Dream on, ozzy.
Fixed that for you.
No…silly question. They were personally much worse off, and many of them died (gonzomax actually got something right there). It would be hard, if not impossible, to convince someone that their suffering was justified because their ancestors MIGHT be better off a few centuries in the future…even if this were the case, which is questionable at best (depending on a myriad of factors, including if the slave in question actually survived, what his or her possible future MIGHT have been, what his or her decedents future might have been in Africa and what their possible future decedents would be in America).
-XT
Of course, the descendants of American slaves could also have been shipped back to Africa by the American Colonization Society and have to suffer civil war, violence and general poverty, so just how lucky would that have made them then?
Fair enough. I’m looking forward to his response, too.
First off, we did not kidnap africans and stuff them into boats, we actually bought them in slavers auctions and stuffed them into boats. The africans did it to their own. There already was a slave economy there, we just bought slaves to bring over.
To be honest, I am sick to death of slavery this and slavery that … get off it. You are descended from a slave who would have been a slave no matter where they lived. At least in the US your lineage eventually got freed, in Africa they still have slavery [though it is rarely discussed, it still happens. Read some of the human rights violation websites sometime.] I didnt drag your ancestors ass off a slave block and stuff them into a ship, go to school, get an education and get your ass a job. If you are over 18 you are franchised, get your ass out and VOTE. Participate in the modern world and ignore the past. Women didnt have to be slaves to be forced into marriage, have no legal standings other than as chattel, and be abused, all women were born into chattel slavery.
If I were black, I really wouldn’t like the percentages the USA affords.
You know, Curtis LeMay, a lot of Africans have emigrated to the U.S. by choice without being enslaved. They might be lucky. The slaves weren’t.
Wow. Why does this offend you personally? Nobody accused you of owning slaves.
And then it will rain gumdrops and the trees will sprout candy canes. Not everything you say in this post is wrong, but ignoring the past does not make it go away.
Hahaha! Try telling that to your wife after you get caught screwing a chained-to-the-bed trafficked woman in a Thai brothel!
“I did not * traffic* women and force them to have sex. I actually bought this young lady’s services from her pimp and forced her to have sex. The Thais did it to their own!”
Yes, there still is slavery in Africa. And it’s plenty discussed! There are countless organizations that fight against it. I bring it up here pretty often, as I’ve had some personal and rather disturbing experiences with it. Anyone who has any interest in human rights in Africa probably discusses it pretty often. It’s not like the NGOs are hiding this information on the back pages or something.
But modern African slavery (and historical African slavery) is a different substance from chattel slavery as practiced in the Americas. The most formal slavery systems happen in places like Mauritania and Niger. The slavery there works like something between chattel slavery and a caste system. Slave caste families are forced to work for other Master class families for generations. But Masters generally cannot and do not breed their slaves, destroy their families, execute extreme punishments or work them to death. It’s more like a hereditary indentured servitude. Ugly, but not the same thing as whipping the slaves in the field.
Other forms of slavery include trafficked women and children for domestic and sex work- an evil that is found around the world, including our own back yards. There are some forms of religious slavery, where children are promised to holy men in exchange for granted prayers. Ugly, but it’s temporary, non-hereditary, and the children generally have the same (admittedly limited) rights of all children in the community, who after all labor for free for their families under threat of physical punishment (the exception would be a system of religious child sex slavery found in parts of, I believe, Benin.) And then there are things like child soldiers and children forced to work on Cocoa plantations (whose products we gladly buy.) Still, a different substance.
African slavery never resembled American slavery. Nor was the slave trade a natural extension of African slavery. For example, there was no traditions of “slave raids.” Though POWs were sometimes used as slave labor, that was a by-product of war and not a cause for it. The idea of running off and attacking another tribe for the sole purpose of enslaving them developed because of the slave trade. There were not slave markets or slave trade routes or any of the formal systems that popped up because of the Western slave trade. Traditional slavery was local, family-based and lasted through generations. It wasn’t a commercial trade.
Though we made the demand, they filled it. I’ll give you that. But, like the trafficked Thai woman above, that doesn’t really absolve slave traders of much, does it?
