"Whaddabout?"

 

Trump alleges ‘left-wing indoctrination’ in schools, says he will create national commission to push more ‘pro-American’ history

        I received an e-mail from a friend, a conservative, who regularly forwards “stuff” to me, sometimes without reading. This is a US Military O-6 reserve retiree who was an executive with a major national corporation, and we are good friends. But…In my world, you own what you forward unless it is as an example with which you differ.  I responded to most of the verbiage in the e-mail and was going to leave it at that, and then today I read the above headline from the Washington Post.

        First, however the e-mail: It was, generally a “whaddabout” apologia for slavery, or more specifically, reading between the lines, a minimalization of the bad/discriminatory treatment of Blacks today, based on the fact that there has been such treatment in the past. (a “Whaddabout” is the logically flawed but too frequently used application of the non-theory that if someone else does a thing, it creates the idea that “Well then I can do it to,”  as in if you get caught robbing a bank, a line of defense would be to tell the judge “Oh yeah? but Whaddabout John Dillinger”)

        More bizarre, it condemned several current political figures because of events generations ago. It also reverts to the old, lame excuse that some few blacks had owned slaves which, by some unfathomable twist of illogic, either makes today’s Blacks complicit or excuses Whites.  This is somewhat akin to saying “Jeffrey Dahmer, a White guy, ate people, therefore all White people are cannibals.”

        The political and more specifically, racial, bias inherent in the e-mail can be shown from just a few of the “bullet point” statements therein I’ll note the ones worthy of response”

Beginning of e-mail:

“True” History of Slavery

“True” story of slavery, and reminders of how easy it is to "revise" it. And the last comment says it all.

They do not have, and do not want any perspective because it is all just political for them.

Blacks were not enslaved because they were black, but because they were available.

Slavery has existed in the world for thousands of years.

Whites enslaved whites in Europe for centuries before the first black was brought to the Western hemisphere 

Asians enslaved Europeans.

Asians enslaved other Asians.

Africans enslaved other Africans and even today, in North Africa blacks continue to enslave other blacks. Slavery has existed since the Old Testament Biblical times.

The remainder will be addressed individually, my comments in bold italics”

Of course, the above historical statements are true, but it’s a giant “But Whaddabout.”  But then, the Bible also speaks of selling one’s daughter into slavery, but for White Southerners that only applied to Black slaves’ daughters!

A bit of history that is conveniently ignored; between 1500 and the 1860s at least 12 million Africans were brought to the ‘New World’ of the Americas.

 (This is never in my experience as a history teacher “ignored.” In fact, this is an unqualified lie)

Of these 12 million forced into slavery, less than 500,000 were brought to North America. The remaining 2,500,000 Africans went to South America and the Caribbean. By the mid-1600s Europeans were outnumbered by Africans in cities such as Mexico City, Havana, and Lima.

 So, Spaniards and Caribbean Brits also were slavers? And…?

A few more historical facts: (facts?)

1. The first legal slave owner in American history was a black tobacco farmer named Anthony Johnson.

 Blatantly skewed and false in implication:  Johnson was sold as an indentured servant to a white planter named Bennet to work on his Virginia tobacco farm In 1621. By this time Blacks had been in Jamestown for several years, at first as indentured servants. 14 years later, he paid off his indenture and bought 5 more indentured Black servants including his own son! This was to enable himself to obtain land from colonial authorities. in 1640 one if his indentures sued him for his freedom, and the courts ruled him (the servant) a slave for life. Of course, we can speculate on the morality of Johnson’s owning “slaves” but it, in no sense, makes slavery a moral institution, it’s just another Whaddabout?  

 

2. South Carolina’s largest slave holder in 1860 was a black plantation owner named William Ellison. Simply put – a lie. As one of South Carolina’s 900 free Blacks, Ellison owned 37 slaves, at most, and his son eventually owned 19. Meanwhile Joshua John Ward, of Georgetown County, South Carolina, was the largest American slaveholder, dubbed "the king of the rice planters". In 1850 he held 1,092 slaves; Ward was the largest slaveholder in the United States during his lifetime. In 1860 his estate held 1,130 or 1,131 slaves. 1130 is a larger number than 37. The original statement is wrong by a factor of 3300%!

 

3. American Indians owned thousands of black slaves.

And? another Whaddabout? Is slavery somehow more palatable or morally justified because of this? The indigenous peoples of North America had utilized a form of captive-taking and involuntary labor long before European contact. But this form of bondage was not either trans-generational or permanent. (nor was it based in an assumption of racial inferiority) Captive-taking was most often used to replace a dead loved one within the family with a new person. The captive would then take on this deceased person's sexual or labor-related capacities.

Strictly as an aside, the Five “Civilized” Tribes tried hard to adapt to “the white man’s ways” to retain some hold on ancestral lands, In the case of the Choctaw, Creeks, Chickasaw and Cherokees, and Seminoles   this included building and living in permanent settlements, farming, raising livestock, and, lamentably, using slaves. These slaves were taken to Indian territory (on the Trail of Tears) and declared freedmen and tribal members by Law. Sadly, the Five Nations tribes unlike most other “relocated” tribes attempted to remove these non-Indian folks from tribal status. (and the rights attached to that status) The descendants of these former slaves fought back, filing several lawsuits. On August 31, 2017, the descendants of people enslaved by members of the Cherokee Nation were victorious. The US District Court in Washington ruled that these descendants should have citizenship rights in the Cherokee Nation. So, what’s the takeaway here? Primarily that not only Whites can be racist in action.  

4. In 1830 there were 3,775 free black people who owned 12,740 black slaves.

And? Just another Whaddabout?

 5. Many black slaves were allowed to hold jobs, own businesses, and own real estate.

Even though free people of color were able to purchase real property in the South, their numbers were few and many states erected barriers that either prohibited land ownership by African Americans or imposed strict limitations on their ability to purchase real property. In the absence of de jure (by law) restrictions, there were de facto (in reality) impediments that came in the form of violence against African Americans who either made land purchases or attempted to make such purchases and the outright refusal by Whites to sell land to them. "A slave may, by the consent of his master, acquire and hold personal property. All, thus acquired, is regarded in law as that of the master." This S.C. law about sums up the gist of how wrong this initial statement is. Yes, slaves were at times hired out to others, but wages were the owners’ to allot or not. Slaves (not freemen) did not and could not own land by law. Of course, since the real issue here is the attempt to somehow diminish the essentially immoral and evil nature of slavery, the writer omitted the term “Free Persons” (who could with the above noted impediments and incumbrances, own land and run a business.

6. Brutal black on black slavery was common in Africa for thousands of years.

The article referenced for this statement is a scholarly historical analysis of slavery which never uses the word “Brutal” to describe African slavery except as it applied to the Arabs who bought and mistreated Black Africans. In fact, Africans who took captives and sold them as slaves were in their eyes selling persons of another race (tribe). Europeans made it about color, and on that distinction hinged the assumption of racial inferiority. This was nothing new, since Arabs, far ahead of Caucasian Europeans in many areas of math and science by the Renaissance, were also discriminated against on both racial and religious grounds.

         In fact, Africans enslaved by other Africans were not slaves in the same sense as elsewhere. The European form was called chattel slavery. A chattel slave is a piece of property, with no rights. Slavery within Africa was different. A slave might be enslaved in order to pay off a debt or pay for a crime. Slaves in Africa lost the protection of their family and their place in society through enslavement. But eventually they or their children might become part of their master’s family and become free. This was unlike chattel slavery, in which enslaved Africans were slaves for life, as were their children and grandchildren.

 

7. Most slaves brought from Africa to America were purchased from black slave owners.

No shit?

And turning to the present:

 

1. Barack Obama, who has stoked the fires of racial hatred for the last eight years, is the direct paternal descendant of slave owners.

According to the research, one of Obama's great-great-great-great grandfathers, George Washington Overall, owned two slaves who were recorded in the 1850 census in Nelson County, Ky. The same records show that one of Obama's great-great-great-great-great-grandmothers, Mary Duvall, also owned two slaves. So, let’s punish everyone who has an unpleasant fact in their history five generations ago?

The bigger and obviously politically motivated issue here is the claim that Barack Obama “stoked the fires of race hatred..” This blatant lie is code for “I am White and he’s Black and I’m a bigoted racist arsehole.” I’m a pretty perceptive guy and I’m still looking for the “fire stoking” example in Obama’s 8 years.  Oh wait, was it the whole “Cops shouldn’t murder unarmed men with choke holds?”  Who wrote this? Trump's father?  Sadly, it takes far less time to find a ream of Trump examples. This one statement reveals the true intent of their whole screed.  

2. You certainly won't hear CNN's Anderson Cooper mentioning Obama's sordid family history, lest Obama might remind Cooper, the son of heiress Gloria Vanderbilt, that his family also was slave owners:

Sordid family history? Huh? Mitch McConnell only has to go back three generations to find a slave owning forebear, so friggin’ what? We’re responsible for our own actions in the here and now, not the sins of our fathers. And if we acted morally today where race is concerned, none of this would matter.

3. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who found some Lee and Jackson statues to remove from the Empire State, seems to have forgotten New York is named for one of the most notorious slave traders in history, the Duke of York. Better tear down that Big Apple, Andy.

As Physicist and Nobel laureate Wolfgang Pauli once described a truly horrid student effort: The above nonsense is “So bad it isn’t even wrong.”  New York, like Boston, New London, Plymouth, (And the Duke of York’s title etc.) is named for the town in England of the same name, which was established in 71 AD. 

End of e-mail

Before continuing, let’s be clear: This same shitty logic is also used by the offended minority as a rationale for equally stupid statements. One such example is the opinion, which I have seen proffered several times, that because Francis Scott Key was probably a racist, the poem (The Star Spangled Banner) he wrote about an event absolutely devoid of racial content or context -  the British siege of Fort McHenry, on September 14, 1814 – is a “bad/racist/insulting” poem. Sadly, (I think) too many will jump on that bandwagon and claim that the song itself is “racist.” As Dr. Freud said, and I find these words to live by, “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”  Another example is the Evangelical “Karens” who saw in “Let It Go,” from Frozen, some sort of devious plot to groom 5-year-old lesbians. (sometimes a great song is just a song)  

        That said, what might “Pro-American history” look like? Coming from Donald Trump, who wasn’t really sure who the contestants were at Normandy or what the significance if the Arizona memorial is, this would be laughable…..if he wasn’t so easily gulled into being the mouthpiece for others, far brighter and even more devious. At least with Trump, the stupidity is so obvious that one can almost dismiss it, but we must remember that he is easily manipulated by those with far more sinister goals.

        Well, maybe Custer wasn’t really a bad guy and incompetent egotist who got most of the 7^th cavalry killed. Or those Indians were just in the way and wouldn’t admit “our” superiority. Maybe the Tulsa, St Louis and Memphis race riots were caused by “uppity” Blacks. Perhaps those Pequot Indians deserved to die because they wouldn’t convert to Christianity…and so on ad nauseum. Some states have already tried to “sanitize” texts to elide over these “embarrassing” incidents of white racist violence in our past.

In the case of the previously mentioned e-mail there were links to numerous other “articles” some of which don’t exist (“404, file not found”) and, more frequently, items out of context which were misleading to say the least.

The first Black slaves in America (of what would become the USA) were actually owned by the Spanish in St Augustine, you knew that, right? (Didn’t think so) As far in what is now the USA, Blacks came to Jamestown in two “batches” first. The first group was “dumped” there after being captured by a British warship from a Portuguese vessel, the second were from a Dutch vessel and were briefly much like indentured servants. As Tobacco became king in Virginia (and labor intensive as Cotton and Indigo would also) and England became addicted, for some odd reason indentures gradually lengthened into lifetime servitude.

        The real reason Black Africans became the “slaves of choice” in later years was medical, but most don't know or want to understand that. The first systematic use of Black African slaves who were destined to be slaves for life was on the Madeira islands where the Portuguese invented plantation agriculture of sugar. The reason Blacks were well suited was their far greater genetic resistance to malaria. In the Caribbean, Spaniards tried enslaving the Indians, but European diseases and malaria proved fatal, since New World native DNA lacks several leukocytic antigens which Africans have. Sadly, the “trade off” for Blacks’ Malaria resistance is far greater incidence of sickle cell anemia. 

        Jump ahead to the British absentee landlords, first on Barbados, and then the rest of the "sugar islands" of the Caribbean. Cultivating sugar (but really malaria) killed almost all of the few white indentured servants who worked for the very first British planters, so Black Africans were used instead. Unlike indentured servants they weren’t freed. The Brits burned through, via work, or killed an unbelievable number of humans in the name of sugar.  As the cost of white labor in England went up, planters, on the advice of Dutch and Sephardic merchants, turned to West Africa for their source of manpower. Black slaves were imported in large numbers from the Gold Coast region in particular, especially from what is today the country of Ghana.  It is estimated that between 1627 to 1807, some 387, 000 Africans were shipped to Barbados alone, against their will, in overcrowded, unsanitary ships, which made the Middle Passage a synonym for barbaric horror. Many of these individuals were re-exported to other slave owning colonies, either in the West Indies or to North America. The high mortality rate among slaves working on the sugar plantations necessitated a constant input of fresh slaves in order to maintain a work force.

All persons were slaves by race and by heredity, as slavery in the late 17^th century was in fact, race based and permanent. The fact that some blacks did eventually become freed, either by owners on their death (As Washington did) or some eventually were able to buy their freedom, does, in no way, make slavery OK. The fact some free blacks owned slaves doesn’t either.  It is supremely sophomoric to cite the bad behavior of a few as proof that it was ok. That’s like “Well Jeffrey Epstein screwed 14-year-olds, so it must be ok?

        And, in summary, had all Americans acted in accordance with the spirit and the letter of the 13^th, 14^th, and 15^th Amendments 150 plus years ago, instead of allowing racial bigotry to poison their hearts and minds, we wouldn’t have to have this conversation.