- Mar 11, 2015
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So I see we have a thread here talking about the African slave traders. But you see, there is no trade if no one buys. There is no slavery in America if it is not made legal by whites.
America did not have to have slavery. Whites here chose to. By making that choice, you cannot now try blaming Africans for the choice your ancestors made. Furthermore the choice to continue treating blacks as second class citizens after slavery completely removes African complocity.
"A nation is a choice. It chooses itself at fateful forks in the road by turning left or right, by giving up something or taking something -- and in the giving up and the taking, in the deciding and not deciding, the nation becomes. And ever afterwards, the nation and the people who make up the nation are defined by the fork and by the decision that was made there, as well as by the decision that was not made there. For the decision, once made, engraves itself into the landscape, engraves itself into things, into institutions, nerves, muscles, tendons; and the first decision requires a second decision, and the second decision requires a third, and it goes on and on, spiraling in an inexorable processus which distorts everything and alienates everybody.
America became America that way. Fork by fork, step by step, option by option, America or, to be more precise, the men who spoke in the name of America decided that it was going to be a white place defined negatively by the bodies and the blood of the reds and the blacks. And that decision, which was made in the 1660s and elaborated over a two-hundred-year period, foreclosed certain possibilities in America -- perhaps forever -- and set off depth charges that are still echoing and re-echoing in the commonwealth. What makes this all the more mournful is that it didn't have to happen that way. There was another road -- but that road wasn't taken. In the beginning, as we have seen, there was no race problem in America. The race problem in America was a deliberate invention of men who systematically separated blacks and whites in order to make money. This was, as Kenneth Stampp so cogently observed, a deliberate choice among several alternatives. Slavery, he said, "cannot be attributed to some deadly atmospheric miasma or some irresistible force in the South's economic evolution. The use of slaves in southern agriculture was a deliberate choice (among several alternatives) made by men who sought greater returns than they could obtain from their own labor alone, and who found other types of labor " more expensive. ...
It didn't have to happen that way. Back there, before Jim Crow, before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them, the Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures. Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together. They had essentially the same interests, the same aspirations, arid the same grievances. They conspired together and waged a common struggle against their common enemy -- the big planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen. No one says and no one believes that there was a Garden of Eden in Colonial America. But the available evidence, slight though it is, suggests that there were widening bonds of solidarity between the first generation of blacks and whites. And the same evidence indicates that it proved very difficult indeed to teach white people to worship their skin.
All this began to change drastically in the sixth decade of the seventeenth century .The decade of the 1660s: this was the first great fork in the making of black America. For it was at this fork that certain men decided to ground the American economic system on human slavery. To understand that great fork, one must understand first the roads leading to it -- roads that were not taken."
Africans did not do this. Africans did not decide for white colonists that blacks would be slaves. But in the rush to try discrediting the 1619 project, the Wall Street Journal writes a story and every racist here wants to cosign it.
But the 1619 Project is about AMERICAN HISTORY, not Europe and so here we will start with Pt. 1
www.nytimes.com
America did not have to have slavery. Whites here chose to. By making that choice, you cannot now try blaming Africans for the choice your ancestors made. Furthermore the choice to continue treating blacks as second class citizens after slavery completely removes African complocity.
"A nation is a choice. It chooses itself at fateful forks in the road by turning left or right, by giving up something or taking something -- and in the giving up and the taking, in the deciding and not deciding, the nation becomes. And ever afterwards, the nation and the people who make up the nation are defined by the fork and by the decision that was made there, as well as by the decision that was not made there. For the decision, once made, engraves itself into the landscape, engraves itself into things, into institutions, nerves, muscles, tendons; and the first decision requires a second decision, and the second decision requires a third, and it goes on and on, spiraling in an inexorable processus which distorts everything and alienates everybody.
America became America that way. Fork by fork, step by step, option by option, America or, to be more precise, the men who spoke in the name of America decided that it was going to be a white place defined negatively by the bodies and the blood of the reds and the blacks. And that decision, which was made in the 1660s and elaborated over a two-hundred-year period, foreclosed certain possibilities in America -- perhaps forever -- and set off depth charges that are still echoing and re-echoing in the commonwealth. What makes this all the more mournful is that it didn't have to happen that way. There was another road -- but that road wasn't taken. In the beginning, as we have seen, there was no race problem in America. The race problem in America was a deliberate invention of men who systematically separated blacks and whites in order to make money. This was, as Kenneth Stampp so cogently observed, a deliberate choice among several alternatives. Slavery, he said, "cannot be attributed to some deadly atmospheric miasma or some irresistible force in the South's economic evolution. The use of slaves in southern agriculture was a deliberate choice (among several alternatives) made by men who sought greater returns than they could obtain from their own labor alone, and who found other types of labor " more expensive. ...
It didn't have to happen that way. Back there, before Jim Crow, before the invention of the Negro or the white man or the words and concepts to describe them, the Colonial population consisted largely of a great mass of white and black bondsmen, who occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and legislatures. Curiously unconcerned about their color, these people worked together and relaxed together. They had essentially the same interests, the same aspirations, arid the same grievances. They conspired together and waged a common struggle against their common enemy -- the big planter apparatus and a social system that legalized terror against black and white bondsmen. No one says and no one believes that there was a Garden of Eden in Colonial America. But the available evidence, slight though it is, suggests that there were widening bonds of solidarity between the first generation of blacks and whites. And the same evidence indicates that it proved very difficult indeed to teach white people to worship their skin.
All this began to change drastically in the sixth decade of the seventeenth century .The decade of the 1660s: this was the first great fork in the making of black America. For it was at this fork that certain men decided to ground the American economic system on human slavery. To understand that great fork, one must understand first the roads leading to it -- roads that were not taken."
Africans did not do this. Africans did not decide for white colonists that blacks would be slaves. But in the rush to try discrediting the 1619 project, the Wall Street Journal writes a story and every racist here wants to cosign it.
But the 1619 Project is about AMERICAN HISTORY, not Europe and so here we will start with Pt. 1
America Wasn’t a Democracy, Until Black Americans Made It One (Published 2019)
Our founding ideals of liberty and equality were false when they were written. For generations, black Americans have fought to make them true.
www.nytimes.com
