> he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.
Jefferson had some of the most elegant words against slavery while perpetuating it himself. Jefferson the words vs Jefferson the man. His massive hypocrisy is one of those irreducible complexities of American history. And I don’t believe it’s pure cynicism. His words had major impact on the idea of America and were part of the reason the South (at least according to the Confederacy’s Vice President in his “Cornerstone” speech) rebelled:
“The prevailing ideas entertained by him [Jefferson] and most of the leading statesmen at the time of the formation of the old Constitution were, that the enslavement of the African was in violation of the laws of nature; that it was wrong in principle, socially, morally and politically. It was an evil they knew not well how to deal with; but the general opinion of the men of that day was, that, somehow or other, in the order of Providence, the institution would be evanescent and pass away. [...] Those ideas, however, were fundamentally wrong. They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation, and the idea of a Government built upon it—when the "storm came and the wind blew, it fell."” —Alexander Stephen’s, VP of the Confederacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornerstone_Speech
I am cynical, to quite a extent. Especially when people in power are concerned. Lately so I came to the conclusion that what I see as pure cynicism on there behalf might actually be rooted in honest believes. Not that these believes make any sense or are even remotely logical so. And I think that this self contradictory nature might actually be one of the big driving forces behind these people.
FWIW, Jefferson's beliefs were remarkably complicated, to the point where even his interests in abolishing slavery were tied up in his belief that black people were inferior... and so like, once emancipated, he apparently intended deportation as the next, critical step?
Slavery, the US / American Colonies variety of it, was deeply rooted in racism. Slavery is gone, racism is still there. So I honestly don't see how the western world is doing a bad job at separating the two.
Let's face it, most of the founding fathers were racist slave owners.
Slavery (as seen then) implies that the person you are enslaving as subhuman (remember the 3/5s compromise?). Most slave owners treated their slaves as investments like a farmer would treat a tractor today. In fact, for the really terrible work many slave owners would hire Irish immigrants to do the jobs they didn't want their slaves doing out of fear of the risk of harm to the person doing the job. They were tools, not humans.
Racism, which we have now (though probably to a much lesser degree than what some people would want you to believe) acknowledges that the other is human but is inferior due to skin color or ethnicity.
Bigotry is more cultural. The other is human, and should have all the rights thereof, but the bigot doesn't like the culture of the other person. This is called racism by contemporary standards, which is very wrong.
The 3/5 compromise is even worse than mere sub-human-ness. They were already not entitled to any human rights. Their owners also wanted them counted as human solely for the purpose of adding to their power in the Congress and Electoral College. So not only were they subhuman, but the goal was to make it even harder for people to grant them rights.
The opposition was to count them for 0. The "compromise" was to account them for "only" 3/5 -- not at "3/5 of a human" but "slave owners get that much thumb on the scale of all future votes".
That still wasn't sufficient to mollify them, and they ended up seceding, making it quite clear that their reason was to continue to own people.
They didn’t enslave people because they were racist, they enslaved people because it was effectively free labor. Sure, they chose Africans because they were racist and thought them savages, but that isn’t why the institution of slavery existed.
The institution of slavery didn't exist until they came to the New World. The medieval practice of serfdom was pretty brutal, but serfs were at least considered human.
Slavery was introduced in the New World and not in Europe, because that's where the non-Europeans were. When the native Americans proved poor slaves (among other things, dying in droves from disease and being better able to escape due to knowing the area), they imported slaves from Africa.
The Africans had been practicing slavery all along, but the Europeans had considered it barbaric until then. They still didn't tolerate it within Europe, but only safely out of sight in the New World. The institution of slavery only came into existence after colonizing places inhabited by people of other races.
Slavery played a huge role in antique Rome and Greece. Across the Mediterranean in fact. But that kind of slavery was very different from the cattle slavery practiced in the American colonies, especially the US. It was also much less routed in race, besides the POWs being enslaved.
Race has played a huge role in slavery throughout time, but to your point it depends on when and where that time is. My original point was someone can be racist without believing in slavery (and the other way around), and they can not like a particular culture/class without being racist. These differences are important because once we start making blanket statements about what people really think it only encourages that tribalism they're trying to fix in the first place.
He's neither the first person nor the last person to fail to live up to their own ideals. Jefferson was overly worried about the logistics, and he was definitely racist, but he also did believe that slavery was a moral abomination that should be abolished.
