Which of these charming gents is Virginia governor Ralph Northam?

boing
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i’ve looked back more. you’re right. the original core of what you said was:

I can’t back that the normal person had a “moral failing” for accepting what was general practice, especially when we’ve had so much “moral failing” talk with regards to things like drug use or “poor finance skills” when it comes to poor people not spending their paychecks properly.

for sure, it’s a long conversation. first, obviously, slavery is a moral failing. drug use is an addiction and sometimes a coping mechanism. poor spending habits are, similarly, often actually the best choices a person can make in a given situation.

i think it’s no coincidence that the far right and white evangelicals make out those latter too as moral issues. like racism, it’s a self justification of privilege and an excuse to continue in the status quo. that’s why all this continues today.

im going to continue to deny that treating humans worse than animals - treating flesh and blood, breathing, speaking, intelligent, real live human beings as chattel was ever moral.

there is simply no way that people go to bed with nary a thought for the beating they just gave another human being.

could i believe that people didn’t know what to do about the situation? absolutely. i don’t know what to do about most of the shit i see going on in the world.

could i believe that people were somehow ignorant of basic human emotion? somehow completely lacking in empathy? no. i can’t.

it was ultimately people from many different backgrounds in life and levels of education that came together to end slavery. so obviously the idea came from somewhere.

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Black people from antebellum New York, St. Louis, or New Orleans?

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Which was literally all I was suggesting from the start! Further, I’m arguing that they did at times do that, based on not education or persuasion from abolitionists (though I’d argue that their works and ideas circulated a lot more broadly than you’re giving allowance for), but based on their real world experiences with those around them. Although the elites certainly had a language of white unity, they were also prone to act out of class interests over some supposed racial interests.

I also think that although the state was founded by the British, the entire state was a big place, and north GA was especially more ethnically diverse than you’re suggesting. Plus, the southern part of the state would have been more diverse (ethnically) thanks to it’s proximity to Florida.

I’d say by the antebellum period, GA was more diverse than just people descended from Brits, with the Scots-Irish having a large population in the north.

Yes, and there’s this too, that black people in the south - freed and enslaved, had a view of this world, and regularly interacted with whites in the south. The lines were probably far blurrier than our popular histories allow for.

All those places - a diversity of views would have existed, based on their personal experiences, but given the nature of slavery, those differences would have been less likely to be ignored, and would have brought all three of them into a more common set of experiences and understandings of racism and slavery. Because it would have similar effects across the country. Solomon Northup is a great example of a black man living in the north who came to understand the evils of slavery when he was kidnapped and brought south despite being an educated black man. His specific experience of being free came to naught when he was kidnapped and sold into slavery.

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Hey, if it’s going to be the first black people you mention, then dealer’s choice.

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Thank goodness this guy brought his wife to his press conference. She reminded him of Michael Jackson’s name and then advised him not to moonwalk at the request of a reporter.

He would have looked really silly moonwalking like Michael Whats-His-Face. That could have been a real career killer.

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See, and that’s a big weird thing, too.

This is another thing I’m going to get into trouble here for: A poor dirt farmer in 1830s Georgia probably didn’t even have slaves, and if they did they may not have beat them. More than a few slaves bought their way out and went north, where laws were more friendly to them. Some of them were treated decently. This doesn’t absolve slavery, or their actions, but I wonder how much some farmers even considered it on a regular basis when they were legally not allowed to fraternize with blacks to begin with.

Because you’re right, in any context, slavery is wrong. It’s there with murder and rape. And I’m not even saying that it’s OKAY that they were racists, I’m only saying that I understand and don’t hold it against them quite as hard as I do anyone who holds those views today. Or like Thomas Jefferson. I really fucking hold it against him, because he fucking knew better, but he had a straight up ethical and moral failing that damn near wipes out everything good he ever wrote or did.

But a lot of the pamphlets, plays, books, and speakers who were all over the north and into the border states weren’t allowed into certain parts of the south. So it’s like us getting upset that the Chinese don’t know anything about their war on Tibet, when they have the Great Firewall to contend with.

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Some did, because maybe they inherited them and came into money and was able to buy one for cheap. It was a status symbol and a means of improving one’s lot.

It’s not just brutality that made slavery an evil. On some level the kind slave owners might have made the situation worse, because it elided the brutality of owning another human being and denying them basic dignity and rights.

