Senate "Race" Relations (was "U.S. Society and Black Men")

Yea, there wasn't a "but" nor a "too" that I could see.

There really aren't either applied to the slave trade which led to so many Africans being deported to the Americas. The exact terminology would be "the overwhelming majority of African slaves sold to Europeans and deported to the Americas were sold by Africans". Only 2% of the ~11 million slaves bought by Europeans to be sent to the Americas were reduced into slavery by Europeans in the first place. The rest were either reduced into slavery on the continent or actually born into it on the continent - sickening as it may sound, a significant portion of the African slaves sold by Africans to Europeans were raised from infancy with the deliberate intent to sell them as slaves...

 

EDIT: Well this sucks. I had quite a long post, of which our wonderful server decided to retain only the first paragraph.

Anyway, what evidence do you have of that last statement, Lordban. That Europeans didn't directly abduct slaves isn't the same as saying people were "raised from infancy" to be sold as slaves. Nor, going further, is being "reduced to it on the continent" because of a war no one would have fought if Europeans had not offered exorbitant prices for slaves really any appreciable comment that advances our understanding of slavery in Africa. As with calculating deaths attributable to a natural disaster, the relevant metric is "excess deaths" (here, excess slaves) that would not have existed were it not for this looming external factor.

The trade ended up being a huge destabilizer in Africa because in societies there, as in many others worldwide, war captives were one of the few legitimate sources of slaves. Therefore, people driven by the profit motive became much more likely to launch wars of conquest against one another, hoping to keep up with demand. That is--as I went into great depth in my now vanished post--also sad, but very different than what you've proposed.

Assessing the guilt/culpability of mid-level players in a larger system is complex. For instance, how do we understand the female employees that helped arrange for the occasions when Hollywood actresses were raped or assaulted by executives? Individually, their actions are wrong. But they exist within a larger structure they neither defined nor appreciably controlled. Ultimately, we have to turn to those who drove defined the structural and ideological parameters wherein the rest of the world passed its life.

 

https://thegrio.com/2018/10/03/geor...on-after-falsely-claiming-black-man-shot-her/

The lengths people will go to

 

I don't have the time for a long response, but there would be a few things I'd point out:

1. The markets were preexisting to Europeans investing it (more than a millennium before the Portuguese mapped the coasts), and actually continued for a while after them (1929 in West Africa, 1964 in East Africa, 1980 in Mauretania); they were defined and controlled without their influence
2. Of course, the arrival of buyers of their power, especially when Britain and France entered the trade, caused some serious destabilization
3. There's also a large measure of hypocrisy European-side - they were technically following the precepts (sometimes mandates) from their religious authorities by not doing the job of enslaving people themselves
4. War only represented one method of acquisition; also existed and was of significant importance a literal production of slaves in many areas; enslavement was also a means to get rid of criminal elements (actual criminals and criminals captured out of a pretext)
5. We're in general not talking one system, considering how many different actors existed across how many millennia and relying to how many varying practices on how many different grounds
6. As to sourcing: "Les Traites négrières, essai d'histoire globale" by Olivier Pétré-Grenouilleau (2004, Gallimard)

And here I was wondering when that kind of thing would happen. Turns out it already did

What are the chances the scumbag actually does the 15 years of time?

 

And here's what makes her actions especially evil:

"Unfortunately Hall’s antics ensnared a Black man matching her fake description who was arrested and taken in for questioning."

What if they'd killed that guy? That guy should be thanking his lucky stars.

 

And suing that chick.

 

1. I don't think the pre-existence of other sorts of slave markets is relevant, as you yourself have made passing reference of and Merkurian dealt with at length. It's a bit like pointing out that people used silver as a valuable before the Spanish occupation of Mexico.

2/4/5. There was not one system prior, but there was arguably one system after. These were all stratified societies with slavery. Though they came from a variety of sources (war, crime, etc) the common theme was that slavery had a pretty contained role in society. It was a form of social censure, often pretty specific to individuals, and in many cases with some sort of opportunity for redemptive re-integration into society, albeit with an inferior role.

