You seem to be saying, “If we let people resign over actual past racist behavior, then maybe someone will later have to resign for something smaller and not racist.”
(I don’t have a particular image of you, but you’re making a weak slippery slope argument here.)
Look, if you actually both to read the article you originally posted, you’ll see that 100,000 unionists joined the Union side. Most of these came from the eastern highlands of Tennessee. Georgia, on the other hand, had 400, the fewest in the southern states.
Clearly, we can’t agree on why there’s this disparity in the numbers. I think it has something to do with culture and education, so I’m not going to blame them in the same way I would an educated person of the time. I’m not sure what you think the explanation is, only that you think mine is wrong. I could come up with some, but they wouldn’t be supported by facts.
I do know, though, that you want to blame ignorant dead people for the way they thought.
Everything else we’re talking about is shit you brought up, and I still don’t know what any of it has to do with anything I initially wrote.
And, no, plenty of people don’t spontaneously overcome social programming. Very, very few do, even now with near infinite access to resources. Even your own article proves that: most from Eastern Tennessee, as I’ve stated previously, 400 from Georgia. 400 doesn’t equal plenty. Statistical outliers are not “plenty”.
My point was that there were “uneducated” people included in that number, whether it’s 400 from GA (which is right there next to TN) or 100,000 from TN.
And you’re assuming that the only metric that matters here are numbers.
Southern whites are not a racist monolith is my point. The fact that different ideas existed during the antebellum and civil war era points to the fact that there were different ideas, even among the uneducated classes… so they are being judged by their own historical context, not my todays.
All you’re saying is that the racist farmers of 1830 were super sincere in their racism.
Great.
Supporting human slavery is a moral failing, even if it’s held with naive vigor, in a supportive environment.
Modern white South Africans who supported the apartheid system weren’t less racist because it was common, legal, and long-held.
In a world of instantaneous communication and frequent travel, I’d agree with every point you’ve made. But, as it was, and as we’ve discussed:
Eastern Tennessee was an abolitionist holdout, due to a Quaker from Pennsylvania and his descendants who actively worked against slavery from the 1790s onward.
You keep saying the same things at me, and I keep saying the same things at you, and I think it boils down to our having a fundamental difference on levels of understanding when it comes to the historical context of this discussion.
What’s crazy, is that it was not that long held - it started in the 40s and ended in the early 90s. Less than a lifetime in some cases… same with Jim Crow in the south - 1890s to the 1960s… yet, people came to see them (especially white people) as common sensical and as having existed for forever. It wasn’t on either count. The Jim Crow system (and Apartheid) made no sense (morally, politically, or economically), and was not something rooted in the deep past… as a social construct it was historically contingent and entirely changeable into something better.
Yes… I have a phd in US history.
No, I’m saying:
They were raised to be racist. Their religion, their neighbors, their government all told them to be racist. Literally saying “you shouldn’t be a racist piece of shit” would end up with you in jail. Talking to slaves for extended periods when you didn’t own them could end up with you in jail.
Just because they’re not able to spontaneously STOP being racist, I’m not going to hold them to the same standard as someone who was educated, or traveled to Europe, or lived in New York city, or even in New Orleans.
the way you frame your arguments, multiple times, is that poor people are undereducated and therefore racist.
this is a terrible trope that deserves to die.
there are huge economic benefits (for a small group of people) to establish an under-class based on easily identified physical characteristics like skin color.
viewed in that way, racism is a self-justification for economically successful behavior that would otherwise be morally reprehensible.
people often can’t look at how racism benefits themselves, because that self-examination would call into question their whole way of life.
it’s not that they don’t see the issue, it’s that they’ve convinced themselves not to care because of the perceived benefits.
( the rub being, we all – in fact – do better when all do better. racism provides a pretty terrible local maxima. )
while many people in the south used people in slavery for economic advantage, it was the richest of people - and the most educated among them - who had the access to the greatest ability to change things. they didn’t.
in fact the southern elite went so far as to try to establish their own confederacy of slave holding states to keep the dollars coming.
As long as you get to decide who is offended and by what, I doubt I can make an analogy that you find relevant, although you might want to consider that in an election people with views you don’t like get to vote too. What about Kamala Harris, who definitely should be unelectable on the “one strike and your out” rule that seems to apply here? The whole story about “we can’t release prisoners even when ordered too because we need their labor” stinks.
Blockquote
Yes… I have a phd in US history.
Is it focused on the period we’re discussing?
Our point is that some people did manage to rise above that, even in the 1830s. Hell, I was raised to be racist, and yet here I am trying to rise above that programming.
We’re holding them to the standards of the time. Slavery doesn’t magically stop being an evil just because it happened in the past. Even people steeped in a particular ideology, with less access to other information, can see past it and some people did in fact do that.
This! We have evidence of people at the time rising above that ideology.
There is this too…
And let’s not forget that during the civil war, there were uprisings in the confederate army against the elite… many of them were bread riots, to be sure, but it was also a class based rebellion, because rich men could buy their way out of service, where poor white men could not.
