What a conversation. You can see the threads of inadvertantly setting up her son for failure by focusing on blackness and how everything is steeped in 'white supremacy'.
"They'll break down what each European mathematician "brought us", and let hang in mid air the implication that we need not look beyond that continent for more contribut…
What a conversation. You can see the threads of inadvertantly setting up her son for failure by focusing on blackness and how everything is steeped in 'white supremacy'.
"They'll break down what each European mathematician "brought us", and let hang in mid air the implication that we need not look beyond that continent for more contributors." WTF? Where does her son go to school, KKK High? As a piss-poor math student I didn't get taught about math discoveries *at all*. I think I knew that Arabs invented algebra, something I still haven't forgiven them for :) But, all kidding aside, I wonder a few things about the notion that we're teaching kids how 'white' math, literature, music or science or anything else is. Speaking from the perspective as a woman, since feminists make the same complaints about gender bias in studies. And also a Canadian, where my adopted peeps seem sometimes to be in a competition with Americans for valuable contributions to civilization. (Frozen fish, Pablum, zippers, basketball, ice hockey [bien sur!] hydrofoils, Gramophones, etc. You're welcome. Remember us in your will. :)
One question to ask is how truly critical a particular contribution is. Some inventions were truly revolutionary (the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, the Internet) and others were valuable but not as civilization-shaking. Speaking American-historically, it's been pointed out by many that black folks and women are playing catchup after hundreds of years of oppression and limits to their education. The first women were admitted to the college in 1849, the first black men about twenty years later. White Eurocentric/American men have a long established centuries-long history of work to build upon, the rest of us less so - we're all using the knowledge base developed by them. As creators or researchers, we're just not as good at it, yet. Our contributions will likely prove to be less valuable (but hardly worthless, just perhaps valuable to niches) for awhile but we'll get better. I noticed this when I discovered a website for female-produced and directed movies, where women were portrayed as women actually were rather than the sexualized wank material they were required to be in mainstream movies. And, having a thing for offbeat indy movies to begin with, I thought, "Cool!" But, reading the descriptions of the movies I could tell they were a little amateurish, or maybe a better word is less-developed. The stories didn't sound quite compelling, although maybe the description writer didn't know how to write a compelling blurb - a sign that this may be an amateurish effort overall. We don't yet have the body of work of female production and direction to build upon, learning from previous mistakes.
Another thing I wonder about the 'domination' of white Euro-American male presence: How much of it depends on written records? Europeans have a long catologued history, as do Asians and Middle Easterners, and I'm not sure where Africa stands in that regard. I'll admit I'm a little fuzzy on pre-colonial Africa but I HAVE looked for a good history book on it and all I seem to find are books obsessed with Africa's slave trade. (Which makes me wonder about this lady who complains that the kids are being taught 'Africa started with the slave trade': Gee, what colour are the people who seem most obsessed with the African slave trade history, and want to predate America's founding to 1619 because, slave ship?)
It's possible Africans invented shit before the rest of us but no one knows because it's not documented. Who invented the wheel? Who knows, happened in preliterate societies. Probably several people in several different places.)
Then there's the guy who theorized heliocentrism 1,500 years before Copernicus: Aristarchus. Humanity seemingly forgot about it and Cop the European is the guy who figured out the truth, right? Why did we forget what Aristarchus taught us? Maybe heliocentrism wasn't the clusterfuck for the ancient Greeks as it was in Christian Europe. Maybe the Greeks were all like, "Yeah, that's interesting, gotta go to the temple now," rather than "BURN HIM!!! BURN HIM!!!"
In the end, math is about the least racist- and gender-possible subject ever. Math is what it is. The numbers are either wrong or right. Math doesn't care what colour you are, what's between your legs, whether you're Einstein or Dr. Oz, or what your politics are. You're either wrong or right.
"You can see the threads of inadvertantly setting up her son for failure by focusing on blackness and how everything is steeped in 'white supremacy'."
I've pointed to this problem over and over again. It's so depressing that more people can't see it. The current Tate of racial discourse teaches black children that they're doomed to fail. It practically insists that they see themselves as oppressed victims. Regardless of how rich or privileged they are by every reasonable metric.
It teaches them to constantly define themselves in opposition or comparison to white people. And then to feel personally implicated by the areas where black people in general lag behind.
Now, of course, I think *everybody* should be interested in the areas where black people lag behind. At least insofar as some of those disparities were created by a fairly recent legacy of legally-mandated racism (not to mention the centuries long exploitation of Africa and its resources).
But I don't feel insecure because some people believe that black people are inferior or less worthy of credit. I don't tally up the various contributions to humanity by race. I think that's where J is going so very wrong.
With regard to African history, which Africa ? It's a very big place. North Africa has a different culture and history. Was the trans Saharan slave trade that Westerners trapped into and expanded to become trans Atlantic slave trade about race? I don't know for sure but I suspect that the history of North Africa has a more detailed historical record than that South of the Sahara.
Were there libraries and museums that were destroyed in tribal warfare? When the Burmese sacked Ayutthaya they destroyed the Thai historical record. The destruction of national/tribal history by invading armies has been historically common worldwide. The lack of historical record may be more due to cruelty than neglect.
Good points. Yes, those are other reasons why there may not be a historical record to show that some African invented something important. I'm not sure I think the slave trade was much about race although I could be wrong. Europeans, having an advanced civilization, tended to regard any other culture more 'behind' than they to be 'savages', esp if they didn't know about Jesus. And of course any group that's 'less civilized' than you is easily enslaved (in the minds of the dominators). I don't think it was that different for whites - the Slavic tribes were heavily enslaved by Europeans back in the day.
This is why i'm getting very sick of hearing about slavery overall. Everyone did it, many peoples' ancestors were slaves regardless of colour, and what's more important is ending the slave trade that exists *today*. However, I do think we need to examine the American slave trade much more as it really does appear to have been a far more brutal system than slave cultures anywhere else. I'm still trying to find an answer as to why that's so. (Not to mention the post-Reconstruction era of brutal lynchings, which sometimes included some near-medieval level of torture. Things that make you go "WTF, AMERIKKKA???")
I would be interested in solid sources for the belief that "the American slave trade was far more brutal system than slave cultures anywhere else". I am very aware that this is a common theme in racial activism, but I'm interested in the historical analysis to support or debunk that assertion?
I'm somewhat skeptical, given accounts of, say, Greeks tossing slaves into snakepits for the fun of it, slaves being burned alive at master's funerals, the terrible life of a galley slave, stories of torture and slavery pre-Columbian North America, slave labor used by Japan in WWII, Roman slave revolts and their punishment, etc. My unscientific sample of eclectic sources over a lifetime of reading (not focused on slavery per se), would suggest that any time somebody effectively "owns" somebody else as property, there are going to be terrible abuses, period - both systematic and individual (psychopaths owning slaves can be uninhibited). But I'm open to more systematic assessments.
One datapoint in such an assessment would be that over the course of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the territories now included in the United States received about 389,000 slaves from Africa; the rest of the Americas received about 10,300,000 (ie: US received about about 4% of total).
For every enslaved African brought to the US, there are about 100 descendants today (there were about 10 descendants at the time of the US Civil War). By contrast, over 1 million slaves were receive in Jamaica, and there are about 2.5 descendants today for each imported slave.
Slaves were pretty much worked to death and replaced, in the Caribbean and Brazil. Of course, being worked to death is only one form of brutality, but I have been assured that other forms of brutality were also rampant. Beyond the non-US destinations of the Trans-Atlantic trade, I've read of many terrible things done to slaves around the world historically. In some places and for some classes of slaves, life was better than in other cases, but I have seen nothing so far that suggests that the North American slavery was uniquely brutal.
So I'm wondering if your impression that slavery in the US, (or in territory which became the US) was uniquely brutal comes from solid sources, or from something closer to DEI trainings? I'm very open to new sources.
"I would be interested in solid sources for the belief that "the American slave trade was far more brutal system than slave cultures anywhere else""
I'm uncomfortable with the framing of one type of slavery being "worse than" another. But I think there are a number of bases for the claim that are, at least, reasonable.
