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1. From: "Oakes, James" <JOakes@gc.cuny.edu> In my previous post I asked that we be very specific about what it is that differentiates the kind of argument Islamic scholars were using by the year 1000 to justify the enslavement of black Africans from the kind of argument used to defend the enslavement of black Africans in the New World prior to the development of biological racism in the 19th century. Responding with blanket reassertions of fundamental structural differences does not quite do what I was hoping for. As it happens, I think that the proslavery ideology that emerged in the United States after the American Revolution was fundamentally different from anything that preceded it. It was, for example, fairly new to develop full scale arguments, in treatises and speeches and even full length books, devoted exclusively to the defense of slavery. Most earlier proslavery thought is gleaned from writings that are concerned with things other than the defense of slavery. So the mere existence of an extensive body of proslavery thought is rather novel. For most of recorded western history the emphasis of "proslavery" thought was on two questions: First, what justifies the initial act of enslavement? Second, which persons or peoples may be legitimately enslaved? (Interestingly, the legitimacy of slavery itself is actually presupposed by both of these questions.) In the nineteenth century defenders of southern slavery had little need to answer the first questions, in part because there were hardly any more initial acts of enslavement after 1808. Instead, Southern defenders of slavery focused more on justifying slavery per se. Mostly they citied the Bible. Not so much the curse of ham as a justification of African enslavement, but the various passages demonstrating the Bible's acceptance of slavery's "abstract" legitimacy. This was really something new. But the abstract justification of slavery did not answer the question of who should be enslaved. This was a much older question, and to answer it southerners most often fell back on some version of racial ideology. Now, it is well known that Bible-reading southerners were often uncomfortable with the implications of scientific racism, since it led logically to the heresy of dual creation. Thus while some proslavery intellectuals pushed the scientific argument to its extreme, most southerners could not go there. Similarly, some intellectuals pushed the abstract defense of slavery close it its own logical extreme of justifying the enslavement of whites, but again most southerners were unwilling to go to that extreme. This is why I think its important to be very careful and very specific about what it was that made the southern defense of slavery so historically specific, and what did not. I would not argue for an unbroken arc or continuity between medieval Islamic writers and 19th century southerners. On the other hand, if we are not allowed to notice the similarities in the justifications for the enslavement of "outsiders" that appear across different times and places on the grounds that those times and places are too vastly different, then I don't see how we could even justify applying the same word--slavery--to those different times and places. Of course there are differences; of course there are similarities. What we are trying to do is disentangle the differences from the similarities. Prof. James Oakes Graduate School Humanities Professor Ph.D. Program in History CUNY Graduate Center 365 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10016 Tel. (212) 817 8430 email: joakes@gc.cuny.edu 2. From: redball@MINDSPRING.COM I've read with interests the various posts on the history of racism and slavery, and I'm in the midst of _The Invention of the White Race_. What strikes me most about this discussion, perhaps because of my rhetorical perspective, is that no one is defining the central term: racism. And, I think the disagreement comes because there are two different definitions being assumed by people. If racism is defined as "categorizing people as members of a separate and inferior biological (and ontologically grounded) race," then, by definition, it can't pre-exist the biological concept. If, on the other hand, it's defined as "denigrating members of some outgroup as inherently inferior," then it's an old practice. Some people are arguing that slavery based in a biological racism is different in kind from slavery based in outgroup racism. In the era I'm reading, I'm seeing proslavery rhetors strive for a justification of *perpetual* slavery, and they're flailing around. They're aware that the perpetual nature of US slavery makes it problematic, and even makes comparisons to other kinds of slavery complicated. It seems to me that they're heading toward something like a biological basis, but they're having trouble articulating it. I can imagine that they jumped on the biological notion the second they could because it solved a significant rhetorical problem for them. -- Trish Roberts-Miller redball@mindspring.com "Certain features were common to these three periods of intensified scapegoating. (1) All represented periods when labor was in a position to test its strength against industry....(2) The three periods also coincided with periods of unusually rapid social change wherein both economic and political future seemed unpredictable...(3) There were active liberal movements on foot during these periods" (Allport, The Nature of Prejudice, 254). http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~robertsmiller/homepage.html
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