Slavery gets all but erased
We don’t always even notice the racist symbols, and that’s kind of the point.
Aspirational depictions of a city upon a hill and liberty and justice for all lose their luster when they’re juxtaposed against the systematic genocide of indigenous peoples, or an intricate slave-based economy rubber-stamped by revolutionaries fighting for their own freedom. But more dated history textbooks rarely provide that level of insight around how minority communities were treated during the country’s early years, and slavery gets all but erased – “there’s no discussion of what life was like in the United States prior to 1860, or if it is, it’s just African Americans were enslaved in this country, and the civil war freed them,” said Berry.
A lot of people – white people mostly – roll their eyes at this kind of thing, but…to belabor the obvious, they (we) shouldn’t. It’s all too easy to ignore oppression and exploitation in daily life because it’s hidden away. We don’t go looking for it, most of us, so we don’t see it, so we don’t realize it exists, so when we’re told it does we bristle or yawn and say it’s not true or it’s in the past or it’s a step on the way to prosperity.
It’s this inconsistent retelling that has allowed for the veneration of deeply flawed characters, whose biographies are often cherry-picked for effect. Many of the founding fathers, including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, were slaveholders, despite waxing poetic about how the institution was a “moral depravity”. Even Benjamin Franklin, revered as an early abolitionist, owned enslaved people for much of his life and ran ads selling others in his newspaper.
Champions of these men often attribute their moral failings to the sociopolitical environment in which they lived. But “just because slavery was accepted among white elites or even the broader white population at the time does not mean it was accepted by everybody, because everybody includes Black people who were enslaved, indigenous people who were pushed off their lands in order to expand plantation slavery,” said Akiboh.
That’s a very important point. It’s all too easy to think “People didn’t realize,” but the people who didn’t realize were the people it didn’t happen to.
That’s one reason artifacts like Gone With the Wind are so insidious: generations of Americans got the impression from that novel and film that slaves were happy and like members of the family, and that’s before we even get to the part about the KKK and lynchings.
When earlier this month Nascar hosted the first major sporting event with fans since the coronavirus pandemic, a plane with a gargantuan Confederate battle flag flew across the skyline to protest against the new ban.
Heritage, yeah?
And the people it did happen to are part of history, too.
Of course, it’s humanly understandable, up to a point, to not know about what’s not happening to you. Fine. But then you spend some time on that other point of view.
Plus–I do understand about “product of their time”, and I’m less interested in excoriating these men than in seeing them in context, good and bad. But sometimes “product of their times” is misleading. Even back then, there were white thinkers who understood and argued that slavery was wrong and that the treatment of American Indians was a disgrace. It’s not like it was this totally unthinkable theory waiting for a mathematical genius to be discovered.
I hope the post doesn’t give the impression that I’m saying “product of their time.” I’m saying that’s not good enough.
We imbibe prejudice with our mother’s milk and are formed by prejudice as we grow so that it becomes part of us, of who we are. There really is no innocence (despite Traherne), and no escape, and those who suppose that a person can somehow reach an intellectual vantage-point above their social formation and, god-like, look clearly at things and become free of prejudice are very wrong. There is merely a long struggle with oneself to shuffle off prejudice. But then of course there are those who like Jeff Sessions find the filthy nest they inhabit all too comfortable.
I’m mainly talking about non-awareness in this one though. I think it’s possible to be non-aware independently of being prejudiced or racist etc. I say “independently of” rather than “without” because I think non-awareness does at the very least make racism a lot easier…but they’re still not quite the same thing.
The history has been deeply hidden for a long long time.
This. So much this.
My education was different of course because I’m a Brit. So I guess I came at this from a different angle from the start. And the dismissal of slavery, of the terrible price the descendants of those emancipated slaves continue to pay, is weirdly both staggering and unsurprising.
But the thing that bothered me the most when I first came here? The vile way women like Sally Hemings are treated – described as Jefferson’s “mistress”, talking about their “relationship” or even “love affair”. Give me a break. The master-slave power dynamic is as unequal as it gets – don’t tell me she felt no coercion or was free to accept or reject his advances at will.
