"Slavery wasn't racist, it was economic!" says GOP lawmaker

[Ordenstaat Burgundy]

The thread fell silent and forevermore there was nothingness, a black abyss of an unnatural absence of life

Poets…

If only that were the case....I'd say we have under an hour before it once again jumps to life.

[Drongonia]

Owning slaves wasn't racist. Owning slaves of a particular race, refusing to own any of other races, and enjoying your ownership of those slaves on the basis of their race... was racist.

[Aclion]

That's literally the background for Amazing Grace....

The literal background was an uninvolved person who looked at slavery and disliked it, not the slave-traders throwing themselves a pity-party about how hard and sad it is to have to kidnap and brutalize people.

"Amazing Grace" is a Christian hymn published in 1779, with words written in 1772 by the English poet and Anglican clergyman John Newton (1725–1807).

Newton wrote the words from personal experience. He grew up without any particular religious conviction, but his life's path was formed by a variety of twists and coincidences that were often put into motion by others' reactions to what they took as his recalcitrant insubordination. He was pressed (conscripted) into service in the Royal Navy.

After leaving the service, he became involved in the Atlantic slave trade. In 1748, a violent storm battered his vessel off the coast of County Donegal, Ireland, so severely that he called out to God for mercy. This moment marked his spiritual conversion but he continued slave trading until 1754 or 1755, when he ended his seafaring altogether.

He isn't citing African Kingdoms to argue slavery wasn't that bad. Of course it was bad. But it shows that the reason Europeans chose to trade in African slaves was not because they hated Africans but because there was an available 'supplier' of the 'product'.

Again, this doesn't change the fact that slavery is morally reprehensible and unjustifiable, but there is an alternative explanation for the African slave trade that isn't racial prejudice against black people.

I'd be very suspicious of someone reaching for this 'alternative explanation' with no evidence.

If you truly didn't care about the race of the person you enslaved, you'd enslave your white neighbour in the US.

This might come as a surprise. But governments generally frown on it when you enslave their citizens.

[Iridencia]

First, African slaves were far cheaper, and in greater supply.

Yes, because Europeans did not sell other Europeans. Price is based on supply, with rarer things tending to be more expensive, and supply is largely dependent on the sellers' willingness to provide the product in the first place. Africans were willing to provide other Africans for slavery, thus driving up supplies and lowering prices, but this could have easily been countered against had Europeans been willing to do the same thing. But that didn't happen, why? Because Europeans, by in large, evidently had no problem with seeing non-whites in chains but wouldn't consider creating the same scenario for people who look like them. That is a racial double standard.

While there were people going and enslaving people throughout Europe, there wasn't the same kind of port to trade them at, and fewer people were doing it.

See above point on why so few people were doing it.

Had there been more white slaves in the market and more willingness to buy them, it's not unreasonable to imagine that a port would have eventually manifested itself for the same reason modern day stores manifest themselves in response to demand for other products.

Europeans were also wealthier than Africans, so if a European was going to sell a slave he would have wanted a higher price.

He may have wanted it, he wouldn't necessarily get it. That's the thing about business transactions, there's a lot more nuances that go into what is worth what than just what price someone demands.

Second, the prejudice started because people needed to justify an inherently immoral system somehow. Due to the aforementioned market pressures most slaves would have been imported from Africa, not Europe. Therefore an easy way to justify slavery - with minimal economic consequences on who should or should not be a slave - would have been racism.

I have no doubt that racist attitudes evolved and intensified as people grew up seeing different ethnic groups in different societal positions and as questions regarding the morality of slavery arose, but that once again does not preclude the existence of racism in its origins. As I stated in the OP, racism isn't just about a pure sadistic drive to hurt someone all because they're another race, it also includes a lack of qualm about doing something immoral to someone because of their race — and we know that Europeans had both.

Again, racism isn't natural. There has to be something to motivate it.