By contrast, what the trans-Atlantic slave trade built was something that was pretty rare in the time prior: a society based on slavery. It was the primary driver of its economy, it played a major role in its legal system, had an outsized voiced in its ideological self-definition and increasingly bent the countries and colonies involved in the direction of police states. This emerged out of a pretty unique ferment of globalization, and early capitalism, among other things. The point I want to make here is that a slave society requires an entirely different scale and nature of slavery than do societies where slaves serve a more accessory function.

6. Do you have some English language reference? I don't speak French but I am pretty familiar with the major authors on slavery in that language (eg David Brion Davis) and can't say I recall any such allegation. It would be interesting to see.

 

1. It's relevant in one aspect: it does not absolve the societies who practiced selling slaves of their responsibilities prior to the 15th century or after 1850.

2/4/5. There definitely wasn't one system after locally, nor during - we're talking about over a hundred different local regimes across many centuries and thousands of miles of coast. It's a testament to how self-centered the western white man has become that he can believe he can cause a near-uniform system to appear in the societal organization of two sub-continents, when in practice he's not capable of bringing about that change from the outside in one country when deliberately attempting it.

It should also be of note that while in the local context of the Americas, the use of slaves did represent a major factor in the economy, it had very little impact in the European countries themselves.

Societally-speaking, it did not play a driving factor at all. Of its four major actors, two of them, Spain and Portugal, stayed highly conservative Catholic societies, and eventually descended in relative insignificance, to the point of pretty much being non-factors by the Revolutionary wars. The British Empire gradually became a parliamentary society concurrently with the century in which it truly invested in slave trade. For France, it corresponded to enlightenment, and far from ending in a police state, the tentative early liberalization exploded into the Révolution. Police states, for their part, first emerged in Europe in countries which did not or hardly participated in the Atlantic slave trade.

Contrary to belief, the Atlantic slave trade itself wasn't even necessarily always profitable, and it ends for Europe precisely when early capitalism is in full-swing, while in the USA, it continues only for states which industrialization is largely leaving behind. Capitalism has this cruel property of favoring what is economically more efficient, and slavery already barely was before industrialization. It simply wasn't worth keeping during industrialization, and on a societal level, it became a political nuisance to get rid of, so capitalist societies got rid of it.

As to its economic impact, Portugal and Spain sank to economic insignificance despite (especially for Portugal) their widespread use of slaves; and at their respective heights, slave-using production barely represented 1.5% of the GDP of France and 3% of the GDP of the British Empire - periods which, as pointed out, corresponded to the gradual parliamentarization of Britain and the Enlightenment in France.

And yes, I did just point out that 11 million people were deported by Europeans across centuries for virtually no significant profit.

6. Most of my history library is in French for obvious reasons, but if I do find a well-documented source in English, I'll post it.

 

A. I don't mean to suggest it was all a single system. I mean to imply that the various systems tended to share features, which also held across most other pre-modern societies that employed slavery. Largely because they were pre-industrial, there were some common constraints on what was really useful or achievable through these methods.

B. I of course agree with your stipulation that it was the colonies that became police states, because this is where slavery was both concentrated and useful. Noting that it didn't have as much impact on the colonial centers proper is like pointing out that even in periods of expansive coal mining, Washington DC was not much affected but instead places like West Virginia. Whether inside colonialism or other systems, centers of powers have always tended to insure negative consequences are, for them, externalities.

C. Turning to the question of economics, whether it was "always" profitable isn't really the most meaningful question. Consider, instead, the importance of Southern cotton for basically all of the European textile industries. In a global economy requiring raw materials, it's not really sensible to be dismissive of the method of raw material acquisition. Indeed, the disruptions in the cotton supply chain triggered the Lancashire Cotton Panic. Similarly, the level of effort thrown into trying to re-establish slavery in the Carribbean (taking the French empire as exemplary) sort of undermines the notion that it was unimportant. At the very least, that view certainly does not coincide with the best understanding of policy makers at the time.

 

A. There were quite a wide variety of constraints, but to get into them in Africa, you have to go deeper into local conditions (both space and time-wise), and expand as well towards Arab and Berber slavery, especially when looking at the Portuguese role in African slavery.

