholehearted in the support of, and empathy for, the slaves. As part of the class, my students read some of the 19th-century defenses of slavery, written by folks like James Henry Hammond and George Fitzhugh, and the students are unanimous in their criticism of these historical arguments. I sometimes have to actually try to get them to push their feelings aside so we can actually discuss the documents calmly and rationally in class.
I think you’re right about this, but i think it’s rather problematic to assume that everyone will feel kinship and association based only on race. I think this sometimes does happen, and i think MandaJo is right that people might, by default, “tend to imagine themselves as a racial analogue.” But, if i can put in a plug for my discipline here, i think this is why history is valuable: because it teaches us to understand people in greater depth and to move beyond superficial similarities and engage with human complexity.
I think it’s partly because of my historical awareness that i understand that i probably have far more in common with a black person from 2015 than i have with a white person from 1855, whether or not that white person held slaves. The 21st-century African American and i, even if we’ve led very different lives and don’t see eye to eye on everything, share a worldview shaped by modern sensibilities and by all of the historical changes of the past century.
And, as someone who studies history for a living, and who weighs historical issues of politics and economics and social and cultural mores, i feel no particular kinship or association with white slaveholders. I understand that we share our European ancestry, and i understand also that we might even share certain types of education and experience, but i feel no more kinship or commonality with the plantation owner than i do with the slaves working his fields. And in terms of empathy and human understanding, i feel that i identify far more with the slave than the owner.
I think plenty of white Americans feel like this, especially if they have some historical understanding. I think it’s also partly because slavery seems so long ago to so many Americans, and so it’s easy to accept that it was an unjust system without feeling personal guilt about it. In my experience, my students are far likely to feel empathy with prejudiced whites, and to get defensive about racial issues, as our historical studies bring us closer to the present. A student who can easily see the injustice of slavery can sometimes find it much harder to see the injustice in the modern criminal justice system, or 1950s housing policies, etc.
It’s difficult bordering on impossible to make a relativist argument about the morality of the US slavery of black people based on the ability of humans to get by day to day in oppressive and difficult circumstances and the observation that most US Southern slave holding whites were not overt sadists.
I’ve heard your argument in various forms from other people discussing past wrongs, and it basically amounts to “If it sucked for everyone then one was really super oppressed or abused because (1) the oppressed didn’t know how bad they had it, and (2) most of the slave owners were just regular folks and not ogres and were not constantly killing and torturing their slaves even though they had the legal permission and cultural leave to do so if they wished. So yeah it sucked to be a slave, but it wasn’t super-bad all the time, they had some good times too, so don’t be a big historical drama-queen about it.”
I understand your argument and I’ve seen it applied to multiple scenarios where there is contemporary outrage about behavior in the past regarding racism, sexism, or just plain abuse of human beings in general. The problem with this stance is that you cannot stand in modernity, make the aforesaid rationalizations, and then say as a modern “See it really wasn’t so bad after all!”
Why? Because from our moral posture as moderns it *was *horrific. There’s no way to make a time traveling Gedanken experiment where using retro-cultural relativism it’s “OK” for people to be bought and sold like cattle and beaten if they disobey. You’re in 2016 and all arguments regarding historical morality are from a 2016 pivot. If you want to say “If I lived in the Antebellum south I could own a slave, and not be a considered a terrible and abusive human being by my surrounding culture”. All true and utterly beside the point from the perspective of modernity. You can’t reach back through time and give slave owners a moral hall pass. It’s philosophically impossible.
Sounds like a worthy and valuable research project in general psychology, with an emphasis on the possible coincidence of rightist/supremacist views and Cluster B personality disorders (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition). Fund it!
I’ll do it for $2000. No butt stuff though.
Nah, don’t need funding. I’ll take it if you got it though.
If we’re taking butt stuff off the table, I’ll counter with…$1.67 and a half-pack of gum.
No butt stuff? That’s the best part. No deal.