First, all the various examples you cited regarding other types of slavery (except the snake pits and the burning at their master's funerals), are all true of The Atlantic slave trade at the same time. Slave revolts were brutally and disproportionately punished (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner%27s_slave_rebellion), torture was fairly commonplace, and the Middle Passage was, I daresay, worse even that what galley slaves had to endure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Passage).
I've spent far more time than I care to learning about The Atlantic Slave trade. There's endless detail about it's brutality if you look online for it. But there's less data on other forms, largely, as I said, because The Atlantic slave trade is more modern and therefore more reliably detailed. There are surviving audio testimonies of slaves in America. Not so from other legalised forms of slavery.
But yeah, ultimately, I think we should all be able to agree, without the slightest hesitation or desire to relativise, that it's one of the most awful stains on humanity's moral history. Certainly its modern history. We should also be able to agree that white people today don't need to feel complicit or defensive about it.
First off, I find all forms of slavery abominable, and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was indeed very terrible indeed. Nothing either of us says about relative comparisons implies in any way that any kind of slavery is OK. Let's agree on that and move to the areas where we do not have consensus yet.
PgbR: "I would be interested in solid sources for the belief that "the American slave trade was far more brutal system than slave cultures anywhere else""
Note carefully the specific assertion I was questioning, quoted from the comment to which I was responding; it's a current example of a common theme in modern anti-racism. I was not dismissing it, I was asking for solid sources and using examples to explain my initial skepticism, pending such a source.
(1) At question is not whether the US trade was brutal or abominable (see opening), but whether it was "far more brutal" than that of any other culture.
(2) I was talking about the slave trade to the (sometimes future) United States, whose ships carried about 2.5% of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and whose shores received about 4%. I am contending that the larger bulk of that trade appears to have been at least as brutal and very likely more so, than that ending on US shores. This subset of my questioning is not addressed by arguments about the overall TA slave trade.
(3) Brutal slave treatment in the service of a war of conquest doesn't seem to make it any less brutal. The rationale for the slavery was not part of the assertion I was questioning.
Was the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in Western Africa "far more brutal" than the Arabic slave trade in Eastern Africa? They had similar total numbers, albeit stretched over more centuries in the latter case. The Arabic slave trade did enormous numbers of castrations, which had a high fatality rate. Other than that difference, I haven't seen a case made for either being "far more brutal" than the others.
As an aside, in regard to specifically comparing just the Middle Passage and being a galley slave - even though both are horrible histories, the best estimates are that about 20% of those embarking in Africa died before arriving in the New World. As terrible as that is, the fatality rate among galley slaves was essentially 100 percent as they were worked to death on the oars, and the horrors they faced in the galley would last the rest of their short lives.
(Although, suffering the Middle Passage combined with ending up on a Caribbean sugar cane plantation to be typically worked to death within a few years, would be more comparable to being a galley slave).
If we read about the rebellion led by Spartacus, and the massive crucifixions that were used to punish it, it becomes hard to make the comparative case that the US slave trade was "far more brutal" in the way it punished rebellions, or in the conditions which caused people to rebel even knowing the consequences.
Remember, the assertion I was asking for references for was not "was US based slavery terrible and brutal in general" nor "did the worse examples exhibit the same kinds of brutality as the worst examples elsewhere in the world" - but rather that the US slave trade was "far worse than" the slavery in any other culture. Both being really bad does not support the assertion in question.
TL;DR:
* I agree that US Slavery was a terrible, horrible and brutal affront to humanity
* I need more evidence before I can agree that it was "far more brutal" than any other slavery practiced by humans.
And I'm not seeing any of *that* evidence in your response.
"Note carefully the specific assertion I was questioning, quoted from the comment to which I was responding"
Yep, I understood the question you were asking, and acknowledged that I was reframing it slightly because as asked, it's almost impossible to answer. Firstly because what qualifies as "far more brutal" is subjective, and secondly because there are all kinds of examples of slavery throughout history that we don't have good data for. In fact, we don't have very good data for most forms of slavery as they were a long time ago. I couldn't say with any authority how the Egyptian slave trade compared to the Atlantic slave trade, for example.
That's why I compared the Atlantic slave trade to the other examples of slavery you mentioned (I can't believe I forgot, as Nicole mentions below, the various medical experiments performed on slaves, women in particular). There are many things, like those experiments, that we don't hear of in accounts of other examples of slavery. And very few (if any) things we hear about in other accounts of slavery that didn't also happen during the Atlantic slave trade. Galley slaves, for example, worked to death on the oars, African slaves, if they survived the journey, worked to death on the land. This isn't a perfect measure of its brutality, but it's a reasonable basis for the argument.
I didn't mean to imply that you think slavery is okay. Obviously you don't. But rather that it's very difficult for comparisons not to come across as moral relativism or attempts to say "well, other people did it too." I don't think you'd be tempted to do this if not for the idiots arguing that white people are complicit in atrocities that took place before they were born. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But I very rarely hear anybody talk about other genocides when the Holocaust is brought up, for example.
Disposing with a potential distraction: I understand your point "I don't think you'd be tempted to do this if not for the idiots arguing that white people are complicit in atrocities that took place before they were born." However, I was not trying to connect anything to complicity one way or another - that's a separate issue and I agree with you about that.
My point was limited to questioning the narrative that "slavery in the US was far more brutal" than everywhere else in the world. I don't currently believe that is true, so unless there is some solid reason to support it, we should STOP REPEATING IT. Take it out of the bullet points.
I was NOT trying to suggest that we should replace that talking point with "slavery in the US was better" much less "slavery in the US was OK". Unless we can justify that "far more brutal" narrative, let's just stop comparing it to other forms of slavery, period. That kind of comparison doesn't provide any guidance to the problem of what to do now, anyway, as far as I can see - and all the more so for an unjustifiable comparison. It was brutal, as were all forms of slavery. That's enough.
So I think we are agreed, to just avoid that kind of comparison, as not helpful and difficult to do anyway.
"I don't currently believe that is true, so unless there is some solid reason to support it, we should STOP REPEATING IT. Take it out of the bullet points."
Right, but I think it's fair to say you're not an expert on the history of slavery. Nor am I of course.
I'm certainly not wedded to that narrative. I don't think I've ever espoused it myself, precisely because it's difficult (and tasteless) to compare. I think its recency and its direct contradiction of the "self-evident truths" in the Declaration of Independence are far more relevant that comparisons to Ancient Egyptian slavery. But I guess I also don't hear it very often. And when I do, it's usually comparing slavery in the US at that time to slavery in Africa at that time, which, as far as I know, *was* far less brutal.
So I guess my question is; why does the narrative bother you? Particularly given that it isn't something that you can confidently refute, doesn't have any significant impact that I can see, and is at least a reasonable claim given what we do know about it.
I raised the point about complicity precisely because I can't see any other issue (maybe I'm missing something of course). And I think an important piece of working through our issues with racism is purging this notion of white complicity from our collective mind. It inevitably makes conversations more accusatory on the one hand, and more defensive on the other, than they need to be. For example, I might have my doubts if somebody called the Holocaust a more brutal genocide than Stalin's, but I wouldn't be concerned one way or another if that narrative were repeated.
(You mention complicity again, but we are agreed upon that separate issue, so let's drop it)
I was responding to the assertion here in your comment section that US slavery was "far more brutal" than any other culture, which I consider an unsubstantiated allegation, which seems rather unlikely to be true. However, I am very willing to revise that assessment if anybody can provide a good source.
You note that neither of us is an expert on slavery. We are not climate scientists either, but at least somebody making a credible assertion about climate change should be able to cite their expert sources, which is all I asked for. I've never seen a sober analysis which placed US slavery as far worse than any other in the world, not one - just naked assertions without evidence.
You speak about recent history versus ancient history. But (1) the specific assertion I questioned and quoted did not make that limitation and (2) some of the counter examples I tentatively mentioned as justifying skepticism are contemporary or more recent. That assertion would require that US slavery was far more brutal than the other 96% of trans Atlantic slavery, which to my best understanding was more brutal and fatal. And far more brutal than the contemporary Arabic slave trade in Eastern Africa. And far more brutal than the Japanese use of slave labor in Asia during WWII.
You say you don't encounter that assertion often; for me, seeing it crop up in your comment thread was the Nth time I have encountered it. Maybe it will fade away, or maybe you will start seeing it more often. Time will tell.
(I have also seen videos of young people asserting that the US invented slavery. Full stop. That's what ordinary non-intellectual people take away from their history lessons; while it's not the same assertion, it comes from the same attempts to create an emotionally evocative but intellectually flimsy narrative, and they absorbed the tone if not the details.)
You ask why (other than to avoid allegations of complicity) would anybody care about an unsupported and likely false comparison being made, rather than just accepting it and moving on. Fair question.
Of course, just a love of the truth is one component of it. Remember, I asked for sources, not as a tactic but because if there are solid sources I *will* probably revise my opinion, as I have many times. Otherwise I suggest not passing on a possible false comparison. I see truth seeking as an incremental refinement process. This is a strong proclivity of mine in general, whether I'm checking out an urban legend, or looking at who really invented something, or what causes ulcers. It's not specific to politics or to racial history or any other niche.
Before proceeding, I think it's worth asking why the assertion gets made, not just why it was questioned. Why would somebody assert that US slavery was far worse than that of any other culture? What payoffs would persuading others of that assertion have? If the motive is just getting the truth out there in the same spirit I've mentioned, then sources should be readily and cheerfully available. If the motive is emotional hijacking of critical thinking, then sources are less important, because no moral person should ever pause to ask for them.
But you tell me - what harm would result if we agreed not to assert that strong comparison without evidence? How would it hurt the dialogue or truth seeking? Why is is important to make or defend such an assertion?
I believe that the assertion that US slavery was uniquely brutal is part of weaving a particular narrative more related to a morality play than to honest truth seeking. If it really was, by far, the worst example in all of human history around the globe, then wouldn't it be morally suspect to question proportionately extreme counter-measures? Doesn't all the kind of careful nuancing that you and I attempt to do fall into trivia, when confronting the ultimate evil humanity is capable of?
One of the problems I find with the neo-progressive narrative on race is the tendency to remove history from relevant context. The 1619 project and related narratives seeks to center the American experience on oppression, permeating every value, ideal, or pragmatic decision. This is of course based on a substantial (but smaller) kernel of truth, but it attempts to exaggerate, distort, and decontextualize that to justify more radical analysis and prescriptions. One common element of that distortion is to frame US slavery as historically unprecedented and uniquely evil. I don't like distortions, especially in service of dogmatic ideologies.
As such, repeating an unsupported allegation seems harmful (just as repeating some unfactual urban legends can be harmful). However, if there is evidential support, then my regard for truth is again dominant and I will change my view of that assertion. You and I might still agree that comparisons are not very useful, but I would not challenge the truth of it. But until then, I support not making any unsupportable assertions in any direction. Slavery was very bad, and is always very bad, regardless of what happens or happened somewhere else; that's enough for rational political purposes.
Honestly, I am puzzled by how hard you seem to be taking this. We both agree that (1) it was a horrible blemish and terribly cruel and brutal, (2) that's quite sufficient reason to condemn it, it doesn't have to be the worst to be very bad, (3) we should not link it to present day complicity in any case, and (4) it's not easy to make accurate and objective comparisons between brutal systems and would at minimum take major effort by unbiased experts. For all those reasons I would have expected you go agree that we should avoid making strong yet simplistic comparisons of US slavery with all other examples, based on no solid sources.
As for the related implicit question of why this extended discussion, that's not because this is a big issue for me (it's not, I've spent very little time on this issue over recent years, my comment was meant to be a brief questioning and search for possible sources which might modify my view and I never anticipated nearly so much back and forth!), I think the duration is due to some personality characteristics which you and I share.
I have (well earned) respect for you, and you are engaging intelligently in good faith with me, and I enjoy that kind of shared pursuit of truth. I don't think either of us is imputing ill motives, or seeking to boost our own egos in "owning" the other; we seek truth. You appear to behave similarly. And I enjoy trying to craft words in a way to convey subtle distinctions and nuance arguments clearly. The length of our dialogue here has more to do with that vibrant engagement, than with the global importance of the topic which spawned it.
----
I do want to push back on one thing you said: "slavery in Africa at that time, which, as far as I know, *was* far less brutal."
How much do you know about how the empires in Africa acquired over 20 million salable human being to provide first to the Arabs and then to European traders?
How many defending warriors were killed in the conquer of other tribes? How many non-warrior villagers were killed as too young, too old, too weak, or too feisty to make valuable slaves? If not killed outright, how many villagers later died of starvation after being plundered for slaves? How brutally were captured people treated during the breaking period as they were driven to the fortresses to be later sold? I do not know, but given the population age distribution of similar societies, and the economic dynamics involved, I suspect that multiple others were brutalized and killed for every prime slave delivered at the port for sale to the Arabs or Europeans.
Whether the slaves kept for use within the empires themselves were better treated than the ones sold is going to be hard to determine fairly (given the diversity within African societies and the tendency to cherry pick stories to support narratives), but in any case they represent a small sliver of the total people conquered and enslaved by Africans in Africa.
There is no slavery which is not brutal, because people do not take well to being enslaved. Comparison is not needed and should in general be avoided, within the political dialogue context. But if one nevertheless wants to compare brutality, then one needs to be honest about it.
"I was responding to the assertion here in your comment section that US slavery was "far more brutal" than any other culture, which I consider an unsubstantiated allegation, which seems rather unlikely to be true."
Yep, I know that. I didn't make the assertion, and I haven't tried to defend it with any enthusiasm. You asked for information that might support it, and I offered some that I found persuasive but far from definitive. If you don't find it persuasive, that's totally fair. There is no "truth" here, at least not that we'll unearth without investing several years of study. There are no definitive statistics that measure levels of brutality throughout the history of slavery. No metrics for human suffering. Just random accounts of horror that we dig up on the internet. Your questions about warriors killed in the conquer of other tribes are literally impossible to answer.
You mention the 1619 project and a few staggeringly ill-informed young people. But getting to the bottom of which form of slavery was most brutal will have zero impact on either, because the fact of the Atlantic slave trade is enough. Even if we had definitive proof that it was the least brutal form of slavery in history, what we *do* know about it is more than emotionally evocative enough for the people who want to fixate on it. As I said, it's incompatibility with the Declaration of Independence alone is enough to keep the grifters grifting for years to come.
Those grifters profit mainly from race essentialism and guilt based on the notion of racial complicity, which is why I think those are much more interesting and valuable routes to break down false narratives. Convincing the world that people aren't responsible for the past actions of people with the same skin colour would have a seismic impact on racial discourse. Convincing the world that the Atlantic slave trade was only the fifth most brutal form of slavery in history would have no real impact whatsoever. That's why I think the former is a far more worthwhile use of our attention.
You say you're puzzled by how hard I seem to be taking this, but I feel exactly the same way.😅 I'm genuinely not taking it hard at all. You call Nicole's comment an "allegation" in your last reply. And it does seem as if you're taking her statement personally. I conceded that the assertion might not be true in my very first reply. And again, if you're not convinced, that's totally reasonable. I just don't think it's unreasonable that other people *are* convinced. I don't think Nicole made the assertion because she believes America invented slavery or because she's a supporter of the 1619 project or because she wants to promulgate an anti-American narrative.
I haven't done a comprehensive study of slavery in all times and places so I can't swear the American system was THE most brutal and I'll admit I tend to avoid, in most cases, reading too much about human cruelty to others because I find it extremely upsetting. I was furious at my history teacher in college for making us read 'Treblinka' which I figured would at least have a happy ending as it ended with a successful Nazi concentration prisoner revolt, but it was the most brutal thing I'd read to date and I was deeply disturbed by it. I consoled myself that I could put it out of my mind and forget about it, which I did, and all I remember now is descriptions of the 'black humour' (not racial, the very dark humour you find from people in very dark places) and the fact that like 300 pages later, the goddamn happy ending didn't come until like the last three pages. I was pissed.