That’s not to dismiss the other barbarities of slavery and the way America glosses over or flat out lies about slavery and the founding fathers as well as other notable historical figures. There’s no point arguing that a person viewed slavery as a moral obscenity whilst they also kept a large contingent of them. Don’t argue that someone was a kindly or benevolent slaveowner. The one automatically precludes the other.
Black people are erased from history presumably so that white Americans don’t have to look upon the stained roots of their country’s founding. In the same way, British schools minimize the atrocities we committed in India and Africa. It’s not pleasant to think your ancestors were monsters. We need to change this – kids need to learn all the sides of any historical period, including the horrid parts.
Yes, there is obvious prejudice that has been made explicit, but I think what I am trying to say, doubtless not very well, is that prejudice underlies both non-awareness and explicit prejudice; that none-awareness is what might one call implicit or unrecognised (by the persons or group, since it is ultimately always a group) prejudice – it is as it were part of their world, no more to be examined than ‘cake is sweet’ or ‘summer comes after spring’. I suppose I should say that among those prejudices we grow up with some are useful and not to be despised: it’s probably not a bad thing to be prejudiced against snakes (perhaps it is even an evolved rather than a culturally taught prejudice). And also in our thinking we start from somewhere – being brought up as a semi-Christian I was formed to a degree by those values and my rebellion against them; for prejudices, if recognised as such, can stimulate you to think about the world.
It doesn’t. I knew what you meant.
Yes about non-awareness as prejudice. Eisenhower’s America, basically.
@ophelia
Forgive me a moment of snarkiness, but I know literally zero people who think or thought that slaves were happy or like family members. Maybe there are those who believe such in virtue of Gone With the Wind, but that seems a rather difficult bit of causation to establish. I mean, I could say that it’s plausible, but that is a rather low bar.
I’m not sure what you mean by this. What history has been hidden from whom?
@Claire:
That’s a pretty sentiment, and it makes a nice bit of intuitively compelling rhetoric. I’m not quite on board with it, though.
I find little trouble with the idea that a person can believe that GOOD(x) while simultaneously not doing x, or believing that EVIL(y) while engaging in y. I can see that happening regardless of how good or evil x and y are held to be. One need look no further than Nazi Germany, the Milgram experiment on obedience, or the silence of those who know that gender ideology is BS to see how people’s actions can be at odds with their moral intuitions.
As for the possibility of a kindly slave owner, if it is your view that kindly is non-gradable (i.e., all kindly people to possess that quality in equal measure) then yes, a “kindly slave owner” is an incoherent. However, I’m not so certain that kindly is prima facie non-gradable. If kindly here could be a comparative (gradable) adjective rather than an absolute (non-gradable) adjective, then a marking one slave owner more kindly than another has meaning. I think it useful to allow that there be degrees of severity and intensity even in those things that are cruel, barbaric, and morally repugnant.
@Nullius in Verba You’re arguing semantics. Nitpicking about how nice someone is to the people they own or how they argued against slavery while owning slaves is exactly the kind of whitewashing I am complaining about. People are complex, nobody is completely good or bad, I am not arguing that and you know it. Sometimes morality is complex too. But this one is easy – owning other humans is abhorrent.
So there were degrees of severity of slave mistreatment and that fact is irrelevant. So-called “kindly” slaveowners supported the trade of human beings knowing that some slaveowners were appalling cruel. These were wealthy people with power and influence and yet, they not only stood by and did nothing, they actively engaged in the trade.
Never been to Texas, I presume? Or Oklahoma? I found it a not uncommon attitude there. I was at lunch with a friend one day, a liberal friend, a kind hearted friend. He made this argument. Seems his great- or great-great (He was about my age, so I imagine great-great) grandfather owned slaves, and he was a nice guy, good to kids, didn’t beat his wife, gave bums a dime, that sort of thing, so if he kept slaves, it must be that the slaves were treated well.
There is too much of a tendency here (and possibly elsewhere, but I don’t know) to equate good with all good and bad with all bad to the extent that if you see someone doing something good, you will reject the idea they could do bad. Also, if someone is loved, it must be they are good. I was reading a non-fiction book a couple of years ago where the author was going to interview a ruthless businessman. When he got to his office, the guy had pictures of his wife and kids on his desk. There was a young man in his office that had been an orphan, and the businessman took him in, gave him a home, and brought him into the business. The ruthless businessman was a very pleasant fellow. So the author decides he was wrong about him being a ruthless businessman. Because all ruthless businessmen are like Ebenezer Scrooge: alone, unloved, without a single positive quality or a single moment of kindness. But life doesn’t work like that.
