Hey there were a lot of other things going on, ok?
The controversy du jour is how dare the NY Times make a big deal of slavery and how dare anyone hint that slavery is any kind of blot on our record.
GRIFF JENKINS (FOX NEWS CORRESPONDENT): Newt, I want to ask you about The New York Times Magazine, I know you read it as much as you can, launching a new crusade to reframe America as defined by slavery and racism. Here’s the headline, I want to show it to you. The 1619 Project, and the quote inside says, “It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of Black Americans at the very center of the story tell we tell ourselves about who we are.” You are a historian. Your reaction?
NEWT GINGRICH (FOX NEWS CONTRIBUTOR): Yeah, the whole project is a lie. Look, I think slavery is a terrible thing. I think putting slavery in context is important. We still have slavery in places around the world today, so we recognize this is an ongoing story. I think certainly if you are an African American, slavery is at the center of what you see as the American experience. But, for most Americans, most of the time, there were a lot of other things going on.
Yes but that’s the point, surely. For most Germans there were a lot of other things going on in 1942 and 1943, too – a lot of things – but that doesn’t change the importance of the genocide. Of course for “most” Americans, by which he means white Americans, there were other things going on, but that’s one reason slavery went on for so long. That’s always one reason atrocities continue: they are perpetrated on only some of the people, and the rest of the people proceed with their lives, ignorant or indifferent or both. White people underestimate it and its aftermath because they were and are largely immune to both.
Anyway why shouldn’t we put the consequences of slavery at the very center of the story tell we tell ourselves about who we are? It seems to me it is at the very center, along with the genocide of the people who were here before the Europeans.
Best reply to Gingrich on Twitter…
My sister linked to the article below on Facebook this morning. I didn’t realize how close it was to reality.
https://www.theonion.com/newt-gingrich-slams-new-york-times-1619-project-as-sh-1837374390
Pretty Much Every Conservative “Intellectual”: “Facts don’t care about your feelings, libtard! History and science are real even if they say things that some races don’t like. You can’t go crying ‘racism’ every time you hear some unpleasant facts you don’t like, you fragile SJW snowflakes.”
NYT: “Here is some history about slavery in America.”
PMECI: “WAAAAH! This is RACISM towards white people! WHY is the Times PERSECUTING us with this information?”
NYT (two weeks from now): “We have considered your criticism and humbly apologize. For balance, we are discontinuing 1617 and beginning a new series on the never-before-explored issue of liberal college campuses. Also, we are replacing Paul Krugman, Jamelle Bouie, and Michelle Goldberg with Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro, and Joe Rogan.”
The history of America is so much the history of slavery. The slaves built a great deal of America. They did the hard work. They didn’t get paid for doing the hard work. They got beaten and killed and called lazy. Those beautiful plantations in the South? They are there because of slavery. The rich people living in them are rich because of slavery. White America was built on the backs of black America.
Gingrich knows that. He has to know that. He just doesn’t give a shit. He got his, and poor (white or black) Americans are less deserving than he is, so why should he bother? Never mind that everyone who is rich probably got there by the labor of people who are not rich, and did more of the hard work than they did. Newt knows that, but Newt doesn’t care because it isn’t him.
For a party that loves to brag that it was founded to end slavery, the GOP sure hates it when you bring up the topic.
Yeah, cause a lot of them were Democrats until Civil Rights.
Yes, and one of those places that still has legal, government mandated slavery is…the U.S.A.
I was surprised to learn recently that the 13th. Amendment did not abolish slavery but merely restricted its use. From the 13th.:
Originally, all prisons were government-run facilities, meaning that the government retained the sole right to create and use slaves, which would be bad enough itself, but with the continued rise of privately-run prisons in the U.S., the government – through its justice system – is quite literally in the business of supplying slaves in order to enrich the owners and shareholders of private businesses. When one considers that the prison population is disproportionately African-American, it has to be legitimate to ask what’s really changed since 1865.
I haven’t read this yet, but I think it’s a terrific initiative. Certainly when I was growing up we were never really taught how absolutely central slavery was to the development of the US.
On this side of the Atlantic, if you haven’t run across it yet, is this database from UCL:
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/
When it first came out I was up until 4am crunching numbers–and realised that it could legitimately be argued that there would have been no British railway network, and no ‘second industrial revolution’, without the investment of money collected from poor people and given to rich people to compensate rich people for owning other people. Not sure why no one’s actually written about this yet–the figures are all here; I’ve mentioned it in various places, assuming that others would be doing the same kinds of investigation as I have, but haven’t seen anything yet. So it might end up being left up to me to make and publish the argument.
A lot of people here have also used the database to take a good hard look at whose names are in it.
You know, I criticize my school system a lot (justifiably) for how they taught both science and history, but I do have to give a shout out on this. They were better than most, apparently, because they did teach us this – not only the slavery, but the indentured servants and the poor immigrants who had huge debts. They also did a good job with the “Trail of Tears” in that they managed to make every student in their class aware that it was a trail of death, and that the Native Americans (we still called them Indians in those days) were being moved against their will and at a great cost of lives. So thank you to my history teachers who managed to get most other things (especially WWI and Vietnam) wrong, but somehow did manage to get this right.
And this was in Oklahoma. If Oklahoma can do it, anyone can. (I will notate here that this was a community where 80+% of the students would go on to college, and needed at least some level of college preparation.)
#8
I checked, just one English cousin in the Honduras mahogany business. Compensated, it seems, THREE times, for 7 people he owned. Over £1,000 all told, if the awards didn’t overlap.
AoS @ 7, quite so, and there’s been increasing discussion of mass incarceration as neo-slavery.
Prison was quite literally a substitute for slavery in the Jim Crow south, with no bashful concealment. Legislatures passed “vagrancy” laws such that black people were subject to arrest and conviction for walking down the street, and then the prisons contracted prisoners out to plantation owners, turpentine operations, and the like.