Prometheus 6

is particularly nauseating. "well, the reason the conditions on the slave ships were such a terrible tragedy is, well, gosh, those slavers HAD to have felt JUST AWFUL about it!" yeah, and the poor bastards who jumped off the ships were just going for a nice little swim.

it's this sort of head-in-the-sand disingenuousness that's the reason ordinary people were able to walk by the smokestacks at auschwitz without wondering what they were burning - a rank, ahistorical self-delusion that is a juicy and red-hot example of what we're talking about when we say "white privilege". this is in fact one of the most sickening examples of "making it all about me" i've ever seen.

from a different angle...I feel you and BIG UP for the link to the Berkeley paper. Great job as always. Scholarly when appropriate, raw when it's right. Aiight then!!

http://temple3.wordpress.com/2007/10/03/slavery-reparations-thomas-sowells-slippery-slope/

I really was ignoring the shit, but it kept popping up here and there.

Thanks so much. Did you read Angry Black Bitch's solution for Medved?

Slavery Camp

http://www.eurweb.com/story/eur37358.cfm

     "War and strife leave terrible wounds.  It is the duty of humanity to heal them.  It was therefore soon conceived as neither wise nor patriotic to speak of all the causes of strife and the terrible results to which sectional differences in the United States had led.  And so, first of all, we minimized the slavery controversy which convulsed the nation from the Missouri Compromise down to the Civil War.  On top of that, we passed by Reconstruction with a phrase of regret or disgust. 

     "But are these reasons of courtesy and philanthropy sufficient for denying the Truth?  If history is going to be scientific, if the record of human action is going to be set down with that accuracy and faithfulness of detail which will allow its use as a measuring rod and guidepost for the future nations, there must be set some standards of ethics in research and interpretation....

     ".... Our historians tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right.  Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center.  The difference of development, North and South, is explained as a sort of working out of cosmic social and economic law....

     "Yet in this sweeping mechanic interpretation, there is no room for the real plot of the story, for the clear mistake and guilt of rebuilding a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful experiment; for the triumph of sheer moral courage and sacrifice in the abolition crusade; and for the hurt and struggle of degraded black millions in their fight for freedom and their attempt to enter democracy.  Can all this be omitted or half suppressed in a treatise that calls itself scientific?....

     "One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over.  We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only remember that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer.  We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner, or that Thomas Jefferson had mulatto children, or that Alexander Hamilton had Negro blood, and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring.  The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth....

     "This, then, is the book basis upon which today we judge Reconstruction.  In order to paint the South as a martyr to inescapable fate, to make the North the magnanimous emancipator, and to ridicule the Negro as the impossible joke in the whole development, we have in fifty years, by libel, innuendo and silence, so completely misstated and obliterated the history of the Negro in America and his relation to its work and government that today it is almost unknown.  This may be fine romance, but it is not science.  It may be inspiring, but is is certainly not truth.  And beyond this it is dangerous.  It is not only part foundation of our present lawlessness and loss of democratic ideals; it has, more than that, led the world to embrace and worship the color bar as social salvation and it is helping to range mankind in ranks of mutual hatred and contempt, at the summons of a cheap and false myth....

     "What is the object of writing the history of Reconstruction?  Is it to wipe out the disgrace of a people which fought to make slaves of Negroes?  Is it to show that the North had higher motives than freeing black men?  Is it to prove that Negroes were black angels?  No, it is simply to establish the Truth, on which Right in the future may be built.  We shall never have a science of history until we have in our colleges men who regard the truth as more important than the defense of the white race, and who will not deliberately encourage students to gather thesis material in order to support a prejudice or buttress a lie."

                                                                              -- W.E.B. Du Bois in Black Reconstruction, 1935. 

As I was transcribing these words, it occurred to me that they carry over into the points discussed in the threads concerning the lack of a critical mass of anti-racist white people and the attempts to construct white identity based politics in a sphere which does not lend itself to the defenition of a nation-state. 

P.S  I like the new colors (I think they are the best yet), but would like to be able to see all the links without having to go over them with the arrow.     

How's it now?

Still not seeing the links.  Is there a way I can fix this one my own? 

Thanks for finding the DeLong paper - that was interesting. He's right as far as he goes & he's also right that historians and sociologists would benefit from using mircoecon tools.

That being said, my two cents are:

The 3 groups did not benefit equally from the profits slave labor based commodity exports any more than we could say that unskilled antebellum white and black laborers were equally harmed by the effects of chattel slavery. Obviously, large planters derived the greatest advantage ( and these were rice planters, not cotton planters BTW) far and away beyond that of other groups. It also begs the question of where the profits garnered by Southers were invested. It wasn't in northern industry.

DeLong is simply wrong regarding the potential Egyptian and Indian cotton production. There was a global glut and falling prices for cotton in the postbellum period because the British had successfully shifted cotton growing to these areas during the Civil War (possibly while increasing productive capacity in textile mills-I'd have to check that one). This was a major factor in the acceleration of black sharecropping debt-peonage, the decline of white yeomanry as a Southern class and the extension of Northern bank credit systems down to town stores in the postbellum South.

Antebellum Northern capitalists wanted high tariffs, not lower taxes, in order to protect the home market from cheaper, better, British manufactured goods. It was the planter class that demanded low tariffs and free trade. That consumers benefited from lower tariffs was true but the North as a sectional interest and capitalist political economy, did not. Slavery retarded the growth and distorted the market economy in ways too numerous to list here.

Economists would benefit from surveying existing historiography before making sweeping historical claims based on algebra. :o)

You know I like precision. But given the topic, I'm going to point out that Medved's point four is still just the repetition of a flat lie crafted by neo-Confederates.