Worst thing I've read *since* then was intentional, "Hitler's Willing Executioners", which surpasses Treblinka in horror (it makes Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning look like a fucking fairy tale) but I read it about ten years ago, trying to understand the nature of evil and two things that have always struck me as speaking to the core of human evil are lynchings, which Steve has gotten into already and I will add "Ditto, and I read one on Medium a few months back that SO horrified me about what was done to a black woman in the 1930s that I'm like, the ones who just got hung had it easy. The brutality of lynchings post-Civil War are a strong argument for how much hatred white people of the day had for black people for reasons I doubt I will ever understand. Several years prior, I was surprised to find human beings HAD been burnt at the stake here, if not as much as in Europe, and pretty much only black men in particularly brutal killings. No witches in Salem or anywhere else in the Colonies were ever burnt at the stake.
I got my information from Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste: The Origin of our Discontents" which someone gave me for Christmas a few years ago. I thought, "Oh shit, I wonder if this is one of those lefty-extremist things," but I thought it was quite good, even though I would suggest she is a little too lefty on anti/racism for my taste. BUT....I checked out at least a few of her claims and found them valid. Like that the Nazis' Final Solution was inspired in part by the really hardcore, stratified racism found in the US at the time. Wilkerson also pointed out that whites were even stratified amongst themselves in the early 20th century which was another, "Holy fuck, she nailed it," moment as I was compiling and outlining family history on my mother's side with my uncle and I'd laughed with him about how our formerly moneyed family managed to lose it all by marrying the 'wrong people' - not POC, but people of the 'wrong' European ethnic lineage, including one whose family disowned them because he married...<gasp!> AN AMERICAN! What Wilkerson described about the various European castes fit a little with what I found in our family history.
I checked this book out before I read it and I took Wilkerson to be a fairly credible source (I didn't make an exhaustive study of it, but I did the same before asking for '1493' when some nutty black Medium writer said I needed to read it. It's a well-regarded book and I got it for Christmas (it was on my list). Just started it last night.
Wilkerson's bio notes she's a Pulitzer Prize winner and also a winner of the National Humanities Medal, a NY Times bestseller (The Warmth of Other Suns) and a few other non-fiction awards. She quotes minister William Goodell in the 1830s writing that slaves had no right to ever fight back, defend themselves, has 'no protection and no redress," and furthermore was 'not capable of being injured'.
"Whipping was a geteay form of violence that led to bizarrely creative levels of sadism," wrote the historian Edward Baptist. Enslavers used "every modern method of torture," he observed, from mutilation to waterboarding. The chapter on "Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control" is the most difficult and brutal chapter to read, and I was quite glad when it was done (and it's only like seven pages). It gets into the whipping, so common that some slaveowners would whip 'the last slave to leave the quarters,' just to remind the others who was always in charge. The Nazis, by comparison, mandated 25 max lashes, but would make the prisoner count them and sometimes claim they counted wrong and subject them to a few more. American slaveholders, she says, sometimes went as much as 400 lashes. They were often branded, sometimes on the face, and castrations were common too (I actually know a little about castration from my study of the Middle East back when I was a belly dancer in a medieval society, although that didn't cover, obviously, American history). She describes 14 lb chains with metal horns radiating two or three feet from the skull of slaves who'd tried to escape. (I saw a distant cousin when I visited New Orleans in 2000, a 'slave collar' that fit loosely around the neck and with bells to warn the master if he tried to escape, and make it impossible for him to get far even if he did.) Then there was 'bucking', in whcih a slave was tripped naked, hands and feet tied, forced into a sitting position around a stake and rotated for three hours of flogginw tih a cowhide, as other slaves were made to watch. Then he was washed down with salt and red pepper. There's some other stuff in that I've skipped over, this shit is pretty bad.
When I was in New Orleans I saw a holding pen for slaves near the river in which they'd be crammed, sometimes for days on end, without any room to do anything but stand. When some of them died they just stayed there, propped up by the others until someone let them out. One story I heard - you can find this all over the Internet, but I've been unable to verify *all* the claims - was the infamous Madame LeLaurie, who was found having supposedly performed hideous Nazi-like experiments on slaves (early 19th century) including turning one into a 'crab' by breaking all her limbs and a few others whose memory I have repressed. Evidence, for this, we were told, was the newspaper that reported it the next day and you could buy a reproduction in souvenir shops that detailed the horrors but they were written in French and I really didn't need to read it even if they'd had it in English. There are some problems with the story - they supposedly found a lot of slave corpses inside that no one knew about, which is pretty questionable given how hot Lousiana gets in an era with no a/c. I've Googled this from time to time and while some facts are indisputable (Mme. LeLaurie existed, a slave girl jumped out a second-story window and fell to her death in the street, widely regarded as suicide, the mansion catchign fire, and some evidence of brutality) but some say she was 'no worse' than others of her time, and given the wanton cruelty even for the time alleged to her, I'm not sure what to believe.
American slavery was pretty bad, for sure, and if you an pick apart Ms. Wilkerson's claims you're welcome to. I know plenty of other cultures and times have been very brutal, but remember we're talking about slaves, not everyone in general. It struck me that cruelty and barbarism were used quite specifically to keep slaves in line, and often not even for that, just for the sheer 'fun' of the cruelty. Given how brutal lynchings were afterward, and some of the less violent bigotries Wilkerson describes like 'pollution', i.e., black bodies couldn't be in pools or touch white people lest they 'pollute' them, a quite common bigotry that's also fairly universal. I hadn't heard/read about it with American blacks, and I Googled on it and found yeah, that was a big thing in the early 20th century and then don't you know CNN had a story just a few days later about the history of 'pool politics' in the 1950s.
Like I said, I haven't made a comprehensive study of what was absolutely the worst slave institution ever, but I'd say American slavery is definitely a contendah.
Now let's see if Substack posts this long-ass response without losing it (I have it copied and pasted into email if it does :)
I was sincerely wondering if you had come across an expert judiciously weighing different forms and making the conclusion that the US had by far the most brutal in history; that would surprise me, but I like changing my mind due to evidence. What I'm hearing is more that you have recently been exposed to some especially wrenching examples from US history.
From what I've come across, slavery has always been pretty bad, everywhere. While the average treatment of the compliant subset of slaves varies across cultures, it seems pretty universal that (1) the treatment of escaping or rebelling slaves is almost always brutal, and (2) individual owners can have unbounded cruelty if they "own" somebody else.
I consider slavery near the top of pernicious practices that our species has adopted, due to a combination of how terrible it is on average and the prevalence of the practice. Sadly, it paid off and so was very widely practiced on large scale. When humans got the idea that they could "own" other humans like they would "own" a donkey, and thus gain control and rights to the fruits of their labor, it was a terrible path.
If you had recently read about how slaves were treated in the Caribbean, you might for a while believe that was the worst form the world had ever known - until you read the gory details of another example elsewhere.
Anecdotes about the worst recorded examples of some single system, or even of several systems, are not a good yardstick for general comparisons of slavery across cultures.
So rather than compare, let's just stick to what you said - we know it was terrible - without need to compare. Finding that someplace else was worse, or better, would not in any way make US slavery any more acceptable.
The only function I've seen for comparison, is in making a case that the worst behavior in human history deserves the most generous compensation in human history. Other than that sort of case making, I see no gain to making dubious comparisons.
Like I mentioned before, I haven't made a comprehensive study of slavery, and probably never will, it's not my wheelhouse. I'm reading more on race issues than I was before but avoid the 'woke' crap. I'll table my assessment for now because I can't provide a lot of historical analysis for my position, it's assembled over many years of the slavery issue occasionally passing my eyes. I also don't know enough about pre-colonial slavery, and particularly pre-European slavery in Africa, something I've tried to find information about but have not found much except for a Wikipedia article about it. Google it, and almost every result is about post-contact slavery and how bad it was. Since Africa is *still* the centre of slavery today, within as well as without, that would be a quite interesting comparison.
What a conversation. You can see the threads of inadvertantly setting up her son for failure by focusing on blackness and how everything is steeped in 'white supremacy'.