Also not true, or at least not plausible. It's generally and well accepted among sociologists and evolutionary psychologists that racism is a manifestation of the evolved need to survive against the odds in the wild (which often means competing for resources against outside groups) and the selfish but unconscious drive to propagate one's own kind, whether that be species or genes. Racism in particular derives from the evolutionary shorthand of helping those who physically resemble you because they're more likely to share your genes, and eliminating or curbing those who do not because they likely carry competitor genes.

That doesn't make it right, which would be a naturalistic fallacy, nor does that make it inevitable. Humans are not necessarily bound to evolutionary drives (contraception is proof of that), but they are still there.

[Ifreann]

Extremely unsurprising to see someone conceptualise racism as only a fully conscious, frothing, and unceasing hatred for black people.

---

But racism and slavery aren't inherently connected: a white person can subjugate another white person to slavery. Anyone could enslave someone else. Racism and slavery are separate, terrible ideas. The only reason they are connected in the American mind is that American philosophical thought realized slavery was wrong and needed a way to justify it. The nature of the slave trade meant racism was a natural answer, and here we are.

We're not talking about slavery as a wider theoretical practice, we're talking about the slavery that occurred in the United States. And it was very, very racist. Don't try to weasel out of the actual subject.

Um yeah, Slavery wasn't Racist. There were a ton of Irish

No.

(And no, the Irish were never slaves, sorry that conservative facebook meme lied to you.)

Big this. Stop trying to use your abuse of the Irish to wave off the racism fuelling your abuse of Africans, American racists.

[Aclion]

First, African slaves were far cheaper, and in greater supply.

Yes, because Europeans did not sell other Europeans. Price is based on supply, with rarer things tending to be more expensive, and supply is largely dependent on the sellers' willingness to provide the product in the first place. Africans were willing to provide other Africans for slavery, thus driving up supplies and lowering prices, but this could have easily been countered against had Europeans been willing to do the same thing. But that didn't happen, why? Because Europeans, by in large, evidently had no problem with seeing non-whites in chains but wouldn't consider creating the same scenario for people who look like them. That is a racial double standard.

One problem. The situations of European countries vrs African countries were entirely different, as were their roles in the slave trade.

[GlobalControl]

At least a monster can also change directions. It's more like walking on train tracks, seeing the train walking, and deciding to run ahead instead of jumping sideways.

Someone call the SCP Foundation.

[The Realm of Platinum]

Owning slaves based on something that is not race is not racist, but it's still inhumane

[US-SSR]

Trump: "US citizens who are women of color in the House of Representatives should go back where they came from!"

Deplorables: "Hold my beer!"

[Ifreann]

At least a monster can also change directions. It's more like walking on train tracks, seeing the train walking, and deciding to run ahead instead of jumping sideways.

Someone call the SCP Foundation.

[EastKekistan]

New Hampshire lawmaker deletes post, clarifies after saying 'owning slaves doesn't make you racist'

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/453932-new-hampshire-lawmaker-deletes-post-clarifies-after-saying

A Republican state representative from New Hampshire, is under fire for a since-deleted post in which he wrote that “owning slaves doesn’t make you racist.”

Werner Horn had made the comment on Facebook in response to a post shared by former state Rep. Dan Hynes (R) in which he bashed HuffPost for a story about a historian who said President Trump is tied with former President Andrew Johnson as the “most racist president in American history.”

“LOL. This is why no one believe the media (huffpo),” Hynes wrote. “Trump is the most racist president in American history, what does that say about all of the other presidents who owned slaves.”

Horn wrote in a since-deleted response: “Wait, owning slaves doesn’t make you racist…”

Horn later told HuffPost in an interview released on Thursday that he was being sarcastic in his response and said that his comment is by no means to be construed as “support for either slavery or racism.”

But in a follow-up statement, Horn said that although it is “never OK to own another person,” he feels that labelling the institution of slavery “is a false narrative.”

Horn argued in the interview that slave owners were making a “an economic decision” when purchasing slaves — a decision, he told the publication, that race did not play a deciding factor in.

