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The discussion currently seems to concentrate on the changing ideological bases for the belief in African inferiority. But even this assertion of inferiority must have had a beginning, and I'm not sure that it was there in the earliest days of African servitude in the Americas. James Oakes quotes "Eugene Genovese's still developing argument that what distinguished the intellectuals who defended southern society was their construction of an abstract defense of slavery in which racism played little or no part" -- I'm familiar with the case of Zephaniah Kingsley, who appears to have maintained that slavery need no assumption of African inferiority, and who emigrated (with his slaves) to the Bahamas when he found his ideas objectionable to the slaveholders around him. I should welcome pointers to others with similar views, particularly in the early part of the nineteenth century. John Weiss 2. From: eward9thdecade <eward9thdecade@juno.com I remember a long-ago conversation I had with a Jewish colleague when we were undergraduates at Columbia. He was trying to convince me that the Holocaust was somehow ‘worse’ than slavery. I told him that this was a misleading and unproductive way of looking at things and that there was no ‘worse.’ The Holocaust was the barbarous outgrowth of many centuries of effort through which oppressors (using religious and racialist ‘justifications’ for genocide) methodically planned to destroy a rich and honorable culture by systematically annihilating an entire people. Slavery, by contrast, was a barbarous plan through which oppressors (using religious and racialist ‘justifications’for war, kidnapping, murder, rape, and societal alienation) systematically annihilated a rich and honorable culture in order to force an entire people to work for hundreds of years for nothing. (The monumentality of this achievement can be seen in contemporary Africa; it seems to hav worked just as well on those who were not transported as on those who were). This chicken/egg; worse/not-so-bad conversation might benefit from our revisiting theodore allen’s two volume “invention of the white race,’ starting with his reiteration of the 1950s debate between the handlins, on one hand, and degler and jordan, on the other. Allen classifies their respective positions as ‘socio-economic’ and ‘psycho-cultural’and clearly situates them as the bifurcated root of the theoretical tree we’re still trying to climb. As one of the most brilliant and comprehensively effective social control mechanisms ever devised, Allen (and others) have argued that American racism’s relatively unmolested perpetuation into the 21st century is largely a function of the early and calculated development by the planters of a ‘buffer’ class of landless whites who were brought along a carefully contrived and codified avenue of supposed ‘privilege’ and ‘racial superiority’ relative to Blacks; whites who would otherwise, if left unchecked, surely have aligned themselves (remember Bacon?) with Black bondsmen and, with numerical superiority, done away with those planters when they had the chance. As soon as ‘Black’ began to equal ‘slave’ and ‘whiteness’ became an inherent (and economically valuable) property ‘right,’ the nation was already more than halfway down the slippery slope. Allen’s (and Roediger’s) discussions of the Irish, as almost perfect patsy’s for this scheme, brings us forward two hundred years. In the history of the world, there has never been anything lower than a slaveholder. Nor has there ever been anything benign about slavery. No matter how it’s coated, there is no ‘better’ or ‘worse’ here, and scholars who wish to elucidate temporal or cultural variations and relative degrees of severity, culpability and determinism among slaveholding societies must also be prepared to acknowledge their own biases and positions along this continuum, even while they practice rigor in their resolve not to descend unwittingly into this murky place. elise virginia ward
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