The Lie That America Bears Unique Guilt for Slavery

@Richard:

BTW, what is the point of this thread? Okay, so America was not built on the backs of slaves.
And that is important to those who live in the 21st century because??????

Richard,

Is it not obvious? So many people- including non-Americans- have been sold the notion that America bears unique guilt, singled out from the proper context of history. It leads to race profiteers like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson to enslave blacks to a victim mindset. It leads to apology resolutions, like the one from New Jersey in 2007 and the one from the House of Representatives on July of 2008 that are just saturated with false history and guilt. In the 2nd “whereas” clause of the House resolution, it says: “Whereas slavery in America resembled no other form of involuntary servitude known in history, as Africans were captured and sold at auction like inanimate objects or animals…”

Medved again:

No reputable historian – no, not one – would agree with this outrageous statement.

The House suggests that slavery in America represents some horrible innovation, achieving incomparable levels of degradation? Actually, slavery in the United States strongly resembled all the most common forms of involuntary servitude that have constituted a universal human institution since the beginnings of recorded history. Yale professor David Brion Davis (author of the magisterial and definitive book Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World) suggests that in its very essence, slavery treats its victims like animals. In fact, the practice of enslaving humans began in the mists of pre-history at the same time as the domestication of beasts and pointedly used some of the same cruel techniques to secure unquestioning obedience from man as well as animal.

Davis writes of the hideous abuse of slaves by the Brazilian tribe, the Tupinamba, long before first contact with the Europeans: “It is crucial to realize that such slaves were being treated essentially as animals, a fact symbolized by their ritualistic slaughter and the final cannibal feast. This behavior dramatizes the point that, wholly apart from later economic functions, slaves from the very beginning were perceived as dehumanized humans – humans deprived of precisely those traits and faculties that are prerequisites for human dignity, respect and honor.”

Even among the famously civilized Greeks (more than two-thousand years before the emergence of the United States) Aristotle said the ox was the poor man’s slave and Xenophon “compared the teaching of slaves, unlike that of free workers, with the training of wild animals.”

None of this absolves from guilt the United States (or the British colonies that preceded independence): the institution of slavery wrecked the lives of millions. But the out-of context consideration of that guilt amounts to an irresponsible distortion of its essential nature and its extent. Of the estimated eleven to thirteen million human beings kidnapped from Africa and brought to the New World in the 400 years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, less than 5% of them went to the British colonies in mainland North America. In other words, some nineteen out of twenty slaves were shipped to the West Indies and Latin America, not to the future United States.

The idea that the House of Representatives now officially endorses the claim that “slavery in America resembled no other form of involuntary servitude in history” is an embarrassment—one more shameful demonstration that preening politicians are willing to assault history, the truth, and even their own country in their mad, headlong pre-adjournment rush to serve the stern gods of brain-dead, America-hating political correctness.

In the 21st century, how is Will Smith oppressed by the legacy of American slavery? Reverend Wright? Michelle Obama? Blacks in America today have the ability to succeed or fail based upon their own merits; unless they remain on the plantation of believing they are being “held down by white society” or by events that happened over a hundred years ago still affecting their psyche. What’s affecting their psyche is the preoccupation with racism and fixation on American slavery.

@Dave Noble:

Word,

From a moral perspective, there is no contextualization of evil. Srebenica, in which Christian murderers slaughtered 8000 Bosnian men and boys, does not provide “context” for 9/11 in which Muslim murders slaughtered over 3000 Americans. Vietcong atrocities do not provide context for My Lai. Sabra and Shatila do not contextualize suicide bombings Insurgent atrocities do not provide context for Abu Ghraib. From a moral standpoint, all evil acts are sui generis. They stand on their own.

I understand. But we are talking specifically about the issue of slavery. And have acknowledged that all slavery is abhorrent and evil. But what is at issue is when one nation specifically- America- is singled out as the worst offender in the history of the world. That is a flat out defamatory lie. There is nothing wrong with calling people on it; it doesn’t minimize the actual gravity of American slavery.

“Again, who does not acknowledge where we’ve been? Not Medved. Not wordsmith.”

Actually, my homely analogy is directly on point. When Billy tells Mom that Johnny did it too, he isn’t denying his own guilt either, he’s trying to deflect it. He’s saying “I’m not the only one, I’m not unique, I’m not so bad.” Medved is doing the same thing.

