quote:This country still is what is is in large part to the massive wealth gotten from slavery.
This is not in fact true.
If anything, the opposite. Slavery generated very little wealth, and caused the southern economy to stagnate for over a century- which was the cause of the civil war to begin with, a small oligarchy trying to maintain itself against a rising tide of technology and a market based economy.
People often look at slavery as if it's just like work for wages, minus the wages. The problem is that in an economy where the majority of workers are not paid, there is very little incentive to diversify, and very little actual liquidity to work with or invest. You can be "rich" in comparison with your neighbors, but you can't a) borrow money b) start a new business or c) change jobs, because there is no money to a) lend, b) buy anything with, or c) pay salaries. And since the cost of labor is so artificially low, that means that the funneling of money to the land owners is a perpetual cycle that never lets up. Eventually in the south, very few people were wealthy, and even their wealth was as nothing compared to the new industrialists in the north.
Thus you got the social construct that persisted for over a century in the south, that certain families had "family money," even when they had no money at all, because they were from families that had been at the top of that zero-liquidity pyramid- they owned land they couldn't sell or leverage, and relied on a lowest-possible margin crop to survive, and cheap labor to produce it.
I'd have to see numbers before I could buy into this. The idea that slavery generated little wealth is basically the opposite of every 19th century American history book I've ever read.
I think wealth generation is the wrong way of looking at it. Did people get rich off slavery, absolutely. But we are generating the same sort of rich folks in our society now. You can't even make the trickle down argument for slavery in the South because the slave owners weren't paying wages to most of their workers. If they opened up a new plantation, few if any paying jobs were created. Since wages weren't going to slaves, they weren't spending virtually any money.
I think the correct way of looking at money is "flows". Slavery restricted flows to just a few people, who could not possibly spend that money in such a way as to distribute it to wider society, much like our uber rich cannot possibly buy enough yachts to get that money to other people. If you aren't spending your dollar, I'm not earning a dollar.
So the South stagnated because flows were restricted. America in the early 20th Century as a whole had this same problem, and we're going through it all over again today.
Two sides of the same coin. You need liquidity to have credit in the market. You need credit to start new businesses and leverage land ownership. You need wage earners to buy from new businesses, and on and on it goes. No workers, means no customers, no customers means no new businesses, no new businesses means no net wealth creation, means no liquidity, means no credit. It's a cycle. Slavery interrupted the cycle.
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quote:The idea that slavery generated little wealth
There's a difference between making a small elite class rich, and creating a wealthy society. Money earned from slaves was, by and large, not reinvested in capital assets; owning ships, machinery, mills and what-have-you was "trade" and declasse. A factory owner in the North, making a profit, would build another factory, or invest in a railroad or canal, or otherwise participate in the economic growth that made the North so rich. A slave owner would buy his wife the latest dresses from Paris, because what was there to invest in?
Again, this is not a version of history I'm familiar with.
Cotton money went extensively to the north, because the South produced almost nothing other than cotton, tobacco and other cash crops. Much of their cotton was exported to Britain, which made up the vast of American exports during the first half (and later) of the 19th century. Much was also sold to northern traders for export or use in northern textile mills.
What money was gained from cotton did not sit idly in the banks of large landholders. That money often went to northern and western industries in return for manufactured goods, crafts and large amounts of food stuffs, since southern lands were not self-sufficient, choosing only to grow cash crops and import food from the north instead.
Too, most slaveowners were not the super rich. A teeny tiny percentage of southern slave owners had more than a handful of slaves. The large uber plantation we all think of as iconic of Southern slavery was in fact a very small piece of the overall picture, where tens of thousands of small land owners owned one or two slaves, or a dozen. They weren't sitting on millions. Their money was all flowing north to buy goods.
Southern wealth flowed into the north and west, spurring industrialization, playing a huge role in developing the modern banking industry and giving America a credit worthiness that allowed for foreign capital to come into the country, it also financed large chunks of the growth of the US railroad industry - the backbone of American industrialization.
The idea that southern money sat in banks waiting for finery from Europe suggests that the South was in general self-sufficient and required nothing from the north, nor contributed anything to it. The truth is the exact opposite.
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quote:those ships, capital investments all, sometimes used them in the transportation of human slaves and were well paid for the work.
Again, individual wealth is not the same as wealth for a society. What would those ships have been used for, if the slave trade hadn't existed? It would probably have been better for economic growth. Observe the Royal Africa Company, which for a while had an actual monopoly on transporting slaves to the Spanish colonies, managed to lose money on the deal and go bankrupt! And when the Royal Navy was intercepting slave traders, then sure, a ship that made it through could make its owner a rich man, but the traders as a whole lost money.
quote:for example a number of those factories which were built from industrial profits went to build or were themselves textiles. Which weren't whether they were in England or the North fed by the millions of acres of cotton fields worked by paid citizen labor.
They would have been, however, if the slaves hadn't been there - as was demonstrated during the Civil War. The blockade prevented England from getting American cotton; so in the space of two years they got Indian and Egyptian cotton instead. You're trying to compare Southern fields full of slaves to the South as an uninhabited wasteland, and call that difference the wealth created by slaves. But the correct comparison is to think what would actually have happened if slavery had been abolished much earlier; that is to say, the Southern fields would have been worked by freemen (and probably not as a monoculture), and the US as a whole would likely have been wealthier. But some rich planters, of course, would have lost out.
It's similar with India: The British Raj was likely a losing proposition for Britain as a whole. But it made money for the decision-making class.
On your last point, that freemen in the south would have produced greater economic benefits...we have evidence of how that would have gone. When the slaves were freed, the vast majority went right back to work in the fields for very, very low wages, often living out a life of indebtedness to their former masters because they now had to pay for all the equipment and seed (and food and housing) that previously was just part of their servitude. Because their wages never actually covered their costs, most died in what was effectively still slavery. That continued for another century.
Sharecroppers also produced little in economic activity that could be called an increase. Slave owners essentially used them as a revenue stream for all the same things they would have needed t buy anyway. Poor sharecroppers couldn't afford any goods that would have generated additional economic activity. They couldn't even afford the food, clothing and housing they now had to pay for.
We also know that yields did not increase as a result of sharecropping. Chemical pesticides helped make up for the bole weevil infestation, but until the advanced mechanization that came decades later, there was no great increase in American cotton production. Yields fell after the civil war. Yields also fell in middle states when abolitionists who were convinced free people could produce cotton more efficiently tried their hand at it and found they simply could not find anyone who do the work slaves were doing as quickly as they were doing it to generate that level of profit.
I see no evidence to suggest that freeing the slaves any earlier would have led to any better an outcome, unless we'd done it before we ever landed in America. But then you'd have to deal with the fact that the trade lanes opened by slave traffic never would have existed as well, which puts a crimp on global trade.
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quote:This country still is what is is in large part to the massive wealth gotten from slavery.
This is not in fact true.
If anything, the opposite. Slavery generated very little wealth, and caused the southern economy to stagnate for over a century- which was the cause of the civil war to begin with, a small oligarchy trying to maintain itself against a rising tide of technology and a market based economy.
People often look at slavery as if it's just like work for wages, minus the wages. The problem is that in an economy where the majority of workers are not paid, there is very little incentive to diversify, and very little actual liquidity to work with or invest. You can be "rich" in comparison with your neighbors, but you can't a) borrow money b) start a new business or c) change jobs, because there is no money to a) lend, b) buy anything with, or c) pay salaries. And since the cost of labor is so artificially low, that means that the funneling of money to the land owners is a perpetual cycle that never lets up. Eventually in the south, very few people were wealthy, and even their wealth was as nothing compared to the new industrialists in the north.
Thus you got the social construct that persisted for over a century in the south, that certain families had "family money," even when they had no money at all, because they were from families that had been at the top of that zero-liquidity pyramid- they owned land they couldn't sell or leverage, and relied on a lowest-possible margin crop to survive, and cheap labor to produce it.
I'd have to see numbers before I could buy into this. The idea that slavery generated little wealth is basically the opposite of every 19th century American history book I've ever read.
I doubt that sincerely. Slavery generated a high degree of wealth disparity. But if you're talking about gross purchasing power, slavery tamped down economic diversity and depressed the economy as a whole. The wealth it generated in the hands of a few was, compared to the expected output of a free market economy, pretty paltry. There's a good reason the south lost the war and never recovered economically.
Look, I'm not saying that in a purely objective sense, slavering didn't generate wealth. It did of course. Every pound of cotton has a price on the market. What I am saying is that in a relative sense, if you let the southern economy play out in two alternate universes, one in which a supply of slaves didn't exist, and one in which it did, the one in which there were no slaves would have seen economic growth and total wealth generation (per capita, as the population would have also been smaller), many times what slavery produced.
We have a very good test case for that: the northern states and the southern ones. While their economies were fundamentally different in many regards, slavery is owed a great portion of the blame for the south's stagnant economy, not to mention its moral perfidiousness. This was observed by De Tocqueville half a century before the war.
And this was not a new thing in history. The demographic and economic impacts of a saturated slave economy and wealth/land disparities was what toppled the Roman republic. Once the economic interests of the landed class reached far enough in the opposite direction from the majority of actual citizens, let alone the population, conflict is inevitable.
The South lost the war because of a lack of manpower and a lack of industry. Ultimately the pool of military age men was much, much smaller than that of the north, and despite the fact that Southern generals were superior to northern ones, and that they managed to kill a hell of a lot of Union soldiers, in the last couple years, Grant and Sherman just kept pumping more and more men into the meatgrinder, overwhelming the South. They also had access to most of the navy, which blockaded large scale attempts to procure foreign military goods to the South, and they had almost all of American industry, which was used for the Union war machine. There was absolutely no lack of money in the South. If you're talking about diversification as a means to fight a war, then yes, the South was doing a terrible job. If you're suggesting their poor economy meant they couldn't afford to fight a war, then you're very wrong. That's not why they lost.
You might have to explain to me what you're talking about when you describe the Southern economy as if it was on the brink of failure. When are you talking? What time period? Before the Civil War I assume. And in what way was it stagnant? The price of cotton was rarely higher and exports never higher than in the years leading up to the Civil War.