“Unless you’re going to try to tell me those plantation owners were so in the dark ages that they delighted in being also sexist and ageist — practicing age discrimination and sex discrimination when they bought slaves — I don’t see how you can say they’re being racist because they bought black slaves,” he continued.

“My comment specifically was aimed at a period of time when that was how you survived, that’s how you fed your family,” the lawmaker went on. “It wasn’t ‘I want to own a black person today.’ It was, ‘I need to feed my family; I need five guys who can work stupidly long hours in the sun without killing themselves.' ”

During the interview, Horn was also pressed about his thoughts on a recent controversy ensnarling the president after he told four Democratic congresswomen of color — Reps. Rashida Tlaib (Mich.), Ayanna Pressley (Mass.), Ilhan Omar (Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (N.Y.) – to "go back" to their where they came from.

In his response, Horn said he thought the president’s comments were “rude” and “inaccurate” but broke from other lawmakers who described the remarks as “racist.”

We've hit peak, "I'm not racist BUT..." levels here.

If I play devil's advocate (and play damn hard), I suppose I could see what Horn was trying to get at, but even that generous assumption still reveals an disgustingly unforgivable ignorance about history. He's essentially saying that because slaveowners didn't own slaves out of pure sadism and instead had some money-making interests in mind, that means that slave-owning was purely monetarily driven and therefore not racist at all, completely ignoring everything we know about how slavery in the Americas got started, how it was justified, how even many anti-slave people felt about black people, etc. 'Cuz if you don't know, there's a reason that none of those "purely economically motivated" slaves were white. (And no, the Irish were never slaves, sorry that conservative facebook meme lied to you.)

As small an incident as this may be, I believe it is emblematic of larger disturbing trends going on in America, namely the increasingly elaborate mental gymnastics of mainstream right-wingers to sympathize with horrific traditions and practices without having to suffer the label of a bigot. And, of course, continuing to cling to the notion that the south was somehow an innocent victim in the Civil War.

What says you?

Slavery as an institution is not racist. However restrictions on free blacks certainly was. In the long run what slavery seemed to create is a new mostly black ethnicity cut off from cultures of both Europe and Africa.

[Great Minarchistan]

At least a monster can also change directions. It's more like walking on train tracks, seeing the train walking, and deciding to run ahead instead of jumping sideways.

Someone call the SCP Foundation.

for a second I thought you said SPLC

[Vetalia]

Someone call the SCP Foundation.

This is what we will see when we all die.

[Katganistan]

There is another simple reason that slaves were black.

When someone is clearly different from the rest of the population, it is very easy to not only 'other' them, and to strip them of their rights, but by and large people didn't care even when legitimately free blacks were kidnapped and forced into slavery.

Solomon Northup's story was made into a film some years back, but his memoir is here. (Except they're not called memoirs, but slave narratives.)

https://education.blogs.archives.gov/20 ... -of-color/

https://www.thirteen.org/wnet/slavery/e ... tory2.html

[LiberNovusAmericae]

Economics did play a part, but so did racism. If it was merely economic, then blacks would not have been lynched and discriminated against after slavery's abolition.

[The Realm of Platinum]

Economics did play a part, but so did racism. If it was merely economic, then blacks would not have been lynched and discriminated against after slavery's abolition.

One disturbing fact about slavery: slavemasters gave their slaves a racist version of the Bible.

[Salus Maior]

.....Why would you even have to comment such a thing as "owning slaves doesn't make you racist"? Since when was that a relevant topic in the modern age? Nobody owns slaves anymore in the West.

This is just stupid on top of stupid.

[Galiantus III]

First, African slaves were far cheaper, and in greater supply.

Yes, because Europeans did not sell other Europeans. Price is based on supply, with rarer things tending to be more expensive, and supply is largely dependent on the sellers' willingness to provide the product in the first place. Africans were willing to provide other Africans for slavery, thus driving up supplies and lowering prices, but this could have easily been countered against had Europeans been willing to do the same thing. But that didn't happen, why? Because Europeans, by in large, evidently had no problem with seeing non-whites in chains but wouldn't consider creating the same scenario for people who look like them. That is a racial double standard.