Even if you accepted the premise that enslaved Africans are now substanuially better off, the OPs argument fails on the intentions of the slavers and the outcomes.
There was never any intention of making slaves any better off, nor was there ever such an outcome designed at any stage, none of the outcomes were intentional, except for the use of forced labour.
So what we are looking at is a remote possbility that your antecedant would be better off, but with no path to get there and every institution around you determined to keep you in your place as a slave.I don’t think that is much of a choice for the enslaved.
You should also note that the world is not black and white, it does not conform to our views of ‘right’ and ‘wrong’, bad outcomes can readily come from good intentions and even from actions most would accept as laudible, similarly, good outcomes have ocurred from the most distressing actions. Some bad people do good things either by accident or by intent, and similarly good people do bad things.
The good that evil men do - it has a lot of philosophical arguments, and it can be awkward for those with inflexible minds to rationalise, but it is a real enough phenomenon.
Sometimes it is not possible to connect good and bad outcomes through our simplistic notions of ‘good people and bad people’ life is far more complex than that. In other words, the evil behaviour of slavers may indeed have led to beneficial outcomes for the ancestors of the enslaved, but it should not detract from the reality; slavery itself is an evil activity
We “bought them,” how is this phrasing any better?
A White Guy: “If it wasn’t for us, you guys would be starving in Africa.”
A Black Guy: “You never saw Back to the Future, did you?”
Those were not exactly the options . . .
Bear in mind that if you were a slave sold for trans-Atlantic shipment, the sanitary conditions belowdecks being what they were, you had perhaps a one in three chance of dying on the voyage, your body tossed over the gunwale.
Also that if you were shipped to the Caribbean in the early days of slavery there, you probably would not have any descendants, as few women were available and the male slaves were simply worked to death in short time and cheaply replaced.
Also that Western Africa itself might be much better off today if the trans-Atlantic slave trade had never existed. Yes, slavery was an indigenous institution there, but the Europeans added something new: A lucrative export market. And that had devastating sociopolitical effects on the West African nations – bandits roving the countryside to kidnap merchandise, kings making war on each other just to get saleable P.O.W.'s, subjects condemned to slavery as punishment for trifling offenses, etc., etc. Which made later European colonization much harder to resist.
I strongly disagree with this, and I think the academic consensus is on my side. First, if the slave owners benefit, then all the people getting their products do as well. Plenty of the people in the North benefited greatly from slavery as well.
Second, the Civil War was not just about slavery, nor is it the primary reason the South lags behind today. Hell, if slavery is such a bad idea all around, why do we still have slaves in the world today?
Wasn’t there an African-American author who suggested just this in a book maybe 5-10 years ago? Anyone remember it?
Because it sounds like a good idea (“I’ll get workers for free!”), is probably an effective punishment, feeds into feelings of superiority over another person or culture?
Well, all moral aspects aside, slavery is a pretty crappy system on an economic basis. It disincentivizes mechanization, for a start. So why do we still have it? Multiple reasons…
First, individuals are myopic. Not having to toil in the hot sun in the cotton fields/rice plantation is pretty appealing to many people, and the benefits of a wage system and the generation of surpluses to reinvestment in labor saving devices may seem a long way off.
Second, and closely linked, whatever people like Friedman may think, individuals are not rational individuals driven purely by economics. Slavery is and was an institution. People like how owning others makes them feel; they also like the social structure that it brings with it. Slavery creates a social hierarchy that people value independently of the economic benefits associated with it.
You know I have heard mainstream conservatives make this very argument. Medved, Limbaugh, Buchanan have all said this and so has David Duke.
Bill Maher actually made this argument on Politically Incorrect to Tavis Smiley. His exact quote was “We saved you.” They were arguing about Africa. Maher was writing off the entire continent. Smiley asked him if he had ever been to Africa bacause the whole continent is not a war-torn, wasteland. Smiley had been there. Maher responded he didn’t have to because he had CNN. Smiley was almost speechless . Then as usual when PI gets good, commercial break and change subject.
I was at home thinking, “Bill, do you know how White supremacist you sound, right now?”