Um....

[conuly]

Glenn Beck: Slavery "started with seemingly innocent ideas" and then "the government began to regulate things"

I haven't actually watched the video, so maybe this quote was taken wildly out of context. I'm not sure what context that could possibly be, but if there's any form of justification for this, somebody braver than I am can point it out to me. I refuse to risk my precious brain cells.

Comments

[interactiveleaf.livejournal.com]

History is one of my weak subjects, I admit that. But my understanding was that before slavery, we had indentured servants. People would come over, and they'd have to work for 7 years with basically no rights, and then they were free and had paid off the travel or their debts or whatever sent them here.

Histories differ. I'll quote some sources that, uh, "teach the controversy."

The other crucial event that would play a role in the development of America was the arrival of Africans to Jamestown. A Dutch slave trader exchanged his cargo of Africans for food in 1619. The Africans became indentured servants, similar in legal position to many poor Englishmen who traded several years labor in exchange for passage to America. The popular conception of a racial-based slave system did not develop until the 1680's. (A Brief History of Jamestown (http://www.preservationvirginia.org/rediscovery/page.php?page_id=6), The Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities, Web published February, 2000)

For perspective on this story, keep in mind that the colony was founded in 1606, so there just wasn't a large gap between the founding and the first commercial trading of Negroes even according to the most apologetic sources.

The legend has been repeated endlessly that the first blacks in Virginia were "indentured servants," but there is no hint of this in the records. The legend grew up because the word slave did not appear in Virginia records until 1656, and statutes defining the status of blacks began to appear casually in the 1660s. The inference was then made that blacks called servants must have had approximately the same status as white indentured servants. Such reasoning failed to notice that Englishmen, in the early seventeenth century, used the word servant when they meant slave in our sense, and, indeed, white Southerners invariably used servant until 1865 and beyond. Slave entered the Southern vocabulary as a technical word in trade, law and politics. (Robert McColley in Dictionary of Afro-American Slavery, 1988 pp 281)

My view is more in line with the second quote, which I believe is substantiated by the fact that "cargo of Africans" came from, well, Africa, where the Dutch and British were enslaving the Africans from tribes they could conquer and treating or fighting with the ones they couldn't.

Those people weren't being transported because they had debts, they were being brought to "the New World" to trade to other Englishmen who needed labor.

I should note that during this time, Europeans were also captured and used for slave labor in the Ottoman Empire and parts of North Africa, and that the Arabs were heavily involved in overland European and African trading routes. Slavery was far more the norm than the exception, which makes it that much more unlikely that the Africans in question were going to be released in seven years.

Hi! My name is Samantha, and I am married to a historian. I have all sorts more random facts at my fingertips these days than before I met him. :-)

[leora.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I hadn't realized that. Okay. Although my understanding was that in practical terms, there wasn't really a difference in most cases between slave and indentured servant, since in both cases it tended to be a life sentence. But maybe that wasn't the case in North America.

But I suppose it is unsurprising given the deep bigotry that was clearly present well before the US became the US.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

But I suppose it is unsurprising given the deep bigotry that was clearly present well before the US became the US.


Hell, it's my understanding that most cultures were xenophobic to some degree or another before the mid-20th century or so (and duh, many still are, just some are making an effort not to be).

[leora.livejournal.com]

Psychology is my field. And a tendency to break people into Us and Them is certainly very common and seems to be cross-cultural. The ability to dehumanize Them and then do horrible things to people in that group has been well demonstrated.

It does seem to be a fairly natural state for people to fall into, unless the culture makes great strides to educate its masses against this tendency. And I'm not sure how possible it is to truly move away from it. But you can definitely make a difference in degree.

[marveen.livejournal.com]

The psych. prof in college was deadly dull (reading out of the book for lectures? every day? really?) but soc. was my favorite class, despite the killer exams. That prof made you THINK and defend your position in class discussions, which happened roughly three times a week.

Thus I don't mistake my own cultural biases for universal truths. ;)