Maybe jingoistic Americans who didn't pay attention in high school history class believe that the Industrial Revolution started in the U.S., and maybe such people are unfortunately common, but that has nothing to do with the facts.
Exactly the people that I'm talking about.
I don't understand. Are you saying that you're basing your argument on a premise you know to be an ignorant falsehood?
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
The period where the economy is becoming so globalized that some random person in a third world country can potentially make $50,000 a year off an internet business? Yes.
I just noticed I made a mistake. I read "The economy of this time period is better than any in history yet we still have racists" as you saying "that time period".
Not relevant. The U.S. Constitution clearly said that all men had blah blah blah.
But obviously slavery wasn't always abolished, so that point isn't relevant.
We are talking specifically about the U.S. and the state of slavery here. As such, The Constitution is VERY relevant.
In fact, it is about the only relevant thing, because the promise of freedom to choose for all men written within it is what started the whole fight against slavery in the U.S. to begin with.
No it would have remained until the world was willing to say "ok, now we see that slavery is completely wrong". You could argue that without slavery, people wouldn't have such a good reason to never even think of doing it again.
You're saying slavery only occurred because of economic needs, but given the fact that slavery has existed in a wide range of economies of various types and amounts of wealth, it shows the act of slavery is regardless of economy, people would have had slaves for the sake of assuming they were superior or trying to hold back others from challenging them so they could remain in control or because they thought there was nothing morally wrong with it.
But that wasn't why people kept slaves in the U.S.
Again, I could care less why people kept slaves in ancient Greece. The same reasons do not apply to the colonial U.S. They just don't.
Maybe jingoistic Americans who didn't pay attention in high school history class believe that the Industrial Revolution started in the U.S., and maybe such people are unfortunately common, but that has nothing to do with the facts.
Exactly the people that I'm talking about.
I don't understand. Are you saying that you're basing your argument on a premise you know to be an ignorant falsehood?
?
I'm not basing my argument on that. I'm just saying that the IR as it began in Britain isn't (to my knowledge at least, but my knowledge of English history is spotty at best) what the average American today thinks of as industrialism.
I'm speaking more of the fact that the average American today seems to think that industrialism, and by extension the revolution itself, began with all the iron and steel and crap in the late 19th century, when in actuality it began in the mid-late 18 century in Britain and got along to full steam in the early 19th century in both Britain and the U.S.
We've already done everything necessary to address slavery: we ended it.
Everyone now exists under the same umbrella of equal opportunity, not equal outcome. I think that notion tends to get blurred in the mad scramble of things due to the fact that desired outcomes tend to overlap or almost be universal. It's not a stretch to say that everyone wants to be financially successful or comfortable, live a long healthy life, exist in safety etc.
The so called advantages that come from being born into a wealthy family are only a factor in the sense of protectionism style efforts among the wealthy which can be either valid or invalid depending on if its based on work ethic and associated principles or cronyism and associated principles. Regardless there's no guarantee that those efforts will be successful and the wealthy will continue to be so just as there's no guarantee that the poor will remain poor.
There really doesn't need to be anymore opportunities created because doing so in the legislative sense always turns into taking from someone else to give to another. If opportunities are to be created they should be so at the local community level, face to face interactions with people creating their own opportunities and networks of success. Legislating it does little when part of the notions of freedom, opportunity and success is it stemming from and a result of your own particular efforts. Programs and legislation don't feed the spiritual beast and depression sets in.
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CAMILLA: You, sir, should unmask.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
We are talking specifically about the U.S. and the state of slavery here. As such, The Constitution is VERY relevant.
In fact, it is about the only relevant thing, because the promise of freedom to choose for all men written within it is what started the whole fight against slavery in the U.S. to begin with.
So why did the US choose slavery over hiring a bunch of engineers to design machines that could go beyond any human capacity? Either way there's going to be cost in investing, someone would either have pay a bunch of money for shelter, food, water and for the slaves themselves and/or hiring some people on a boat to raid a village and capture people and people to watch over the slaves to make sure they do work, or one have to spend money on machine parts after hiring some engineers to design a better machine and have a few people use them.
Again, I could care less why people kept slaves in ancient Greece. The same reasons do not apply to the colonial U.S. They just don't.
But economy is not why anyone ever thought there was nothing wrong with slavery, which history shows. Slavery existed first, and then after that people tried to justify it by saying it helps the country's economy.
So why did the US choose slavery over hiring a bunch of engineers to design machines that could go beyond any human capacity?
Because the industrial revolution didn't introduce robots? The new machines did not "go beyond any human capacity" they multiplied the work performed by humans. Plantations weren't nearly at capacity when machinery was introduced. The result was that each slave became more valuable, they could do more work for the same amount of resources, and there was no reason to get rid of them. The cotton gin rather famously increased the demand for slaves in the South.
So why did the US choose slavery over hiring a bunch of engineers to design machines that could go beyond any human capacity?
Because the industrial revolution didn't introduce robots? The new machines did not "go beyond any human capacity" they multiplied the work performed by humans. Plantations weren't nearly at capacity when machinery was introduced. The result was that each slave became more valuable, they could do more work for the same amount of resources, and there was no reason to get rid of them. The cotton gin rather famously increased the demand for slaves in the South.
There was still heavy industrialization before slavery was abolished as well as research in physics snd machincal engineering. Machines went beyond human capicitty in the the sense that the cotton gin increased the efficiency that one could do that type of work than a human could do in the same amount of time. It wouldn't have been a stretch to say "let's have someone make something even more efficient", and after slavery was abolished not only in the US but in other developed countries, that's exactly what the world did to compensate for lower production, even though they could have researched that in the first place before slavery was used on such an industrial scale.
There was still heavy industrialization before slavery was abolished as well as research in physics snd machincal engineering. Machines went beyond human capicitty in the the sense that the cotton gin increased the efficiency that one could do that type of work than a human could do in the same amount of time. It wouldn't have been a stretch to say "let's have someone make something even more efficient", and after slavery was abolished not only in the US but in other developed countries, that's exactly what the world did to compensate for lower production, even though they could have researched that in the first place before slavery was used on such an industrial scale.
Why don't we have robots doing all manual labor today? Once we saw humans it wasn't a stretch to say "Let's have someone make something even more efficient."
Massive technological shifts do not simply occur the moment someone conceives that improvement is possible (if they did the ancient Chinese would have swept through the world with assault rifles). Mills could not be plugged into a nationwide electrical grid in the 1800s. You needed either muscle power (slaves or horses) to operate them or a strong running river nearby that you would be allowed to use. Even if it were practical to build a mill where you were the mill did not gather its own cotton or transport its own cotton.
The pressure to stop using slaves was very low (its not like they weren't turning a profit) and plenty of people were afraid of retaliation or disenfranchisement if slaves were given freedom. Simply because in hindsight its possible to imagine better choices doesn't mean they were apparent at the time.