Entirely irrelevant.

No one believes you were saying that, BTW. Or I didn’t at least. Rather you’re making the erroneous argument that they didn’t know better, but many did.

Did he? Apparently not, because it did not change his behavior one iota. It’s more likely he believed that his skin color made him superior, which would not have been out of step with his time and class.

Yet they managed to do so anyhow. Harriet Tubman traveled south nearly 20 times and freed some 300 slaves. She did not do that work alone. She would have depended on a network of not just northerners, but southern anti-slavery activists too. She did this AFTER the passage of the fugitive slave act, where it became much harder to operate the underground rail road.

Except that some Chinese DO know about that, despite the great fire wall.

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You don’t have to “hold it against them” as if you have a personal relationship with these long-dead people. You’re not being judged for whether you’d go for a beer with any of them.

But soft-pedalling the role ordinary workaday people had in maintaining something like slavery isn’t great.

For instance, I understand why Random McGillicutty feels he needs to drive a car to work in Philadelphia to maximize his time spent in the suburbs. That doesn’t mean you turn a blind eye to the structural effect that someone deciding to be a car driver has on climate change and pedestrian deaths. The physical effects are there, no matter if car driving is common or not.

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Louisiana was the only state that had black people owning black people, and where courts would treat you equally. To make matters worse, most of them were educated in France, and sure as hell knew better. They had thinks like the quadroon ball, where white landed gentry would go to New Orleans to find a mistress, where the requirement was that female attendees (sent by their mothers and fathers to attend) be 3/4th white, 1/4 black. Then they’d put them up in special neighborhood down near the river where they could go visit them when they were away from their wife. The daughters and sons of the quadroons (who generally ended up being only 1/8th black) moved to places like St. Louis, Chicago, and New York where they could pass as white, since anywhere in the south they had to deal with the “drop of blood” rule.

St. Louis had a big, big German and Irish community, so a lot of slaves who bought their freedom traveled there and created thriving businesses. They didn’t deal with the racism in anywhere near the same way, since a lot of the Germans were the educated who had been run out during the 1840s revolution. They had a very, very dim view of racism and slavery.

New York, blacks lived in five points alongside white people, and they used to write “horror stories” in the press about how “race didn’t matter” there. That black men slept with white women, and white men slept with black women, and it was absolute pandemonium. Quite a few fled after the conscription riots, where there were a rash of lynchings by Irish immigrants.

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You’re argument seems to be that southern whites were a monolith who didn’t know better, but northern whites were not?

I’ll also point out that many Irish immigrants (and other ethnic groups) eventually embraced racism because they could give themselves a leg up in a white supremacist society…

I’ll note that I count myself as largely ethnically Irish, as the most recent immigrants from my family came from Ireland.

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And, you’re right, some people did know! But this has always been about the average person in a time and place and economic class, and my saying I’m not holding them to the same standard as I would others. Can I think they should have known better, that it should have been self evident?

Of course! But, historical context of it makes it really unlikely that certain groups would have been exposed to it, and I’m not going to hold them not being to read a pamphlet or hear an abolitionist speaker against them in the same way that I do hold it against someone like Thomas Jefferson. And, I misspoke: he should have known better.

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We can hold them to the standard of the day, and the fact that there were very much elements in southern society that “knew better” indicates that. We can most certainly hold them accountable for their actions within their context, is my point.

Again, being exposed to the ideas held by anti-slavery activists wasn’t just shared by pamphlets. Poor whites could see the effects of slavery with their own eyes, they could have heard about them from the mouths of the enslaved or those that worked on plantations (who were not enslaved people). Obviously, poor whites did not build the system they were living in, but they would not have been ignorant of the brutal lives many slaves in their midst experienced. They lived in close proximity. Northern whites would have had less experience with the institution than southern whites and those documents and lectures were more for them, because of that.

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Nope, my argument was that an 1830s deep south Georgia dirt farmer wouldn’t have known better because of the culture surrounding him, and his own myopic view of the world due to lack of resources and education.

I will say this, though: I think the north did have a very different economic and cultural structure, with different approaches to religion and who went into government, and that this did shape whether or not your average New Yorker or Bostonian was exposed to something like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the various abolitionist plays, or abolitionist speakers who regularly made their circuits, not to mention not having laws specifically put in place to keep them separated from blacks.

