http://personalwebs.myriad.net/steveb/slavery2.html
Is it immoral to deny that slavery was about race?
Is it immoral to deny that slavery was about race?
Slavery denial
- Thread starter Oniw17
- Start date
I would comment in this thread, but then spuriousmonkey would come along and accuse me of being rascist.
One should point out that the Old Testament also allows for fathers to sell their daughters as sex slaves, and then turn them out of their house if they are not pleasing to their new masters.
One should point out that the Old Testament also allows for fathers to sell their daughters as sex slaves, and then turn them out of their house if they are not pleasing to their new masters.
Why do you care what spuriousmonkey calls you? You're a pussy because you won't comment.
Slavery has rarely been about race. Slaves have been of all races and often, same cultures.
Just being facetious. I don't really have any comments on this subject other than the one I already posted.
The point I was making there is that those who quote the bible and try to rationalize slavery should not be offended at the notion of selling their daughters as sex slaves.
Slavery wasn't about race - not directly anyway. It was about money. It died out, not because we became more civilised, but because it was no longer economically viable. Race wasn't an issue since few slave-owners saw blacks as humans with rights, but as commodities to be bought and sold.
I'll make a comment about the slavery that happened in US history, because I don't know much else about slavery.
From what I can determine from the political history of the US, the debate over slavery was that of civil rights versus property rights. The liberals of the day argued that the slaves were being mistreated and should be freed. This abolitionist view was eventually expressed by the Republican party, which was the liberal and left-wing party of the day. The conservatives, who the Democratic party of the day represented, argued that the slaves were not even human, and were thus the slave owners' property, equatable to their house, land, and even toilet (if they even had indoor plumbing back then).
Thankfully, the nation eventually came to its senses enough to figure out that civil rights are more important than property rights (or, at least they figured it out when it came to slavery). But it's regrettable that it took so long after that for the freed blacks to finally get their full set of civil rights that the whites already had for so long.
Anyway. To say that slavery isn't about race may or may not be true. In some ways, I guess it was. After all, it would require a mentality among race A that race B is inferior to them in order for A to enslave B. As far as the idea of keeping slaves in the first place, that probably isn't about race.
Why would he do a thing like that?
By the way: There's only one S in 'racist'.
Funny, ain't it?
Thus, a debate over civil rights versus property rights in the US.
But I don't think the main point of contention here was that it was no longer economically viable. I believe it was more the fact that the slaves were being treated worse than domesticated animals.
From what I can determine from the political history of the US, the debate over slavery was that of civil rights versus property rights. The liberals of the day argued that the slaves were being mistreated and should be freed. This abolitionist view was eventually expressed by the Republican party, which was the liberal and left-wing party of the day. The conservatives, who the Democratic party of the day represented, argued that the slaves were not even human, and were thus the slave owners' property, equatable to their house, land, and even toilet (if they even had indoor plumbing back then).
Thankfully, the nation eventually came to its senses enough to figure out that civil rights are more important than property rights (or, at least they figured it out when it came to slavery). But it's regrettable that it took so long after that for the freed blacks to finally get their full set of civil rights that the whites already had for so long.
Anyway. To say that slavery isn't about race may or may not be true. In some ways, I guess it was. After all, it would require a mentality among race A that race B is inferior to them in order for A to enslave B. As far as the idea of keeping slaves in the first place, that probably isn't about race.
Why would he do a thing like that?
By the way: There's only one S in 'racist'.
BenTheMan said:
Funny, ain't it?
Thus, a debate over civil rights versus property rights in the US.
But I don't think the main point of contention here was that it was no longer economically viable. I believe it was more the fact that the slaves were being treated worse than domesticated animals.
The word slave derives from slav doesn't it, and slavs are an ethnic group not a race.
It was because the Slavs were enslaved by the Holy Roman Empire. But Slav itself does not mean "a slave" and the concept of slavery extends back further than that.
Argh. Thank you Webster. My degree is in physics.
Well, that's how I interpreted your comments in the Holocaust thread. Perhaps we have misunderstood each other. Apologies!
This is an interesting point. Could white Europeans have owned white slaves?
I don't know about this---is there any evidence? I mean, slaves were extrememly expensive to buy, and only the very richest plantation owners were able to afford them. This is not to argue that they were treated as humans, because this clearly wasn't the case.
Yes, and they did ...even if they called it "indentured" instead of slavery. It was common practice in Europe and England for hundreds of years. A man who couldn't or wouldn't support his offspring, could offer the kid to a businessman to work for virtually nothing but food and shelter so as to "learn a trade". Same thing as slavery except for the name!
Actual evidence of mistreatment of slaves in the USA is pretty scarce, and mostly from biased accounts of the slave's descendents ...who had/have a vested interest in showing the horrors ...which probably didn't exist. A slave that did what he was told to do, and worked hard for the owner, would have been treated as good or better than their horses ...which were well treated, but weren't allow to run away either!
Baron Max
I think slavery precedes racism in the causal chain...
I'm not so sure about that. For example, the very reason the black slaves of Africa were used above and beyond white races is because they looked so different to the whites. They looked and acted different enough that they could and did see them as only "animals", not humans. That, I think, is racism, ain't it?
Baron Max
I thought it was because Africans had the natural immunity to malaria that was necessary for the climes of slave plantations.
Sorry to be a Spelling Nazi. It's just that particularly bad misspellings are annoying to me.
BenTheMan said:
I'm sure they could've. Race isn't the only thing people use to argue that they're better than "those people".
BenTheMan said:
This is a good point. After all, right wingers today have some weird ideas of what is economically viable and what isn't, and I'm willing to bet it was the same in the mid 19th century.
That's an interesting possibility. I didn't know about this.