If your problem is that there wasn't a vibrant consumer middle class in the south, then I'm really not sure what you're comparing it to. That didn't come into being until 60+ years after the Civil War.
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quote:This country still is what is is in large part to the massive wealth gotten from slavery.
This is not in fact true.
If anything, the opposite. Slavery generated very little wealth, and caused the southern economy to stagnate for over a century- which was the cause of the civil war to begin with, a small oligarchy trying to maintain itself against a rising tide of technology and a market based economy.
People often look at slavery as if it's just like work for wages, minus the wages. The problem is that in an economy where the majority of workers are not paid, there is very little incentive to diversify, and very little actual liquidity to work with or invest. You can be "rich" in comparison with your neighbors, but you can't a) borrow money b) start a new business or c) change jobs, because there is no money to a) lend, b) buy anything with, or c) pay salaries. And since the cost of labor is so artificially low, that means that the funneling of money to the land owners is a perpetual cycle that never lets up. Eventually in the south, very few people were wealthy, and even their wealth was as nothing compared to the new industrialists in the north.
Thus you got the social construct that persisted for over a century in the south, that certain families had "family money," even when they had no money at all, because they were from families that had been at the top of that zero-liquidity pyramid- they owned land they couldn't sell or leverage, and relied on a lowest-possible margin crop to survive, and cheap labor to produce it.
I'd have to see numbers before I could buy into this. The idea that slavery generated little wealth is basically the opposite of every 19th century American history book I've ever read.
I think wealth generation is the wrong way of looking at it. Did people get rich off slavery, absolutely. But we are generating the same sort of rich folks in our society now. You can't even make the trickle down argument for slavery in the South because the slave owners weren't paying wages to most of their workers. If they opened up a new plantation, few if any paying jobs were created. Since wages weren't going to slaves, they weren't spending virtually any money.
I think the correct way of looking at money is "flows". Slavery restricted flows to just a few people, who could not possibly spend that money in such a way as to distribute it to wider society, much like our uber rich cannot possibly buy enough yachts to get that money to other people. If you aren't spending your dollar, I'm not earning a dollar.
So the South stagnated because flows were restricted. America in the early 20th Century as a whole had this same problem, and we're going through it all over again today.
Two sides of the same coin. You need liquidity to have credit in the market. You need credit to start new businesses and leverage land ownership. You need wage earners to buy from new businesses, and on and on it goes. No workers, means no customers, no customers means no new businesses, no new businesses means no net wealth creation, means no liquidity, means no credit. It's a cycle. Slavery interrupted the cycle.
Interrupted it for who? Southern money flowed into the north which meant northern factories and farms had money to hire and pay workers who could then buy goods and companies could, to a degree, reinvest.
But really wonder at a lot of your language. Antebellum America was not 20th century America. There was really no consumer class. We were not a consumer-driven economy. Lots of people buying up lots of goodies did not drive out economy. It didn't really drive ANY economy. Mass production wouldn't lower the price of most goods to consumer-approachable levels for decades, and wages wouldn't rise to the levels appropriate to buy those goods for decades as well.
If your suggestion is just that, why gee, if only 19th century America used 20th century economics, things would have been better, then why not argue if only they'd had satellites and computer things would have been better as well?
You venture into fantasy history at that point.
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quote:The idea that slavery generated little wealth
There's a difference between making a small elite class rich, and creating a wealthy society. Money earned from slaves was, by and large, not reinvested in capital assets; owning ships, machinery, mills and what-have-you was "trade" and declasse. A factory owner in the North, making a profit, would build another factory, or invest in a railroad or canal, or otherwise participate in the economic growth that made the North so rich. A slave owner would buy his wife the latest dresses from Paris, because what was there to invest in?
Again, this is not a version of history I'm familiar with.
Cotton money went extensively to the north, because the South produced almost nothing other than cotton, tobacco and other cash crops. Much of their cotton was exported to Britain, which made up the vast of American exports during the first half (and later) of the 19th century. Much was also sold to northern traders for export or use in northern textile mills.
What money was gained from cotton did not sit idly in the banks of large landholders. That money often went to northern and western industries in return for manufactured goods, crafts and large amounts of food stuffs, since southern lands were not self-sufficient, choosing only to grow cash crops and import food from the north instead.
Too, most slaveowners were not the super rich. A teeny tiny percentage of southern slave owners had more than a handful of slaves. The large uber plantation we all think of as iconic of Southern slavery was in fact a very small piece of the overall picture, where tens of thousands of small land owners owned one or two slaves, or a dozen. They weren't sitting on millions. Their money was all flowing north to buy goods.
Southern wealth flowed into the north and west, spurring industrialization, playing a huge role in developing the modern banking industry and giving America a credit worthiness that allowed for foreign capital to come into the country, it also financed large chunks of the growth of the US railroad industry - the backbone of American industrialization.
The idea that southern money sat in banks waiting for finery from Europe suggests that the South was in general self-sufficient and required nothing from the north, nor contributed anything to it. The truth is the exact opposite.
What's confusing me here is that you are describing the other half of the same phenomenon that KoM is describing.
The cotton industry generated *money* but that money was spent on goods manufactured in the north- manufacturing which generated *wealth.* What version of that history are you not familiar with? You're both outlining the same problem.
quote: On your last point, that freemen in the south would have produced greater economic benefits...we have evidence of how that would have gone. When the slaves were freed, the vast majority went right back to work in the fields for very, very low wages, often living out a life of indebtedness to their former masters because they now had to pay for all the equipment and seed (and food and housing) that previously was just part of their servitude. Because their wages never actually covered their costs, most died in what was effectively still slavery. That continued for another century.
That's being rather disingenuous. The scheme set up after slavery was essentially another form of slavery. Its economic modality was not different from that of slavery, and thus it was just as dysfunctional. With legal protection for blacks, and a true market economy, things might have been different- but that was a function of the system that had already been in place, and was not about to let itself be replaced so quickly.
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quote:This country still is what is is in large part to the massive wealth gotten from slavery.
This is not in fact true.
If anything, the opposite. Slavery generated very little wealth, and caused the southern economy to stagnate for over a century- which was the cause of the civil war to begin with, a small oligarchy trying to maintain itself against a rising tide of technology and a market based economy.
People often look at slavery as if it's just like work for wages, minus the wages. The problem is that in an economy where the majority of workers are not paid, there is very little incentive to diversify, and very little actual liquidity to work with or invest. You can be "rich" in comparison with your neighbors, but you can't a) borrow money b) start a new business or c) change jobs, because there is no money to a) lend, b) buy anything with, or c) pay salaries. And since the cost of labor is so artificially low, that means that the funneling of money to the land owners is a perpetual cycle that never lets up. Eventually in the south, very few people were wealthy, and even their wealth was as nothing compared to the new industrialists in the north.
Thus you got the social construct that persisted for over a century in the south, that certain families had "family money," even when they had no money at all, because they were from families that had been at the top of that zero-liquidity pyramid- they owned land they couldn't sell or leverage, and relied on a lowest-possible margin crop to survive, and cheap labor to produce it.
I'd have to see numbers before I could buy into this. The idea that slavery generated little wealth is basically the opposite of every 19th century American history book I've ever read.
I doubt that sincerely. Slavery generated a high degree of wealth disparity. But if you're talking about gross purchasing power, slavery tamped down economic diversity and depressed the economy as a whole. The wealth it generated in the hands of a few was, compared to the expected output of a free market economy, pretty paltry. There's a good reason the south lost the war and never recovered economically.
Look, I'm not saying that in a purely objective sense, slavering didn't generate wealth. It did of course. Every pound of cotton has a price on the market. What I am saying is that in a relative sense, if you let the southern economy play out in two alternate universes, one in which a supply of slaves didn't exist, and one in which it did, the one in which there were no slaves would have seen economic growth and total wealth generation (per capita, as the population would have also been smaller), many times what slavery produced.
We have a very good test case for that: the northern states and the southern ones. While their economies were fundamentally different in many regards, slavery is owed a great portion of the blame for the south's stagnant economy, not to mention its moral perfidiousness. This was observed by De Tocqueville half a century before the war.
And this was not a new thing in history. The demographic and economic impacts of a saturated slave economy and wealth/land disparities was what toppled the Roman republic. Once the economic interests of the landed class reached far enough in the opposite direction from the majority of actual citizens, let alone the population, conflict is inevitable.
The South lost the war because of a lack of manpower and a lack of industry. Ultimately the pool of military age men was much, much smaller than that of the north, and despite the fact that Southern generals were superior to northern ones, and that they managed to kill a hell of a lot of Union soldiers, in the last couple years, Grant and Sherman just kept pumping more and more men into the meatgrinder, overwhelming the South. They also had access to most of the navy, which blockaded large scale attempts to procure foreign military goods to the South, and they had almost all of American industry, which was used for the Union war machine. There was absolutely no lack of money in the South. If you're talking about diversification as a means to fight a war, then yes, the South was doing a terrible job. If you're suggesting their poor economy meant they couldn't afford to fight a war, then you're very wrong. That's not why they lost.
You keep stating the same problem from different perspectives and claiming it's a different problem. A lack of manpower is a consequence of the economic structure. As is the lack of capital and industry.
And yes, I am suggesting that their economy gave them no means to fight a war. When their cash crops were cut off, their credit was worth nothing in Europe, and they weren't able to feed themselves and buy weapons. Thus, they lost. If they'd had credit, much less the means to manufacture their own weapons, they might have stood a better chance. We're talking about the same problem here.
quote: You might have to explain to me what you're talking about when you describe the Southern economy as if it was on the brink of failure. When are you talking? What time period? Before the Civil War I assume. And in what way was it stagnant? The price of cotton was rarely higher and exports never higher than in the years leading up to the Civil War.
If your problem is that there wasn't a vibrant consumer middle class in the south, then I'm really not sure what you're comparing it to. That didn't come into being until 60+ years after the Civil War.
It was not on the brink of failure. By the yardstick of the time, it had already failed. I'm not describing a middle class revolution- that didn't even happen in the north until the 20th century. I'm talking about an industrial revolution. The south missed out on theirs, and it cost them dearly.