B. Certainly the centers of power ensured negative consequences were externalities, and essentially, they were. With regards to the major colonial powers, though, abolition was far from untainted by self-centered concerns... Here, the USA are included - it's highly significant how Lincoln's abolition did not apply in the four slave states which stayed in the Union.

C. Profitability is very much a question, and goes well beyond the slave trade itself. On the actual traders' part, on two of the three parts of the chain, there were competing activities which could be more lucrative (not going to go into them while in a break at the office )

With regards to cotton more specifically, it's a perfect example of the continuance of Christian hypocrisy Europe-side. Abolition having been effected decades earlier certainly did not stop Europe from buying slave-produced cotton in foreign countries, just like the Papal bull in early 16th century effectively forbidding Christians from enslaving anybody who wasn't in a religious war with them was circumvented both by rejecting Papal authority and purchasing people who were already enslaved.

As for French Carribean slavery, ironically, yes, it was very much unimportant on the scale of the country's economy (and the frantic move to re-establish it saw a rentability even more hazardous because of the various coalition wars and the dominance of the Royal Navy). Its Napoleonic re-establishment was, however, largely informed... on a personal level... First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte was married to a widow from Créole nobility...

 

B. I'd disagree re:Lincoln. This is a talking point that Southern apologists love, but I don't think withstands scrutiny. In the first place, it wasn't going to be politically viable to have millions of free blacks running around, with several thousand of them having military training and combat experience, and expect to maintain enslavement in two or three states. Basically the whole world understood that abolition was something they couldn't meaningfully undo or even reverse the momentum of.

That besides, there was work on the 13th Amendment banning slavery universally within the nation that same year. There would be no reason to do this if there was some nefarious plot to keep Union-aligned states able to maintain slavery. The only real significance in talking about the limited scope of the Emancipation Proclamation is discussing Lincoln's political calculations to balance maximal support for his cause, and how they tried to work within the confines of the prevailing legal theory of the day.

C. Sure, but I think you have to go beyond just noting "hypocrisy." They were the overwhelming major supplier of cotton for all the European textile industries. Just as you couldn't write about the 20th century without acknowledging the role of oil from Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Middle East, you also have to acknowledge that this industry was really important in the early Industrial Revolution.

C-2. The view of Josephine as some megaphone of the planter aristrocracy has never been well-evidenced and is in fact pretty out of date. More recent authors like Philippe Girard and Laurent Dubois are pretty dismissive. We know that she was a back-channel for Touissant L'overture as he looked to check in on his children, and I find it pretty unlikely that he would have struck up a friendship with some wild racist. That besides, Napoleon routinely ignored the wishes of his family and loved ones when it came to matters of state. I think the more likely point is that Napoleon reinstated slavery in the Caribbean because he thought it was most profitable to reinstate slavery in the Caribbean.

6. Would you mind translating the relevant passages or at least giving the corresponding footnotes?

 

He couldn't have even if he wanted to. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued under his authority as commander-in-chief of the armed forces of the U.S. Since the military administered territory taken from the CSA, the president could unilaterally set policy. As Kentucky, Missouri, Maryland and Delaware were not in rebellion, Lincoln's order did not apply to them and it would take an act of congress.

 

I'll do a bit of translating in a few days, about to be hospitalized.

Very fair point about the legalities behind Lincoln's emancipation. Should have thought of looking them up.

 

Which, in fairness, Lincoln fought for with the 13th ammendment.

 

The worse part is, this kind of behaviour is only possible as a common occurrence because there's an entire societal structure supporting it...

 

Man that's depressing. But thank you for sharing, because it just drives home how different the lives of black people are and all the things you have to consider simply because of your skin color.

 

I saw that.... the woman actually followed them around... creepy.

 

https://thegrapevine.theroot.com/the-peoples-eyeroll-dwayne-johnsons-casting-as-john-he-1829650189

Nonwhites continue to treat mixed race people worse than whites ever have.

 

Whites have never told me to stay in my lane. I actually prefer to be around them.