There was still heavy industrialization before slavery was abolished as well as research in physics snd machincal engineering. Machines went beyond human capicitty in the the sense that the cotton gin increased the efficiency that one could do that type of work than a human could do in the same amount of time. It wouldn't have been a stretch to say "let's have someone make something even more efficient", and after slavery was abolished not only in the US but in other developed countries, that's exactly what the world did to compensate for lower production, even though they could have researched that in the first place before slavery was used on such an industrial scale.
Why don't we have robots doing all manual labor today? Once we saw humans it wasn't a stretch to say "Let's have someone make something even more efficient."
Massive technological shifts do not simply occur the moment someone conceives that improvement is possible (if they did the ancient Chinese would have swept through the world with assault rifles). Mills could not be plugged into a nationwide electrical grid in the 1800s. You needed either muscle power (slaves or horses) to operate them or a strong running river nearby that you would be allowed to use. Even if it were practical to build a mill where you were the mill did not gather its own cotton or transport its own cotton.
The pressure to stop using slaves was very low (its not like they weren't turning a profit) and plenty of people were afraid of retaliation or disenfranchisement if slaves were given freedom. Simply because in hindsight its possible to imagine better choices doesn't mean they were apparent at the time.
Robots doing the majority or all of manual labor is coming, it's just way too expensive and not out of the ultra experimental phase yet. Prototypes for farming and manufacturing robots have been built by robotics companies but they need to be cheaper and more on the mass scale before we see that.
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CAMILLA: You, sir, should unmask.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
Not really, it's a thing that actually happened which demonstrates that we need to be aware of the possibility of specifically racially target problems. I thought that's what you were asking about. Obviously I agree that we ought to make processes race blind when we can.
I have a problem with not being conscious of race by default indicating someone is "ignoring" racism.
An analogy:
I'm not consciously thinking about my shoe size every day in all aspects of my life. I can pass a shoe store and not think about my shoe size. However, when I need to buy shoes, I then think about my shoe size.
An example in the current context:
I do not make any conscious thought about clerks race. It's the furthest thing from my mind but if you were to ask me what race the clerk was...I could answer it. Or, if someone made a slur, I could then acknowledge the person race in order to better understand the context.
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Many times people have accused me of "ignoring" racism by not thinking about race buy default....There is no logical reason to acknowledge race unless their is a catalyst to warrant such a consideration.....What I'm finding though is many people resist this as being even possible. No one can convince me that we as a people should actively consider race with out provocation.
Sure, but aside from that I don't really understand the question. Could you clarify?
It's like this. The cartoon in the OP looks like it represents the prosperity of two races in the form of the ledge that the White kid climbs up on. So, it's showing that the White kid is prosperous relative to to Black kid. That's what I mean by a relative measure of prosperity.
Then what I said was that in order to have a statistical, relative measure of prosperity, you have to have two reference points and measure one against the other. In the cartoon, the White kid is higher than the Black kid. My question is - what would those two points of comparison be in modern times?
Because I don't agree that Modern Whites and Modern Blacks should be compared to slave-holding Whites and Black slaves.
I think a better measure is absolute prosperity, rather than whether one race is better off than another. And I think that Slavery and subsequent racial oppression after abolition were the causes for nothing but harm to the US, both economically and socially. And there are a lot of real economic and social benefits to be found in racial diversity and racial tolerance today, inasmuch as we can achieve it.
Also, you'd have to accept the idea that Whites became better off due to slavery and racial oppression, hence the ledge. In reality, slavery had enormous costs above any productivity gains (if there were any), same with racial oppression, and those areas of the US worst affected by it continue to be worse off economically than the other areas of the US. So if anything, these Whites "climbing over" Blacks hurt themselves relative to others. So, the cartoon would need to include a third person face palming and wondering what in the world they were doing, then coming in to help them out.
No.
Without black slavery, both the industrial development of the North and Britain would have been greatly reduced, due to the lack of slave labor producing all the cotton that effectively started the IR in the U.S. and helped greatly accelerate the one in Britain.
Cotton is a big ****ing deal.
The great "lie", if you will, of the modern interpretation of slavery in the U.S. is that the North didn't benefit as much as the South. That's utter bull****, and one that needs to die sooner. The entire industrial development of the U.S. depended a large part on black slavery.
I agree that commodity trade benefited national trading power across the board, but I don't agree with applying that idea as far as to say that slavery, on balance, was an economically beneficial practice.
I've read studies about the profitability of Atlantic trade in the 1700's, the availability of labor, and the suitability of agriculture, and so forth. I've also read economic theories that explain why slavery is more common when labor is rare, and vice versa. But always, these things are pointed at the economic causes for slavery as a tool for historical explanation, not as an argument for why slavery needed to have happened.
What the economic thinking of the time failed to account for were the real money costs of social inequality. One example, it's likely that the total time-adjusted costs of the Civil War in productivity and liquid assets outweighed the entire cotton trade of the early 1800's. Just that one event. Not to mention the on-going costs of a failure to racially integrate a post-war South. The results can be plainly seen in areas that continue to struggle economically to this day.
So as a whole, I have no reservation at all in saying that Slavery made America worse off, socially, economically, politically, and in every other way imaginable. It's as close to "evil" as you can objectively get, in my opinion. America would be a much better nation at every point in time up to today if it had never practiced slavery.
But the concept of slavery existed pre-hand and slavery itself still existed.
Not relevant. The U.S. Constitution clearly said that all men had blah blah blah.
People naturally questioned the contradiction, and everyone recognized the contradiction. It would have remained a contradiction until cotton came along.
Even ancient Greece had slaves, even kings or I suppose leaders of tribes in Africa had slaves, some Native American tribes made the losers of a war into slaves, Asia had slaves, feudal Europe had peasants which were very close to slaves seeing as how it was highly unlikely for them to move up in class. The industrialization was an incentive to have more slaves but saying that it would have died out is an over-estimate.
See above. The concept of slaves as a whole and its historical prevalence is not relevant. The U.S. Constitution made it as such in the U.S. Add to that the fact that Britain, a country that the U.S. tried to feel socially superior to during the early 19th century, had already banned slavery.
You're taking a post-Civil War reading of the Constitution and applying it to the pre-war era.
Easy enough thing to do, since Lincoln's policies were so effective in reaching the hearts and minds of the nation, and even the South itself was very effective in revising history to paint itself in a more favorable light.
But the fact of the matter is that virtually no one before Lincoln's party thought that any of the content of the US constitution should be applied to the states, not even individual protections. There is a running history of religious, racial, and all sorts of other class persecution, not only tolerated by the states, but overtly enacted by them. It's not just a failure to bring lawsuits, or that the states were getting away with anything. It's that it was considered perfectly legal at the time. And on the other hand, you had "free" states that did not have the common law precedent to acknowledge an owner's rights of chattel slavery in court, and were only made to do so in the Dredd Scot decision of 1857.
The idea of an integrated Federal government rather than an association of sovereign States was one of the reasons the southern states felt justified in armed conflict. They felt that their sovereign patria was their State and the Federal government was a trade confederation, much like the European Union. War changed that.