As far as the Irish and immigrant groups embracing racism (Italians are some of the fucking worst I’ve ever met, FWIW), I wonder how much of that has to do with assimilating in general, in addition to the working class just being constantly bombarded in anti-union and racist shit by the media and industry. Even in abolitionist literature, it was a HUGE deal that Tennessee referred to blacks as “colored” for the first time anywhere in the nation during the Reconstruction era.

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I suspect these examples aren’t really representative of how black people in Georgia would view white slaveholders though.

It still doesn’t seem accurate to judge white Georgian slave-owners and farmers solely by the standards of other white Georgian slave-owners and farmers.

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Also, I think you can go “that view that person hoed is shitty” with regards to racism in 1830s Georgia, while also going: “that view that person held is so shitty it makes him an absolute shit person, and any contribution he made to society is circumspect” about a plantation owner in the same time period, particularly when that plantation owner has more access to an expanded worldview. Also: “neo-nazis are garbage humans.” I think these are all possible.

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I got a feeling the black slaves in Georgia probably fucking hated their owners, and I don’t think I’m going out on a limb about that.

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Again, they are probably going to be MORE familiar with slavery than a northern white, because they would be in close proximity to it, more so than people in the north, who were more likely to hear about it second hand.

Maybe, but the two regions were intimiately tied together thanks to the slave economy. The northern industrial economy depended upon the wealth of the south - from the extraction of raw materials for factories to the rise of the banking system.

Yes, that’s my whole point. They embraced racism because it was a form of assimilation and it meant their status rose.

First, no one said that. Second, at what point do we hold people accountable for helping to uphold systems of brutality and oppression? And it was slave owners who had an education and access to an expanded world view who imposed this system in the first place. Education doens’t always equal less bigoted.

We’re not talking about their view of the owners, we’re talking about the fact that blacks in the south made up a portion of the population and not all of them were slaves. They had views and opinions of slavery as well, and are part of the southern landscape.

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Okay, so, this is the original thing that spawned all of this:

" Within the context of any place in the world, in any time period, it :clap: is :clap: a :clap:moral :clap: transgression :clap:. Race is a social construct, and any support of that construct a moral failing.

Get your head on straight.

To which I responded:

" While I do agree with you on certain time periods (let’s say the 1850s on in certain parts of the United States), lets not forget that straight up an 1830s poor ass white farmer in Georgia just would not have the wherewithal to understand that he’d been systematically raised to believe black people weren’t any more than animals. His education was minimal, his understanding was minimal, and the society around him was literally designed to teach him that black people weren’t human."

The abolitionist movement was just starting to gather steam in the 1830s, England had had theirs for a long time already, but it wasn’t abolished until mid-1830s. If you look at my quote, I don’t even excuse that same farmer in 1850, twenty years later.

I think you can really start to draw the line when, metaphorically speaking, someone taps you on the shoulder and goes “Yo, dude! This is fucked, what are you even fucking doing?”

I wrote something somewhere else about blacks in New Orleans, and how they were plantation owners with plenty of slaves. I think it’s also interesting to note that a lot of the slaves who shipped over to Liberia ended up recreating plantation life over there, with their own slaves. I mean, this whole thing is completely fucked, and really interesting to study.

But, going back to my original point: I can’t hold the 1830s Georgia Dirt Farmer to the same standard I hold this fuckwad of a Governor to in the 1980s. One would have had to nearly spontaneously come to the conclusion on his own, while the other was living in the 1980s.

Also, prior to this, there was a northern abolition movement (1700s on), but that’s literally thousands of miles away, and likely sometimes in a completely different language still! I mean, revolution era, there’s a discussion on whether or not English or Dutch (deutsche) will be the official language of our new nation. It’s just a completely different time back then, with completely different contexts.

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This. People seem to want to make the same kind of ahistorical mistake as never mentioning women as groups of reasoning humans with social influence, in the time before women could vote.

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Look, I wouldn’t hold them to the same standard either. One wore blackface as a costume and is now in mortal danger of having to voluntarily give up a temporary cushy job and remain in physical comfort the rest of his life. The other are a group of long dead agriculturalists who relied on human slavery as a financial concern, actively grew and expanded its use from an earlier time when it had been in recession, and who you are characterizing as being too bone stupid to have an opinion about it, as blameless as fish that are confused by the concept of “water”.

Not the same standard.

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