Just listen to yourself for a second. You are suggesting that if the world had enslaved more people, that would be better because at least racism would be lessened. In reality, the African slave market was driven up because they could sell for a significantly lower price than European slaves. Based on very simple economic laws, that would have put any European slave traders out of business very quickly. So no, it was not inherently racist.

P.S. The English hated the Irish to an absurd degree. Don't tell me they didn't actually get some kind of glee from seeing them in chains.

While there were people going and enslaving people throughout Europe, there wasn't the same kind of port to trade them at, and fewer people were doing it.

See above point on why so few people were doing it.

Had there been more white slaves in the market and more willingness to buy them, it's not unreasonable to imagine that a port would have eventually manifested itself for the same reason modern day stores manifest themselves in response to demand for other products.

Europeans were also wealthier than Africans, so if a European was going to sell a slave he would have wanted a higher price.

He may have wanted it, he wouldn't necessarily get it. That's the thing about business transactions, there's a lot more nuances that go into what is worth what than just what price someone demands.

My point is that within Europe, slaves were harder to "produce", and therefore to return a profit the slave trader would have to sell them for more. The African Slave trade put them out of business because they couldn't compete.

Second, the prejudice started because people needed to justify an inherently immoral system somehow. Due to the aforementioned market pressures most slaves would have been imported from Africa, not Europe. Therefore an easy way to justify slavery - with minimal economic consequences on who should or should not be a slave - would have been racism.

I have no doubt that racist attitudes evolved and intensified as people grew up seeing different ethnic groups in different societal positions and as questions regarding the morality of slavery arose, but that once again does not preclude the existence of racism in its origins. As I stated in the OP, racism isn't just about a pure sadistic drive to hurt someone all because they're another race, it also includes a lack of qualm about doing something immoral to someone because of their race — and we know that Europeans had both.

The fact that white slaves existed at all would suggest they didn't mind doing immoral things to anyone except maybe their family and friends. If they could exploit someone for money, they would do it, regardless of their race. And at the time, African slaves just happened to be a convenient way to do it.

In fact, this is how the Romans operated, and how the African tribes operated. People enslaved others of their own race all the time. This is just the first time mass-scale shipping could be economically done, and the location that could produce slaves the cheapest flooded the market. You are going to have to give me a good cause for the claim of extreme racism among Europeans because that would make them an exception, by historical standards. And again, money is a pretty good motivator, and you are simply dismissing it.

Again, racism isn't natural. There has to be something to motivate it.

Also not true, or at least not plausible. It's generally and well accepted among sociologists and evolutionary psychologists that racism is a manifestation of the evolved need to survive against the odds in the wild (which often means competing for resources against outside groups) and the selfish but unconscious drive to propagate one's own kind, whether that be species or genes. Racism in particular derives from the evolutionary shorthand of helping those who physically resemble you because they're more likely to share your genes, and eliminating or curbing those who do not because they likely carry competitor genes.

That doesn't make it right, which would be a naturalistic fallacy, nor does that make it inevitable. Humans are not necessarily bound to evolutionary drives (contraception is proof of that), but they are still there.

Yeah, whatever. If that theory were true, there wouldn't be a bias towards murdering people of your own race. Most competitors look the same. Individuals are just selfish and will take advantage of whatever they can to secure resources. If that means creating anger about another race, they'll do it. If that means cooperating with someone of another race to harm someone of their own race, they'll do it. The whole point is resources and reproduction.

[The Realm of Platinum]

One disturbing fact about slavery: slavemasters gave their slaves a racist version of the Bible.

They weren't Christians then.

HERETICS!

Nobody expects the 'Murican Inquisition

[Ohioan Territory]

Y'all, please. We all know that slavery on its own is not inherently racist.

But when you're a politician in the United States, and someone brings up slavery, there is a 99.99999% chance they're referring to the chattel slavery that occurred in the American South between the first 20 slaves to arrive in Jamestown and the end of the Civil War in 1865. That slavery was positively racist: it was built on the supposed inferiority of Africans to WASPs.