So on balance, it's a mistake to think that the US "enacted" slavery in the Constitution through its failure to abolish it. In fact, all the common law was inherited from Great Britain or France, depending on the state, and they all had precedent in place to uphold the slaveholder's supposed right to chattel slavery. It was very much a practice inherited from the old world, and the 1787 constitution attempting to unify the nation in abolishing the practice would've been seen as radical activism of the kind the states wouldn't have supported. So it's not as if some plantation owner looked at their ledger, then decided to ship blacks over from Africa to enslave them because it was the only way he could balance his books.
There was still heavy industrialization before slavery was abolished as well as research in physics snd machincal engineering. Machines went beyond human capicitty in the the sense that the cotton gin increased the efficiency that one could do that type of work than a human could do in the same amount of time. It wouldn't have been a stretch to say "let's have someone make something even more efficient", and after slavery was abolished not only in the US but in other developed countries, that's exactly what the world did to compensate for lower production, even though they could have researched that in the first place before slavery was used on such an industrial scale.
Why don't we have robots doing all manual labor today? Once we saw humans it wasn't a stretch to say "Let's have someone make something even more efficient."
Massive technological shifts do not simply occur the moment someone conceives that improvement is possible (if they did the ancient Chinese would have swept through the world with assault rifles). Mills could not be plugged into a nationwide electrical grid in the 1800s. You needed either muscle power (slaves or horses) to operate them or a strong running river nearby that you would be allowed to use. Even if it were practical to build a mill where you were the mill did not gather its own cotton or transport its own cotton.
The pressure to stop using slaves was very low (its not like they weren't turning a profit) and plenty of people were afraid of retaliation or disenfranchisement if slaves were given freedom. Simply because in hindsight its possible to imagine better choices doesn't mean they were apparent at the time.
Robots doing the majority or all of manual labor is coming, it's just way too expensive and not out of the ultra experimental phase yet. Prototypes for farming and manufacturing robots have been built by robotics companies but they need to be cheaper and more on the mass scale before we see that.
I'm not talking about high tech robots, I'm talking about equipment that is very basic by today's standards, you could have had a steam powered planter or a basic rotater for watering.
Is it possible for society to level the paying field when it comes to racial disparity brought on by slavery?
Sure.
First, how? Second, is this based on a moral imperative or pragmatism? Third, who says society is responsible for correcting what society did hundreds of years ago? How do you correct it without unjustly taking from other people?
Past societal constructs are largely irrelevant except as a means for explaining current circumstances. A historically discriminated against group isn't always going to have issues bring represented proportionally in society (I.E. Irish, Jewish).
It does get to the point. Honestly, if someone asked me this question, I'd refute the premise right off the bat. .
We aren't targeting the black population because they're historically discriminated against, that's just context to explain why things are the way they are. It's important to understand why black people as a population are held further behind in the statistics than other historically discriminated against populations.
Why? If you are not going to use this awareness for anything, what' the point of it?
Although it's important to note that unlike the Irish and the Jewish populations, blacks aren't just ethnically different from the majority of the population. It also helps that the Irish ended up intermarrying with just about every other population ethnicity in New York, which is part of why they're so widely accepted now. A lot of the backlash against the Irish was due to cultural circumstances at the time, they were a lot like the hispanic population of today in that way.
In any case, we're targeting black populations because we've determined that, due to social barriers, they are still disproportionately affected despite legal barriers being removed.
Race should not matter when it comes helping poor kids or people.
I work in public health, and for interventions we target specific racial and ethnic minorities all the time. We do that because there are cultural differences and barriers that, for some reason, means certain groups have worse health outcomes despite being in the same SES as others.
So you are proponent of racial profiling? I make no judgement on this because I see a benefit of sorts in the medical community however there is contradiction in the anti-racist argument. Not saying you are anti-racist....but a cop stops a black kid, its racist, a doctor stops one...its not?
Ignoring race is, in my opinion, a bad thing. People naturally group themselves into social clusters, and there will always be people who group themselves based on race or cultural background. Acknowledging those differences and respecting them is important. 'Ignoring' the differences between us implies painting everyone with the same brush, which isn't always effective, because there is no 'generic' cultural grouping.
You say it's ignoring. I say it's irrelevant. I do not see everyone as the same. I see everyone as individuals. I automatically know they will be different than me. I see no reason to consider a persons race unless its needed to understand context.
What ignoring race essentially means is treating people as if they come from the same background, which is the background of majority of Americans.
No it doesn't, it means treating them like individuals regardless of their race. For me to treat someone respectfully, I do not need to consciously acknowledge a persons race nor does it mean I'm ignoring it.
The worst kind of marketing is universal marketing, if you're trying to get a message across you need to account for what makes segments of the population different and what appeals to one segment versus another.
And that encompasess significantly more cultural difference than the complexion of someones skin. Skin color is such an insignificant part of culture and it amazes me many people think is the most important or least the one they talk about the most.
I agree that commodity trade benefited national trading power across the board, but I don't agree with applying that idea as far as to say that slavery, on balance, was an economically beneficial practice.
I've read studies about the profitability of Atlantic trade in the 1700's, the availability of labor, and the suitability of agriculture, and so forth. I've also read economic theories that explain why slavery is more common when labor is rare, and vice versa. But always, these things are pointed at the economic causes for slavery as a tool for historical explanation, not as an argument for why slavery needed to have happened.
You would be correct if you were looking purely at 18th century slave labor and earlier. It was not very economical to begin with, and the contemporaries of that period knew it. It was used purely as an attempt to make up for both a real and perceived shortage of labor.
But, as I understand it, 19th century slave labor is a far cry from the earlier centuries. Like I said, cotton was that big of a deal.
And it is also worth noting that the South was the economic powerhouse of colonial America. This simply couldn't have happened without slave labor.
Slavery didn't need to happen. That doesn't prevent the fact that, particularly in the 19th century, it greatly assisted the development of the economy in the U.S.
What the economic thinking of the time failed to account for were the real money costs of social inequality. One example, it's likely that the total time-adjusted costs of the Civil War in productivity and liquid assets outweighed the entire cotton trade of the early 1800's. Just that one event. Not to mention the on-going costs of a failure to racially integrate a post-war South. The results can be plainly seen in areas that continue to struggle economically to this day.
So as a whole, I have no reservation at all in saying that Slavery made America worse off, socially, economically, politically, and in every other way imaginable. It's as close to "evil" as you can objectively get, in my opinion. America would be a much better nation at every point in time up to today if it had never practiced slavery.
And, as I wrote earlier, the entire lead-up to the conditions of the Civil War came almost entirely from effects caused by slavery. Anyone who isn't biased cannot seriously contend this.
And, honestly speaking, you cannot have the U.S. as we know it today without slavery.
There is absolutely no way we would know where the U.S. would have gone if
- Slavery never existed in the Americas to begin with.
or
- Slavery was outright banned at the Convention of 1787.
As such, I find it really silly to even claim that slavery made America worse off. For all we know, America may not have even existed without slavery, or have not lasted.
The framers certainly knew that pushing the issue at the Convention would have led to the South not agreeing to any discussion, and that would have meant two separate republics at best, a bunch of weak nation-states at each other's throat at worst.