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quote:Originally posted by Orincoro: Two sides of the same coin. You need liquidity to have credit in the market. You need credit to start new businesses and leverage land ownership. You need wage earners to buy from new businesses, and on and on it goes. No workers, means no customers, no customers means no new businesses, no new businesses means no net wealth creation, means no liquidity, means no credit. It's a cycle. Slavery interrupted the cycle.
Interrupted it for who? Southern money flowed into the north which meant northern factories and farms had money to hire and pay workers who could then buy goods and companies could, to a degree, reinvest.
Yes, reinvest in the North. I'm not as interested in the consumer aspect as the industrial one. Real capital formation started with the entrepreneurial class in the northern cities. You have to have industrial cities and reasons to form capital. Reasons the south didn't have.
quote: But really wonder at a lot of your language. Antebellum America was not 20th century America. There was really no consumer class. We were not a consumer-driven economy. Lots of people buying up lots of goodies did not drive out economy. It didn't really drive ANY economy. Mass production wouldn't lower the price of most goods to consumer-approachable levels for decades, and wages wouldn't rise to the levels appropriate to buy those goods for decades as well.
If your suggestion is just that, why gee, if only 19th century America used 20th century economics, things would have been better, then why not argue if only they'd had satellites and computer things would have been better as well?
You venture into fantasy history at that point.
This is a pretty bad reading of what I've said. I don't know what to tell you. There are many steps between capital formation and a consumer driven economy, and those steps involve slow diversification of consumption (by governments as well as consumers). Increasing diversification and increasing consumption (and we are talking about more than just a consumer driven economy, but industrial consumption of materials as well), leads to capital formation and the extension of credit, because a diverse industry based on resource exploitation has a great deal of growth potential.
The south never diversified, never built up capital, and never created an entrepreneurial class- its economy was based on exports, rather than resource exploitation, so it had little incentive to find new efficiencies (you produce more, only to see prices fall). It stayed dependent on a crop that could only ever become cheaper. The north was taking those first steps in the 1860s. That is my point.
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quote:What's confusing me here is that you are describing the other half of the same phenomenon that KoM is describing.
The cotton industry generated *money* but that money was spent on goods manufactured in the north- manufacturing which generated *wealth.* What version of that history are you not familiar with? You're both outlining the same problem.
I think the point that Lyrhawn and certainly myself are making is this. It's my understanding that you and KoM are rejecting the premise that slavery had a significant part in establishing the foundations of what is the modern American economy. Your evidence for this is how bad slavery was at generating wealth for the South, compared to other potential systems.
My point and again I think Lyrhawn's is contained in the bolded quote. The South thanks to slavery and their reliance on cash crops needed to import so much to continue to survive. These things were very often manufactured in the North, or imported from elsewhere and shipped by the North, sometimes on Northern ships. The Industrial Revolution in the North was built in part with the wealth generated by slavery-wealth generated in the North.
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quote: The biker gang shootout this weekend in Waco, Texas, that left nine people dead, 18 wounded, and as many as 192 facing organized crime charges has sparked a lot of scrutiny over how police and media are treating this incident compared with how they approached the protests in Ferguson, Mo., and Baltimore.
The relatively relaxed-looking police presence in Waco was a big topic of discussion. Photos taken by news organizations in the aftermath of the incident showed arrested bikers — who were mostly white — sitting without handcuffs and able to use their phones, while law enforcement officers looked casual and minimally attentive.
quote:Public Safety and Correctional Services Secretary Stephen T. Moyer said in a statement that authorities began investigating the two officers following a tip.
“We will not allow the vast majority of our employees who are honest and hardworking to be tainted by the actions of a few,” he said.
Right on.
I wonder why it's harder for some people to realize that the actions of a few looters do not reflect on the rest of the protestors.
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quote:Public Safety and Correctional Services Secretary Stephen T. Moyer said in a statement that authorities began investigating the two officers following a tip.
“We will not allow the vast majority of our employees who are honest and hardworking to be tainted by the actions of a few,” he said.
Right on.
I wonder why it's harder for some people to realize that the actions of a few looters do not reflect on the rest of the protestors.
Police will also infiltrate protests and attempt to provoke them towards violence in order to justify escalated responses.
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quote:What's confusing me here is that you are describing the other half of the same phenomenon that KoM is describing.
The cotton industry generated *money* but that money was spent on goods manufactured in the north- manufacturing which generated *wealth.* What version of that history are you not familiar with? You're both outlining the same problem.
I guess I'm just confused by the terminology then. This point originated from the argument you and KoM were making that slavery did not generate wealth. But now it sounds, when you dig into the details, like your problem is that they were only INDIRECTLY creating wealth.
Southern money was being invested in northern factories to create wealth. So your problem is that the South was creating gasoline instead of engines. Seems to me it was actually a rather solid symbiotic relationship for the United States as a whole to create wealth.
quote:That's being rather disingenuous. The scheme set up after slavery was essentially another form of slavery. Its economic modality was not different from that of slavery, and thus it was just as dysfunctional. With legal protection for blacks, and a true market economy, things might have been different- but that was a function of the system that had already been in place, and was not about to let itself be replaced so quickly.
And now we're back to fantasy history. This was never going to happen. You might as well argue that the contribution of slaves is meaningless because if only we'd managed to skip the Dark Ages, the 19th century would have been the Computer Age. Maybe it's true, but it's also pretty much meaningless.
You're really going to sit there and tell me that what happened, and the contribution made, was basically pointless because a fantasy history existed that would have worked better? That's freaking bizarre, and I'm going to assume that's not what you mean. So please elaborate further.
quote:You keep stating the same problem from different perspectives and claiming it's a different problem. A lack of manpower is a consequence of the economic structure. As is the lack of capital and industry.
I think that's an interesting way to look at history...viewing a country's economy through the lens of its ability to fight a war. By that metric, Holland has one of the world's worst economies, despite the fact that, you know, it has incredibly high GDP and one of the highest standards of living in the world. But what's that, no navy and no tank factories? They're basically a third world country.
Once again, the South did not lack capital. They did lack the means to move their capital and received goods, that's true. But again, it's kind of bizarre to look at a breakaway region from a country and hit them for not being 100% self-sufficient. That's certainly not how the modern world works. Countries today specialize in what they can make the best and sell it to people in other countries who make something else better. The South made cotton and tobacco better than anyone else, and they had a ton of money. They could purchase the goods they needed with that money, and that worked. They had no need to build shipyards and factories to make guns; they were part of a country and the country as a whole had those things. That's like saying Massachusetts has a terrible economy because it could never feed itself on its own.
quote:And yes, I am suggesting that their economy gave them no means to fight a war. When their cash crops were cut off, their credit was worth nothing in Europe, and they weren't able to feed themselves and buy weapons. Thus, they lost. If they'd had credit, much less the means to manufacture their own weapons, they might have stood a better chance. We're talking about the same problem here.
Yeah sort of, but you're coming at it from (in my view) a really weird perspective that's getting us to very different conclusions.
quote:It was not on the brink of failure. By the yardstick of the time, it had already failed. I'm not describing a middle class revolution- that didn't even happen in the north until the 20th century. I'm talking about an industrial revolution. The south missed out on theirs, and it cost them dearly.
By WHAT yardstick? Seriously, what hard metric are you using to judge failure?
quote:Yes, reinvest in the North. I'm not as interested in the consumer aspect as the industrial one. Real capital formation started with the entrepreneurial class in the northern cities. You have to have industrial cities and reasons to form capital. Reasons the south didn't have.
What does it matter? It was NATIONAL growth. Southern money was fueling NATIONAL growth for the country by pumping large sums of money into American industry and infrastructure.
I don't understand what's happening here. Why are you separating the South out like this? This discussion began over the role the South played in NATIONAL growth. You're trying to argue that just because reinvestment didn't happen in the south the way it did in the north that southern money that got it all going doesn't matter? Where do you think that money came from? And so long as we're playing fantasy historian, how does the north grow WITHOUT southern money?
quote:The south never diversified, never built up capital, and never created an entrepreneurial class- its economy was based on exports, rather than resource exploitation, so it had little incentive to find new efficiencies (you produce more, only to see prices fall). It stayed dependent on a crop that could only ever become cheaper. The north was taking those first steps in the 1860s. That is my point.
Near as I can tell, that's half your point; you haven't given me the second half yet. And further, I think your whole point is built on a rickety foundation.
The South didn't diversify, but it DID build up tremendous capital - much of which went north to fuel NATIONAL growth. And cotton running up to the Civil War did not become cheaper. The South created greater and greater amounts of it to feed an ever growing global demand. No, that wouldn't have lasted forever, but it was doing fine at the time.
The second half of your point would have to answer this: So what?
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quote:What's confusing me here is that you are describing the other half of the same phenomenon that KoM is describing.
The cotton industry generated *money* but that money was spent on goods manufactured in the north- manufacturing which generated *wealth.* What version of that history are you not familiar with? You're both outlining the same problem.
I think the point that Lyrhawn and certainly myself are making is this. It's my understanding that you and KoM are rejecting the premise that slavery had a significant part in establishing the foundations of what is the modern American economy. Your evidence for this is how bad slavery was at generating wealth for the South, compared to other potential systems.
My point and again I think Lyrhawn's is contained in the bolded quote. The South thanks to slavery and their reliance on cash crops needed to import so much to continue to survive. These things were very often manufactured in the North, or imported from elsewhere and shipped by the North, sometimes on Northern ships. The Industrial Revolution in the North was built in part with the wealth generated by slavery-wealth generated in the North.
My point is half this. I find it baffling that Southern money is being pulled out of the equation as if the North would have continued on its merry way without it. I don't see any evidence to suggest that's the case. Without customers - especially continental ones who helped fund the railroad system to DELIVER goods to those customers - northern factories would never have gotten far past the blueprint stage. British factories were doing just fine to supply Europe with most of what they needed.
The KoM/Orincoro counterargument seems to be based on fantasy. In a perfect idealized ahistorical Southern system, we can IMAGINE a system that would have worked much better to generate long term wealth.