"They'll break down what each European mathematician "brought us", and let hang in mid air the implication that we need not look beyond that continent for more contributors." WTF? Where does her son go to school, KKK High? As a piss-poor math student I didn't get taught about math discoveries *at all*. I think I knew that Arabs invented algebra, something I still haven't forgiven them for :) But, all kidding aside, I wonder a few things about the notion that we're teaching kids how 'white' math, literature, music or science or anything else is. Speaking from the perspective as a woman, since feminists make the same complaints about gender bias in studies. And also a Canadian, where my adopted peeps seem sometimes to be in a competition with Americans for valuable contributions to civilization. (Frozen fish, Pablum, zippers, basketball, ice hockey [bien sur!] hydrofoils, Gramophones, etc. You're welcome. Remember us in your will. :)
One question to ask is how truly critical a particular contribution is. Some inventions were truly revolutionary (the printing press, the telegraph, the telephone, the Internet) and others were valuable but not as civilization-shaking. Speaking American-historically, it's been pointed out by many that black folks and women are playing catchup after hundreds of years of oppression and limits to their education. The first women were admitted to the college in 1849, the first black men about twenty years later. White Eurocentric/American men have a long established centuries-long history of work to build upon, the rest of us less so - we're all using the knowledge base developed by them. As creators or researchers, we're just not as good at it, yet. Our contributions will likely prove to be less valuable (but hardly worthless, just perhaps valuable to niches) for awhile but we'll get better. I noticed this when I discovered a website for female-produced and directed movies, where women were portrayed as women actually were rather than the sexualized wank material they were required to be in mainstream movies. And, having a thing for offbeat indy movies to begin with, I thought, "Cool!" But, reading the descriptions of the movies I could tell they were a little amateurish, or maybe a better word is less-developed. The stories didn't sound quite compelling, although maybe the description writer didn't know how to write a compelling blurb - a sign that this may be an amateurish effort overall. We don't yet have the body of work of female production and direction to build upon, learning from previous mistakes.
Another thing I wonder about the 'domination' of white Euro-American male presence: How much of it depends on written records? Europeans have a long catologued history, as do Asians and Middle Easterners, and I'm not sure where Africa stands in that regard. I'll admit I'm a little fuzzy on pre-colonial Africa but I HAVE looked for a good history book on it and all I seem to find are books obsessed with Africa's slave trade. (Which makes me wonder about this lady who complains that the kids are being taught 'Africa started with the slave trade': Gee, what colour are the people who seem most obsessed with the African slave trade history, and want to predate America's founding to 1619 because, slave ship?)
It's possible Africans invented shit before the rest of us but no one knows because it's not documented. Who invented the wheel? Who knows, happened in preliterate societies. Probably several people in several different places.)
Then there's the guy who theorized heliocentrism 1,500 years before Copernicus: Aristarchus. Humanity seemingly forgot about it and Cop the European is the guy who figured out the truth, right? Why did we forget what Aristarchus taught us? Maybe heliocentrism wasn't the clusterfuck for the ancient Greeks as it was in Christian Europe. Maybe the Greeks were all like, "Yeah, that's interesting, gotta go to the temple now," rather than "BURN HIM!!! BURN HIM!!!"
In the end, math is about the least racist- and gender-possible subject ever. Math is what it is. The numbers are either wrong or right. Math doesn't care what colour you are, what's between your legs, whether you're Einstein or Dr. Oz, or what your politics are. You're either wrong or right.
"You can see the threads of inadvertantly setting up her son for failure by focusing on blackness and how everything is steeped in 'white supremacy'."
I've pointed to this problem over and over again. It's so depressing that more people can't see it. The current Tate of racial discourse teaches black children that they're doomed to fail. It practically insists that they see themselves as oppressed victims. Regardless of how rich or privileged they are by every reasonable metric.
It teaches them to constantly define themselves in opposition or comparison to white people. And then to feel personally implicated by the areas where black people in general lag behind.
Now, of course, I think *everybody* should be interested in the areas where black people lag behind. At least insofar as some of those disparities were created by a fairly recent legacy of legally-mandated racism (not to mention the centuries long exploitation of Africa and its resources).
But I don't feel insecure because some people believe that black people are inferior or less worthy of credit. I don't tally up the various contributions to humanity by race. I think that's where J is going so very wrong.
With regard to African history, which Africa ? It's a very big place. North Africa has a different culture and history. Was the trans Saharan slave trade that Westerners trapped into and expanded to become trans Atlantic slave trade about race? I don't know for sure but I suspect that the history of North Africa has a more detailed historical record than that South of the Sahara.
Were there libraries and museums that were destroyed in tribal warfare? When the Burmese sacked Ayutthaya they destroyed the Thai historical record. The destruction of national/tribal history by invading armies has been historically common worldwide. The lack of historical record may be more due to cruelty than neglect.
Good points. Yes, those are other reasons why there may not be a historical record to show that some African invented something important. I'm not sure I think the slave trade was much about race although I could be wrong. Europeans, having an advanced civilization, tended to regard any other culture more 'behind' than they to be 'savages', esp if they didn't know about Jesus. And of course any group that's 'less civilized' than you is easily enslaved (in the minds of the dominators). I don't think it was that different for whites - the Slavic tribes were heavily enslaved by Europeans back in the day.
This is why i'm getting very sick of hearing about slavery overall. Everyone did it, many peoples' ancestors were slaves regardless of colour, and what's more important is ending the slave trade that exists *today*. However, I do think we need to examine the American slave trade much more as it really does appear to have been a far more brutal system than slave cultures anywhere else. I'm still trying to find an answer as to why that's so. (Not to mention the post-Reconstruction era of brutal lynchings, which sometimes included some near-medieval level of torture. Things that make you go "WTF, AMERIKKKA???")
I would be interested in solid sources for the belief that "the American slave trade was far more brutal system than slave cultures anywhere else". I am very aware that this is a common theme in racial activism, but I'm interested in the historical analysis to support or debunk that assertion?
I'm somewhat skeptical, given accounts of, say, Greeks tossing slaves into snakepits for the fun of it, slaves being burned alive at master's funerals, the terrible life of a galley slave, stories of torture and slavery pre-Columbian North America, slave labor used by Japan in WWII, Roman slave revolts and their punishment, etc. My unscientific sample of eclectic sources over a lifetime of reading (not focused on slavery per se), would suggest that any time somebody effectively "owns" somebody else as property, there are going to be terrible abuses, period - both systematic and individual (psychopaths owning slaves can be uninhibited). But I'm open to more systematic assessments.
One datapoint in such an assessment would be that over the course of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the territories now included in the United States received about 389,000 slaves from Africa; the rest of the Americas received about 10,300,000 (ie: US received about about 4% of total).
For every enslaved African brought to the US, there are about 100 descendants today (there were about 10 descendants at the time of the US Civil War). By contrast, over 1 million slaves were receive in Jamaica, and there are about 2.5 descendants today for each imported slave.
Slaves were pretty much worked to death and replaced, in the Caribbean and Brazil. Of course, being worked to death is only one form of brutality, but I have been assured that other forms of brutality were also rampant. Beyond the non-US destinations of the Trans-Atlantic trade, I've read of many terrible things done to slaves around the world historically. In some places and for some classes of slaves, life was better than in other cases, but I have seen nothing so far that suggests that the North American slavery was uniquely brutal.
So I'm wondering if your impression that slavery in the US, (or in territory which became the US) was uniquely brutal comes from solid sources, or from something closer to DEI trainings? I'm very open to new sources.
(For the sizes of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, I recommend David Eltis' work, numerically summarized at https://www.slavevoyages.org/assessment/estimates)
"I would be interested in solid sources for the belief that "the American slave trade was far more brutal system than slave cultures anywhere else""
I'm uncomfortable with the framing of one type of slavery being "worse than" another. But I think there are a number of bases for the claim that are, at least, reasonable.
First, all the various examples you cited regarding other types of slavery (except the snake pits and the burning at their master's funerals), are all true of The Atlantic slave trade at the same time. Slave revolts were brutally and disproportionately punished (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nat_Turner%27s_slave_rebellion), torture was fairly commonplace, and the Middle Passage was, I daresay, worse even that what galley slaves had to endure (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Passage).