And the lack of slavery in the English colonies may have led it to being economically pointless and people may never have moved here/develop the thirteen Colonies to begin with.
But the fact of the matter is that virtually no one before Lincoln's party thought that any of the content of the US constitution should be applied to the states, not even individual protections. There is a running history of religious, racial, and all sorts of other class persecution, not only tolerated by the states, but overtly enacted by them.
Hamilton and other die-hard federalists, and then nationalist democrats afterwards, would like to have a word with you.
The idea of an integrated Federal government rather than an association of sovereign States was one of the reasons the southern states felt justified in armed conflict. They felt that their sovereign patria was their State and the Federal government was a trade confederation, much like the European Union. War changed that.
No. This is simplistic history, and one that takes the reaction of the southern states in the years immediately before the Civil War as though it represents their stance all throughout the antebellum period.
So on balance, it's a mistake to think that the US "enacted" slavery in the Constitution through its failure to abolish it. In fact, all the common law was inherited from Great Britain or France, depending on the state, and they all had precedent in place to uphold the slaveholder's supposed right to chattel slavery. It was very much a practice inherited from the old world, and the 1787 constitution attempting to unify the nation in abolishing the practice would've been seen as radical activism of the kind the states wouldn't have supported. So it's not as if some plantation owner looked at their ledger, then decided to ship blacks over from Africa to enslave them because it was the only way he could balance his books.
If you thought that I was saying that the Constitution "enacted" slavery, then you totally misunderstood what I wrote.
From what I understand, this is what happened-
Chenjesu talks about historical precedence with slavery in ancient times and whatnot as if it means anything.
I say all those are irrelevant, because the U.S. Constitution claims to give all men a bunch of unalienable rights. Most of the framers immediately recognize that there's a contradiction between the words in the Constitution and their own actions in keeping slaves. A number of slave owners, including Jefferson in his younger years, believe that slavery will just die out on its own because of said conflict and the ramifications that come from it.
And then people in the early 19th century also recognize the contradiction.
So, what I'm saying is, the Constitution basically gave a big ****-you to slavery. If you took the preamble to the letter, then it's completely incompatible with slavery, and people saw this.
It's like this. The cartoon in the OP looks like it represents the prosperity of two races in the form of the ledge that the White kid climbs up on. So, it's showing that the White kid is prosperous relative to to Black kid. That's what I mean by a relative measure of prosperity.
Then what I said was that in order to have a statistical, relative measure of prosperity, you have to have two reference points and measure one against the other. In the cartoon, the White kid is higher than the Black kid. My question is - what would those two points of comparison be in modern times?
Because I don't agree that Modern Whites and Modern Blacks should be compared to slave-holding Whites and Black slaves.
I think a better measure is absolute prosperity, rather than whether one race is better off than another. And I think that Slavery and subsequent racial oppression after abolition were the causes for nothing but harm to the US, both economically and socially. And there are a lot of real economic and social benefits to be found in racial diversity and racial tolerance today, inasmuch as we can achieve it.
I don't see why observing the current relative differences in prosperity requires equating modern people to slave-holders and slaves. To observe a difference in relative prosperity, you need only look at the current status. It doesn't require drawing the sort of equivalence that the cartoon does to people 150 years ago.
I say all those are irrelevant, because the U.S. Constitution claims to give all men a bunch of unalienable rights. Most of the framers immediately recognize that there's a contradiction between the words in the Constitution and their own actions in keeping slaves. A number of slave owners, including Jefferson in his younger years, believe that slavery will just die out on its own because of said conflict and the ramifications that come from it.
And then people in the early 19th century also recognize the contradiction.
So, what I'm saying is, the Constitution basically gave a big ****-you to slavery. If you took the preamble to the letter, then it's completely incompatible with slavery, and people saw this.
The preamble wasn't intended to be taken to the letter, which is why the whole idea that the US Constitution intended to give these unalienable rights to everyone within the boundaries of the federal government is revisionist hogwash.
Look at legal history. Judges and lawmakers said lots and lots of fluff. It's in the culture. The more fluff, the better. The practice continues today in the SCOTUS. The term of art is "dicta" - philosophical musings that are not intended for legal effect. And "fluff" and "dicta" are synonymous with "preamble".
Abolition was a cultural movement, not a legal one. The legal one happened with Lincoln. From the Lincoln-Douglas debate, to the inauguration speech, to the Gettysburg Address, to the reconstruction amendments, every word of it was party platform. It wasn't some long-neglected legal dogma suppressed by economic necessity since the founding.
So to say that slavery continued only in suppression of a tide of legal pushback, for the plain reason of economic benefit, just isn't true. Slave-holders continued to hold slaves because it was their tradition to do so. They failed to find another economic solution to meet cotton demand because they didn't need to. And consequently, they doomed themselves, the slaves they oppressed, and the rest of the US to a horrible fate.
It's like this. The cartoon in the OP looks like it represents the prosperity of two races in the form of the ledge that the White kid climbs up on. So, it's showing that the White kid is prosperous relative to to Black kid. That's what I mean by a relative measure of prosperity.
Then what I said was that in order to have a statistical, relative measure of prosperity, you have to have two reference points and measure one against the other. In the cartoon, the White kid is higher than the Black kid. My question is - what would those two points of comparison be in modern times?
Because I don't agree that Modern Whites and Modern Blacks should be compared to slave-holding Whites and Black slaves.
I think a better measure is absolute prosperity, rather than whether one race is better off than another. And I think that Slavery and subsequent racial oppression after abolition were the causes for nothing but harm to the US, both economically and socially. And there are a lot of real economic and social benefits to be found in racial diversity and racial tolerance today, inasmuch as we can achieve it.
I don't see why observing the current relative differences in prosperity requires equating modern people to slave-holders and slaves. To observe a difference in relative prosperity, you need only look at the current status. It doesn't require drawing the sort of equivalence that the cartoon does to people 150 years ago.
Well, I agree on the point that it's not needed to blame any particular group with Slavery in order to justify policy.
But the cartoon does associate modern Whites with slave-holding Whites, and Modern Blacks to enslaved Blacks. And I just don't think that's good justification for policy.
It's not the only justification, and so it's for a lot of other reasons as well that I think an approach that takes overall prosperity into account over relative differences makes better policy.
Well, I agree on the point that it's not needed to blame any particular group with Slavery in order to justify policy.
But the cartoon does associate modern Whites with slave-holding Whites, and Modern Blacks to enslaved Blacks. And I just don't think that's good justification for policy.
It's not the only justification, and so it's for a lot of other reasons as well that I think an approach that takes overall prosperity into account over relative differences makes better policy.
Is it really an either-or choice, though? We're certainly capable of considering both relative and absolute prosperity. Further, the existence of a significant relative gap has negative societal impacts which lead to decreased absolute prosperity, so the issues are hardly separate.
It's like this. The cartoon in the OP looks like it represents the prosperity of two races in the form of the ledge that the White kid climbs up on. So, it's showing that the White kid is prosperous relative to to Black kid. That's what I mean by a relative measure of prosperity.