The final conclusion drawn from this seems to be that the contribution of slaves doesn't count based seemingly on 2 points: 1. That a non-slavery fantasy system could have done a better job. And 2. The North would have continued along merrily without the South.
You can understand why for me, as an historian, that line of argument doesn't really work.
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quote:Without customers - especially continental ones who helped fund the railroad system to DELIVER goods to those customers - northern factories would never have gotten far past the blueprint stage.
How many customers did the South generate, noting that the slaves weren't buying anything? You can't tell me that the tiny plantation elite were a significant market on the scale of the industrialisation of the US. Indeed, the railroads you mention demonstrate the point: They didn't run in the South! If we replace the slaves with wage laborers (not sharecroppers), they would have formed an extensive market and boosted industrialisation everywhere.
Here's a simple model that clarified my thinking: There is a worker, a landowner, a hairdresser, and a manufacturer. The worker produces stuff that is split between him and the landowner; if he is a slave, he gets the minimum that will keep him alive, if free, he gets something more. The landowner spends some of his stuff on getting his hair cut, and some on factory goods from the manufacturer. The manufacturer invests some of the stuff he gets - he is the only one who does so.
Now, if the worker is a slave, then the manufacturer gets the business only of the landowner, and has to take his investments out of that. But if the worker is free, the landowner spends about the same amount on factory goods, and cuts down on the haircuts; the worker, however, starts spending on factory goods. So when the worker becomes free, the hairdresser loses out, but the manufacturer gets more stuff to invest with, creating economic growth.
quote:In a perfect idealized ahistorical Southern system, we can IMAGINE a system that would have worked much better to generate long term wealth.
So when we are talking about the effects of slavery, exactly what the devil are we supposed to compare it to unless it's an ahistorical system that doesn't have any slaves? You cannot possibly have this discussion if you're going to disallow subtracting the slavery!
To the extent that slavery hurt economic growth relative to hypothetical free labour, our wealth exists in spite of slavery, not because of slavery. We would have been even richer without it.
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quote:To the extent that slavery hurt economic growth relative to hypothetical free labour, our wealth exists in spite of slavery, not because of slavery. We would have been even richer without it.
Alright, but in the real world where wealth was actually generated, a portion of the northern industrial revolution was built on the back of the cotton crop grown in the south and shipped abroad, among other things. That's really not up for debate, is it? That the North made at least *some* money on the profits from slave-based cash crop agriculture?
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posted
I'll do a longer point later, but out of curiosity, how much disposable income do you all imagine the average northern worker had to spend on anything other than necessities?
Keeping in mind that when Henry ford instituted the five dollar day, it was a huge deal in marking the beginning of the consumer spending era in large part because previous to that, most people who were common laborers simply didn't have the money to spend on anything above subsistence living. That wouldn't happen until the twentieth century.
There's a difference between a likely alternate history and a complete fantasy history. Proposing an alternative that actually could have happened had different decisions been made here and there to alter things is an interesting way to look at historical figures. But I think you cheapen history by looking back at it 200 years later and say, gee, if only the entire fabric of their existence was fundamentally altered they could have done so much better.
Suggesting that slavery played no part in making America wealthy because a better fantasy system could have generated MORE money doesn't make any sense. Suggesting slavery held back america from becoming even wealthier, now, go ahead and make that argument and go ahead and use your fantasy history. Totally fair. But to suggest we don't owe slavery anything for our wealth because we could have been even wealthier is illogical.
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quote:To the extent that slavery hurt economic growth relative to hypothetical free labour, our wealth exists in spite of slavery, not because of slavery. We would have been even richer without it.
Alright, but in the real world where wealth was actually generated, a portion of the northern industrial revolution was built on the back of the cotton crop grown in the south and shipped abroad, among other things. That's really not up for debate, is it? That the North made at least *some* money on the profits from slave-based cash crop agriculture?
Of course it isn't up for debate that slavery generated some wealth. If it didn't, it would have been abandoned. But the opportunity cost of slavery- the economy it stopped from forming, represents a colossal loss of opportunity. We can't saw in a raw sense they slavery made america poorer, but it kept us from being much, much richer, particularly the southern states.
And in response to what lyr has said about it being a symbiotic relationship, well, if it really had been, there wouldn't have been a war. It was a client state relationship, and the south was the client. When the terms became unbearable for the north, there was a war. At that point, the reasons for the war were also the reasons the south lost.
quote: What does it matter? It was NATIONAL growth. Southern money was fueling NATIONAL growth for the country by pumping large sums of money into American industry and infrastructure.
I don't understand what's happening here. Why are you separating the South out like this? This discussion began over the role the South played in NATIONAL growth. You're trying to argue that just because reinvestment didn't happen in the south the way it did in the north that southern money that got it all going doesn't matter? Where do you think that money came from? And so long as we're playing fantasy historian, how does the north grow WITHOUT southern money?
I'm differentiating the south because it was differentiated at the time. The structure of the US was fundamentally different- secession was an open question, and the southern states leveraged the threat of leaving the union to extract compromises from the north in the 1820s, and again in the 1840s. It was by dint of the situation becoming unbearable for the north that the south finally seceded, and when it did, it did so according to a real dilineation between the southern economy and the northern. The southern economy was a client of the north, and did not view itself as part of a "union." That view of the states was instituted during the war, as a way of arguing in favor of fighting the rebellion, and after the war, in the process of reconstruction.
The political crisis that led up to the civil war has as its primary cause the very real economic disparities between the north and the south. If they were symbiotic, as you view it, then what led to the conflict? Whatever wealth the south did generate for the north, and of course it did (I am not arguing otherwise), this was still viewed by the north as a poor bargain. The south's cash crops and injections of capital into the northern economy were seen as so worthless compared to the prospect of a modernized southern economy, and the expansion of slavery to the western colonies was seen as such an opportunity loss, that the north was willing to cut trade ties with the south and fight for half a decade to open its markets back up and displace slavery as the basis of the southern economy. That's a very powerful sign of motivation, and a sign that the south was not performing a useful role in the union. If the north had been content to simply quarantine the south and isolate it diplomatically, while continuing to benefit from its client economic status, it could have done so easily. But that is not what the northern states wanted to do.
While you can view that as a sign that the north did see the south as part of a symbiotic relationship, you have to also accept that this symbiosis was dysfunctional, and that the north wanted to gain influence over the southern economy in order to modernize it- which is exactly what the war ended up being about.
quote:The political crisis that led up to the civil war has as its primary cause the very real economic disparities between the north and the south.
Yes, but much of the discussion was political and moral, not economic. I note this, because the big Northern promise to freed slaves wasn't a job in a factory, it was a subsistence living as farmsteader. In other words, they could go right back to growing cotton, but the North got to assuage its guilt. For the South it was about a genuine feeling that they were a people apart in need of self-rule. It's why the Crittendon Amendments failed so strongly, when enshrining legal protections for slavery in the Constitution even failed to mollify Southerners. I've not heard a version of Civil War history told that uses as its primary motivator a desire by the North to declare war to remake the South in its economic image. Do you have some reading you could point me to?
quote:If they were symbiotic, as you view it, then what led to the conflict? Whatever wealth the south did generate for the north, and of course it did (I am not arguing otherwise), this was still viewed by the north as a poor bargain.
Again, the conflict was about self-rule, control, and morality. The North touted an economic plan for the South, post-war, that was basically the same thing as pre-war, it just would have redistributed a lot of cotton growing land to former slaves. But even before Reconstruction ended, there was little sign that the North was attempting any sort of wholesale change on the focus of the Southern economy. It was still focused on cash crops, primarily cotton, for decades to come, only now it was impoverished by a combination of serious global competition from Indian and Egyptian slave labor, and a bole weevil infestation.
In your version, the North declared war on the South because they were upset there weren't more southern factories and customers?
quote:The south's cash crops and injections of capital into the northern economy were seen as so worthless compared to the prospect of a modernized southern economy, and the expansion of slavery to the western colonies was seen as such an opportunity loss, that the north was willing to cut trade ties with the south and fight for half a decade to open its markets back up and displace slavery as the basis of the southern economy. That's a very powerful sign of motivation, and a sign that the south was not performing a useful role in the union. If the north had been content to simply quarantine the south and isolate it diplomatically, while continuing to benefit from its client economic status, it could have done so easily. But that is not what the northern states wanted to do.
Oh, you're viewing the alternative of just letting them go and continuing to make money off them vs. forcing them back into the union. I think you're missing a couple of key factors. 1. The Republicans were in large part an abolitionist movement. It was a key component of their platform back when platforms actually meant something. A lot of them, especially the loudest among them, were vehemently opposed to slavery. To say nothing of the fact that many supported the notion of an eternal federal union, and that also meant a lot to them, they couldn't stomach the idea of A. Not freeing the slaves and B. Then continuing to make money off of them.
2. If their plan was to remake the South...well...where did that go? Reconstruction lasted more than a decade and they didn't really lift a finger to institute any sort of wholesale remake. They mostly focused on getting black former slaves back onto farms to grow cotton. The first experiments with free black colonies? They grew cotton. Your problem seemed to be both with what they were doing and the lack of customers it created. Well, for a decade, the North had carte blanche to rebuild the southern economy any way they wanted, and they chose to go right back to cotton and put black farmers into a subsistence living that probably didn't produce any more consumption that it did previously, since they were buying the same things their former owners had.
Can we just agree that slavery was part and parcel of a great deal of American wealth generation, regardless of how much fantastically richer we might theoretically have been, and call it a day? And that when we look back on the contribution American slaves made to what America is today, we can say they played an important role in getting America to where it is, even if a different method might have gotten us much further?
I feel like you're looking at this like this:
Random person - "Slavery generated a billion dollars! Wow, they really contributed a lot." Orincoro - "They could have generated TEN billion dollars, therefore that billion dollars is totally meaningless and completely worthless."
Even if I said you were right about the waste involved, I can't fathom your end point.
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quote:How many customers did the South generate, noting that the slaves weren't buying anything? You can't tell me that the tiny plantation elite were a significant market on the scale of the industrialisation of the US. Indeed, the railroads you mention demonstrate the point: They didn't run in the South!
What are you talking about? Of course railroads ran in the South. The network wasn't quite as heavy as it was in the north by 1860, but there were plenty of lines in operation in Southern states.