I know there are related current events that might make this a touchy subject, but I’m pretty disappointed that HNers would flag a speech by Frederick Douglass. This adds context that 99% of the reactionary CRT debates lack, and I would hope we have the self control to approach this respectfully.
For context, the speech was delivered on July 5, 1852. 169 years ago. Assuming the average age of the mother at birth of 25, this was 6-7 generations and a civil war ago. I hope that we have enough maturity to not behave as if the respective appalling conditions happened yesterday and as if there is a significant part of the contemporary USA population that is openly supporting slavery. With that being said, it is an excellent necessary speech in its historical context.
There's a quote from the speech that I think is particularly apropos:
> Seventy-six years, though a good old age for a man, is but a mere speck in the life of a nation. Three score years and ten is the allotted time for individual men; but nations number their years by thousands.
Seventy-six years ago, it was 1945. Black soldiers were coming back from winning WWII in a segregated US military, only to be excluded from the GI Bill that helped build the suburbs and establish generational wealth for white veterans. Seventy-six years before that the nation was in the midst of Reconstruction, enacting literacy tests and other measures to exclude Black people from public life.
My parents were born in the twilight years of Jim Crow. They were alive to see MLK assassinated — now universally admired for a white-washed, toothless version of his legacy, he died opposed by a full 75% of Americans. The oldest people on HN probably have early memories of this themselves.
We are living in the shadow of the past. We didn't flip a switch that erased racism after slavery. We didn't do it after Jim Crow either. This is a necessary speech in its historical context, yes — but it's also a necessary speech in today's context. Because unless we understand how the US's deep legacy of racism still perpetuates now, we won't be able to do the hard, uncomfortable, crucial work of undoing it.
Once upon a time there was a small country tucked in the southeast corner of Europe, harboring a colorful mix of ethnicities, yearning for peace and prosperity. There were horrible demons in its closet, and they were unleashed upon its present. The rest is history.
1940-1945. Ustaše regime massacres in atrocious conditions ~300k of Serbian civilians from a population of less than 10M. “Even (Nazi) German officers and SS men lost their cool when they saw (Ustaše) ways and methods.”
1987-1991. Slobodan Milošević and his Croat counterpart, Franjo Tudjman, use relentless propaganda to bring atrocities of the past to bear on the present.
> Long before the conflict in Croatia broke out, both Serbian and Croatian media primed their audiences for violence and armed conflict by airing stories of World War II atrocities perpetrated by the other side. Thus, in the Croatian media, Serbs represented Chetniks (or occasionally Partisans) while in the Serbian media, Croats were portrayed as Ustaše.[3] Once the fighting began, these were the labels routinely used in media war reports from both sides, instilling hatred and fear among the populace.[3] The Serbian and Croatian propaganda campaigns also reinforced one another. [...]
Teaching in schools that "the system is rigged," drumming home the constant message in media that oppression is rampant, is a recipe for violence... as intended. How else does one get a Marxist revolution?
That so many fall for it and fail to learn from past atrocities like the holodomor, or the purges of the Cultural Revolution is the real tragedy.
On the whole, HN readers ARE reactionary. Whether it's about technology or politics, submissions like these, which ask the user to examine their own views, always end up inviting controversy.
But it's always with politics--specifically, with regards race and gender--where it becomes most obvious.
I would offer, it would be nice if the title was something more closer to: “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?”
Frederick Douglass (1852)
When I saw the domain: "teachingamericanhistory.org", I have no context who or what organization it is, so I had no idea what to expect when I clicked on the link (I am glad I did).
> What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy — a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour.
Douglass rightly points out that the US was not living up to the promises as outlined in its founding. Unfortunately it took over another century for that to be resolved.
Not even close to resolved. That's one of the scary pernicious parts right now: "Martin Luther King saved us from our own racism and got the Civil Rights Act passed, so we never have to worry about it again".
Just today, the Supreme Court struck down yet more of the Voting Rights Act, making it that much harder for minorities to vote. Not only is there still progress to be made, but there are people intent on taking progress away. They cause discrimination all through American culture, every day, even in ones less prominent than Supreme Court decisions.
Douglass would be quite clear that we didn't live up to those promises a century later, or today a half-century after that.
> he has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it's most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.