Then what I said was that in order to have a statistical, relative measure of prosperity, you have to have two reference points and measure one against the other. In the cartoon, the White kid is higher than the Black kid. My question is - what would those two points of comparison be in modern times?
Because I don't agree that Modern Whites and Modern Blacks should be compared to slave-holding Whites and Black slaves.
I think a better measure is absolute prosperity, rather than whether one race is better off than another. And I think that Slavery and subsequent racial oppression after abolition were the causes for nothing but harm to the US, both economically and socially. And there are a lot of real economic and social benefits to be found in racial diversity and racial tolerance today, inasmuch as we can achieve it.
I don't see why observing the current relative differences in prosperity requires equating modern people to slave-holders and slaves. To observe a difference in relative prosperity, you need only look at the current status. It doesn't require drawing the sort of equivalence that the cartoon does to people 150 years ago.
It's not equating - it's recognizing that the reason why status quo disparities exist is largely a result of the previous structural conditions.
Asking people to remove quotes in their signatures is tyranny! If I can't say something just because someone's feelings are hurt then no one would ever be able to say anything! Political correctness is stupid.
To people who say it's racist that African Americans are being helped, couldn't you argue that currently there's special scholarships and financial aid for ALL disproportionately poor minority groups? Let's say you hate people from Africa, but also people from North America, South America, Antarctica, and just all continents, that's the same as saying you hate everyone, which doesn't discriminate against any particular group so you are not being racist, just generally hateful. The same reasoning could be applied to helping people.
It's not equating - it's recognizing that the reason why status quote disparities exist is largely a result of the previous structural conditions.
Don't play innocent. The cartoon has one character wronging another, then the same character saying, "I am sorry that I was racist to you." That is abso-****ing-lutely equating. The moral-emotional arc of this little story is that we should dislike Mr. White because he acts cavalier and unrepentant for his actions. But this is misleading, because Mr. Black and Mr. White are supposed to represent not individuals, but large cross-generational groups. And the logic of moral responsibility that works perfectly intuitively for Mr. Black and Mr. White does not work for "black Americans" and "white Americans". Mr. White is the same person as he who wronged Mr. Black, but white Americans are not the same people as they who wronged black Americans, nor are black Americans the same people as they who were wronged. And nobody bears responsibility for actions they have not committed, or deserves restitution for a wrong not done to them. You cannot equivocate between individuals and groups and expect your results to make sense any more than you can equivocate between human cells and humans and expect your results to make sense. That is the fallacy of composition.
I'm not arguing here that there is no reason we as a society should give disadvantaged people a helping hand, but that reason is not and cannot be the wrongdoing of past generations. It's just lazy thinking to present it this way.
Think about the issue from another angle. If we all got amnesia tomorrow and all our history books were somehow wiped blank, so that we had no idea whether the present inequalities we see were the result of historical wrongdoing, morally neutral economic forces, the curse of an evil witch, or sheer random chance... should this ignorance in any way alter our moral assessment of the situation and the proper course of action going forward?
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Vive, vale. Siquid novisti rectius istis,
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Well, I agree on the point that it's not needed to blame any particular group with Slavery in order to justify policy.
But the cartoon does associate modern Whites with slave-holding Whites, and Modern Blacks to enslaved Blacks. And I just don't think that's good justification for policy.
It's not the only justification, and so it's for a lot of other reasons as well that I think an approach that takes overall prosperity into account over relative differences makes better policy.
Is it really an either-or choice, though? We're certainly capable of considering both relative and absolute prosperity. Further, the existence of a significant relative gap has negative societal impacts which lead to decreased absolute prosperity, so the issues are hardly separate.
Well, I mainly resent the idea that one group doing wrong to another with the apparent purpose of getting an advantage means that they got an advantage, measured only by the oppressed group being harmed. It's possible, as is the case with slavery, that both groups are objectively worse off. It's only true that the oppressive group is better off than the oppressed group.
The supposition is that there is some finite amount of resources that have to be divided, such that someone gaining means that someone else has to lose and vice versa. It's just not true. On reflection, there is probably some evolutionary explanation about human populations actually needing to subsist on a limited amount of land, in competition with one another at times.
The modern concept of wealth is entirely different though. When two businesses transact, there are gains on both sides. More broadly, people create wealth rather than discover it. Likewise, currency has value because we assign it value. The more effective we are in creating wealth and making value judgments, the better off everyone is objectively.
So, a relative discrepancy of wealth I consider the sign of a problem rather than the problem itself. Maybe otherwise productive people are being held unproductive. Or maybe we are making poor value judgments. But I don't think the solution is to reassign things until the same race-related measurements yield a more even result. I think the best things to do are drive productivity and opportunity, and allow better social values to take root.
Well, I mainly resent the idea that one group doing wrong to another with the apparent purpose of getting an advantage means that they got an advantage, measured only by the oppressed group being harmed. It's possible, as is the case with slavery, that both groups are objectively worse off. It's only true that the oppressive group is better off than the oppressed group.
The supposition is that there is some finite amount of resources that have to be divided, such that someone gaining means that someone else has to lose and vice versa. It's just not true. On reflection, there is probably some evolutionary explanation about human populations actually needing to subsist on a limited amount of land, in competition with one another at times.
The modern concept of wealth is entirely different though. When two businesses transact, there are gains on both sides. More broadly, people create wealth rather than discover it. Likewise, currency has value because we assign it value. The more effective we are in creating wealth and making value judgments, the better off everyone is objectively.
So, a relative discrepancy of wealth I consider the sign of a problem rather than the problem itself. Maybe otherwise productive people are being held unproductive. Or maybe we are making poor value judgments. But I don't think the solution is to reassign things until the same race-related measurements yield a more even result. I think the best things to do are drive productivity and opportunity, and allow better social values to take root.
I don't really see how this addresses the things I've been saying. One certainly doesn't need to believe that we are playing a zero-sum game to see unacceptable injustice in one group being disadvantaged more than another.
It's not equating - it's recognizing that the reason why status quote disparities exist is largely a result of the previous structural conditions.
Don't play innocent. The cartoon has one character wronging another, then the same character saying, "I am sorry that I was racist to you." That is abso-****ing-lutely equating. The moral-emotional arc of this little story is that we should dislike Mr. White because he acts cavalier and unrepentant for his actions. But this is misleading, because Mr. Black and Mr. White are supposed to represent not individuals, but large cross-generational groups. And the logic of moral responsibility that works perfectly intuitively for Mr. Black and Mr. White does not work for "black Americans" and "white Americans". Mr. White is the same person as he who wronged Mr. Black, but white Americans are not the same people as they who wronged black Americans, nor are black Americans the same people as they who were wronged. And nobody bears responsibility for actions they have not committed, or deserves restitution for a wrong not done to them. You cannot equivocate between individuals and groups and expect your results to make sense any more than you can equivocate between human cells and humans and expect your results to make sense. That is the fallacy of composition.
I'm not arguing here that there is no reason we as a society should give disadvantaged people a helping hand, but that reason is not and cannot be the wrongdoing of past generations. It's just lazy thinking to present it this way.