If we compare the situation to the South to the situation in America today, your conclusion would have to be that America is currently generating very very little wealth. Why? Because while there is in fact a lot of wealth concentrated at the top (our current 1% vs. the landed gentry of the South), there was a very large class of what I suppose for the time could be called "middle class" who owned 1-10 slaves who had enough money to do more than just survive. In the tens of thousands. As we seem to agree, the Southern elite were both small in number and held a relatively small amount of the South's slaves. The vast majority of slaves, and thus the vast majority of money generated by their activity, was held by the average slave owner, not the super rich. Tens of thousands of Southern customers for northern businesses.
quote:If we replace the slaves with wage laborers (not sharecroppers), they would have formed an extensive market and boosted industrialisation everywhere.
How? And when? When was slavery supposed to be abolished and how would decent wage laborers exist in the South? For that matter, where is all this money coming from to begin with to start all the factories?
You're trying to mix and match about a 100 years of American history pulling a lot events really far forward and it's nearly impossible to gauge your scenario without a lot more detail.
Suffice it to say I certainly agree with you that if America developed in an alternate universe where they advanced 100 years forward in their way of thinking and economic practices and slavery was abolished 100 years earlier and the people were magically transformed in their culture and attitudes and the union movement happened 50-60 years earlier....America could indeed have been far, far more prosperous. I won't argue that point.
But to say that the South played little to no role in American wealth generation doesn't make any sense to me.
quote:So when we are talking about the effects of slavery, exactly what the devil are we supposed to compare it to unless it's an ahistorical system that doesn't have any slaves? You cannot possibly have this discussion if you're going to disallow subtracting the slavery!
To the extent that slavery hurt economic growth relative to hypothetical free labour, our wealth exists in spite of slavery, not because of slavery. We would have been even richer without it.
If the point of the discussion is to prove that slavery generated no wealth, then I don't see the point of the comparison, because it's immaterial to the point.
If the point is to prove that slavery wasn't the best system for wealth generation, then I concede the point.
It's fantasy history. It's not so much that it's ahistorical. It suggests a fundamental reordering of the basic social, cultural and economic fabric of the entire country. It's maybe a fun academic exercise, but it's not like we were a few beats of a butterfly's wings away from it actually happening. And I think its purpose, ultimately, is to seriously cheapen the efforts and suffering of people who actually lived and died under the system we had and carry forward today. Like you're trying to brush off any any responsibility we might bear because, although you might benefit from what happened, you don't feel guilty because they were so inefficient about it.
That's the part, ultimately, that rubs me the wrong way.
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Half the track length that the North had. But more to my point, there were not many North-South links; the Southern railroads tended to connect plantations to ports, while Northern ones connected cities to each other. There was apparently not much money in connecting plantations to factories - contrary to your assertion:
quote:the railroad system to DELIVER goods to those customers
quote:Tens of thousands of Southern customers [among small slaveowners]
Still a drop in the ocean on the scale of industrialising the entire continent.
quote:how much disposable income do you all imagine the average northern worker had to spend on anything other than necessities?
What makes you think their necessities weren't made in factories? Clothing is a necessity, and was the original driver of the Industrial Revolution. But to answer your question more directly, this nice summary shows, on page 231, that for the period 1869-1873 (a little after the war, but presumably close enough that the difference won't be huge) consumers are spending 2.8 billion (in 1929 dollars) on consumables, 1.22 on semi-durables, and 0.64 on durables. For that period it seems likely that these roughly correspond to food, clothing, and furniture. So, while they're clearly spending a very large part of their budget on food, nonetheless they do go quite a bit beyond subsistence. Do note that, while dirt poor by our standards, American industrial workers in the nineteenth century were still one of the richest populations in the world!
quote:Can we just agree that slavery was part and parcel of a great deal of American wealth generation, regardless of how much fantastically richer we might theoretically have been, and call it a day?
No, actually, I don't agree that that's true. Wealth in 1850 is only part of our wealth now if it was invested, not consumed. Money that was used on Parisian dresses was wasted, so far as generating twenty-first century wealth is concerned. (Assuming that the dressmaker was not an investor.) You have to show, not only that the slaves generated X amount of money for their owners, but that some significant amount of that production was invested.
quote:If the point of the discussion is to prove that slavery generated no wealth
No, it is to show that slavery didn't generate any (or very little) wealth today. Nobody disputes that it generated wealth in 1850. The question is to what extent that wealth descends to today.
quote:[Like] you don't feel guilty because they were so inefficient about it.
No, actually, I don't feel guilty because it happened before I was born. Somewhere among my ancestors is a rapist and his victim - probably more than one; should I feel bad because I wouldn't exist without that violent act? Nonsense. That way madness lies. "Should we feel guilty for slavery" is a much easier question than "Are we wealthy because of slavery"! The answer is a simple "no, because we didn't do it". The wealth thing requires at least a little bit of economic analysis. I mean, I could even be wrong on the point - it could be the case that most of those ill-gotten gains actually were invested somewhere; but that still wouldn't make anyone now alive guilty, or morally liable to reparations. Both legally and morally, guilt requires not only that you benefit from the act, but that you committed it with that benefit in mind. You cannot be guilty of an act you didn't commit, no matter how much you benefitted.
"We have to abandon the hope of a better past."
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quote:No, actually, I don't agree that that's true. Wealth in 1850 is only part of our wealth now if it was invested, not consumed. Money that was used on Parisian dresses was wasted, so far as generating twenty-first century wealth is concerned. (Assuming that the dressmaker was not an investor.) You have to show, not only that the slaves generated X amount of money for their owners, but that some significant amount of that production was invested.
It's a strange notion you have, where the profits from the cash crop of nearly a century, the cash crop that was one of the chief necessities for the industrial revolution, textiles, just somehow evaporated from that time until now. Spent on Parisian dresses and haircuts, it would seem. I'm trying to think of another piece of an economy, one which actually produces things that people buy such as textiles, that could just disappear out of any consideration such as you're describing. I'm drawing a blank.
As for a question of guilt, you are again recasting Lyrhawn's argument into something he didn't say. He didn't say you should feel guilty over slavery, he said that the American economy benefitted from it. And it's ridiculous to assert that one should feel no guilt from benefitting from a crime.
Anyway, it's all very academic anyway. Even without this fantasy you've created, where all of those millions over several generations contributed little to the industrial revolution in the north, the case for reparations is still solid. Because, you know, we rather reneged pretty horribly on all of the promises we made after the Civil War in terms of things like voting rights and equality, something something acres and a mule, so on and so forth. You can't dodge your way out of guilt for that, not if you're going to actually buy into the notion of each citizen having a stake in the state as a whole. Or is it somehow more ethical to say 'we don't have to feel guilt as long as our predecessors run out the clock on a crime'?
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quote:The political crisis that led up to the civil war has as its primary cause the very real economic disparities between the north and the south.
Yes, but much of the discussion was political and moral, not economic. I note this, because the big Northern promise to freed slaves wasn't a job in a factory, it was a subsistence living as farmsteader. In other words, they could go right back to growing cotton, but the North got to assuage its guilt. For the South it was about a genuine feeling that they were a people apart in need of self-rule. It's why the Crittendon Amendments failed so strongly, when enshrining legal protections for slavery in the Constitution even failed to mollify Southerners. I've not heard a version of Civil War history told that uses as its primary motivator a desire by the North to declare war to remake the South in its economic image. Do you have some reading you could point me to?
I am not saying that the object of reconstruction was to make the south in the north's image. I am saying it happened because of a toxic economic relationship. The moral and ethical argument doesn't fly for me. People don't go to war because of how they feel about things- there are always deeper economic motivations. Vietnam- it was about dominance of the US centered world system against the USSR. Iraq, it's about more or less the same thing, along with a sense that somehow (mistakenly to be sure) war was just going to be generally good for business. Economic motivations don't have to be smart or true, they just have to be there.
Even the second world war was rooted in economics and resources. That is what Hitler's adventurism was really all about. That's not a novel idea at all.
quote: In your version, the North declared war on the South because they were upset there weren't more southern factories and customers?
No, they declared war for many reasons- most proximately because the southern states seceded. The secession happened because the souther oligarchy saw it as the only way of preserving their current status in a dysfunctional economic paradigm. For the north, this paradigm needed to be set up for gradual change. It had been halted in progress, by slavery, for generations.
And yes, of course, the proximate goal of the north was to re-establish the same economic pattern that predated the war, on slightly different conditions. But this is always the near-term goal for complex political systems. You want reform without anything really changing. But the reforms they did want would allow the south to slowly evolve into a better economic partner. Those efforts failed in many ways, but they were clearly a goal for the north's political agenda, long term.
quote: Oh, you're viewing the alternative of just letting them go and continuing to make money off them vs. forcing them back into the union. I think you're missing a couple of key factors. 1. The Republicans were in large part an abolitionist movement. It was a key component of their platform back when platforms actually meant something. A lot of them, especially the loudest among them, were vehemently opposed to slavery. To say nothing of the fact that many supported the notion of an eternal federal union, and that also meant a lot to them, they couldn't stomach the idea of A. Not freeing the slaves and B. Then continuing to make money off of them.
2. If their plan was to remake the South...well...where did that go? Reconstruction lasted more than a decade and they didn't really lift a finger to institute any sort of wholesale remake. They mostly focused on getting black former slaves back onto farms to grow cotton. The first experiments with free black colonies? They grew cotton. Your problem seemed to be both with what they were doing and the lack of customers it created. Well, for a decade, the North had carte blanche to rebuild the southern economy any way they wanted, and they chose to go right back to cotton and put black farmers into a subsistence living that probably didn't produce any more consumption that it did previously, since they were buying the same things their former owners had.
As I've said, I don't see reconstruction as a success in most regards. I'm not saying the north got what it wanted- it mostly didn't. No one did.
And I think, in regard to the first point, that you're too much of a social historian to appreciate what I'm getting at. Why does an abolitionist party thrive and rise into power? Why do people vote for it? Did people vote for a war? Lincoln's unpopularity all over the north during the war, and references to the "black republicans," among the less socially concerned entrepreneurial classes, were very real, during and after the war.
