Your inability to express yourself clearly is not my responsibility. Your immediate and implicit dismissal of black people as counting is your responsibility.
What percentage of slaves would you say had scars? Doing some research on that question, we come to this book:
From that account 1/3rd percent of former slaves had some form of deformity, handicap, or scar useful for the purpose of identification. But on the counter, that it also means that 2/3rds of slaves had no identifiable scars, after a lifetime of slavery.
Of the 1/3rd percent, much of it seemed to be caused by a life of hard labor. And most of the identifying marks were minor.
Do those numbers fit closer with a description where every slave is being flogged every day, just to keep the fear of the devil in them? Or does it better fit a description where specific slaves were more likely to be punished, and most were never or barely punished at all?
You aren’t describing anything horrible, shameful, poor, squalid or cruel, you’re “venturing to guess” that slaves were “given negative feedback” like errant school children. It’s a hideously, impossibly rosy-tinted picture of a system which punished by whipping, branding, castrating, burning, hanging, and Christ knows what other tortures and brutalities. “Made to stand in the corner”, for fuck’s sake. Do you genuinely believe they even lived in the same house, to be able to stand in the corner?
This your “being made to stand in the corner”, you fucking piece of ordure. And if you can read it and still smirk and writhe and twist and equivocate with your “venture to suggest”, you’re beyond fucking humanity:
That cite also days that 42% of the men in that group were visibly scarred. The women displayed fewer scars. Know what doesn’t necessarily leave a visible scar? The owners could and did rape women that they owned.
And living under the knowledge and threat of violence and rape - nothing monstrous or brutal about that.
Well, I’m convinced. That book has a magnificent amount of FOUR REVIEWS, so I think we should all take it as gospel.
My God, when this thread started, I was more apt to side with whoever assumed this was more an academic, “Aw, surely they weren’t all bad. And just by the ratios, many, I bet at least a couple really didn’t mind staying.” bullshit navel gazing.
But reading further along, you really are, honest to goodness, apologizing for slavery. And you’ve been on the boards for how long? I just don’t see how you didn’t show your true colors before now. Because frankly, I agree with what I initially thought might’ve been some over-the-top hyperbole… this is some of the vilest shit I’ve seen posted here and that says a lot. The only thing I’m heartened by is that no one has come to your defense. Yet.
I don’t think you’re as stupid as that–although, yes, I think you’re intellectually lazy, and I find that contemptible. Your words show that you dismiss the opinions of black Southerners as important–you didn’t think they counted when looking for Southern abolitionists. This is a pretty common sort of racism. If you responded by saying, “Gosh, you’re right, I shouldn’t dismiss millions of people so quickly,” that would be a sign that you’re not intellectually lazy.
Instead, predictably, you doubled down and turned it into a thread about you.
I’m done with that. You’re too contemptible to be worth bothering with until you engage in some serious self-reflection, realize exactly how lazy you are, and change it.
People are partially a product of their times and environment. But even that doesn’t excuse slave owners - many people at the same time opposed slavery, most notably for this discussion, people that slave owners interacted with on a daily and often intimate basis.
The system and society was built and operated at all levels with the most important goal of maintaining and strengthening the institution of slavery. Through fear and violence, it strove to silence or drive away any who would speak against it. We should alternately praise and mourn those who spoke against it anyway, and we should strongly criticize those who refused to listen.
After emancipation, Colonel P.H. Anderson of Big Spring, Tennessee, wrote to his former slave, Jourdon Anderson, and requested that he come back to work on his farm. Jourdon’s response is an interesting read. Anderson was apparently a better-than-average master, but Jourdon still didn’t want to return. Here are the last few paragraphs of Jourdon’s letter:
Apologising for it? He’s practically fucking advocating it. I have honestly not read anything quite so vile on these boards before. I suppose you can make an argument that it’s better to have the racists in the room where you can keep an eye on them, but by Christ they don’t half leave a stench.
That would all be fine and good if it were actually true. Sadly for you, it is not. At the time I joined the conversation, George Washington and his cohorts were the subject at hand:
That, to most people, would appear to be a conversation about people like Washington a and Jefferson and not about people like Harriet Tubman or Fredrick Douglass or Nat turner. It seems obvious you were talking about white southerners.
You can talk about me being ignornat all you want but the truth is you rush to judgement and you are rude and hostile for no reason. I don’t know why you have such a bad attitude, why you are so hostile for no good reason at all.
Sooo, this whole thing pretty much revolves around two things:
Sage Rat thinks the Hollywood portrayal of slavery is that every single slave owning household engaged in torture for fun and every single slave cried themselves to sleep every single night.
He imagines that slaves probably went to sleep at night after an honest days work thinking that life was “pretty good.”
Ya know, often before I post, I stop and think “Will this reflect well on me or is this the stupidest thing ever said by a human being?” I imagine that Sage Rat is probably wishing he had such a system in place right about now.