Apparently Hitler was nice to dogs. No matter, he was still Hitler.
@iknklast:
Been to both. Have two sets of family in Texas. I will acknowledge, though, that my family is pretty abnormal, and my life as a whole is atypical. That’s the problem with unquantified categorical statements, though. That is, omitting the “some” or “all” from “A are B” is convenient and concise. It is also critically vague, because “A are B” can mean either.
Yes! This is exactly the sort of thinking that bothers me. Psychologists call it splitting. I call it being a child. Like when politicians act all holier-than-thou when they refuse to acknowledge that a horribly oppressive regime might yet have had some good policies.
Indeed. The equation can work the other way, though. Like, “Apparently Schindler was a Nazi. No matter, he was still Schindler.” It’s the same calculus that allows us not to hate operatives under deep cover who commit despicable acts in order to maintain or further their cover.
@claire:
Yes? And you were declaring semantics. Or, to quote Inigo Montoya, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
Ehhhhh, it’s easy from our perspective. What is easy, ethically speaking, depends on one’s ethical system. You want to know the dirty, little secret about these “easy” ethical questions?
They’re anything but easy.
Under dispassionate analysis, the most basic moral intuitions and convictions unravel. Reweaving them into something coherent from first principles is really, really, really fucking hard.
No one is a perfect model of future morality, and such a person would be an utterly dysfunctional anachronism. Some future society may look back on us and say, “But this one is easy—denying women their right to self-organize as a class is abhorrent.” Another may say the same about eating meat, driving gasoline-powered vehicles, allowing children to use social media, drinking alcohol, or engaging in some sexual practice. From their perspective, that question will have been settled and thus easy. The same is true of people in any era. Their ethical zeitgeist was “easy”, and every benighted society that came before was guilty of sins against humanity. And every educated person in 1776, 1215, 1066, and even 500 BCE wondered the same thing about previous generations: How could they have gotten something so easy so wrong?
But moral progress is ultimately no different from technological progress. Morality itself can be considered a technology our species has been developing since we first discovered that we were a group and not unrelated, specially-created individuals. To hold past peoples at fault for not having made a given moral advance is as unreasonable as holding them at fault for not having made a given technological advance.
We can, of course, evaluate their actions and beliefs with the advantage of our superior moral or technological knowledge, and we can judge them wrong to do or believe as they did. It’s critical that we do, because it’s how we remember what we’ve learned and at what price. We can also look back at those benighted people and see them trying to improve their world. It’s critical that we do, because it connects us to the ongoing story of human progress, straining ever toward the good. If we look back only to see how awful goodness is, then we will have lost our way.
“That’s one reason artifacts like Gone With the Wind are so insidious: generations of Americans got the impression from that novel and film that slaves were happy and like members of the family, and that’s before we even get to the part about the KKK and lynchings.”
Great article, Ophelia. Been away for a few years, but thought I should drop in to see what is going on.
What I find interesting is that more and more often, Americans (and Canadians too, of course, since we think we’re so much more aware of these things than American’s, and are starting to go through a much needed soul-searching too) are starting to look at the history of the last 70 years or so, and recognising that so much has simply been pushed off the page in favour of a much more saccharine picture of American society.
Which is meant as an intro to the following:
I was an Anglican priest in Bermuda for a number of years in the early eighties. I had a contretemps with a parishioner, who told me, in the course of a strained discussion, that there was never really any racism in Bermuda, and she made the point that, slavery in Bermuda wasn’t really slavery, since the slaves in Bermuda, unlike slaves elsewhere, were very content with their lot, and well-treated, almost as members of the family!
I had an interesting experience not long ago. Sifting through some second hand DVD’s the other day when I cam across a copy of Gone with the Wind, which, since I had never watched it before, I bought for a couple dollars. Since so much is made of this film, I expected to while away a few pleasant hours. I put it in the Blu Ray player, and, after just a few minutes, I had to stop. All the nostalgia for Southern society and its rich culture, as it was before the Civil War, simply floored me. I found it hard to understand how anyone could wax lyrical about something as lacking in humanity as a slave-owning society, especially given its sequellae in the culture of the South today. I simply could not watch it. I simply cannot understand how the film had received such acclaim, and I hope I would have reacted to it in the same way if I had watched it years ago.