And indentured servants were not slaves. To claim this is nonsensical misinformation.

[Galiantus III]

Y'all, please. We all know that slavery on its own is not inherently racist.

But when you're a politician in the United States, and someone brings up slavery, there is a 99.99999% chance they're referring to the chattel slavery that occurred in the American South between the first 20 slaves to arrive in Jamestown and the end of the Civil War in 1865. That slavery was positively racist: it was built on the supposed inferiority of Africans to WASPs.

Yes. We know. All that is being said is it didn't start that out that way.

And indentured servants were not slaves. To claim this is nonsensical misinformation.

Indentured servitude was temporary slavery. And there were Irish that were life-long slaves, not indentured servants.

[Kowani]

Y'all, please. We all know that slavery on its own is not inherently racist.

But when you're a politician in the United States, and someone brings up slavery, there is a 99.99999% chance they're referring to the chattel slavery that occurred in the American South between the first 20 slaves to arrive in Jamestown and the end of the Civil War in 1865. That slavery was positively racist: it was built on the supposed inferiority of Africans to WASPs.

Yes. We know. All that is being said is it didn't start that out that way.

And indentured servants were not slaves. To claim this is nonsensical misinformation.

Indentured servitude was temporary slavery. And there were Irish that were life-long slaves, not indentured servants.

Wrong. Indentured servants had some rights. Slaves had none.

[Parhe]

The historian is an idiot. jackson and Wilson were far more racist than either Buchanan or trump.

Sad thing is, I've known college graduates who believe similar things. Apparently, the US formed shortly after the Cold War or something.

[Ohioan Territory]

Y'all, please. We all know that slavery on its own is not inherently racist.

But when you're a politician in the United States, and someone brings up slavery, there is a 99.99999% chance they're referring to the chattel slavery that occurred in the American South between the first 20 slaves to arrive in Jamestown and the end of the Civil War in 1865. That slavery was positively racist: it was built on the supposed inferiority of Africans to WASPs.

Yes. We know. All that is being said is it didn't start that out that way.

It makes it look like you're trying to defend the integrity of American chattel slavery, though. Everyone knows it didn't start that way, so there's no use in clarifying that.

And indentured servants were not slaves. To claim this is nonsensical misinformation.

Indentured servitude was temporary slavery. And there were Irish that were life-long slaves, not indentured servants.

Indentured servitude was similar to slavery, but to be an indentured servant was much, much better than being a slave. From PBS: indentured servants were not slaves for various reasons, including the fact that they were in servitude for 4-7 years compared to a slave's lifelong servitude; had various laws protecting their rights; and received 25 acres of land upon release, along with corn, arms, and clothes.

Moreover, you need to stop with the Irish slavery bullshit. Here's the Census data for the United States prior to 1970. There were nearly four million slaves in the U.S. in 1860, certainly all of which we know were African-descended. Do you think that even if there were some life-long Irish slaves in the U.S., that would excuse the racist institution that enslaved millions upon millions of Africans and African-descended people, completely justified on the basis that Africans were inferior to Europeans?

Again, it really sounds like you're trying to defend the integrity of American chattel slavery. But then again...

Here's some more reputable resources to put away your racist, bullshit myth as well, if you'd like.

[Chestaan]

Allow me to offer nuance that this debate won't include otherwise

Slavery in america began as an economic system in which rich planters didn't need to pay their laborers wages and therefore could maximize profit. It took on a racial overtone as slave owners attempted to justify their right to own slaves. While slavery didn't start out due to racism, American racism was started by slavery and slavery was and still is the cornerstone of the divide between black and white people in america. I don't know what this senator was trying to do but it isn't even offensive to me as much as it is confusing. What's the point of his argument? The evil of slavery still happened and hurt race relations in the United States for centuries to come

Yeah this exactly. Racism didn't breed slavery, but slavery did breed racism. I have no doubt that the slave owners would have enslaved white people if they had the chance and they could get away with it.