Ideas are fine. They are the reasons people claim to vote for the people they end up voting for. They are rarely the real reasons people win elections. And I think underlying the idea that slavery needed to be abolished as a moral imperative (which was of course powerful), there was an economic imperative as well. People recognized, and government institutions recognized, that the dysfunction at the heart of the southern economy was a cancer on the union, economic as well as moral. De Tocqueville recognized this, as I said, decades before, and spoke of it in those terms- moral as well as economic.
quote: Can we just agree that slavery was part and parcel of a great deal of American wealth generation, regardless of how much fantastically richer we might theoretically have been, and call it a day?
Can you just stop being a dick about this? We are defining the terms that are important to us in this discussion. And I have agreed, more than once, that yes, slavery generated wealth. No one is arguing against that, except perhaps in the horrible effrontery involved in complicating that precious moral view of history that you have with the vile idea that economics motivate people to do things.
quote: Random person - "Slavery generated a billion dollars! Wow, they really contributed a lot." Orincoro - "They could have generated TEN billion dollars, therefore that billion dollars is totally meaningless and completely worthless."
This, is why I think you're being a total dick to me for no reason.
It goes more like this for me:
Lyr: Slavery generated a lot of wealth.
Me: Yeah, it did. But you have to consider that it also stood in the way of the south generating a great deal more in different ways.
Lyr: HOW DARE YOU SIR!
Everyone: Wow, what an interesting and nuanced discussion you guys are refusing to have because Lyr is "a real historian," and Orincoro is a mere musicologist, who dares to study this subject with some interest.
quote: Even if I said you were right about the waste involved, I can't fathom your end point.
Clearly because my end point involves discussing the fascinating subject of history without winning anything. Stay classy.
quote: quote:KOM
quote: LYR: Can we just agree that slavery was part and parcel of a great deal of American wealth generation, regardless of how much fantastically richer we might theoretically have been, and call it a day?
No, actually, I don't agree that that's true. Wealth in 1850 is only part of our wealth now if it was invested, not consumed. Money that was used on Parisian dresses was wasted, so far as generating twenty-first century wealth is concerned. (Assuming that the dressmaker was not an investor.) You have to show, not only that the slaves generated X amount of money for their owners, but that some significant amount of that production was invested.
I love watching scientists talk to historians. That's meaty discussion.
KOM:
quote: No, actually, I don't feel guilty because it happened before I was born. Somewhere among my ancestors is a rapist and his victim - probably more than one; should I feel bad because I wouldn't exist without that violent act? Nonsense. That way madness lies. "Should we feel guilty for slavery" is a much easier question than "Are we wealthy because of slavery"! The answer is a simple "no, because we didn't do it". The wealth thing requires at least a little bit of economic analysis. I mean, I could even be wrong on the point - it could be the case that most of those ill-gotten gains actually were invested somewhere; but that still wouldn't make anyone now alive guilty, or morally liable to reparations. Both legally and morally, guilt requires not only that you benefit from the act, but that you committed it with that benefit in mind. You cannot be guilty of an act you didn't commit, no matter how much you benefitted.
I'll quibble with this slightly. Your analysis is correct re: guilt in the criminal or moral sense. Where I think we depart is in responsibility. Whether or not you can show that America as a whole benefited from slavery in a material sense, you can certainly easily show that America was economically divided, and that certain citizens were systematically disadvantaged by slavery, and when it comes to discussing *responsibility*, if not for the act, then for correcting the consequences of the act, then I think we can say that the state of today has a responsibility to rectify the adverse consequences of slavery.
But we should do this as much because it is right to do, as because it *makes sense* to do it. The recent violent confrontations with police, the majority of them white, in areas in which black people live in economic isolation, under constant fear of police brutality and exploitation by means of fines, jailing, and red-lining, have shown that not only can we suffer serious consequences and political and social instability as a result of our history, but also that addressing these situations proactively would make us richer as a society in general. Nobody can look at our incarceration rate, our dropping crime rate, and our ever increasingly punitive judicial system, and say that this is an economically rational situation. Much less a morally rational one.
posted
I think that you are getting to the point. Regardless of what wealth was generated by slavery, it and the policies of segregation for more than a century after that concentrated whatever wealth and opportunity and real estate into white hands. We are still seeing the fruit of that.
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posted
Of course- and that is orders of magnitude more important than whatever wealth slavery generated. That wealth was not managed efficiently or effectively anyway because of the system it was generated in. Economic growth is non-zero sum. The system got set up so that growth was not rationally or efficiently distributed as the economy grew. Of course, most black people in America still live lives undreamed of by the richest southerns of the slavery days- they don't die of small-pox and they have access to information technology, phones, and cars. But the disparity is the important point. They still live, on average, far beneath their potential living standard.
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posted
This reminds me of the arguments in the Song of Ice and Fire books where the Slavers argued the Slavery made the slave states of Slaver's Bay supposedly vastly wealthier than say, Westeros that didn't practice slavery and seemingly doesn't even have serfdom. I was pretty frustrated because seemingly not a single character had a logical counter argument to this despite how obviously wrong it was.
The South-North wealth disparity is the historical example of the counter argument I wish someone would've elaborated on in the books. The South concentrates its wealth in the hands of a minority; its cities and manor houses may look "nice" but the society itself is not wealthy.
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I think I have to agree with KoM in the point that I believe guilt is a worthless, or even detrimental, concept to bring into play in these sorts of discussions. For three reasons:
First, it's application by a lot of well-intentioned "social justice" types (usually coupled with self-righteous and hypocritical anger and condemnation, "how dare you be born into a privileged socioeconomic or racial group! You should be ashamed!") leads quite a few people to conflate and dismiss any sort of reparations or appeals for actual social justice with this sort of guilt-tripping.
Second, it's entirely absurd to believe someone ought to feel ashamed or guilty for the actions of their ancestors. Responsible as a society to fix the mess previous generations left us? Yes. Able to recognize and rectify issues of wealth disparity and privilege? Absolutely. Guilt? Shame? Remorse? Hell no. Forgive me, but that's just stupid.
Half of my ancestors belong to perhaps the most discriminated, reviled, persecuted group of people in history. The other half were hairy blonde savages who made blood sacrifices to the old gods and raped, pillaged, murdered and enslaved their way across western Europe for hundreds of years and otherwise were just total assholes. (they got better and mostly just get it out if their system with Death/Viking Metal bands now) So I guess maybe I'm a wash? Neither set had anything to do with the trade or oppression of African slaves or African American people. But again, trying to calculate the precise amount of ancestral guilt I should feel is an exercise in futility.
Third, and most importantly, feeling guilty doesn't actually accomplish anything. In fact, White Guilt is actually worse than useless, because it imputes a false sense of moral superiority and accomplishment and sates/assuages impulses towards justice that might have actually been used to break down social and economic barriers and effect racial reconciliation.
And this is a pretty touchy subject, admittedly, but I know several arrogant white people like this. People who feel the need to constantly (mostly online) harp about privilege checks, share trending articles and hashtags, and patronizingly lecture their hopelessly close-minded "friends" about how deeply ignorant and privileged they are and how bad they should feel about it. Here's the thing - and I hate saying this because it's such a fricking stereotypical argument Jamaican neighbors black best friend etc - but I can pretty confidently say I've had more close, deep, meaningful friendships and with black people (and thanks to the military black people who grew up in poverty, and also frequently were in authority positions over me) than all of them *combined.* They live in a privileged little upper middle class bubble of all white friends. Because actually getting off their pasty white asses and *doing something* meaningful might mean genuinely interacting with people from radically different cultural backgrounds with totally different ideas about how life works, and God knows that can be just terribly unsafe and uncomfortable.
A lot of them actually brag about not voting.
Sorry for the tangent. Anyway, I liked Elison's comic. I think a big part of the way forward from here starts with calmly and dispassionately trying to understand *why* the injustice and inequality we see continues to exist, analyze all of the nuances that race and class privilege, and then takes steps to rectify that, both personally and as a society. And that could mean everything from reparations paid, political redistricting, and even some social upheaval at the macro-level, to being aware of one's cultural biases when conducting a job interview, or deciding when to cross the street, or what social clubs you're part of and how you socialize in general.
But there's no place for guilt in the way forward, and here's why, here's what I'm trying to get at: guilt is a selfish emotion. It's all about *you*, your feeling of sorrow for a perceived or actual wrong, and your desire to make things right for *you* so you don't feel guilt any more. What we need is empathy. The ability to connect with, feel, and understand the struggles of those who have been oppressed, and then take action to rectify. Empathy makes demands that guilt never can, because it means coming to terms with the needs and desires of the person you're empathizing with, rather than assuaging your own wounded conscience.
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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quote:I'll quibble with this slightly. Your analysis is correct re: guilt in the criminal or moral sense. Where I think we depart is in responsibility. Whether or not you can show that America as a whole benefited from slavery in a material sense, you can certainly easily show that America was economically divided, and that certain citizens were systematically disadvantaged by slavery, and when it comes to discussing *responsibility*, if not for the act, then for correcting the consequences of the act, then I think we can say that the state of today has a responsibility to rectify the adverse consequences of slavery.
I would quibble with your quibble: I think we have a responsibility to ensure that the system is fair and gives everyone a reasonably even playing field. I would not put it in terms of slavery, however. For one thing, it's much too limited: Suppose that there had never been slavery, but we did have a minority that was unfairly treated by our courts, harassed by the police, and what-have-you. Would that be ok? Obviously not; the argument from fairness carries through entirely without any mention of the consequences of slavery. Further, to take slavery specifically is to pick out one injustice from a history swimming in them. Should the US compensate the descendants of the Loyalists, because they were badly treated after the rebellion? Do the descendants of the winners in the African tribal wars, who captured the slaves in the first place, have any responsibility for fixing the crimes of their ancestors? Should Mongolia compensate Russia for the invasion that left them poorer than the rest of Europe? (I'll note that the Russians did think so at one point, and acted accordingly to conquer Mongolia.) Ought Norway to give Ireland some oil money in trade for all that rape, pillage, and looting? Conversely, should Sweden pay an indemnity to Norway and Denmark for all our territory that they stole, without which we are that much poorer? There's no lack of grievances; history is a cesspool. Why is this specific injustice different from all other injustices?