Then I rewatched Gettysburg (which my wife and I had picked up after touring the battlefield at Gettysburg some years ago from the information centre shop on the battlefield) with Martin Sheen playing Robert E. Lee, and the air of nostalgia surrounding the depiction of Lee, along with the statement at the end that he is probably America’s most beloved general, really concerned me. How can anyone be so blind to the outright racism implied in that evaluation, and especially (once again) in the kind of lyricism with which the Lee and the Confederacy are depicted? How can Lee be America’s most beloved general?
Eric! What a joy to hear from you!
GWTW – I know, I know, it makes me writhe.
And before that there was the also massively popular Birth of a Nation, which was the first real blockbuster movie, and was about the glorious Klan. It’s just horrifying.
Nullius @ 9
That’s why I said “generations of Americans got the impression from that novel and film” – why I put it in the past tense.
And speaking of difficult to establish, how on earth do you know that you know literally zero people who think or thought that slaves were happy or like family members? You know the present and past thoughts of every single person you know? How?
Why I think the novel and movie did work that way for far too long: for one thing that was the impression I got from it when I first read the novel and saw the movie as a child. I got over it, of course, but my point is that that is an impression an uninformed person can get from them. For another thing both of them were massively popular at the time, so why wouldn’t they have had an influence on people’s thinking? For another thing the civil rights movement didn’t start to get much traction until the early 60s, more than 20 years after the novel and book, and surely it’s not bonkers to think that indicates that most of the non-Southern white population was at the very least deeply clueless about the whole subject?
@Nullius in Verba
I’m not judging Jefferson by today’s standards. I’m judging him by his own. He made arguments that slavery was bad, but hypocritically still kept slaves. There were other options to get the work done on the plantation, such as paying people, but that is more expensive so he didn’t.
But judgment isn’t the point. It’s about teaching history. You can’t decide to sweep under the carpet things revered historical characters did just because they look bad now. Churchill might have been the ideal Prime Minister for fighting the Nazis in WWII. He was also a horrible person – sexist, racist and vulgar. To not acknowledge and examine these parts of his character and behavior lionizes him and holds him up as the role model which he should not be.
Shrugging our shoulders and dismissing slave-owning as simply a product of its time is not appropriate. We do not shy away from describing the anti-semitic propaganda of the Nazi government in the years before WWII as simply a product of its time, although it certainly was neither unusual, remarkable or particularly concerning to other countries, even though we knew a lot about what was happening. Oh, we wrung our hands in public. And turned away refugees to their deaths.
Abhorrent things that are “products of their time” cannot be dismissed this way in modern analysis of historical events. We can acknowledge that times have changed, of course. I have no idea what your ancestry is, but I do know that many African-Americans are not so willing to hand-wave the slave-owning by Founding Fathers away as a product of its time.
Also – what do I mean by “The history has been deeply hidden for a long long time.” “What history has been hidden from whom?”
The history of slavery, and of Reconstruction, and of Jim Crow. From everyone. Do a little research on it, you might find it interesting. Read up on how Reconstruction was taught until…here it is again…the civil rights movement got some traction in the 60s. It was taught horrendously, shockingly badly, and, again, that was a matter of generations.
Eric — nice to see you again!
My recollection is too vague to even form a proper Google search, but wasn’t there some prominent Republican politician or cable news figure who insisted within the past few years that many of the slaves were quite happy and better off than when they were freed? If I recall right, it was a mild controversy but not a career-ender — it’s not like it was regarded as some loony fringe beyond-the-pale sentiment, at least among conservatives.