There's also the fact that it happened relatively recently, in what was, comparatively speaking, a civilised country that wasn't at war (unlike Japan). And while black people weren't tossed into snake pits, they were lynched for the fun of it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynching_in_the_United_States#Photographic_records_and_postcards), which, in some cases, included being burned alive (https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/slavery/experience/responses/history2.html).
I've spent far more time than I care to learning about The Atlantic Slave trade. There's endless detail about it's brutality if you look online for it. But there's less data on other forms, largely, as I said, because The Atlantic slave trade is more modern and therefore more reliably detailed. There are surviving audio testimonies of slaves in America. Not so from other legalised forms of slavery.
But yeah, ultimately, I think we should all be able to agree, without the slightest hesitation or desire to relativise, that it's one of the most awful stains on humanity's moral history. Certainly its modern history. We should also be able to agree that white people today don't need to feel complicit or defensive about it.
First off, I find all forms of slavery abominable, and the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was indeed very terrible indeed. Nothing either of us says about relative comparisons implies in any way that any kind of slavery is OK. Let's agree on that and move to the areas where we do not have consensus yet.
PgbR: "I would be interested in solid sources for the belief that "the American slave trade was far more brutal system than slave cultures anywhere else""
Note carefully the specific assertion I was questioning, quoted from the comment to which I was responding; it's a current example of a common theme in modern anti-racism. I was not dismissing it, I was asking for solid sources and using examples to explain my initial skepticism, pending such a source.
(1) At question is not whether the US trade was brutal or abominable (see opening), but whether it was "far more brutal" than that of any other culture.
(2) I was talking about the slave trade to the (sometimes future) United States, whose ships carried about 2.5% of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, and whose shores received about 4%. I am contending that the larger bulk of that trade appears to have been at least as brutal and very likely more so, than that ending on US shores. This subset of my questioning is not addressed by arguments about the overall TA slave trade.
(3) Brutal slave treatment in the service of a war of conquest doesn't seem to make it any less brutal. The rationale for the slavery was not part of the assertion I was questioning.
Was the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in Western Africa "far more brutal" than the Arabic slave trade in Eastern Africa? They had similar total numbers, albeit stretched over more centuries in the latter case. The Arabic slave trade did enormous numbers of castrations, which had a high fatality rate. Other than that difference, I haven't seen a case made for either being "far more brutal" than the others.
As an aside, in regard to specifically comparing just the Middle Passage and being a galley slave - even though both are horrible histories, the best estimates are that about 20% of those embarking in Africa died before arriving in the New World. As terrible as that is, the fatality rate among galley slaves was essentially 100 percent as they were worked to death on the oars, and the horrors they faced in the galley would last the rest of their short lives.
(Although, suffering the Middle Passage combined with ending up on a Caribbean sugar cane plantation to be typically worked to death within a few years, would be more comparable to being a galley slave).
If we read about the rebellion led by Spartacus, and the massive crucifixions that were used to punish it, it becomes hard to make the comparative case that the US slave trade was "far more brutal" in the way it punished rebellions, or in the conditions which caused people to rebel even knowing the consequences.
Remember, the assertion I was asking for references for was not "was US based slavery terrible and brutal in general" nor "did the worse examples exhibit the same kinds of brutality as the worst examples elsewhere in the world" - but rather that the US slave trade was "far worse than" the slavery in any other culture. Both being really bad does not support the assertion in question.
TL;DR:
* I agree that US Slavery was a terrible, horrible and brutal affront to humanity
* I need more evidence before I can agree that it was "far more brutal" than any other slavery practiced by humans.
And I'm not seeing any of *that* evidence in your response.
"Note carefully the specific assertion I was questioning, quoted from the comment to which I was responding"
Yep, I understood the question you were asking, and acknowledged that I was reframing it slightly because as asked, it's almost impossible to answer. Firstly because what qualifies as "far more brutal" is subjective, and secondly because there are all kinds of examples of slavery throughout history that we don't have good data for. In fact, we don't have very good data for most forms of slavery as they were a long time ago. I couldn't say with any authority how the Egyptian slave trade compared to the Atlantic slave trade, for example.
That's why I compared the Atlantic slave trade to the other examples of slavery you mentioned (I can't believe I forgot, as Nicole mentions below, the various medical experiments performed on slaves, women in particular). There are many things, like those experiments, that we don't hear of in accounts of other examples of slavery. And very few (if any) things we hear about in other accounts of slavery that didn't also happen during the Atlantic slave trade. Galley slaves, for example, worked to death on the oars, African slaves, if they survived the journey, worked to death on the land. This isn't a perfect measure of its brutality, but it's a reasonable basis for the argument.
I didn't mean to imply that you think slavery is okay. Obviously you don't. But rather that it's very difficult for comparisons not to come across as moral relativism or attempts to say "well, other people did it too." I don't think you'd be tempted to do this if not for the idiots arguing that white people are complicit in atrocities that took place before they were born. Maybe I'm wrong about that. But I very rarely hear anybody talk about other genocides when the Holocaust is brought up, for example.
Disposing with a potential distraction: I understand your point "I don't think you'd be tempted to do this if not for the idiots arguing that white people are complicit in atrocities that took place before they were born." However, I was not trying to connect anything to complicity one way or another - that's a separate issue and I agree with you about that.
My point was limited to questioning the narrative that "slavery in the US was far more brutal" than everywhere else in the world. I don't currently believe that is true, so unless there is some solid reason to support it, we should STOP REPEATING IT. Take it out of the bullet points.
I was NOT trying to suggest that we should replace that talking point with "slavery in the US was better" much less "slavery in the US was OK". Unless we can justify that "far more brutal" narrative, let's just stop comparing it to other forms of slavery, period. That kind of comparison doesn't provide any guidance to the problem of what to do now, anyway, as far as I can see - and all the more so for an unjustifiable comparison. It was brutal, as were all forms of slavery. That's enough.
So I think we are agreed, to just avoid that kind of comparison, as not helpful and difficult to do anyway.
"I don't currently believe that is true, so unless there is some solid reason to support it, we should STOP REPEATING IT. Take it out of the bullet points."
Right, but I think it's fair to say you're not an expert on the history of slavery. Nor am I of course.
I'm certainly not wedded to that narrative. I don't think I've ever espoused it myself, precisely because it's difficult (and tasteless) to compare. I think its recency and its direct contradiction of the "self-evident truths" in the Declaration of Independence are far more relevant that comparisons to Ancient Egyptian slavery. But I guess I also don't hear it very often. And when I do, it's usually comparing slavery in the US at that time to slavery in Africa at that time, which, as far as I know, *was* far less brutal.
So I guess my question is; why does the narrative bother you? Particularly given that it isn't something that you can confidently refute, doesn't have any significant impact that I can see, and is at least a reasonable claim given what we do know about it.
I raised the point about complicity precisely because I can't see any other issue (maybe I'm missing something of course). And I think an important piece of working through our issues with racism is purging this notion of white complicity from our collective mind. It inevitably makes conversations more accusatory on the one hand, and more defensive on the other, than they need to be. For example, I might have my doubts if somebody called the Holocaust a more brutal genocide than Stalin's, but I wouldn't be concerned one way or another if that narrative were repeated.
(You mention complicity again, but we are agreed upon that separate issue, so let's drop it)
I was responding to the assertion here in your comment section that US slavery was "far more brutal" than any other culture, which I consider an unsubstantiated allegation, which seems rather unlikely to be true. However, I am very willing to revise that assessment if anybody can provide a good source.
You note that neither of us is an expert on slavery. We are not climate scientists either, but at least somebody making a credible assertion about climate change should be able to cite their expert sources, which is all I asked for. I've never seen a sober analysis which placed US slavery as far worse than any other in the world, not one - just naked assertions without evidence.
You speak about recent history versus ancient history. But (1) the specific assertion I questioned and quoted did not make that limitation and (2) some of the counter examples I tentatively mentioned as justifying skepticism are contemporary or more recent. That assertion would require that US slavery was far more brutal than the other 96% of trans Atlantic slavery, which to my best understanding was more brutal and fatal. And far more brutal than the contemporary Arabic slave trade in Eastern Africa. And far more brutal than the Japanese use of slave labor in Asia during WWII.