No….he’s not. He fully acknowledges the evil atrocities of slavery in our past. But that’s not the book he’s writing about. He is specifically addressing the charge from the Ward Churchills and Noam Chomskys and Howard Zinns who have created this impression of unique guilt. A more accurate analogy would be to have Billy acknowledge to mommy that, yes, he pulled wings off of flies and delighted with toasting ants by holding a magnifying glass under a hot sun…when he was 6. Older brother Johnny not only did those things when he was 3, but graduated on to setting cats on fire when he was 6, followed by victimizing other kids as he got older. Mommy ignores that there is anything wrong with Johnny who also went on to commit armed robbery, including knifing another kid. Instead, she constantly berates Billy, who’s now 12 years old; not a perfect child, but one who fully accepts that what he did at age 6 was wrong, and not only that, when he was 7, went on an activist crusade to insure that all the other kids at school realize how cruel it was to pull wings off bugs and torture them with a magnifying glass. Billy gets zero credit for that. Billy recognizes and understands his sins. Is it wrong to point out to mommy that there is something wrong with her only punishing and putting down Billy?

My tweaking of your analogy is imperfect; but do you at least get my point?

He’s saying “We’re not the only ones, we’re not unique, we’re not so bad.” Worse yet by using the term “lie,” he’s suggesting we are being slandered, subjected to an unfair calumny.

We are being slandered! Do you not see that there are some beliefs out there that are just patently false?

What child of the 70’s didn’t grow up watching Roots every year? It became part of the American pysche, driving home the evils of our past sin of slavery. That was good; that was needed. But now, how much damage has it also done in creating certain perceptions that are false and misleading?

Alex Haley’s “Roots”: Fact or Fiction?
by Thomas Sowell (January 30, 2002)

“Roots” was the only book I knew my teenage son to read, aside from assigned school books, computer manuals and chess books. He was thrilled to receive a copy autographed by Alex Haley, courtesy of George Haley, his brother, whom I had met.

Alex Haley himself I never really met, though I saw him in person once because we went to the same barber in Los Angeles. Both then and in his television appearances, Alex Haley seemed like a very decent man. That is why it is especially painful to have to recognize, now that the television series based on “Roots” is going to be re-run on its 25th anniversary, that its enormous success a quarter of a century ago was a tragedy for blacks and for American society in general.

Why a tragedy? The short answer is what Winston Churchill said during World War II: “If the past sits in judgment on the present, the future will be lost.” Some disastrous policies had been followed in the years leading up to World War II, and Churchill had sharply criticized those policies at the time but, now that the war was on, looking back could only interfere with the life-and-death job at hand.

There are some very big jobs at hand for black America — and looking back at centuries past is a costly distraction from the work that needs to be done here and now. Moreover, the past that people are looking back at in “Roots” is not a wholly real past. When challenged by professional historians, Alex Haley called his work “faction” — part fact and part fiction. He said that he had tried to give his people some myths to live by.

It was not that “Roots” merely got some details wrong. It presented some crucially false pictures of what had actually happened — false pictures that continue to dominate thinking today.

“Roots” has a white man leading a slave raid in West Africa, where the hero Kunta Kinte was captured, looking bewildered at the chains put on him as he was led away in bondage. The village elders were likewise bewildered as to what these white men were doing, carrying their people away. In reality, West Africa was a center of slave trading before the first white man arrived there — and slavery continues in parts of it to this very moment.

Africans sold vast numbers of other Africans to Europeans. But they hardly let Europeans go running around in their territory, catching people willy-nilly.

Because of the false picture of history presented by “Roots” and by other sources, last year we had the farce of the president of Nigeria making demands on the United States because of the enslavement of people whom his own countrymen had enslaved, and on behalf of a country where slavery still persists, more than a century after emancipation has occurred throughout the Western world.

“Roots” also feeds the gross misconception that slavery was about white people enslaving black people. The tragedy of slavery was of a far greater magnitude than that. People of every race and color were both slaves and enslavers, for thousands of years, all around the world. Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the first African was brought across the Atlantic. Asians enslaved other Asians, as well as whatever Europeans they could get hold of. Slavery existed in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus ever got here.

Slavery, like cancer, was not limited to any particular country or race. To talk about cancer as if it were an American disease, or a white or black disease, would be absurd. If reparations were to be paid for slavery, everybody on this planet would owe everybody else.

There is no danger of that actually happening. The danger is that too many blacks, especially among the young and the ill-educated, will be backing into the third millennium still looking back at centuries past — or at fictions about centuries past — when there are opportunities all around them that most people in the rest of the world today would die for.

The ancestors of black Americans were not taken from some Eden, and there is no Eden for black Americans to return to today. If compensation were to be paid for the difference between where they are and where their ancestors came from, they would owe money, not receive money. But it would be ridiculous to lose the future because of the past.

We are as bad and as good as we are, regardless of what other peoples or nations have done.

Agreed; but the level of self-loathing and self-hatred for historical distortions is just as harmful as living in denial.

And I am not talking about the American people “feeling guilty” about slavery or the plight of Native Americans. What do we need to get a grip about?