And Civil Rights did help some. I got better instruction on Reconstruction than even my siblings that were three and four years older got; I started school a year after the Civil Rights Act, and by the time I got to junior high, things were getting…better. Not perfect, but I certainly had a picture of how Reconstruction was done, and how the entire project of fixing things went off the rails with Johnson. My teachers were scathing about the south, I suspect because back in the 70s, Oklahoma wanted to make sure everyone knew they weren’t a southern state, and weren’t that kind of people (many of them were, unfortunately). These days, Oklahoma likes to pretend it was a southern state; never mind that it was not a state at all during the Civil War, it was territory belonging to the Native Americans, and the history of the area during the Civil War was mixed. Some tribes kept slaves, some didn’t. Some sympathized with the North, some with the South. By the way, that last fact was the one thing I was not taught at all. My teachers were adamant that all Native Americans were vociferously anti-slavery, that none of them kept slaves, and that they sent troops to help the Union. Part of the issue with treating the indigenous population as if they were a monolithic culture. The rich nuances of life get lost.
Eric Foner’s Reconstruction was a game-changer.
I’ve read Foner, but I haven’t read that one. I’ll have to look for it.
It’s top. 5 stars.
I should have responded earlier, but have been in hospital for tests (everything more or less all right, I think). First, it is grand to hear from you, Eric. I hope things are going well.
Regarding the Milgram experiment, which gets cited as truth again & again, I do recommend reading the account of the experiments in the chapter ‘Stanley Milgram and the Shock Machine’ in ‘Humankind: A Hopeful History’ by the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman – the man who delivered a wonderful take-down to the assembled wealthy at one of the Davos conferences and reduced Tucker Carlson to spluttering obscenity in an interview. His account of the Milgram experiment, which is carefully backed up, demonstrates beyond a doubt, at least to me, that Milgram was wholly dishonest and doctored the results in accordance with his prejudices, and the acceptance of his results was due to the the same ready prejudices, claimed to be ‘scientific’, that led to the acceptance of Napoleon Chagnon’s bestseller ‘The Fierce People’ and Stephen Pinker’s incorrect calculations of the average homicide rate among eight primitive societies in ‘The Better Angels of our Nature’, as well as such concepts as ‘the selfish gene’, as if genes could be anything other than what they are, and the proclamation that ‘we are born selfish’, to which Mary Midgley took such fierce and right exception.
Thanks for the welcome, Tim, Screech Monkey, Ophelia. Nice to be back, several years older and not much wiser … Spend more time visiting outpatients in the hospital now. I’ll be 79 this year. It seems like yesterday I was just a kid. Don’t want to be a kid again, but shave a few years off and that would do.
Yes, Ophelia. Not havning seen GWTW before I was quite frankly shocked. It was supposed to be a classic. And Gettysburg seems to get a lot of good press too, which surprised me. The madness of war of course came across very well, but if you take the depiction of the Confederate army and especially the generals, it is clear that the US needs to go back and do some serious revaluation of the outcome of the Civil War. How is it possible that men who fought against the United States should be memorialised so comprehensively — even, I understand, in some places in the North? It’s a bit like put up statues of Hitler, Goering, Himmler … etc. The US played an important part in defeating them, and almost single-handedly defeated Tojo. Perhaps there needs to be a pavilion in DC to honour Kaiser Wilhelm, Hitler, Tojo et hoc genus omnes. Don’t say that out loud, though, Trump might actually do it!
Gone With the Wind won 8 Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director.
I think it’s not considered a classic now, except perhaps by Trump types, but most of them probably prefer Sylvester Stallone. But it won all those awards 11 years into the Depression, when the US had tended about as lefty as it ever has, and still that movie swept all before it. It’s grotesque.
Yeah, it is grotesque. Depressing, even.
I wonder, did Hitler ever make use of things like this to justify his racism. I wrote this down and then decided to search, and yes, he did, and the American racist model was used by the Nazis in creating race law in Germany. Indeed, a book published by Yale, Hitler’s American Model, by James Q Whitman, traces American influences on Nazi racial policy. Hitler even praises American racism in Mein Kampf saying that the US was the only nation that “had “made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist order of the kind the Nuremberg Laws were intended to establish.” One of the things that the Nazis liked about American law marginalising black Americans is that the law was vague, and yet maintained by terror. Some Nazis thought that American racism was too extreme, and would not have been accepted in Germany (though they seemed to have solved this problem). One was in the definition of who was considered black in the US. Only one grandparent was enough to make you black in the US, but Jews in Nazi Germany had to have two. Hitler even praised American immigration statutes. He’d have been pleased with Trump. When you look at it through this lens, the fact that racism is so deeply entrenched in the US even now is a bit sobering.