Think about the issue from another angle. If we all got amnesia tomorrow and all our history books were somehow wiped blank, so that we had no idea whether the present inequalities we see were the result of historical wrongdoing, morally neutral economic forces, the curse of an evil witch, or sheer random chance... should this ignorance in any way alter our moral assessment of the situation and the proper course of action going forward?
This does a very good job of articulating what I was thinking when I saw this cartoon.
It's not equating - it's recognizing that the reason why status quote disparities exist is largely a result of the previous structural conditions.
Don't play innocent. The cartoon has one character wronging another, then the same character saying, "I am sorry that I was racist to you." That is abso-****ing-lutely equating. The moral-emotional arc of this little story is that we should dislike Mr. White because he acts cavalier and unrepentant for his actions. But this is misleading, because Mr. Black and Mr. White are supposed to represent not individuals, but large cross-generational groups. And the logic of moral responsibility that works perfectly intuitively for Mr. Black and Mr. White does not work for "black Americans" and "white Americans". Mr. White is the same person as he who wronged Mr. Black, but white Americans are not the same people as they who wronged black Americans, nor are black Americans the same people as they who were wronged. And nobody bears responsibility for actions they have not committed, or deserves restitution for a wrong not done to them. You cannot equivocate between individuals and groups and expect your results to make sense any more than you can equivocate between human cells and humans and expect your results to make sense. That is the fallacy of composition.
I'm not arguing here that there is no reason we as a society should give disadvantaged people a helping hand, but that reason is not and cannot be the wrongdoing of past generations. It's just lazy thinking to present it this way.
Think about the issue from another angle. If we all got amnesia tomorrow and all our history books were somehow wiped blank, so that we had no idea whether the present inequalities we see were the result of historical wrongdoing, morally neutral economic forces, the curse of an evil witch, or sheer random chance... should this ignorance in any way alter our moral assessment of the situation and the proper course of action going forward?
I don't always agree with Blinking_Spirit, but when I do, it's 100%.
My son is 5. There is zero reason that I can think of, for him and his generation to continue apologizing for slavery, or being repaired from it.
Heck, I don't think there's any reason MY generation should apologize or repair. My parents weren't slave owners. Blacks born in my generation weren't slaves, and neither were their parents.
Heck, MY generation weren't even alive during the civil rights movement.
So, the argument is, do they still suffer inequality for which they deserve compensation? I think not.
Sure, we still have racists, but I believe the institutions that impeded their success no longer exist.
All the opportunity is there, for everyone, no matter who you are. Education, work, housing, etc. In fact, thanks to white guilt, there are even "special" opportunities just for minorities (and women too).
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“Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments
are we bound to prosperity and ruin.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
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I don't understand. Are you saying that you're basing your argument on a premise you know to be an ignorant falsehood?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
I just noticed I made a mistake. I read "The economy of this time period is better than any in history yet we still have racists" as you saying "that time period".
Apologies.
We are talking specifically about the U.S. and the state of slavery here. As such, The Constitution is VERY relevant.
In fact, it is about the only relevant thing, because the promise of freedom to choose for all men written within it is what started the whole fight against slavery in the U.S. to begin with.
I have no idea what you're saying here.
But that wasn't why people kept slaves in the U.S.
Again, I could care less why people kept slaves in ancient Greece. The same reasons do not apply to the colonial U.S. They just don't.
?
I'm not basing my argument on that. I'm just saying that the IR as it began in Britain isn't (to my knowledge at least, but my knowledge of English history is spotty at best) what the average American today thinks of as industrialism.
I'm speaking more of the fact that the average American today seems to think that industrialism, and by extension the revolution itself, began with all the iron and steel and crap in the late 19th century, when in actuality it began in the mid-late 18 century in Britain and got along to full steam in the early 19th century in both Britain and the U.S.
Everyone now exists under the same umbrella of equal opportunity, not equal outcome. I think that notion tends to get blurred in the mad scramble of things due to the fact that desired outcomes tend to overlap or almost be universal. It's not a stretch to say that everyone wants to be financially successful or comfortable, live a long healthy life, exist in safety etc.
The so called advantages that come from being born into a wealthy family are only a factor in the sense of protectionism style efforts among the wealthy which can be either valid or invalid depending on if its based on work ethic and associated principles or cronyism and associated principles. Regardless there's no guarantee that those efforts will be successful and the wealthy will continue to be so just as there's no guarantee that the poor will remain poor.
There really doesn't need to be anymore opportunities created because doing so in the legislative sense always turns into taking from someone else to give to another. If opportunities are to be created they should be so at the local community level, face to face interactions with people creating their own opportunities and networks of success. Legislating it does little when part of the notions of freedom, opportunity and success is it stemming from and a result of your own particular efforts. Programs and legislation don't feed the spiritual beast and depression sets in.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
So why did the US choose slavery over hiring a bunch of engineers to design machines that could go beyond any human capacity? Either way there's going to be cost in investing, someone would either have pay a bunch of money for shelter, food, water and for the slaves themselves and/or hiring some people on a boat to raid a village and capture people and people to watch over the slaves to make sure they do work, or one have to spend money on machine parts after hiring some engineers to design a better machine and have a few people use them.
But economy is not why anyone ever thought there was nothing wrong with slavery, which history shows. Slavery existed first, and then after that people tried to justify it by saying it helps the country's economy.
Because the industrial revolution didn't introduce robots? The new machines did not "go beyond any human capacity" they multiplied the work performed by humans. Plantations weren't nearly at capacity when machinery was introduced. The result was that each slave became more valuable, they could do more work for the same amount of resources, and there was no reason to get rid of them. The cotton gin rather famously increased the demand for slaves in the South.
There was still heavy industrialization before slavery was abolished as well as research in physics snd machincal engineering. Machines went beyond human capicitty in the the sense that the cotton gin increased the efficiency that one could do that type of work than a human could do in the same amount of time. It wouldn't have been a stretch to say "let's have someone make something even more efficient", and after slavery was abolished not only in the US but in other developed countries, that's exactly what the world did to compensate for lower production, even though they could have researched that in the first place before slavery was used on such an industrial scale.
Why don't we have robots doing all manual labor today? Once we saw humans it wasn't a stretch to say "Let's have someone make something even more efficient."
Massive technological shifts do not simply occur the moment someone conceives that improvement is possible (if they did the ancient Chinese would have swept through the world with assault rifles). Mills could not be plugged into a nationwide electrical grid in the 1800s. You needed either muscle power (slaves or horses) to operate them or a strong running river nearby that you would be allowed to use. Even if it were practical to build a mill where you were the mill did not gather its own cotton or transport its own cotton.
The pressure to stop using slaves was very low (its not like they weren't turning a profit) and plenty of people were afraid of retaliation or disenfranchisement if slaves were given freedom. Simply because in hindsight its possible to imagine better choices doesn't mean they were apparent at the time.
Robots doing the majority or all of manual labor is coming, it's just way too expensive and not out of the ultra experimental phase yet. Prototypes for farming and manufacturing robots have been built by robotics companies but they need to be cheaper and more on the mass scale before we see that.