I’m the one who’s talking about unique guilt. That’s what Medved’s addressing. I still think you’re missing his point, and mine for giving it blogtime. You don’t feel that race profiteers like Louis Farrakhan don’t need to “get a grip”? Senator Cohen for pushing the apology resolution that includes some over-exaggerated assertions?

I proudly stand at attention for the national anthem. But I don’t need to remind everyone that “we weren’t the only ones” whenever one of our national crimes is mentioned. I love my country enough not to make excuses for it.

Do you love it enough to defend it against slander and lies and distortions? Or do you just stand there and “take it” like the good patriot you are?

@WadeHM:

I have to jump in on this discussion.

What we did to the Native American Indians was terrible. People can make all the excuses they want about diseases, but America was bent killing the Indians. It is in our history and cannot be ignored. We tried to force our religion and our “advanced culture” on them. When they resisted we called them savages. When they fought back, we slaughtered many of them and put the rest on reservations where they had no rights to land that we stole form them, and they had no rights to move anywhere else in this country. Where do you people think the term “off the reservation” came from?

Wade,

Again, no one is denying that what we did to Native Americans was horrible. But when there are those out there who romanticize this notion that Native Americans were “noble savages” who were also eco-friendly environmentalists living in harmony with nature and their fellow Indians, it’s just nonsense. Because Indians ultimately were on the losing side of western expansionism, and were here “first”, we conveniently forget that they weren’t absolved of atrocities themselves- not all of which were mere retaliation against the brutality exercised by white European settlers. Some tribes attacked, unprovoked. Warfare wasn’t exclusive only to white vs. red; it was also red vs. red, even before the white man arrived. Mayans, Aztecs…engaged in the most horrific cannibalistic enslavement and sadisitic practices of torture and sacrifice. I’d say “savages” is a rather apt adjective for them, if simplistic and narrowly defined.

Slavery is another black eye for America too. I don’t agree that America was built by slave labor, but we still had slavery. And that was shameful too. No matter how worse it was elsewhere, no matter who was responsible for selling the slaves, America supported it knowing it was wrong. Even the founding fathers knew it was wrong and still some of them owned slaves, and still they did not stop it. They could and should have.

Let me cut-and-paste a couple of my comments on another thread:

wordsmith #17:

All men are flawed, Mata.

Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner.

How is that “a flaw”, other than by judging the 18th century by 20th and 21st century moral standards? Easy to do, today, armchaired by the distance of history.

Thomas Jefferson openly denounced slavery as a profound evil. To actually abolish slavery and free slaves was no simple task. In some places, it was legally impossible to do. Taking into consideration the context of the times that they lived in is vital to understanding why those who were against slavery were often at odds with the abolitionists, let alone with a world that “grew up” on the institution of slavery.

Thomas Sowell (“The Real History of Slavery”, in Black Rednecks and White Liberals):

One of the early battles that was lost [in the anti-slavery sentiments growing amongst colonialists] was Jefferson’s first draft of the Declaration of Independence, which criticized King George III for having enslaved Africans and for over-riding colonial Virginia’s attempt to ban slavery. The Continental Congress removed that phrase under pressure from representatives from the South.

When Jefferson drafted a state constitution for Virginia in 1776, his draft included a clause prohibiting any more importation of slaves an, in 1783, Jefferson included in a new draft of a Virginia constitution a proposal for gradual emancipation of slaves. He was defeated in both these efforts. on the national scene, Jefferson returned to the battle once again in 1784, proposing a law declaring slavery illegal in all western territories of the country as it existed at the that time. Such a ban would have kept slavery out of Alabama and Mississippi. The bill lost by one vote, that of a legislator too sick to come and vote. Afterwards, Jefferson said that the fate “of millions unborn” was “hanging on the tongue of one man, and heaven was silent in that awful moment.”

Three years later, however, Congress compromised by passing the Northwest Ordinance, making slavery illegal in the upper western territories, while allowing it in the lower western territories. Congress was later authorized to ban the African slave trade and Jefferson, now President, urged that they use that authority to stop Americans “from all further participation in those violations of human rights which has been so long continued on the unoffending inhabitants of Africa. Congress followed his urging.

Abstract moral decisions are much easier to make on paper or in a classroom in later centuries than in the midst of the dilemmas actually faced by those living in very different circumstances, including serious dangers.

One way to understand the constraints of the times and their effects on public attitudes is to examine the difference between the way that many in nineteenth-century America saw the slave trade, as distinguished from the way that they saw slavery itself. If the institution of slavery and the presence of millions of slaves were facts of life, within which many decision-makers felt trapped by having inherited the consequences of decisions made by others in generations before them, the continuing trade in slaves, whether from Africa or within the United States, was a contemporary problem that was within their control. Thus, decades before slavery was abolished, the United States joined in the outlawing of the international slave trade. Even many Americans not yet ready to support the abolition of slavery as an institution nevertheless made the bringing of more slaves from Africa a capital offense in the United States.