The article I came across was on the African American Intellectual History Society, and is accessible here.
By the way, Ophelia, the confirm subscription link took me to a missing page. Perhaps that has to do with the fact that I use a VPN router. Does this mean I won’t get news of comments. If so, I can bypass the router in order to access the page.
Yes, the Nazis did learn a great deal from the USA. But, really, the whole of Anglo-Saxondom was pervaded by racism. Thatcher & Reagan were supporting the apartheid regime in South Africa not so long ago, the treatment of native people in Australia continues to be abysmal, and it does not seem to be all that much better in North America, particularly when an oil pipeline is at stake. This is not to mention the Belgians in the Congo and the Germans in Namibia, and earlier the Spaniards and the Poruguese. The Rio Tinto mining corporation, with the connivance of the Australian government, blew up a few months ago a cave on an Aboriginal sacred site that had been occupied on and off for 40,000 years to the fury naturally of native people, and also of archaeologists, and offered wholly cynical apologies for the ‘distress’ they might have caused after the justified outcry. Great swathes of documents (those that were not illegally destroyed) concerning the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya and the British response have fairly recently been discovered, hidden away illegally for years and years. And the British government has recently refused to abide by a virtually unanimous UN decision against its occupation of the Chagos archipelago, a part of Mauritius, from which it deported all the inhabitants to Britain. There is a good article in the Guardian (Google: Philip Sands, Guardian – ‘At last, the Chagossians have a real chance of going back home’) by Philip Sands, the author of two truly remarkable and harrowing books concerning the Holocaust, ‘East West Street: on the Origins of Genocide & Crimes against Humanity’ and ‘The Ratline: Love, Lies & Justice on the Trail of a Nazi Fugitive’. Sands is Jewish (and many of his family perished in the Holocaust), and is professor of law at University College London and a barrister at Matrix Chambers. He is counsel for Mauritius on Chagos, and has been involved in many human important rights cases, including that of Pinochet and his torture regime.
On a more personal note, I was asked some years ago to play two small parts (one being Mark Twain) in a good community theatre production of the musical ‘Big River’, which is a version of ‘Huckleberry Finn’. During one of the rehearsals in which a group of recaptured slaves were being marched across the rear of the stage, singing a genuine song from the times of slavery about the desire for freedom, a Jamaican actor had a complete breakdown and ran from the stage shivering and crying. I was in tears, and afterwards, speaking to the very good African-American actor and singer who took the part of Jim, I remarked on how painful the musical was, and he said gravely, ‘Yes, it takes you to places you don’t want to go.’ The production was a good one, because it genuinely brought out the horrors of slavery, as the Broadway or other professional productions you may find on YouTube definitely do not: they play down the horrors and the importance of Jim, making it all about Huck, and sentimentalise things, and so do not do justice at all to what is there in the libretto and music. Our director did a remarkable job, as did all the actors.
Finally, I note that such as Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne are now questioning whether the figures for the deaths of American black people at the hands of the police are really as bad as they are claimed to be – the only implication of which, so far as I can see, is that they suppose that if the figures aren’t quite right, the Black Lives Matter movement is unjustified.
@Claire:
This is true, and yet I do not think that his writing on the subject represented his standards. The course of Jefferson’s relationship with slavery is consistent with morality qua technology.
My grandfather used to talk about how ridiculous everyone said the automobile was, especially whenever encountering a car broken down on the roadside. Eventually, his family purchased a car “just for occasional trips”. Those occasional drives became more and more commonplace, until we are where we are today.
I once was part of a five-year project to implement an upgrade to the Department of Revenue’s systems, from taxes to records to user interfaces. The absolute terribleness of the old system had been obvious for about twenty years by then. It wasn’t as though there hadn’t been replacement options previously. It was just that change costs. Applying kludges to existing tech is easier—and safer—than swapping in a new system. Even knowing that the new system was better, even saying it, many users often tried to go back to parts of the old system.
Replacing existing technology has historically almost always been an uneven process. Perhaps concerns of cost or reliability interfere, or perhaps the needed infrastructure and supporting systems just aren’t in place. Often, the old technology is replaced in stages. Sometimes, old and new are implemented side by side. Still others, the old functions as a redundant system to the new. Alternatively, it is retrofitted, upgraded bit by bit.