You say you don't encounter that assertion often; for me, seeing it crop up in your comment thread was the Nth time I have encountered it. Maybe it will fade away, or maybe you will start seeing it more often. Time will tell.
(I have also seen videos of young people asserting that the US invented slavery. Full stop. That's what ordinary non-intellectual people take away from their history lessons; while it's not the same assertion, it comes from the same attempts to create an emotionally evocative but intellectually flimsy narrative, and they absorbed the tone if not the details.)
You ask why (other than to avoid allegations of complicity) would anybody care about an unsupported and likely false comparison being made, rather than just accepting it and moving on. Fair question.
Of course, just a love of the truth is one component of it. Remember, I asked for sources, not as a tactic but because if there are solid sources I *will* probably revise my opinion, as I have many times. Otherwise I suggest not passing on a possible false comparison. I see truth seeking as an incremental refinement process. This is a strong proclivity of mine in general, whether I'm checking out an urban legend, or looking at who really invented something, or what causes ulcers. It's not specific to politics or to racial history or any other niche.
Before proceeding, I think it's worth asking why the assertion gets made, not just why it was questioned. Why would somebody assert that US slavery was far worse than that of any other culture? What payoffs would persuading others of that assertion have? If the motive is just getting the truth out there in the same spirit I've mentioned, then sources should be readily and cheerfully available. If the motive is emotional hijacking of critical thinking, then sources are less important, because no moral person should ever pause to ask for them.
But you tell me - what harm would result if we agreed not to assert that strong comparison without evidence? How would it hurt the dialogue or truth seeking? Why is is important to make or defend such an assertion?
I believe that the assertion that US slavery was uniquely brutal is part of weaving a particular narrative more related to a morality play than to honest truth seeking. If it really was, by far, the worst example in all of human history around the globe, then wouldn't it be morally suspect to question proportionately extreme counter-measures? Doesn't all the kind of careful nuancing that you and I attempt to do fall into trivia, when confronting the ultimate evil humanity is capable of?
One of the problems I find with the neo-progressive narrative on race is the tendency to remove history from relevant context. The 1619 project and related narratives seeks to center the American experience on oppression, permeating every value, ideal, or pragmatic decision. This is of course based on a substantial (but smaller) kernel of truth, but it attempts to exaggerate, distort, and decontextualize that to justify more radical analysis and prescriptions. One common element of that distortion is to frame US slavery as historically unprecedented and uniquely evil. I don't like distortions, especially in service of dogmatic ideologies.
As such, repeating an unsupported allegation seems harmful (just as repeating some unfactual urban legends can be harmful). However, if there is evidential support, then my regard for truth is again dominant and I will change my view of that assertion. You and I might still agree that comparisons are not very useful, but I would not challenge the truth of it. But until then, I support not making any unsupportable assertions in any direction. Slavery was very bad, and is always very bad, regardless of what happens or happened somewhere else; that's enough for rational political purposes.
Honestly, I am puzzled by how hard you seem to be taking this. We both agree that (1) it was a horrible blemish and terribly cruel and brutal, (2) that's quite sufficient reason to condemn it, it doesn't have to be the worst to be very bad, (3) we should not link it to present day complicity in any case, and (4) it's not easy to make accurate and objective comparisons between brutal systems and would at minimum take major effort by unbiased experts. For all those reasons I would have expected you go agree that we should avoid making strong yet simplistic comparisons of US slavery with all other examples, based on no solid sources.
As for the related implicit question of why this extended discussion, that's not because this is a big issue for me (it's not, I've spent very little time on this issue over recent years, my comment was meant to be a brief questioning and search for possible sources which might modify my view and I never anticipated nearly so much back and forth!), I think the duration is due to some personality characteristics which you and I share.
I have (well earned) respect for you, and you are engaging intelligently in good faith with me, and I enjoy that kind of shared pursuit of truth. I don't think either of us is imputing ill motives, or seeking to boost our own egos in "owning" the other; we seek truth. You appear to behave similarly. And I enjoy trying to craft words in a way to convey subtle distinctions and nuance arguments clearly. The length of our dialogue here has more to do with that vibrant engagement, than with the global importance of the topic which spawned it.
----
I do want to push back on one thing you said: "slavery in Africa at that time, which, as far as I know, *was* far less brutal."
How much do you know about how the empires in Africa acquired over 20 million salable human being to provide first to the Arabs and then to European traders?
How many defending warriors were killed in the conquer of other tribes? How many non-warrior villagers were killed as too young, too old, too weak, or too feisty to make valuable slaves? If not killed outright, how many villagers later died of starvation after being plundered for slaves? How brutally were captured people treated during the breaking period as they were driven to the fortresses to be later sold? I do not know, but given the population age distribution of similar societies, and the economic dynamics involved, I suspect that multiple others were brutalized and killed for every prime slave delivered at the port for sale to the Arabs or Europeans.
Whether the slaves kept for use within the empires themselves were better treated than the ones sold is going to be hard to determine fairly (given the diversity within African societies and the tendency to cherry pick stories to support narratives), but in any case they represent a small sliver of the total people conquered and enslaved by Africans in Africa.
There is no slavery which is not brutal, because people do not take well to being enslaved. Comparison is not needed and should in general be avoided, within the political dialogue context. But if one nevertheless wants to compare brutality, then one needs to be honest about it.
"I was responding to the assertion here in your comment section that US slavery was "far more brutal" than any other culture, which I consider an unsubstantiated allegation, which seems rather unlikely to be true."
Yep, I know that. I didn't make the assertion, and I haven't tried to defend it with any enthusiasm. You asked for information that might support it, and I offered some that I found persuasive but far from definitive. If you don't find it persuasive, that's totally fair. There is no "truth" here, at least not that we'll unearth without investing several years of study. There are no definitive statistics that measure levels of brutality throughout the history of slavery. No metrics for human suffering. Just random accounts of horror that we dig up on the internet. Your questions about warriors killed in the conquer of other tribes are literally impossible to answer.
You mention the 1619 project and a few staggeringly ill-informed young people. But getting to the bottom of which form of slavery was most brutal will have zero impact on either, because the fact of the Atlantic slave trade is enough. Even if we had definitive proof that it was the least brutal form of slavery in history, what we *do* know about it is more than emotionally evocative enough for the people who want to fixate on it. As I said, it's incompatibility with the Declaration of Independence alone is enough to keep the grifters grifting for years to come.
Those grifters profit mainly from race essentialism and guilt based on the notion of racial complicity, which is why I think those are much more interesting and valuable routes to break down false narratives. Convincing the world that people aren't responsible for the past actions of people with the same skin colour would have a seismic impact on racial discourse. Convincing the world that the Atlantic slave trade was only the fifth most brutal form of slavery in history would have no real impact whatsoever. That's why I think the former is a far more worthwhile use of our attention.
You say you're puzzled by how hard I seem to be taking this, but I feel exactly the same way.😅 I'm genuinely not taking it hard at all. You call Nicole's comment an "allegation" in your last reply. And it does seem as if you're taking her statement personally. I conceded that the assertion might not be true in my very first reply. And again, if you're not convinced, that's totally reasonable. I just don't think it's unreasonable that other people *are* convinced. I don't think Nicole made the assertion because she believes America invented slavery or because she's a supporter of the 1619 project or because she wants to promulgate an anti-American narrative.
I haven't done a comprehensive study of slavery in all times and places so I can't swear the American system was THE most brutal and I'll admit I tend to avoid, in most cases, reading too much about human cruelty to others because I find it extremely upsetting. I was furious at my history teacher in college for making us read 'Treblinka' which I figured would at least have a happy ending as it ended with a successful Nazi concentration prisoner revolt, but it was the most brutal thing I'd read to date and I was deeply disturbed by it. I consoled myself that I could put it out of my mind and forget about it, which I did, and all I remember now is descriptions of the 'black humour' (not racial, the very dark humour you find from people in very dark places) and the fact that like 300 pages later, the goddamn happy ending didn't come until like the last three pages. I was pissed.
