Racism - Forever and Always

I'm laughing at this, even though I know how serious this position is. Former Biggest Loser trainer Jilian Michaels says Whites are not to blame for slavery.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/ente...ip-jillian-michaels-race-slavery/85738441007/

After Roginsky said that Trump wanted to deem what was "appropriate for what the Smithsonian can teach in terms of American history," including slavery, Michaels asked for examples. The "Keeping It Real" podcast host claimed that Trump is "not whitewashing slavery." Roginsky asked, "So, he's not?" Michaels replied, "He's not. No."

She added that "you cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just one race, which is pretty much what every single exhibit does."​

And the typical argument.

Torres then opined that "slavery in America was White supremacy," as Michaels replied, "Do you know that only less than 2% of White Americans owned slaves?" and added, "Did you know that slavery is thousands of years old?"​

And what gave me a laugh was Josh Johnson's take. (It's a YouTube short.)

 

I thought it was 2%. Because the cost of owning a slave was relatively high, but it seems I am wrong. A couple of sources say 25%. Perhaps I'm thinking of only 2% owning more than 10 slaves, or something like that.

 

Sounds right, but I haven't read The Peculiar Institution since AP History in 11th grade.

 

Huh? We just elected a racist as President. And before you say this is just about soccer, I'd check Xwitter and such first. Plus soccer is far, far less popular in the US than in England, Germany, or Italy (naming those three countries due to this article from the Guardian).

 

That "Less than 2% of white Americans owned slaves" line is a great example of how to lie/mislead with statistics.

White women (unless they were widows) couldn't own property.

White children couldn't own property.

Slavery was illegal and essentially defunct in every northern and western state* so while it wasn't illegal to invest in enslaved people in the South, that was rare and only a handful of wealthy northern entrepreneurs did so.

So you're really talking about adult white men in the 15 slave states. And given that their wives and children lived with them, you have to include members of the entire household when considering how widespread slavery was.

Every American History 101 class needs to include a discussion of the percentage of white families in the South who owned slaves. In Delaware it was down to single digits, and was also low in Maryland and Missouri (and statistically almost zero in the part of Virginia which became West Virginia). In every other slave state, it ranged from 20% in Arkansas to right around 47-49% in Mississippi, Alabama, and South Carolina.

Not evenly distributed throughout the region, obviously--and there was a direct correlation between slaveholding rates and initial support for succession (Lincoln held on to the hope that those regions were reluctant secessionists even after the war started for the first year-plus of the conflict). But a very different social reality than the technically-accurate-but-wildly-misleading "Less than 2% of all white Americans owned slaves in 1860."



*A grandfathered few exceptions to the contrary.

 

I think that average is about right for the 15 slave states prior to the Civil War. If you take out West Virginia and the four border states (Kentucky was around 25%; the others as noted above were well below 20%) the average for the 11 states of the Confederacy (again, not counting WV) was higher, as every one of those state except Arkansas were above 20%.

 

This book argues that not only was slave renting was much more common in the antebellum period than previously understood; it was keeping the institution economically viable in the upper South at a time when conventional wisdom held it was slowly dying out and clustering in the Deep South.

Upcountry whites and urban whites (particularly in the upper south) tangled with the slave holding class in state politics, but in many if not all of those states the state constitution tilted the playing field in favor of slaveholders, who also had the best land and far more access to credit.

Yes, that was a big theme of the history of American slavery a few decades ago--while the average enslaved person lived on a large plantation, the average slave holder was a small-time farmer with 1-4 enslaved people under this control. They were the ambitious, middle-class strivers of the Slave south, who provided a lot of the votes to support the system even while the plantation class dominated the ruling class.

There's still a lot of controversy on how to read the bulk of existing slave narratives, which were collected in the 1930s by mostly white WPA workers. These narratives need to be read with a critical eye, not only because memory is fallible but also because there are real questions as to how free the interview subjects (most of whom were impoverished, still trapped in the Jim Crow South, and not infrequently still sharecropping near or even for the families of their former 'owners') were to be fully honest.

Edward E. Baptist confronted that challenge head on in his book: