The 400 year old powder keg
8/6/20 19:00![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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talkpolitics"We have been sitting on a powder keg for quite some time and it has burst," Philadelphia Police Commissioner Danielle Outlaw said.
She said that after her cops had arrested hundreds of protesters during the race riots in her city.
She's right of course. Racism has "been there" for quite a while. Right from the colonial times in America actually, then through the Civil War, and to this very day.
Even a rough skim through history shows that since the time of the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery, and then the 14th Amendment that gave the freed slaves the right to life, freedom, property, and due process, the question "what shall we do with the blacks" has remained high on America's agenda. It remains there, even after America has had its first black President, its first black commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and its first black (and female!) Secretary of national security.
While there's no excuse for racism, there's a reason for its persistence. One is the hypocrisy of multiculturalism in its current form, a concept that has completely failed at both sides of the Atlantic. It's been presented as a fake facade that's been cracking ever more frequently as of late, displaying the festering ulcers of the past behind. Equal rights and integration turn out to be fiction that even the official stats and daily mainstream news outlets now struggle to deny.
The hypocrisy begins with the very Founding Fathers, in fact. Thomas Jefferson, one of the more controversial figures in US history, believed slavery is an evil institution that depraves the master even more than it oppresses the slave - but in the meantime he owned, sold, bought and kept slaves through all his adult life. Indeed, he kept them; he bred them for his labor force. The plantations in the South were mostly of two sorts: there were the ones that produced cotton and tobacco, and employed slave labor; and then there were the ones specifically designed to "breed" slaves for sale.
When Jefferson married the wealthy Martha Wayles Skelton and brought her to his estate at Monticello, he had already been living there with a black consort of his. He inherited 11,000 acres of land from the late father of his wife, as well as 14 slaves, including a mistress, a mulatto who belonged to the old Wayles. Jefferson fathered a few children with her, who by all laws and customs of Virginia were born slaves.
In 1781 Jefferson wrote James Monroe (later Secretary of State, and then President) that he dared to publish his Notes on the State of Virginia, where he was bashing slavery, because his position on the Virginia constitution could irritate some people, and accuse more harm than good.
Although a passionate emancipator in theory, Jefferson did nothing in reality to end slavery - neither as Governor of Virginia, nor as Secretary of State, nor as Vice President, and neither as a two times President.
The US Constitution (1787) failed to mention a word on slavery up until the Civil War (1865). Or as it was called at the time, the "Peculiar Institution". While that enlightened document did protect various personal liberties and rights, it was oddly silent on the question if black people are humans, whether they, just as other people, are born free, and if, as free human beings, they too were allowed to own property that they could buy and sell.
We've all read the history books, we all know that slavery was the apple of discord between the industrialized and free North and the plantation-dominated, slave-owning South, and that led to the Civil War. While that may be true, it's also a rather simplistic and idealized notion. The North, led by its newly elected president Lincoln, didn't exactly go to war to free the slaves - and there's ample evidence of that. The Yankees didn't consider the blacks their equals, and in the meantime not everyone in the South supported the Peculiar Institution. So it's not so simple.
For instance, the Confederation commander Gen Robert Lee, albeit a Southern aristocrat, was opposed to slavery. He rejected Lincoln's invitation to lead the Union's armies for one single reason, his loyalty to the state of Virginia.
Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd, coming from a wealthy Kentucky family, regularly scolded her white servants at Washington, and complained that she missed her "delightful niggers" from her home state, stating that if Mr Lincoln happens to die, his soul wouldn't find her living outside the borders of a slave-owning state.
Millions of families were split right through the middle, members of the same family facing each other at the two warring sides. The border state of Missouri gave 100,000 fighters to the Union and 80,000 to the Confederation.
If we look closer at the details, we'd realize that the real trigger for the Civil War wasn't the righteous Northern rage against slavery, not the idealistic drive for equal rights, but the contentious issue of national sovereignty: namely, should the populace of a state that's represented by its state convent who's to decide if said state should be "free" or "slave owning", or should the central institutions of the union decide that (Congress, and the president). South Carolina's determination to decide on such issues on its own is what caused them to quit the Union on December 20, 1860, triggering the war. The same motivation was later cited by the legislatures of another 10 southern states that also split away from the Union, forming the Confederation.
There were a total of 34 states at the start of the war (19 Northern and 15 Southern). Throughout the entire 19th century, the western and southern US border tended to shift, swallowing newly acquired territories. When each of these turned into a new state, the issue of sovereignty, not that of the rights of the black population, is what go re-ignited over and over again; new compromises were constantly sought so that the equilibrium between the two sides at the federal Congress could be maintained.
It was solely thanks to the negotiation skills of politicians like Henry Clay that civil conflict was averted at least three times for nearly four decades following 1818 - especially at the time Missouri, Texas, New Mexico, California, Kansas and Nebraska became states.
The Southern obsession was that the North was trying to gain the upper hand in Congress so it could change the Constitution and abolish slavery, which was of course the basis for the mono-cultural Southern economy that entirely depended on the production of cotton and its exports for Britain.
In fact, Lincoln himself never had such an intention, because even with 15 Southern states he never had the needed majority of 3/4 at Congress to change the Constitution. Upholding the Constitution, including the right of property (part of which was slave-owning), was more important to him than ending the Peculiar Institution, which of course he despised.
In response to a fervent abolitionist article of New York editor Horace Greeley in 1863, Lincoln stated,
"As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views."
Indeed, he couldn't have said it any clearer. The Union is above the human rights. Lincoln openly admitted that the true problem with slavery was not its abolition, but rather what is to be done with the blacks after that. He never deemed the blacks to be his equals. Rather, they could be his moral equals, but in other respects they were fundamentally different and unacceptable as his fellow citizens without restrictions.
The President that signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 said words that would be considered racist today:
"What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if, indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South."
Before he was assassinated on April 14, 1865, Lincoln met a delegation of freed slaves in Washington, and he discussed with them an option that blacks could return to Africa, whence the slave traders had once kidnapped their ancestors. He openly told them,
"There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us .... If intelligent colored men, such as are before me, would move in this matter, much might be accomplished. It is exceedingly important that we have men at the beginning capable of thinking as white men."
He even made attempts to find them a new country where he could re-settle them. One option was San Domingo. The plan failed due to the corruption of his scouting agents.
In the last year of the war, Gen William Sherman's army devastated the defeated Southern states. The Northern revenge was monstrous. He didn't grant the freed blacks of the North any civil rights, not the right to vote, nothing. But he made sure they got that right in the defeated Southern states so they could vote Republican and support Lincoln, not the Democrats whose main electoral base was in the South. The Yankees practically bought the black votes.
With the laws of the so called Second Reconstruction the "rebel states" were practically subjected to military rule, they were forced to ratify the 13th and 14th Amendment if they were to be accepted as full members of the Union. The Scalawag renegades of the South, aided by the Northern parvenus (Carpetbaggers) made sure a one-party Republican rule was established across the land through the Southern black vote.
As one might expect, the Republican administrations imposed upon the Southern states proved utterly ineffective and degradingly corrupt right from the get-go. The blacks formed the bulk of the electorate, and in theory they would occupy most key positions, but real power was in the hands of the Northern parvenus and the few Southern white renegades. Many of the black officials were in fact illiterate. Most of the white ones were scoundrels. No legislation could be passed without massive bribery, no verdicts could be pronounced by the courts without the judges receiving money first.
The hatred for this regime served to unite the Southern whites, and that's how the KKK monster was conceived in 1866/71, the secret white fraternity that spread terror against blacks and white renegades. A society based on racial hatred was created, and it took a long and painful recovery process after that. The black/Republican administrations failed, and the whites were a demographic majority, so they eventually returned to power in all Southern states between 1869 and 1877.
This way, through unwise and short-sighted policies, the post-Civil-War era, instead of uprooting the evil of slavery in the South forever, created a new South where the whites were the ruling elite while the blacks were citizens only in word and on paper. And great silence spread across the land for many decades. America stopped giving a shit about these things for quite a while. After all, it was already getting preoccupied with the most astounding economic expansion in the history of the human race at the time.
Now, nearly 150 years later, and after decades of a (largely successful) fight for equal rights, integration, and healing of the historic wounds, the current US stats shows the following:
- Average household wealth: $171,000 for whites, $17,600 for blacks (almost 10 to 1).
- Average household income: $71,000 for whites, $41,000 for blacks (almost 5 to 3).
- Unemployment: 14.2% for whites, 16.7% for blacks.
- Poverty: 8.1% for whites, 20.8% for blacks.
- People without health insurance: 5.4% for whites, 9.7% for blacks.
- Coronavirus victims: 13% of the whites, 23% of the blacks.
And black people are still getting a knee pressed to their neck.
She said that after her cops had arrested hundreds of protesters during the race riots in her city.
She's right of course. Racism has "been there" for quite a while. Right from the colonial times in America actually, then through the Civil War, and to this very day.
Even a rough skim through history shows that since the time of the 13th Amendment that abolished slavery, and then the 14th Amendment that gave the freed slaves the right to life, freedom, property, and due process, the question "what shall we do with the blacks" has remained high on America's agenda. It remains there, even after America has had its first black President, its first black commander of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and its first black (and female!) Secretary of national security.
While there's no excuse for racism, there's a reason for its persistence. One is the hypocrisy of multiculturalism in its current form, a concept that has completely failed at both sides of the Atlantic. It's been presented as a fake facade that's been cracking ever more frequently as of late, displaying the festering ulcers of the past behind. Equal rights and integration turn out to be fiction that even the official stats and daily mainstream news outlets now struggle to deny.
The hypocrisy begins with the very Founding Fathers, in fact. Thomas Jefferson, one of the more controversial figures in US history, believed slavery is an evil institution that depraves the master even more than it oppresses the slave - but in the meantime he owned, sold, bought and kept slaves through all his adult life. Indeed, he kept them; he bred them for his labor force. The plantations in the South were mostly of two sorts: there were the ones that produced cotton and tobacco, and employed slave labor; and then there were the ones specifically designed to "breed" slaves for sale.
When Jefferson married the wealthy Martha Wayles Skelton and brought her to his estate at Monticello, he had already been living there with a black consort of his. He inherited 11,000 acres of land from the late father of his wife, as well as 14 slaves, including a mistress, a mulatto who belonged to the old Wayles. Jefferson fathered a few children with her, who by all laws and customs of Virginia were born slaves.
In 1781 Jefferson wrote James Monroe (later Secretary of State, and then President) that he dared to publish his Notes on the State of Virginia, where he was bashing slavery, because his position on the Virginia constitution could irritate some people, and accuse more harm than good.
Although a passionate emancipator in theory, Jefferson did nothing in reality to end slavery - neither as Governor of Virginia, nor as Secretary of State, nor as Vice President, and neither as a two times President.
The US Constitution (1787) failed to mention a word on slavery up until the Civil War (1865). Or as it was called at the time, the "Peculiar Institution". While that enlightened document did protect various personal liberties and rights, it was oddly silent on the question if black people are humans, whether they, just as other people, are born free, and if, as free human beings, they too were allowed to own property that they could buy and sell.
We've all read the history books, we all know that slavery was the apple of discord between the industrialized and free North and the plantation-dominated, slave-owning South, and that led to the Civil War. While that may be true, it's also a rather simplistic and idealized notion. The North, led by its newly elected president Lincoln, didn't exactly go to war to free the slaves - and there's ample evidence of that. The Yankees didn't consider the blacks their equals, and in the meantime not everyone in the South supported the Peculiar Institution. So it's not so simple.
For instance, the Confederation commander Gen Robert Lee, albeit a Southern aristocrat, was opposed to slavery. He rejected Lincoln's invitation to lead the Union's armies for one single reason, his loyalty to the state of Virginia.
Lincoln's wife, Mary Todd, coming from a wealthy Kentucky family, regularly scolded her white servants at Washington, and complained that she missed her "delightful niggers" from her home state, stating that if Mr Lincoln happens to die, his soul wouldn't find her living outside the borders of a slave-owning state.
Millions of families were split right through the middle, members of the same family facing each other at the two warring sides. The border state of Missouri gave 100,000 fighters to the Union and 80,000 to the Confederation.
If we look closer at the details, we'd realize that the real trigger for the Civil War wasn't the righteous Northern rage against slavery, not the idealistic drive for equal rights, but the contentious issue of national sovereignty: namely, should the populace of a state that's represented by its state convent who's to decide if said state should be "free" or "slave owning", or should the central institutions of the union decide that (Congress, and the president). South Carolina's determination to decide on such issues on its own is what caused them to quit the Union on December 20, 1860, triggering the war. The same motivation was later cited by the legislatures of another 10 southern states that also split away from the Union, forming the Confederation.
There were a total of 34 states at the start of the war (19 Northern and 15 Southern). Throughout the entire 19th century, the western and southern US border tended to shift, swallowing newly acquired territories. When each of these turned into a new state, the issue of sovereignty, not that of the rights of the black population, is what go re-ignited over and over again; new compromises were constantly sought so that the equilibrium between the two sides at the federal Congress could be maintained.
It was solely thanks to the negotiation skills of politicians like Henry Clay that civil conflict was averted at least three times for nearly four decades following 1818 - especially at the time Missouri, Texas, New Mexico, California, Kansas and Nebraska became states.
The Southern obsession was that the North was trying to gain the upper hand in Congress so it could change the Constitution and abolish slavery, which was of course the basis for the mono-cultural Southern economy that entirely depended on the production of cotton and its exports for Britain.
In fact, Lincoln himself never had such an intention, because even with 15 Southern states he never had the needed majority of 3/4 at Congress to change the Constitution. Upholding the Constitution, including the right of property (part of which was slave-owning), was more important to him than ending the Peculiar Institution, which of course he despised.
In response to a fervent abolitionist article of New York editor Horace Greeley in 1863, Lincoln stated,
"As to the policy I "seem to be pursuing" as you say, I have not meant to leave any one in doubt. I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be "the Union as it was." If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views."
Indeed, he couldn't have said it any clearer. The Union is above the human rights. Lincoln openly admitted that the true problem with slavery was not its abolition, but rather what is to be done with the blacks after that. He never deemed the blacks to be his equals. Rather, they could be his moral equals, but in other respects they were fundamentally different and unacceptable as his fellow citizens without restrictions.
The President that signed the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863 said words that would be considered racist today:
"What next? Free them, and make them politically and socially our equals? My own feelings will not admit of this; and if mine would, we well know that those of the great mass of white people will not. Whether this feeling accords with justice and sound judgment, is not the sole question, if, indeed, it is any part of it. A universal feeling, whether well or ill-founded, cannot be safely disregarded. We cannot, then, make them equals. It does seem to me that systems of gradual emancipation might be adopted; but for their tardiness in this, I will not undertake to judge our brethren of the South."
Before he was assassinated on April 14, 1865, Lincoln met a delegation of freed slaves in Washington, and he discussed with them an option that blacks could return to Africa, whence the slave traders had once kidnapped their ancestors. He openly told them,
"There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us .... If intelligent colored men, such as are before me, would move in this matter, much might be accomplished. It is exceedingly important that we have men at the beginning capable of thinking as white men."
He even made attempts to find them a new country where he could re-settle them. One option was San Domingo. The plan failed due to the corruption of his scouting agents.
In the last year of the war, Gen William Sherman's army devastated the defeated Southern states. The Northern revenge was monstrous. He didn't grant the freed blacks of the North any civil rights, not the right to vote, nothing. But he made sure they got that right in the defeated Southern states so they could vote Republican and support Lincoln, not the Democrats whose main electoral base was in the South. The Yankees practically bought the black votes.
With the laws of the so called Second Reconstruction the "rebel states" were practically subjected to military rule, they were forced to ratify the 13th and 14th Amendment if they were to be accepted as full members of the Union. The Scalawag renegades of the South, aided by the Northern parvenus (Carpetbaggers) made sure a one-party Republican rule was established across the land through the Southern black vote.
As one might expect, the Republican administrations imposed upon the Southern states proved utterly ineffective and degradingly corrupt right from the get-go. The blacks formed the bulk of the electorate, and in theory they would occupy most key positions, but real power was in the hands of the Northern parvenus and the few Southern white renegades. Many of the black officials were in fact illiterate. Most of the white ones were scoundrels. No legislation could be passed without massive bribery, no verdicts could be pronounced by the courts without the judges receiving money first.
The hatred for this regime served to unite the Southern whites, and that's how the KKK monster was conceived in 1866/71, the secret white fraternity that spread terror against blacks and white renegades. A society based on racial hatred was created, and it took a long and painful recovery process after that. The black/Republican administrations failed, and the whites were a demographic majority, so they eventually returned to power in all Southern states between 1869 and 1877.
This way, through unwise and short-sighted policies, the post-Civil-War era, instead of uprooting the evil of slavery in the South forever, created a new South where the whites were the ruling elite while the blacks were citizens only in word and on paper. And great silence spread across the land for many decades. America stopped giving a shit about these things for quite a while. After all, it was already getting preoccupied with the most astounding economic expansion in the history of the human race at the time.
Now, nearly 150 years later, and after decades of a (largely successful) fight for equal rights, integration, and healing of the historic wounds, the current US stats shows the following:
- Average household wealth: $171,000 for whites, $17,600 for blacks (almost 10 to 1).
- Average household income: $71,000 for whites, $41,000 for blacks (almost 5 to 3).
- Unemployment: 14.2% for whites, 16.7% for blacks.
- Poverty: 8.1% for whites, 20.8% for blacks.
- People without health insurance: 5.4% for whites, 9.7% for blacks.
- Coronavirus victims: 13% of the whites, 23% of the blacks.
And black people are still getting a knee pressed to their neck.
(no subject)
Date: 9/6/20 09:39 (UTC)