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November 24, 2005
Is "America" becoming another weasel word?
"Few New Yorkers are aware that their city essentially was a capital of U.S. slavery for 200 years." So says a bold print image placed directly in the middle of today's Thanksgiving day scolding in the Philadelphia Inquirer. The bold language appears nowhere online, so I photographed it: It is certainly to be hoped that few New Yorkers are "aware" of such a thing, as it simply isn't true. The U.S. wasn't founded until 1776, and slavery was abolished in New York in 1827 -- a grand total of 51 years. How the hell do they get 200? I want to be fair to the writer but I'm having a bit of a problem, because I'm not sure who wrote the bold faced heading. The words do not appear in the article -- itself a reprint from a piece (by the Pulitzer Prize winning Robert Lee Hotz) which appeared in the LA Times. Perhaps the misstatement of history isn't Mr. Hotz's fault. Whoever is at fault, a correction is certainly in order, so I'll be sure to look in tomorrow's edition. Ahem. Here's what the Hotz text says (from the Inquirer): Few New Yorkers are even aware that their city essentially was a capital of American slavery for 200 years, as the exhibition documents.Question: Is this a contradiction, or is "America" meant to be synonymous with "U.S."? Or is the goal to blur any distinction between America and the United States in the hope of shaming as many Americans as possible? I don't think it's a minor point, and the confusion is heightened if we continue to read the article: "Most people don't know it existed here," said the exhibition's chief historian, James O. Horton, professor of American studies and history at George Washington University. "I have people tell me they are shocked that slavery ever existed in New York."There! That word again! "American" -- as in American Studies. (The latter is a North American, United States oriented discipline. If you're interested in matters south of the border, the discipline is called "Latin American Studies.") As I read on, the more I saw the word "America," and "American," the more confused I became: The society's effort arises from a broad reassessment of how thoroughly slavery permeated American life when - in what historians consider the largest forced migration in history - 12 million Africans were kidnapped and transported across the Atlantic. In the decades before 1800, more Africans came to America than Europeans.Wait a minute! While it is commonly asserted by historians that 12 million Africans were transported across the Atlantic, when this statistic is interspersed between the statement that "slavery permeated American life" and the discussion of slave transportation as a "challenging part of our history," you'd almost get the impression that "Americans" (those mean people living in United States) are historically accountable for transporting 12 million Africans. From Africa to America. So it's no small issue whether America is a synonym for the United States. And whether this is "our" history. Or, for that matter, even that of North America before the founding of the United States. What is being left out of the Thanksgiving lecture is any discussion of how many of those 12 million were actually transported to North America. As it turns out, the number is a small fraction of 12 million -- a little more than three percent, to be exact. Most were taken to Brazil or the Caribbean: The vast majority of African slaves were taken to Portuguese Brazil or the Caribbean. Only about 399,000 were brought to British colonies in North America.I don't like moralistic scoldings, but even less do I like scoldings based on misleading numbers, outright misstatements of history, and the sloppy misuse of a perfectly good word: America. I don't want to see "America" added to the list of undefinable words. Not on Thanksgiving. While I'll still try to keep in mind Feynman's maxim that we should "never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity," I'm still getting stuck. Can't stupidity ever be malicious? posted by Eric on 11.24.05 at 06:35 PM
Comments
This is a very nice catch. I'm linking to this, it deserves broader exposure. And yes, stupidity and malice are not self-exclusive. Feynman was simply exhorting us not to subscribe to convoluted conspiracy theories. Mister Snitch! · November 25, 2005 12:37 PM Eric, I'm glad you are bringing this article to light, revealing as it does the typical liberal penchant for moral preening and posturing when an opportunity to score points at America arises. Your criticims were so spot on I had to take a look at the original article myself and can add little but the following: 1) The article sez: 2) the article sez: 3) The article sez: 4) Eric mentions a reference that most black slaves were sent to the Caribbean and Brazil, rather than America. This is partially true , but many slaves were then "re-exported" to America from these locations. Indeed, it was common practice for slaves to be shipped to the Caribean for "seasoning" before coming to Amerikka. As Thomas Sowell points out in "Ethnic America", things were harsher there than in the US. The life expectancy of slaves was a lot less in places like the Caribbean where there was more absentee ownership and overseers drove more ruthlessly. It was considered cheaper in the Caribbean to import new slaves than to maintain existing populations. That was the harsh calculus of the times. In America, the situation was a bit less harsh, because owners typically lived with their land and slaves, and the "missus" was often active in organizing care for sick slaves. There was thus greater incentive to maintain slave health than in the more brutal "seasoning" grounds. 5) The article sez: Enrique Cardova · November 25, 2005 03:40 PM I must add that there were also white slaves in the colonial period, the "indentured servants". Precisely because their term of servitude was limited, they were often treated worse than the Negroes who were enslaved for life, for the same reason that you treat a car you rent with less care than a car you own. Get all the work out of them while you can, and if they drop dead, so what? Jim Goad has a harrowing chapter on white slavery in his The Redneck Manifesto. Steven Malcolm Anderson the Lesbian-worshipping man's-man-admiring myth-based egoist · November 25, 2005 05:04 PM They also leave out the millions of Africans who were forcibly transported across the Sahara, most of whom died. But it's Politically Incorrect to mention the Arab slave trade. Steven Malcolm Anderson the Lesbian-worshipping man's-man-admiring myth-based egoist · November 26, 2005 07:50 PM Yes, and they leave out ancient slavery, as well as modern, current-day slavery. Any slavery but American (hopefully meaning the big bad U.S.). Eric Scheie · November 27, 2005 02:11 PM Correct in part Steve. But said white slaves were an insignificant number in the Western Hemisphere. Books like M. Hofman's "White Slavery" discuss the topic way back to ancient Greece, where of course, mostly whites were involved on both sides. In American terms, white slavery was insignificant. In comparison over 12 million blacks were shipped across the Atlantic to be slaves Also to keep in mind, while indentured servants may have had rougly the same STANDARD OF LIVING as slaves, (food, housing, etc, as Thomas Sowell points out) they had several rights forbidden to slaves. The greatest right of all, of course, was to walk free at the end of their indentured term. Just one example of the difference, is that in the 1600s as slavery grew, places like Virginia decreed that all FREE blacks were to be enslaved for life. White indentured servants were of course, exempt. Enrique Cardova · November 27, 2005 02:40 PM |
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Despicable. An Un-Thanksgiving from them, ungrateful spoiled brats who have all the freedom and resulting wealth that America has given then, yet take it for granted and spend the holiday denigrating their country.
Americans paid our "reparations" over 100 years ago, in a bloody Civil war to free the slaves. Slavery, by the way, is as old as history. It was not invented by our Founding Fathers. As you point out, many more slaves were sent to the Caribbean and to Brazil. We don't hear about that.
It was England and then America which first decide to put an end to slavery, beginning with the slave trade. Christians, often of very conservative bent, men like William Wilberforce and Henry Ward Beecher, spearheaded the crusade to abolish slavery. Christianity, capitalism, and Western imperialism put an end to slavery in most of the world.
It was the 20th century, the century of the socialist Utopias made real, that revived slavery on the most massive scale, the slave labor camps of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.