STRANGER: Indeed?
CASSILDA: Indeed it's time. We all have laid aside disguise but you.
STRANGER: I wear no mask.
CAMILLA: (Terrified, aside to Cassilda.) No mask? No mask!
I have a problem with not being conscious of race by default indicating someone is "ignoring" racism.
An analogy:
I'm not consciously thinking about my shoe size every day in all aspects of my life. I can pass a shoe store and not think about my shoe size. However, when I need to buy shoes, I then think about my shoe size.
An example in the current context:
I do not make any conscious thought about clerks race. It's the furthest thing from my mind but if you were to ask me what race the clerk was...I could answer it. Or, if someone made a slur, I could then acknowledge the person race in order to better understand the context.
-----
Many times people have accused me of "ignoring" racism by not thinking about race buy default....There is no logical reason to acknowledge race unless their is a catalyst to warrant such a consideration.....What I'm finding though is many people resist this as being even possible. No one can convince me that we as a people should actively consider race with out provocation.
calling liberals loons=not okay
The standard to which the forum moderators apply the rules here.
It's like this. The cartoon in the OP looks like it represents the prosperity of two races in the form of the ledge that the White kid climbs up on. So, it's showing that the White kid is prosperous relative to to Black kid. That's what I mean by a relative measure of prosperity.
Then what I said was that in order to have a statistical, relative measure of prosperity, you have to have two reference points and measure one against the other. In the cartoon, the White kid is higher than the Black kid. My question is - what would those two points of comparison be in modern times?
Because I don't agree that Modern Whites and Modern Blacks should be compared to slave-holding Whites and Black slaves.
I think a better measure is absolute prosperity, rather than whether one race is better off than another. And I think that Slavery and subsequent racial oppression after abolition were the causes for nothing but harm to the US, both economically and socially. And there are a lot of real economic and social benefits to be found in racial diversity and racial tolerance today, inasmuch as we can achieve it.
I agree that commodity trade benefited national trading power across the board, but I don't agree with applying that idea as far as to say that slavery, on balance, was an economically beneficial practice.
I've read studies about the profitability of Atlantic trade in the 1700's, the availability of labor, and the suitability of agriculture, and so forth. I've also read economic theories that explain why slavery is more common when labor is rare, and vice versa. But always, these things are pointed at the economic causes for slavery as a tool for historical explanation, not as an argument for why slavery needed to have happened.
What the economic thinking of the time failed to account for were the real money costs of social inequality. One example, it's likely that the total time-adjusted costs of the Civil War in productivity and liquid assets outweighed the entire cotton trade of the early 1800's. Just that one event. Not to mention the on-going costs of a failure to racially integrate a post-war South. The results can be plainly seen in areas that continue to struggle economically to this day.
So as a whole, I have no reservation at all in saying that Slavery made America worse off, socially, economically, politically, and in every other way imaginable. It's as close to "evil" as you can objectively get, in my opinion. America would be a much better nation at every point in time up to today if it had never practiced slavery.
You're taking a post-Civil War reading of the Constitution and applying it to the pre-war era.
Easy enough thing to do, since Lincoln's policies were so effective in reaching the hearts and minds of the nation, and even the South itself was very effective in revising history to paint itself in a more favorable light.
But the fact of the matter is that virtually no one before Lincoln's party thought that any of the content of the US constitution should be applied to the states, not even individual protections. There is a running history of religious, racial, and all sorts of other class persecution, not only tolerated by the states, but overtly enacted by them. It's not just a failure to bring lawsuits, or that the states were getting away with anything. It's that it was considered perfectly legal at the time. And on the other hand, you had "free" states that did not have the common law precedent to acknowledge an owner's rights of chattel slavery in court, and were only made to do so in the Dredd Scot decision of 1857.
The idea of an integrated Federal government rather than an association of sovereign States was one of the reasons the southern states felt justified in armed conflict. They felt that their sovereign patria was their State and the Federal government was a trade confederation, much like the European Union. War changed that.
So on balance, it's a mistake to think that the US "enacted" slavery in the Constitution through its failure to abolish it. In fact, all the common law was inherited from Great Britain or France, depending on the state, and they all had precedent in place to uphold the slaveholder's supposed right to chattel slavery. It was very much a practice inherited from the old world, and the 1787 constitution attempting to unify the nation in abolishing the practice would've been seen as radical activism of the kind the states wouldn't have supported. So it's not as if some plantation owner looked at their ledger, then decided to ship blacks over from Africa to enslave them because it was the only way he could balance his books.
I'm not talking about high tech robots, I'm talking about equipment that is very basic by today's standards, you could have had a steam powered planter or a basic rotater for watering.
First, how? Second, is this based on a moral imperative or pragmatism? Third, who says society is responsible for correcting what society did hundreds of years ago? How do you correct it without unjustly taking from other people?
It does get to the point. Honestly, if someone asked me this question, I'd refute the premise right off the bat. .
Why? If you are not going to use this awareness for anything, what' the point of it?
Race should not matter when it comes helping poor kids or people.
So you are proponent of racial profiling? I make no judgement on this because I see a benefit of sorts in the medical community however there is contradiction in the anti-racist argument. Not saying you are anti-racist....but a cop stops a black kid, its racist, a doctor stops one...its not?
You say it's ignoring. I say it's irrelevant. I do not see everyone as the same. I see everyone as individuals. I automatically know they will be different than me. I see no reason to consider a persons race unless its needed to understand context.
No it doesn't, it means treating them like individuals regardless of their race. For me to treat someone respectfully, I do not need to consciously acknowledge a persons race nor does it mean I'm ignoring it.
And that encompasess significantly more cultural difference than the complexion of someones skin. Skin color is such an insignificant part of culture and it amazes me many people think is the most important or least the one they talk about the most.
calling liberals loons=not okay
The standard to which the forum moderators apply the rules here.
You would be correct if you were looking purely at 18th century slave labor and earlier. It was not very economical to begin with, and the contemporaries of that period knew it. It was used purely as an attempt to make up for both a real and perceived shortage of labor.
But, as I understand it, 19th century slave labor is a far cry from the earlier centuries. Like I said, cotton was that big of a deal.
And it is also worth noting that the South was the economic powerhouse of colonial America. This simply couldn't have happened without slave labor.
Slavery didn't need to happen. That doesn't prevent the fact that, particularly in the 19th century, it greatly assisted the development of the economy in the U.S.
And, as I wrote earlier, the entire lead-up to the conditions of the Civil War came almost entirely from effects caused by slavery. Anyone who isn't biased cannot seriously contend this.
And, honestly speaking, you cannot have the U.S. as we know it today without slavery.
There is absolutely no way we would know where the U.S. would have gone if
- Slavery never existed in the Americas to begin with.
or
- Slavery was outright banned at the Convention of 1787.
As such, I find it really silly to even claim that slavery made America worse off. For all we know, America may not have even existed without slavery, or have not lasted.
The framers certainly knew that pushing the issue at the Convention would have led to the South not agreeing to any discussion, and that would have meant two separate republics at best, a bunch of weak nation-states at each other's throat at worst.
