When I was growing up, Hispanics (as they were called) and arabs and South Asian people experienced perhaps even more casual racism than they do now, but I never heard people refer to any of them as a race. Even in the early days of this message board I used to see arguments that prejudice against them can’t be “racism” because they were either Caucasian or were not a race. But in the past 20 years it seems like the consensus has moved toward recognizing them as such. Not that it matters because prejudice is prejudice. And of course my experience isn’t the be all end all of reality.
The hint in here that I was asking about contemporary cites is that what my question quoted was your sentence “Before the Civil War, Southerners wrote millions of words…” That’s the phenomenon I’d like to learn more about.
To elaborate now, one twist of psychology slaveholders might have used to be able to sleep at night could have been to convince themselves that the people they enslaved weren’t really people. This would be to deny them credit for the human feelings the rest of us would have in response to enslavement.
Those “millions of words” would have been evidence to the contrary.
They’d gave to be pretty fucking stupid to believe that in direct condtradiction to what had happened in Haiti. And in fact, their writing, linked multiple times above, shows that they were absolutely shitting themselves over the idea of a Haitian Revolution happening in the South, blamed abolitionists for putting ideas in slaves’ heads, and took many steps to avoid this possibility.
Discerning what Southerners thought about slaves can’t be encapsulated into selected quotes on any one subject. Slavery lasted 250 years and was found in ever colony and every state, and feelings grew after it was incorporated into nationhood and became the issue that Americans fought most about until the Civil War.
People wrote as individually on the subject as they do about every subject on the Dope. You can get a sense of what the general consensus is on most subjects here, but finding individual quotes to back any particular viewpoint is time consuming because that’s not how the search functions work.
The general consensus I get from 50 years of reading on the subject is that Southerners post 1776 both knew that slaves were people and found it convenient to deny that truth whenever expeditious. Middle grades of Jefferson’s sort - they were people but could never be brought up to the level of whites - also circulated.
Slaveowners protected the institution of slavery and the oppression of blacks in general, even free ones, with every word and thought and notion and law they could devise, even if they might be individually contradictory. The myth that blacks didn’t feel pain as whites did was widespread yet that never stopped slaveowners and overseers from devising the most grotesquely painful punishments as deterrents. (No, I’m not going to link: find them yourself if you feel sadistic.) These beliefs cannot be rationally reconciled. Any particular quotation on any side would be misleading.
I don’t want to be accused of giving you homework, but the only way to understand slavery and Jim Crow in America is to read copiously and deeply.
Agreed. The only reason I had references off hand is that both Hardcore History and Atun Shei pun out videos about the Haitian revolution where they talked about the South’s response, which happened to precisely match what he was asking for.
The opposite is true. The beliefs you cite go hand-in-hand.
To the extent that a person is less sensitive to pain, you would need to do things even more painful for it to be a deterrent.