Jefferson opted for the last option. The dissonance between his highest ideals and the depravity of the world in which he took part is fascinating, and studying how that dissonance vis-a-vis slavery manifested in writing and in practice is enlightening. Examining Jefferson’s attempts to retrofit the practice of slavery and ameliorate the disparity between the ideal and the actual can produce real knowledge and understanding of how moral change occurs (or doesn’t) on personal and societal levels, as well as how to help or hinder its adoption. Just as when intelligent religious believers attempt to mitigate the difference their faith and reason, the enterprise was doomed from the start. To say, “oh, he said slavery was bad but owned slaves,” is true but simplistic, negating historical depth and preventing rich appreciation of the human condition. To say, “therefore he was bad,” simplifies ethics and the process of progress.
I mostly agree. The bad aspects of historical figures should not be ignored. I noted in my previous reply that seeing their faults and failings is crucial to learning from history. To sweep such things under the carpet or shove them into the attic does everyone a disservice.
Where we part is in two respects. First, whether to call Churchill a horrible person. Second, whether he should be a role model.
If omitting the bad is an error—on which we assuredly agree—then omitting the good is its inverse. My objection is that in attempting to correct for the Type I error, it is easy to end up with an error of Type II. As obviously bad as the former is, the latter is just as insidiously deleterious. Reducing historical figures to only their negative qualities denies us value, as does reducing them to their positive traits. That is all I am attempting to avoid. The reason I am reluctant to call Churchill (or Jefferson, or whomever) a horrible person is that such descriptions tend to be totalizing.
We might be operating on different understandings of what it means, but I see no problem with Churchill as a role model. As I read it, you view a role model to be someone who models all virtues. (What Aristotle would have deemed the virtuous man.) For you, Churchill’s sexism, racism, and vulgarity disqualify him as such.
For me, a role model is someone who models a virtue. In my view, a person can have good and bad traits, and a role model is one who has a particularly admirable trait to be emulated. No more; no less. So for me, while his sexism, racism, and vulgarity are to be decried, Churchill can and should be a role model for all the reasons that brought him success as a war-time PM.
It might be objected that my view of role models is riskier than yours, in that it potentially invites a sort of sympathy creep. While this is certainly plausible, it is a risk I am willing to take, for psychological and sociological reasons.
This is where I think we’re talking past each other somehow, because what you describe isn’t my position. I have not argued that American chattel slavery be dismissed as simply a product of its time. That would be ridiculous. I merely argue that people’s relationship to that institution must be understood within its time. Temporally-located analysis lets us learn more, about the past, the people who came before us, and ourselves.
Eric – Sorry, I don’t know how the subscription thing works. I’m clueless about the technical side of things.
I knew some of that about Hitler’s admiration for US white supremacy and racism. It’s a big subject…
[…] a comment by Tim Harris on Slavery gets all but […]
Nullius, I really do not think that that you are representing Claire’s points very well at all. I think she understands the complexity of morality & history very well, as do all of us. I also feel that you are trivialising what is at stake by your references to technology and automobiles.
I saw something on Twitter an hour or so ago, I forget from whom, about asking a history class how they would have behaved if they’d been raised in the slaveholding South. To a person they all said they would have been abolitionists.
Which is funny, if you think about it, because then why were there so few abolitionists anywhere in the US before during and after the Civil War? Were all those non-abolitionists some different brand of people?
Pfff. Of course not. We are what we’re raised to be, we learn what’s available to us to learn, we pick up what’s there to be picked up.
My German ancestors (on my mother’s side) were a far-flung trading family (Germany, Russia, Eastern Europe), originally from Bremen in the 16th century, as I recall, some of whose members immigated into Britain & the USA in the 19th century and were involved in the cotton trade in Manchester & New Orleans. I imagine, alas, that they would not have been all that exercised by the fact that what they traded in was the product of slavery, though I would, doubtless too fondly, like to think that at least some of them had misgivings.
If I am misinterpreting her points, then I apologize to Claire for that. However, I am honestly doing my best to understand her reasoning and respond to that rather than to a manufactured man of straw.
