Not wrong, but not the point. Slave-owners mostly did not treat their slaves as people at all. They might have sex with one, which is probably just a good example of compartmentalization. When children were the result of such an act, there is no evidence they were treated any differently from other slaves. Slave-owners wouldn’t necessarily break up families for shits and giggles, but if it seemed like a good idea they wouldn’t think twice. Slaves weren’t people, they were things (as far as the whites were concerned), objects to be manipulated for profit, and occasionally pleasure.
So the issue wasn’t poverty, poor living conditions, or even beatings or rape. The issue was persons being owned by other persons, being chattel, having no rights of any kind, having their very personhood denied and being reduced to the status of a farm animal.
I can’t seem to put into words how abhorrent this should be, even 150 years after it ended. It is even worse that after the official status of slave was abolished, those people and their descendants were (and often still are) treated as sub-human by so many in this country.
I wish every one of us, not just apologists like Sage Rat, but every single one of us, could go back and inhabit the life of any slave for one month, and then come back and see what they think should be done about the way the descendants of slaves are treated today.
eta: I was typing while Sage Rat’s post was put up. What GW did or didn’t do with his slaves is irrelevant. No slave owner was particularly better than any other so long as he bought and sold people as if they were oxen.
Are you fucking thick, or what? They ran away because they were owned as property. They were human beings, and they were owned, kept, and treated as livestock. All arguments begin and end there, because all treatment that springs from keeping people as farm animals is illegitimate. It doesn’t matter if he gave them cake and ice cream three times a day, it would still be illegitimate because he owned people like things.
Yes, yes you are. And you use wayyy too many words to say it. Just stop.
I’m not going to bother parsing the rest of your ridiculous tripe. You might try a little research next time, before you pile on idiocy on top of idiocy. There is no equivalency between modern life and your idyllic fantasy of life as a slave in America.
Your level of apologist bullshit is an inspiration to Holocaust Deniers everywhere.
The only redeeming quality that I can find in you is that you bothered to show up for your Pitting.
You are fucking aware that there wasn’t due process for slaves, that those “horrible acts” included not wanting to be somebody’s property? Or learning to read and write? Or not doing as you were told? That’s what being a fucking slave means, you arse, it means that You. Are. Owned. You have no human agency, none whatsoever. Are you that fucking bereft of imagination or empathy that you think belonging to George Washington - or any other slaver, for that matter - was just a minor inconvenience?
If only slves had left written and transcribed first person accounts! If inlu many of thise accounts has been substantiated by later scholarship! If only!
Where this shit really gets racist is when people refuse to believe what actual slaves actually said about their situation. And while a handful of people who were mostly only slaves as children remembered it as all right, the vast majority of written accounts make it clear that the horror of slavery was the central fact of most slaves’ lives.
Because nobody is going to pay them and the alternative to being the slave of a benevolent owner would have been to be the slave of a less benevolent owner (and even that wasn’t in fact an option, it’s not like they had any right to switch to another boss, be it as slave or as paid worker)?
I guess they counted their lucky stars in such a situation.
Sorry, but everything he wrote could be applied as a similar gloss to slaves in Rome or Persia or Timbuktu or China. So in that regard alone, he’s not racist. Slavery elsewhere was just as nasty as in America.
Well, somebody has considerable experience with LHOD. I imagine our brand new poster won’t be with us for long.
Sage Rat’s style of argumentation is classic. He supposes, he conceives, he considers likely, he laments the non-existence of data, and he draws his own completely ludicrous conclusions, because one simply cannot know for sure but one can certainly infer, especially when one is a racist slimeball.