The moral distinction between slave trading and the continuation of slavery as an institution might be hard for some in later centuries to understand because, in the abstract, there is no moral difference. Only in the concrete circumstances faced by the people of the times was there a practical social difference.

wordsmith #19:

Try putting yourself in the context of the times, and the social constraints of what was possible. Your casting moral judgment is anachronistic. Moral choices can be made only from options that are actually available to be made. More excerpts from Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals:

We cannot assume twenty-first century options, or even present-day knowledge, when judging decisions made in the 19th century. Nor can we assume that we have superior knowledge of the social realities of an earlier era that we never lived through, compared to the first-hand knowledge of those who confronted those realities daily and inescapably.

Moral Questions about slavery have been, almost exclusively, Western moral questions.. Non-Western societies had neither moral concerns about slavery nor, in most cases, the power to decide on the continuance or extinction of the institution for themselves during the era of European imperialism, when slavery was suppressed over most of the world by the West. Not only has the West’s crucial role in the destruction of slavery around the world gone largely unnoticed, standards applied almost exclusively to the West have been used to condemn European and European offshoot societies for having once had slavery.

Even those Western leaders who sought to end slavery are condemned by critics today for not having done it sooner or faster. The dangers and constraints of their times have too often been either ignored or brushed aside as mere excuses, as if elected leaders operating under the constitutional law could simply decree whatever they felt was right.

~~~

Even those slaveholders with aversions to slavery in principle were constrained by a strong tradition of stewardship, in which the family inheritance was not theirs to dispose of in their own lifetime, but to pass on to others as it had been passed on to them. George Washington was one of those who had inherited slaves and, dying childless, freed his slaves in his will, effective on the death of his wife. His will also provided that slaves too old or too beset with “bodily infirmities” to take care of themselves should be taken care of by his estate, and that the children were to be “taught to read and write” and trained for “some useful occupation”.

This is an important point to highlight, because some like Jefferson and Washington understood that simply freeing slaves without giving them the necessary tools and means to survive in society was more like abandonment than liberation. They did consider the possibility of sending freed slaves back to Africa. But the reality was, many of these slaves no longer had ties to Africa, either.

One concrete result of the back-to-Africa movement was the establishment of the colony of Liberia on the West African coast, to which freed American blacks were sent during the administration of James Monroe, for whom they named their capital Monrovia. These first settlers were decimated by African diseases to which they no longer had biological resistance- which was just one of the problems of trying to undo the past.

Frederick Douglass himself, refused the offer to be sent to Africa, seeing himself as an American.

[Washington’s] estate in fact continued to pay for the support of some freed slaves for decades after his death, in accordance to his will.

The part of Washington’s will dealing with slaves filled almost three pages, and the tone as well as the length of it showed his concerns.

The language of the will was written in very legalistic terms; but when it came to speaking about what was to become of his slaves, he spoke with the passionate command of issuing an executive decree: “I do hereby expressly forbid the sale…of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretext whatsoever.”

“There is not a man living who wishes more sincerely than I do to see a plan adopted for the abolition of it.” Washington once said, in regards to slavery as a national issue. The moral question for him was easy; but how to carry it out with compassion and foresight planning was a complex matter. Only through legislation, did Washington see it as a realistic possibility to end the institution; and he said that the legislator who could achieve that, would get his vote.

During his public life, Washington was known to leave behind slaves he brought with him on his travels to the north, in effect, freeing them. His behavior as a slaveowner is also noted in Richard Brookhiser’s Founding Father:

Beginning in the early 1770’s, he rarely bought a slave and he would not sell one, unless the slave consented, which never happened. not selling slaves was an economic loss. Slave labor on a plantation with soil as poor as Mount Veronon brought in little or nothing…The only profit a man in his position would make was by selling slaves to states where agriculture was more flourishing. Washington would not. “I am principled against selling negroes as you would do cattle at a market…” From 1775 until his death, the slave population at Mount Vernon more than doubled.

Back to you, Wade:

I am right-wing conservative, I love my country, but I can admit her errors. This country has had her share sins, but I still love this country and still am proud of her, but I will not simply dismiss her sins, especially based on the premise that, “But Johnny did it too.”

We must remember the truth so that we don’t forget it.

No one is saying let’s forget the past; let’s just not distort it to make ourselves feel good by constant handwringing self-loathing and exaggerated sense of feeling unique guilt. I really do think many Americans- usually liberals- make themselves feel good by feeling so much guilt and the need to do penance for crimes committed by ancestors generations ago.