If you think that I am trivializing anything, then I honestly don’t know what to say. It’s not my intent, as I wouldn’t have spent an hour composing that post had I believed the topic of no consequence.
Just a quick note on the comment about Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne. Things seem to have gone in the wrong direction with the new atheism. When Jerry Coyne sent me packing I began to wonder where things were going. I’m not surprised that things have gone wrong, but still … That’s PZ Myers, Sam Harris and Jerry Coyne that I have read about since my recent dip into my old haunts. What’s up? I know that’s off topic, but I’m a bit new to this after a few years.
Re the whole idea of history and value. The question of how you relate historical characters like Thomas Jefferson with the values of his time and our own — it’s not quite so simple (is it?) as looking at what Jefferson himself thought at moments when he came to seem to have views which are more fully developed now. He may have thought slavery a bad thing (he should have, of course), but, as I say, is it that simple? He had these ideas so he should have been like us? After all, we are rooted in our time, so the views held by our contemporaries impinge on us with special force, and if we live long enough we may find our values revalued to make us look as out of tune as Jefferson may look to us today. Why could he no simply see as we see, if he could already see slavery as wrong?
I know that, for myself, I hold views now which my former self would be surprised to have ever come to hold some values which I now take for granted. For example, I grew up in a society where homosexuality was never mentioned, though it was obvious that not mentioning it was to condemn it. Then I came to recognise how unfair this was — unfair to those whose nature (however understood) is in conflict with the views commonly held by society today, where gayness is understood as the way some people are (or have chosen to be). I think I recognised quite a long time before many others how wrong that attitude was, and how unfair, but there was still a time during the transition from one view to another that I found myself vacillating between what everyone simply knew was wrong and perverse and the new recognition that this was simply wrong. That was not likely to have come to seem unproblematic had the world not suddenly gone global and cosmopolitan. Surely, one of the founding figures of the American Republic, since that was about liberty, at least laid part of the foundation for the liberation of the slaves. You can scarcely form a Republic with liberty and justice for all before coming to recognise the humanity of those you thought you owned.
I guess the question, for me, is whether someone like Jefferson is mainly known for his views on slavery; or whether his mind, in other respects showed important growth in other directions that we hold to have been important, even vital, to the possibility of a change of heart and mind (in others) towards slavery. I don’t know a lot about Jefferson, but I think probably that is the case with him.
It’s hard to be someone not of our time. There is always a contemporary viewpoint which is fairly hard to rise above, even if we have occasional insights that go beyond it. So, Jefferson may have had halting insights about slavery, and yet be himself so rooted in his time that he cannot see far beyond it, though it was from those occasional insights which test the limits of the present that new values can grow. I guess the question, for me, is whether Jefferson was open enough in other dimensions that he left room for the good to develop out of the narrower views (now rightly condemned) which he shared with his contemporaries. If we don’t allow this, then our history has to be rejected almost entirely, because those who came before us did not share our moral views, which, after all, developed out of theirs.
What is less forgivable is the failure to recognise, after the changes have taken place, that the past is another country where things are done differently — which seems to be the case when movies like GWTW wrongly capture the imagination, and are not seen for what they are: a glorification of a past which a nation came to see was intrinsically disordered and fought a war to defeat. This is very different. How did it come about that GWTW was accepted (and still seems to be by some) as the depiction of a time for which anyone in the 1930’s should have felt nostalgia?
Re: New Atheism
It was inevitable, really. The one uniting feature of atheists is that we do not believe a particular category of ontological truth claim. Eventually the salience of that shared feature had to fade relative to others. Different perspectives on politics, on ethics, on aesthetics … Denying the existence of deities starts to get comparatively boring after a while.
Eric (welcome back, btw),
Are you trying to subscribe to the comments RSS feed or by email to receive comments on a particular post?
The latter has been broken for some time, it’s an issue with WordPress, not your VPN.
The RSS comment feed seems to work OK (for me) although occasionally new comments are delayed for some hours.
latsot… Thanks for the welcome.
No, when I first signed on I got a simple message
I clicked on the link and was taken to a page which said something like ‘Missing page.’
RSS feeds are a bit overwhelming for me, especially on busy sites like B&W. I just hunt and peck at things that look interesting.