Guest post: Better to be a rebel than gripe on Twitter
Guest post by Chris Clarke.
Apropos of the Emmeline Pankhurst T-Shirt thing.
1) American slavery was a genocidal atrocity, and I fully support reparations for the descendants of former slaves. Full stop, as they say.
AND: slavery as an institution and concept is not limited to its American context. As someone with British and French ancestry, I am almost certainly descended from slaves. Hundreds of thousands of Europeans, perhaps millions, were kidnapped into slavery along the Barbary Coast as recently as the early 1800s. (Google “Baltimore, Ireland” for a chilling example.)
The very word “Slave” is essentially a forgotten ethnic slur, after the Slavic people who were kidnapped into slavery in Spain a thousand years ago.
This isn’t intended as an “all lives matter” kinda argument: I’m just saying that when people say things like “white women never had to endure slavery,” which I’ve seen frequently of late, they’re spreading a falsehood and erasing a historical reality. Racist slavery in the Americas was unique in many ways, and its legacy still shapes our society. But restricting the word “slave” to that particular near-endless atrocity erases literal millennia of injustice and suffering, especially of that people who lent their very name to the concept.
2) I think the degree to which the word “Rebel” is assumed to signify only the armies of the racist Confederacy speaks volumes about the state of American progressivism these days. The IWW were rebels. The SDS were rebels. Women Strike for Peace were rebels. The Panthers and the Attica Brothers and the occupiers of Vieques were rebels. It’s sad that so many progressives claim that the label automatically allies you with the worst elements of American history. What path does that leave us? Griping on Twitter, apparently.
3) The expectation that the entire world needs to hew to American sensibilities is a form of colonialism.
To 1) I’d add that millions of people are essentially slaves today. And even officially, slavery existed in our lifetime in various countries, even in this millennium.
As for 3), it has the effect of colonialism, but I put it down more to being oblivious of any world beyond the “coast-to-coast” even exists, and ignorant of everything that goes on in that world. Of course that’s an ignorance born of privilege.
Ahem.
(No, it isn’t. The etymology is Latin, not Spanish)
Purported expectation, to be accurate.
(So… are Americans exceptional, or does that also apply to other sensibilities?)
John Morales:
Yes, but it’s a medieval (not classical) Latin word. In classical Latin it was “servus”.
I read that the origin of the word reaches back to the Slavic Wars waged by Otto the Great, which ended with the enslavement of many Slavs. (Somewhat surprisingly, I found also a theory explaining the origin of the word “Slav” as coming from “esclavus”, but from what I see, the theory is not treated seriously by the linguists.)
As for the ‘Spanish connection’, many Slavic slaves were brought to Spain by the Radhanites. Still, so far I haven’t seen any mention of Spain as playing a crucial role in the word’s acquiring its meaning.
. As someone with British and French ancestry, I am almost certainly descended from slaves.
I’m not sure how you are deriving this. Are you saying that most British and French people were slaves? You give the example of white slavery in North Africa, so are you saying that white slaves in North Africa returned to Britain and France to have descendants such as yourself?
In Our Time had a program on Slavery and Empire in which Linda Colley spoke on Euro slaves and Catherine Hall quite effectively contrasted the situation of these slaves with the situation of New World slavery.
Nope. But about ten percent of the populace in the British Isles at the time of the Domesday book, and a similar percentage in rural Carolingian Europe, and before that there was the continual capture of Britons and Gauls by Rome, and that’s just the part of Europe in which I personally have known ancestry.
Hence my statement that slavery in the Americas was unique in many ways.
And even in New World, Atlantic Trade enslavement of Africans, the US was a special and different issue. Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, Barbados, Haiti, etc. did not have secessionist ‘rebel’ movements to perpetuate slavery. And, for the most part, they did NOT have an enforced end to the importation of slaves, which made some difference in the status of slaves as property.
The T-shirt nonsense is partly connected to American provincialism. But also involves the emotional justification for idiotic campaigns of censorship. Learning the actual facts about slavery might involve the risk of ‘triggering.’ Better to wallow in reactive ignorance.
So I haven’t really noticed any of this before reading about it on B&W just now, but do I understand it correctly that some people interpret the sentence “I’d rather be a rebel than a slave” as an expression of sympathy with the Confederate States of America? I hope and assume I misunderstand though, because that interpretation would be really stupid and ignorant…
Alex SL, it’s not unambiguous, so that it invites interpretation*, and some people indulge in the availability heuristic.
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* This aspect discussed in the “The spirit that animates this movement” thread, nearby.
John Morales,
If that is your standard I believe you will find very little language that is less unambiguous than that sentence. One would have to narrow one’s perspective down to one historical era and one country on this planet and assume a rather nonsensical meaning (when would anybody ever have the choice of being either a confederate or one of their slaves?) to even possibly arrive at that interpretation. If there is no context (and again, the only context that allows the misinterpretation is a very specific one and wrong) then the reading is absolutely clear as simply a statement of defiance against oppression.
Suya @ 5,
Apart from the fact that most Europeans descend from slaves in ancient times, there was considerable interbreeding throughout the various empires and we never had a one-drop rule so that by the end of C18 people visibly of mixed heritage were present in all parts of society. See the movie “Belle’ for just one example.