And the lack of slavery in the English colonies may have led it to being economically pointless and people may never have moved here/develop the thirteen Colonies to begin with.
Hamilton and other die-hard federalists, and then nationalist democrats afterwards, would like to have a word with you.
No. This is simplistic history, and one that takes the reaction of the southern states in the years immediately before the Civil War as though it represents their stance all throughout the antebellum period.
If you thought that I was saying that the Constitution "enacted" slavery, then you totally misunderstood what I wrote.
From what I understand, this is what happened-
Chenjesu talks about historical precedence with slavery in ancient times and whatnot as if it means anything.
I say all those are irrelevant, because the U.S. Constitution claims to give all men a bunch of unalienable rights. Most of the framers immediately recognize that there's a contradiction between the words in the Constitution and their own actions in keeping slaves. A number of slave owners, including Jefferson in his younger years, believe that slavery will just die out on its own because of said conflict and the ramifications that come from it.
And then people in the early 19th century also recognize the contradiction.
So, what I'm saying is, the Constitution basically gave a big ****-you to slavery. If you took the preamble to the letter, then it's completely incompatible with slavery, and people saw this.
I don't see why observing the current relative differences in prosperity requires equating modern people to slave-holders and slaves. To observe a difference in relative prosperity, you need only look at the current status. It doesn't require drawing the sort of equivalence that the cartoon does to people 150 years ago.
The preamble wasn't intended to be taken to the letter, which is why the whole idea that the US Constitution intended to give these unalienable rights to everyone within the boundaries of the federal government is revisionist hogwash.
Look at legal history. Judges and lawmakers said lots and lots of fluff. It's in the culture. The more fluff, the better. The practice continues today in the SCOTUS. The term of art is "dicta" - philosophical musings that are not intended for legal effect. And "fluff" and "dicta" are synonymous with "preamble".
Abolition was a cultural movement, not a legal one. The legal one happened with Lincoln. From the Lincoln-Douglas debate, to the inauguration speech, to the Gettysburg Address, to the reconstruction amendments, every word of it was party platform. It wasn't some long-neglected legal dogma suppressed by economic necessity since the founding.
So to say that slavery continued only in suppression of a tide of legal pushback, for the plain reason of economic benefit, just isn't true. Slave-holders continued to hold slaves because it was their tradition to do so. They failed to find another economic solution to meet cotton demand because they didn't need to. And consequently, they doomed themselves, the slaves they oppressed, and the rest of the US to a horrible fate.
Well, I agree on the point that it's not needed to blame any particular group with Slavery in order to justify policy.
But the cartoon does associate modern Whites with slave-holding Whites, and Modern Blacks to enslaved Blacks. And I just don't think that's good justification for policy.
It's not the only justification, and so it's for a lot of other reasons as well that I think an approach that takes overall prosperity into account over relative differences makes better policy.
Is it really an either-or choice, though? We're certainly capable of considering both relative and absolute prosperity. Further, the existence of a significant relative gap has negative societal impacts which lead to decreased absolute prosperity, so the issues are hardly separate.
It's not equating - it's recognizing that the reason why status quo disparities exist is largely a result of the previous structural conditions.
Don't play innocent. The cartoon has one character wronging another, then the same character saying, "I am sorry that I was racist to you." That is abso-****ing-lutely equating. The moral-emotional arc of this little story is that we should dislike Mr. White because he acts cavalier and unrepentant for his actions. But this is misleading, because Mr. Black and Mr. White are supposed to represent not individuals, but large cross-generational groups. And the logic of moral responsibility that works perfectly intuitively for Mr. Black and Mr. White does not work for "black Americans" and "white Americans". Mr. White is the same person as he who wronged Mr. Black, but white Americans are not the same people as they who wronged black Americans, nor are black Americans the same people as they who were wronged. And nobody bears responsibility for actions they have not committed, or deserves restitution for a wrong not done to them. You cannot equivocate between individuals and groups and expect your results to make sense any more than you can equivocate between human cells and humans and expect your results to make sense. That is the fallacy of composition.
I'm not arguing here that there is no reason we as a society should give disadvantaged people a helping hand, but that reason is not and cannot be the wrongdoing of past generations. It's just lazy thinking to present it this way.
Think about the issue from another angle. If we all got amnesia tomorrow and all our history books were somehow wiped blank, so that we had no idea whether the present inequalities we see were the result of historical wrongdoing, morally neutral economic forces, the curse of an evil witch, or sheer random chance... should this ignorance in any way alter our moral assessment of the situation and the proper course of action going forward?
candidus inperti; si nil, his utere mecum.
Well, I mainly resent the idea that one group doing wrong to another with the apparent purpose of getting an advantage means that they got an advantage, measured only by the oppressed group being harmed. It's possible, as is the case with slavery, that both groups are objectively worse off. It's only true that the oppressive group is better off than the oppressed group.
The overarching, universal mistake in thinking is the zero-sum fallacy (http://www.povertycure.org/issues/the-zero-sum-fallacy/).
The supposition is that there is some finite amount of resources that have to be divided, such that someone gaining means that someone else has to lose and vice versa. It's just not true. On reflection, there is probably some evolutionary explanation about human populations actually needing to subsist on a limited amount of land, in competition with one another at times.
The modern concept of wealth is entirely different though. When two businesses transact, there are gains on both sides. More broadly, people create wealth rather than discover it. Likewise, currency has value because we assign it value. The more effective we are in creating wealth and making value judgments, the better off everyone is objectively.
So, a relative discrepancy of wealth I consider the sign of a problem rather than the problem itself. Maybe otherwise productive people are being held unproductive. Or maybe we are making poor value judgments. But I don't think the solution is to reassign things until the same race-related measurements yield a more even result. I think the best things to do are drive productivity and opportunity, and allow better social values to take root.
I don't really see how this addresses the things I've been saying. One certainly doesn't need to believe that we are playing a zero-sum game to see unacceptable injustice in one group being disadvantaged more than another.
This does a very good job of articulating what I was thinking when I saw this cartoon.
calling liberals loons=not okay
The standard to which the forum moderators apply the rules here.
I don't always agree with Blinking_Spirit, but when I do, it's 100%.
My son is 5. There is zero reason that I can think of, for him and his generation to continue apologizing for slavery, or being repaired from it.
Heck, I don't think there's any reason MY generation should apologize or repair. My parents weren't slave owners. Blacks born in my generation weren't slaves, and neither were their parents.
Heck, MY generation weren't even alive during the civil rights movement.
So, the argument is, do they still suffer inequality for which they deserve compensation? I think not.
Sure, we still have racists, but I believe the institutions that impeded their success no longer exist.
All the opportunity is there, for everyone, no matter who you are. Education, work, housing, etc. In fact, thanks to white guilt, there are even "special" opportunities just for minorities (and women too).
Thanks to Xenphire @ Inkfox for the amazing new sig
“Thus strangely are our souls constructed, and by slight ligaments
are we bound to prosperity and ruin.”
― Mary Shelley, Frankenstein