"We must abandon the hope of a better past". We can't fix the past. We can only fix the present and the future. Restitution has nothing to do with it. Fairness does.
quote:But we should do this as much because it is right to do, as because it *makes sense* to do it. The recent violent confrontations with police, the majority of them white, in areas in which black people live in economic isolation, under constant fear of police brutality and exploitation by means of fines, jailing, and red-lining, have shown that not only can we suffer serious consequences and political and social instability as a result of our history, but also that addressing these situations proactively would make us richer as a society in general. Nobody can look at our incarceration rate, our dropping crime rate, and our ever increasingly punitive judicial system, and say that this is an economically rational situation. Much less a morally rational one.
If you want to reform the American justice system, I'm entirely with you. I just don't think it has anything to do with slavery.
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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quote:Originally posted by King of Men: Should the US compensate the descendants of the Loyalists, because they were badly treated after the rebellion?
Sure.
quote:Do the descendants of the winners in the African tribal wars, who captured the slaves in the first place, have any responsibility for fixing the crimes of their ancestors?
Sure.
quote:Should Mongolia compensate Russia for the invasion that left them poorer than the rest of Europe?
Sure.
quote:Ought Norway to give Ireland some oil money in trade for all that rape, pillage, and looting?
Sure.
quote:Conversely, should Sweden pay an indemnity to Norway and Denmark for all our territory that they stole, without which we are that much poorer?
Sure.
quote:Why is this specific injustice different from all other injustices?
Wait, what? It is?
I feel like your examples aren't very good at leading up to your intended point
Edit to add: Which is to say, that normally I would actually be a little more sympathetic to your point. For a multicultural society, this isn't just a black and white issue (hah!). Its just that your examples seem kinda poor at making your point.
posted
Thinking that we should not single out slavery (not that anyone in this conversation is, actually, it's just the topic being discussed) is one thing. There's plenty of traction with that argument. Thinking that the systematic mistreatment of African Americans at the hands of the American criminal justice system has nothing to do with slavery makes even less sense than the idea that the wealth generated by slavery and cash crop farming simply vanished out of the American economy with little or no impact on its future wealth. Of course a systemic form of basically the worst kind of racism (ethnically justified human slavery) short of genocide, for nearly half of our history as a nation, has an impact on the justice system today. Those other (much older) events you named had an impact as well, obviously.
Man, I am almost cringing imagining what y'all might say about how we should feel about American treatment of Native Americans.
----- Dog, I'm on my phone right now so I can't do it justice except to say that you're defining 'guilt' differently than I used it. 'Guilt as felt in a responsibility to address a wrong done' is the way I'm using it. Certainly not (and I will confess some frustration, since I feel it was pretty plain I didn't mean it this way) as in 'guilt for something you, personally, did'.
------ Orincoro, if Lyrhawn was being a dick to you I missed it. Further if he was being a dick to you, based on his posts to you, then frankly you're a bit ridiculous to complain about it, if his tone to you is dickish. On that scale you're almost Hulkish in your dickishness.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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quote:Originally posted by Rakeesh: Dog, I'm on my phone right now so I can't do it justice except to say that you're defining 'guilt' differently than I used it. 'Guilt as felt in a responsibility to address a wrong done' is the way I'm using it. Certainly not (and I will confess some frustration, since I feel it was pretty plain I didn't mean it this way) as in 'guilt for something you, personally, did'.
Lyrhawn and KOM were both definitely using it in that context though, Rakeesh. I honestly have never seen guilt used in the definition you just described - taking responsibility for a wrong done by someone else. The word "guilty" by it's very nature implies personal responsibility for a wrong done. Otherwise the phrase "feeling guilty for something I didn't do" doesn't need the qualifier. Likewise, if you're found guilty for a crime you didn't commit, that implies an mistake was made somewhere alone the way in reaching that judgement.
I think it's pretty clear I'm using the standard definition of the word, and so I think your frustration is misplaced here. You can't expect me to guess you're using a rather bizarre definition, or even what that definition is, especially when the person you were addressing (KoM) was also obviously using the same definition I was.
You're free to define words however you choose, and I'm definitely not interested in starting a debate about semantics here or to lecture you in any way. But I don't think any agreement about whether or not we should feel guilt in this situation is possible if we don't have a common definition. Your definition of guilt is something I would probably define along the lines of "moral imperative" or maybe "responsibility."
And in that case, yes, as just and moral humans (or I guess, humans who strive to be just and moral) it's our responsibility to try and put and end to injustice and oppression. But I think that's something everyone in this thread would agree on, and indeed something I'm pretty sure everyone *has* said so far. So I'm really at loss where the disagreement lies, unless your definition of "guilt" is more granular in way that both defies the standard "personal responsibility for a wrong" but is also not in line with "moral imperative", which is certainly possible. Again, I'm not trying to be pedantic here, but slippery definitions like this can cause a lot of exasperation if they're not nailed down, as I'm sure you're aware.
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It's 330am right now and I'm about to crash, so please remind me later if I leave this conversation dangling. http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/guilt The very second definition of the word doesn't lay claim to personal wrongdoing needed to feel guilty for something, so I'ma hafta object to your objection;)
It's a long conversation, but if you can point out to me where Lyrhawn said or suggested anyone here should feel personally guilty for slavery in the meaning you use, I'll cop to being wrong about that.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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posted
I never said you had to actually have done anything to *feel* guilt, Rakeesh. (if that were true my entire post would be pointless) You can be made to feel guilty about just about anything.
But if you read the definition you mentioned it says "a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong, etc., whether real or imagined." That still pretty clearly imputes a personal sense of culpability for the wrong committed. Can you feel guilty about slavery? Absolutely. Again, you can *feel* guilty for anything. *Are* you guilty that slavery existed or *should* you feel guilty about slavery? That seems to be the question at hand, as KoM clearly stated he shouldn't feel guilty about slavery existing (because he wasn't around at that point), and you told him he should.
But honestly, seriously, I have never seen anyone but you define "guilt" in such a bizarre fashion. And with the way you're dancing around the definition by changing the terms from "should" to "can" (which is a pretty cheap move fwiw) it's making it harder to figure out what exactly you mean. I'm specifically referring to you telling KoM "You can't dodge your way out of guilt for that". You and I both know damn well you weren't telling KoM "it's possible for you to feel guilt about this issue." you're either saying A) he *is* guilty for it or B) he *should* feel guilty about it. Which is a very SJW/White Guilt move, and I addressed it in my first post. (And yes, I assumed B by default since I think it's a safe assumption that you don't believe KoM is literally actually guilty for slavery so A doesn't apply.)
So you're saying he should feel guilt - which is a very distinct emotional response of responsibility for a wrongdoing - but you're saying it's some sort guilt that somehow isn't personal. Which tautologically just doesn't make sense - guilt is by nature a personal emotion.
(And let me reiterate this again since I suspect it's going to come up, this is not about whether it's *possible* to feel guilt for something you didn't do. It's possible to feel guilt for a supernova, if you really set your mind to it.)
So by telling KoM he *should* feel guilty about slavery, you're telling him he *should* feel personally responsible. Because that's what guilt is - being or feeling responsible for a wrongdoing. If you're not telling him he should feel personally responsible, than you shouldn't be telling him he should feel guilty. You should be telling him he should feel bad about it, or have empathy.
Or put in another way.
"Rakeesh, you should feel bad about the recent Earthquake in Nepal"
vs.
"Rakeesh, you should feel guilty about the recent Earthquake in Nepal"
Or even,
"Rakeesh, you should feel bad King of Men ate my cookie"
vs.
"Rakeesh, you should feel guilty King of Men ate my cookie"
Do you see how one of the two phrases imputes a personal responsibility?
The *entire* difference between "guilt" and "empathy" in this sense - the feeling bad about something wrong happening and/or feeling a moral imperative to rectify it - is the feeling of personal responsibility. If something isn't "personal guilt" than it's not guilt.
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I don't think I ever used the word "guilt" or implied it in any sense you're suggesting.
But to clear things up: I don't think you should feel guilty about slavery.
The only way I could see a person today feeling guilty is if they haven't done enough to fix the problem that exists today before of 200 years of institutionalized oppression. I certainly agree you shouldn't feel bad about what happened 140+ years ago.
But there's plenty of pretty bad stuff going down right now that you bear a shared responsibility for fixing. That is, unfortunately for many of us, how society works. You don't have to feel bad for slavery, or Jim Cros laws, or police brutality. How you feel is immaterial in that sense. But society has a "you break it you buy it" policy that you're a signatory of by being born here and living here. So you might not bear guilt, but you bear responsibility.
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posted
Lyrhawn: FWIW, I'm mostly addressing KoM's and Rakeesh's use of it, but what started this all was you saying this:
quote:Like you're trying to brush off any any responsibility we might bear because, although you might benefit from what happened, you don't feel guilty because they were so inefficient about it.
That's the part, ultimately, that rubs me the wrong way"
What sense did you mean it in then? You saying that it "rubs you the wrong way" that KoM doesn't feel guilty sure makes it seem like you think he should feel guilty about it.
Other than that, I agree with what you said 100%. Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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posted
I would say that guilt, in that particular passage, was directly tied to the responsibility I mentioned in the first half of the sentence.
"I don't feel guilty about the current state of minorities in America, so I don't feel a responsibility to help them."
You shouldn't feel guilty about what happened in the past. But you should feel guilty if you're shirking your responsibility to make up for the crimes committed by our society. In this sense, guilt and responsibility are linked. But none of it has anything to do with feeling DIRECTLY guilty or responsible for what happened before we were born.
If the semantics are tripping you up, then just replace "guilty" with "responsible" or "responsibility" every time you see me say it.
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I'm not guilty of anything. To hell with white guilt. But I don't get to be running around doing some Billy Joel style "well, WE didn't start the fire" panacea.