No, but I have to teach the entire survey from colonial to the modern, so I do have some knowledge on this period of time. I don’t know everything, but I know enough of the historiography to speak to it with some competence. I’ll note once again, that I’m focusing on the standard of the time, not our modern standard. Education wasn’t always the defining feature of what made someone buy into the system that they lived in, and the rejection of it came from uneducated people. Being “raised to be racist” isn’t much of an excuse now, and that wasn’t an impediment to developing a different outlook on these issues then, either.
Yes… and that was in the 1980s, not the 1830s! That’s most certainly NO excuse there.
I think I can then, at the very least, hold them to the standard that they were indeed racists.
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Ralph Northam blacked his face up and treated blackness as a costume for sporty humor.
Some people are saying that you can’t call it racist because everyone (excluding and not mentioning black people) was like that, and since everyone was racist, no one was. (Again, completely eliminating the opinions of all black people at the time).
Others say that there was no provable racist intent, so people should agree that making fun of a race could have nothing to do with racism.
And if everyone let the goalposts be moved past each other, then no one, throughout history to today, can be thought racist, and that doesn’t seem historically accurate somehow.
No, the way people keep framing my argument is what you’ve described.
My argument is: their culture, government, church, and everyone around them dictated that that was the way of the world, that it was the right way, and there wasn’t exactly an abolitionist speaker circuit going through their home town.
Everyone here keeps acting like these people traveled huge distances, read a lot of books, or had an opportunity to even meet someone with a differing view, and that’s really just not the case. We all know that laws against fraternizing with slaves were put in place specifically to curtail lower class whites from identifying with slaves.
My whole point has been: I can’t hold a poor, uneducated farmer in Georgia to the same standard as an educated white person in the south during that period. It’s not even they were uneducated, or poor, it’s that they weren’t ever exposed to a different kind of reality.
Nobody came to ask me if blackface was offensive before they complained about it. I don’t know what you mean here.
People finding blackface objectionable has nothing to do with any political opinion anyone has about Kamala Harris, for or against. Saint or sinner, she’s has nothing to do with blackface make-up.
No, but as I and others have noted, plenty of educated southerners were the core figures upholding slavery and racism, while some poor whites were able to reject that. We’re suggesting that from the start racist structures came from the elite classes and were at times rejected by the lower classes.
And as I’ve noted above, getting to know people directly impacted by racism and slavery would very much have been an exposure to a different kind of reality - would that change everyone’s mind on these issues, of course not, but it most certainly could change someone’s mind.
A good account of the complicated way that the white lower classes viewed the civil war and slavery can be found here:
It shows that neither side was a monolith and that people quite often deviated from what the educated classes believed (in both the north and the south).
Is the argument, a sincere racist isn’t a real racist, because their racist worldview is deeply ingrained and comfortable?
And at the same time someone like a hipster racist isn’t racist, because they’re only ironically going through every action and signifier, to identical effect?
I wish some of the explainers of racism would provide a concrete example of an action or person whom they think could actually be considered racist, and why.
I don’t know, cause it’s not my argument… @nonlocal isn’t wrong that the historical context matters, of course. But if the historical context includes arguments against the prevailing views, arguments that had real world impacts at the time, we can’t just dismiss that out of hand. Local beliefs were not immune to the larger circulating set of ideas, even if they were harder to come by in the local context. It might be true that we “know better now”, but in fact, plenty of people don’t seem to know better now.
Got it!
So, antebellum and Reconstruction south, specifically around New Orleans and into Tennessee, and the history of St. Louis and Missouri, along with Texas, have always been a huge interest to me, so I do have about a decade and a half hunting down and reading through original source material of the time, whether it’s newspaper articles, memoirs, or plays (in addition to the few texts on it). That’s why my original statement was specific to 1830s deep south Georgia farmers, and not southerners in general. Tennessee had a vastly different culture than Georgia when it came to Reconstruction, and to the entire institution of slavery, just like Louisiana had an entirely different approach to the legal framework around being black (no drop of blood rule, for instance).
A big part of this difference is in who settled where. Georgia was primarily British, and the Tennessee Highlands were primarily Scots Irish, and they brought very different attitudes to religion, government, and things like slavery.
I’ve never been interested in the Civil War, but the culture and history to either side of it have always been incredibly interesting. Not in a fetishistic way (my family didn’t even fight in the civil war, we didn’t own slaves, and so on), but just a “how in the fuck did this all happen, and why do things still seem so different, but not different” way.
And what I mean by “educated” is: access to books, travel, and being able to find people who might have a different worldview from you. A small, poor landowner in that time just wouldn’t have the expanded context a wealthier, wider-traveled, more educated slave owner would have. Seriously, fuck those guys, specifically.
Could a poor farmer with a myopic worldview break social conditioning? Yeah, of course he could. But, as I’ve said before, I’m still not going to hold him even to the standard of a guy in Tennessee in the same time period. It’s incredibly difficult, even today, to grow up into something you weren’t raised to be.
What about the black people, were their views identical to the Scots Irish about slavery?
(It’s an honest question, because the way you’re framing history here, it’s like historians of some future judging Jeff Bezos only by the opinions Jeff Bezos had of himself, his actions, and his beliefs, and silently passing over any mention of a single Amazon employee.)