Worst thing I've read *since* then was intentional, "Hitler's Willing Executioners", which surpasses Treblinka in horror (it makes Viktor Frankl's Man's Search For Meaning look like a fucking fairy tale) but I read it about ten years ago, trying to understand the nature of evil and two things that have always struck me as speaking to the core of human evil are lynchings, which Steve has gotten into already and I will add "Ditto, and I read one on Medium a few months back that SO horrified me about what was done to a black woman in the 1930s that I'm like, the ones who just got hung had it easy. The brutality of lynchings post-Civil War are a strong argument for how much hatred white people of the day had for black people for reasons I doubt I will ever understand. Several years prior, I was surprised to find human beings HAD been burnt at the stake here, if not as much as in Europe, and pretty much only black men in particularly brutal killings. No witches in Salem or anywhere else in the Colonies were ever burnt at the stake.
I got my information from Isabel Wilkerson's "Caste: The Origin of our Discontents" which someone gave me for Christmas a few years ago. I thought, "Oh shit, I wonder if this is one of those lefty-extremist things," but I thought it was quite good, even though I would suggest she is a little too lefty on anti/racism for my taste. BUT....I checked out at least a few of her claims and found them valid. Like that the Nazis' Final Solution was inspired in part by the really hardcore, stratified racism found in the US at the time. Wilkerson also pointed out that whites were even stratified amongst themselves in the early 20th century which was another, "Holy fuck, she nailed it," moment as I was compiling and outlining family history on my mother's side with my uncle and I'd laughed with him about how our formerly moneyed family managed to lose it all by marrying the 'wrong people' - not POC, but people of the 'wrong' European ethnic lineage, including one whose family disowned them because he married...<gasp!> AN AMERICAN! What Wilkerson described about the various European castes fit a little with what I found in our family history.
I checked this book out before I read it and I took Wilkerson to be a fairly credible source (I didn't make an exhaustive study of it, but I did the same before asking for '1493' when some nutty black Medium writer said I needed to read it. It's a well-regarded book and I got it for Christmas (it was on my list). Just started it last night.
Wilkerson's bio notes she's a Pulitzer Prize winner and also a winner of the National Humanities Medal, a NY Times bestseller (The Warmth of Other Suns) and a few other non-fiction awards. She quotes minister William Goodell in the 1830s writing that slaves had no right to ever fight back, defend themselves, has 'no protection and no redress," and furthermore was 'not capable of being injured'.
"Whipping was a geteay form of violence that led to bizarrely creative levels of sadism," wrote the historian Edward Baptist. Enslavers used "every modern method of torture," he observed, from mutilation to waterboarding. The chapter on "Terror as Enforcement, Cruelty as a Means of Control" is the most difficult and brutal chapter to read, and I was quite glad when it was done (and it's only like seven pages). It gets into the whipping, so common that some slaveowners would whip 'the last slave to leave the quarters,' just to remind the others who was always in charge. The Nazis, by comparison, mandated 25 max lashes, but would make the prisoner count them and sometimes claim they counted wrong and subject them to a few more. American slaveholders, she says, sometimes went as much as 400 lashes. They were often branded, sometimes on the face, and castrations were common too (I actually know a little about castration from my study of the Middle East back when I was a belly dancer in a medieval society, although that didn't cover, obviously, American history). She describes 14 lb chains with metal horns radiating two or three feet from the skull of slaves who'd tried to escape. (I saw a distant cousin when I visited New Orleans in 2000, a 'slave collar' that fit loosely around the neck and with bells to warn the master if he tried to escape, and make it impossible for him to get far even if he did.) Then there was 'bucking', in whcih a slave was tripped naked, hands and feet tied, forced into a sitting position around a stake and rotated for three hours of flogginw tih a cowhide, as other slaves were made to watch. Then he was washed down with salt and red pepper. There's some other stuff in that I've skipped over, this shit is pretty bad.
When I was in New Orleans I saw a holding pen for slaves near the river in which they'd be crammed, sometimes for days on end, without any room to do anything but stand. When some of them died they just stayed there, propped up by the others until someone let them out. One story I heard - you can find this all over the Internet, but I've been unable to verify *all* the claims - was the infamous Madame LeLaurie, who was found having supposedly performed hideous Nazi-like experiments on slaves (early 19th century) including turning one into a 'crab' by breaking all her limbs and a few others whose memory I have repressed. Evidence, for this, we were told, was the newspaper that reported it the next day and you could buy a reproduction in souvenir shops that detailed the horrors but they were written in French and I really didn't need to read it even if they'd had it in English. There are some problems with the story - they supposedly found a lot of slave corpses inside that no one knew about, which is pretty questionable given how hot Lousiana gets in an era with no a/c. I've Googled this from time to time and while some facts are indisputable (Mme. LeLaurie existed, a slave girl jumped out a second-story window and fell to her death in the street, widely regarded as suicide, the mansion catchign fire, and some evidence of brutality) but some say she was 'no worse' than others of her time, and given the wanton cruelty even for the time alleged to her, I'm not sure what to believe.
American slavery was pretty bad, for sure, and if you an pick apart Ms. Wilkerson's claims you're welcome to. I know plenty of other cultures and times have been very brutal, but remember we're talking about slaves, not everyone in general. It struck me that cruelty and barbarism were used quite specifically to keep slaves in line, and often not even for that, just for the sheer 'fun' of the cruelty. Given how brutal lynchings were afterward, and some of the less violent bigotries Wilkerson describes like 'pollution', i.e., black bodies couldn't be in pools or touch white people lest they 'pollute' them, a quite common bigotry that's also fairly universal. I hadn't heard/read about it with American blacks, and I Googled on it and found yeah, that was a big thing in the early 20th century and then don't you know CNN had a story just a few days later about the history of 'pool politics' in the 1950s.
Like I said, I haven't made a comprehensive study of what was absolutely the worst slave institution ever, but I'd say American slavery is definitely a contendah.
Now let's see if Substack posts this long-ass response without losing it (I have it copied and pasted into email if it does :)
> "American slavery was pretty bad, for sure"
Let's agree on that.
I was sincerely wondering if you had come across an expert judiciously weighing different forms and making the conclusion that the US had by far the most brutal in history; that would surprise me, but I like changing my mind due to evidence. What I'm hearing is more that you have recently been exposed to some especially wrenching examples from US history.
From what I've come across, slavery has always been pretty bad, everywhere. While the average treatment of the compliant subset of slaves varies across cultures, it seems pretty universal that (1) the treatment of escaping or rebelling slaves is almost always brutal, and (2) individual owners can have unbounded cruelty if they "own" somebody else.
I consider slavery near the top of pernicious practices that our species has adopted, due to a combination of how terrible it is on average and the prevalence of the practice. Sadly, it paid off and so was very widely practiced on large scale. When humans got the idea that they could "own" other humans like they would "own" a donkey, and thus gain control and rights to the fruits of their labor, it was a terrible path.
If you had recently read about how slaves were treated in the Caribbean, you might for a while believe that was the worst form the world had ever known - until you read the gory details of another example elsewhere.
Anecdotes about the worst recorded examples of some single system, or even of several systems, are not a good yardstick for general comparisons of slavery across cultures.
So rather than compare, let's just stick to what you said - we know it was terrible - without need to compare. Finding that someplace else was worse, or better, would not in any way make US slavery any more acceptable.
The only function I've seen for comparison, is in making a case that the worst behavior in human history deserves the most generous compensation in human history. Other than that sort of case making, I see no gain to making dubious comparisons.
Like I mentioned before, I haven't made a comprehensive study of slavery, and probably never will, it's not my wheelhouse. I'm reading more on race issues than I was before but avoid the 'woke' crap. I'll table my assessment for now because I can't provide a lot of historical analysis for my position, it's assembled over many years of the slavery issue occasionally passing my eyes. I also don't know enough about pre-colonial slavery, and particularly pre-European slavery in Africa, something I've tried to find information about but have not found much except for a Wikipedia article about it. Google it, and almost every result is about post-contact slavery and how bad it was. Since Africa is *still* the centre of slavery today, within as well as without, that would be a quite interesting comparison.