Independent of any other facticity indelibly providing for a person's privilege, if you have privilege that comes at the expense of other categories of people, it is your moral responsibility to actively eschew and work to counter and tear down that privilege. Do whatever you sincerely think is the most appropriately productive method for removing the benefits you get from the very real legacy of privilege for and marginalization against entire classes of people. The more power you have to affect this condition, the more you have the responsibility to apply your efforts and attitudes towards change.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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I'm not guilty of anything. To hell with white guilt. But I don't get to be running around doing some Billy Joel style "well, WE didn't start the fire" panacea.
Independent of any other facticity indelibly providing for a person's privilege, if you have privilege that comes at the expense of other categories of people, it is your moral responsibility to actively eschew and work to counter and tear down that privilege. Do whatever you sincerely think is the most appropriately productive method for removing the benefits you get from the very real legacy of privilege for and marginalization against entire classes of people. The more power you have to affect this condition, the more you have the responsibility to apply your efforts and attitudes towards change.
I agree with this sentiment, but I have no idea how this translates to real world practices. How does one eschew privileges that are inherent in their skin color or upbringing?
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posted
Well, you can see my earlier post in this thread (the first one on this page) for some broad examples. The "job interview" one is a good place to get started, and there's a reason I posted it. Applicants with "black sounding" names are 33% less likely to receive a call back than applicants with "white sounding" names in a wide variety of industries, and this trend is even more exacerbated by other factors. I.e, the quality of the resume highly effecting the callback rate for white-sounding names but having almost no impact on black-sounding names.
sam's point about the more power you have to affect the condition applies exactly to this: if you're an employer or hiring manager or even HR rep who sifts through resumes and decides who to pass on, it's your responsibility to understand the (often subconscious) impact racial bias plays in your interview, hiring, and salary decisions and work towards mitigating that bias.
This is just one of the many, many ways systemic racism works. Some of these things you can impact and change yourself, some you have to be in a position of power to change, some require you to do things that may feel highly uncomfortable and break social/cultural boundaries somewhat. De facto segregation is still a huge problem, especially in social situations. Some of this is classism as well, but you're a lot more likely to, say, find a poor white person in the social circle of wealthy and powerful persons than you will a poor black person, which can make upward mobility a lot easier for whites than blacks.
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posted
I agree with all that. But Sam said "it is your moral responsibility to actively eschew and work to counter and tear down that privilege". How am I supposed to counter the fact that I'm more likely to get a job because I'm white? Or eschew my privilege that got me an education that someone born in a lower-income area did not receive?
On a personal level, I treat people equally. I'm confident enough in my self-awareness to know that applies subconsciously as well. On social media, I grudgingly take up arguments to provide an alternative voice to the people posting "Black cop kills white man, where's the outrage???" articles. (I just realized this sounds like I'm asking for a pat on the back, I don't mean this post that way) Other than that, I don't know what else I'm supposed to do.
In your earlier post you wrote "Because actually getting off their pasty white asses and *doing something* meaningful might mean genuinely interacting with people from radically different cultural backgrounds with totally different ideas about how life works, and God knows that can be just terribly unsafe and uncomfortable." What physical actions do you think the average non-hiring manager privileged person should be doing?
Posts: 2054 | Registered: Nov 2005
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quote:Originally posted by GaalDornick: In your earlier post you wrote "Because actually getting off their pasty white asses and *doing something* meaningful might mean genuinely interacting with people from radically different cultural backgrounds with totally different ideas about how life works, and God knows that can be just terribly unsafe and uncomfortable." What physical actions do you think the average non-hiring manager privileged person should be doing?
FWIW, my criticism was levied particularly at the people I mentioned and their hypocrisy.
That being said, there are all sorts of things you *can* do. (I'll leave "should" out of this) When I was in college I volunteered for a non-profit called Rebuilding the Wall, an organization that does everything from construction work and landscaping on damaged and/or dilapidated property in underprivileged (read: "ghetto") neighborhoods to funding and supporting local entrepreneurs from those neighborhoods and empowering them to be job creators. I still regularly send them money. (mostly because they still e-mail me all the time telling me about all the incredibly wonderful stuff they do, and I don't have the heart to block their e-mails)
I used to volunteer for Habitat for Humanity on weekends and do projects in Florida/eastern Alabama when I lived in Pensacola.
That's sort of "entry level" basic stuff you can do that might take a few hours of your week/a little bit of money to make a real and noticeable difference. If you want to get more involved, there's the Big Brothers/Big Sisters where you get to be mentor to children who are in disadvantaged situations. And it's one I've been thinking about doing for a while now as I've realized just how important mentor ship and good advice can be to success.
But seriously man, almost anywhere you will find an abundance of non-profit organizations that do a lot of good work bringing about justice. Anything from literally just working with your hands to - as a lawyer friend of mine did volunteering for a place called the Neighborhood Christian Legal Clinic - providing free legal counsel and services to underprivileged people.
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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OK, returning to it after a few days of holiday weekend.
quote:But honestly, seriously, I have never seen anyone but you define "guilt" in such a bizarre fashion. And with the way you're dancing around the definition by changing the terms from "should" to "can" (which is a pretty cheap move fwiw) it's making it harder to figure out what exactly you mean. I'm specifically referring to you telling KoM "You can't dodge your way out of guilt for that". You and I both know damn well you weren't telling KoM "it's possible for you to feel guilt about this issue." you're either saying A) he *is* guilty for it or B) he *should* feel guilty about it. Which is a very SJW/White Guilt move, and I addressed it in my first post. (And yes, I assumed B by default since I think it's a safe assumption that you don't believe KoM is literally actually guilty for slavery so A doesn't apply.)
Have you truly never encountered someone using 'guilt' to refer to something done by someone else, without their consent, but from which they still benefit? Suppose for example you were in college and it turned out that your instructor was simply giving everyone As or Bs to pad their own scores for their own record. For whatever reason in this hypothetical, you had not done the work to make an A but received one anyway. You hadn't done anything to deserve it, but would you experience any feelings that might resemble guilt?
As for my statement about 'not being able to dodge guilt', I think you cut off some rather critical context there. "You can't dodge your way out of guilt for that, not if you're going to actually buy into the notion of each citizen having a stake in the state as a whole." Is what I said. Is it simply the case that our society utterly resets into something entirely new, a blank slate, blameless, on each succeeding generation? That would be a pretty strange thing, historically speaking, rather unique really.
Or is it right to feel that the obligations our government has taken in the past ought to be met by us in the present as well as them in the past? Especially if those obligations were never met in the past at all?
quote:So you're saying he should feel guilt - which is a very distinct emotional response of responsibility for a wrongdoing - but you're saying it's some sort guilt that somehow isn't personal. Which tautologically just doesn't make sense - guilt is by nature a personal emotion.
I don't grant your premise that guilt is by definition such a personal-as in, in response to personal actions-emotion. That hasn't been my experience. Pride in accomplishments certainly isn't strictly a personal emotion, particularly if we're talking about taking credit for past achievements of ours as a nation.
quote: So by telling KoM he *should* feel guilty about slavery, you're telling him he *should* feel personally responsible. Because that's what guilt is - being or feeling responsible for a wrongdoing. If you're not telling him he should feel personally responsible, than you shouldn't be telling him he should feel guilty. You should be telling him he should feel bad about it, or have empathy.
Oh, I'm not so much telling him he should feel guilty. I'm telling him-and anyone else-that white American men have inherited a system which benefits them substantially to the detriment of others, and that to experience a benefit where others suffer through no fault of your own...feelings of guilt are not an inappropriate response. None of this 'better past' nonsense, I am speaking of the present.
(As an aside I should note that rjectiong notions of a better past go strangely with the theme of 'lets examine how supposedly the institution of slavery had no impact on the modern economy'.)
quote:But there's plenty of pretty bad stuff going down right now that you bear a shared responsibility for fixing. That is, unfortunately for many of us, how society works. You don't have to feel bad for slavery, or Jim Cros laws, or police brutality. How you feel is immaterial in that sense. But society has a "you break it you buy it" policy that you're a signatory of by being born here and living here. So you might not bear guilt, but you bear responsibility.
Lyrhawn and I are using different language to arrive at generally the same point. For me, if something is broken and you have a responsibility to fix it, a feeling of guilt is not inappropriate-but then in my experience 'guilt' does not always have to mean personal responsibility. I may be utterly isolated in that use of the word, but it's not been my experience.
Posts: 17164 | Registered: Jun 2001
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I'm not guilty of anything. To hell with white guilt. But I don't get to be running around doing some Billy Joel style "well, WE didn't start the fire" panacea.
Independent of any other facticity indelibly providing for a person's privilege, if you have privilege that comes at the expense of other categories of people, it is your moral responsibility to actively eschew and work to counter and tear down that privilege. Do whatever you sincerely think is the most appropriately productive method for removing the benefits you get from the very real legacy of privilege for and marginalization against entire classes of people. The more power you have to affect this condition, the more you have the responsibility to apply your efforts and attitudes towards change.
I agree with this sentiment, but I have no idea how this translates to real world practices. How does one eschew privileges that are inherent in their skin color or upbringing?
For most people, this means talking about it a lot, without actually getting close to anything remotely productive or transformative. But you know, hire people of color, rebuke your friends and colleagues for latent racism, protest your school's recruitment practices, etc, etc.
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posted
While I don't think those measures are useless, per se, they also won't really do anything.
Something more concrete would be donating a significant sum of money to a charity that helps minorities in poverty.
Something more sincere and lasting would be to devote a significant amount of your time to organizing and protesting until real change comes about. This is something very, very few white people will ever do.
Liking something on Facebook or even yelling in an internet forum don't really count, but it's what seems to make most people feel good about themselves.
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posted
I'm really curious as to why what I suggested "won't really do anything." The organization I mentioned has, along with it's partners, helped transform entire neighborhoods.
Posts: 2222 | Registered: Dec 2008
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posted
Orincoro also suggested a couple of concrete actions including protesting, so it doesn't seem super responsive to him either.
quote:Liking something on Facebook or even yelling in an internet forum don't really count, but it's what seems to make most people feel good about themselves.
While I'm not going to argue that these things are maximally beneficial, I also don't think that they are always useless. A lot of people spend a lot of their lives online. Online activity, I think, does influence other things.
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