Covers the persons and events and powerful intererests that shifted conservative christianity away from Billy Graham and Oral Roberts (both opposed to racism and both pro-choice) towards the Falwells and etc…
Summarizes the truly dangerous and lunatic roots to our current carnage.
david fb
P.S. Only thing they leave out is the crux role of Richard Viguerie, the master of using direct mail to stoke fear and hatred in the service of getting rich… He saw that gay and women’s rights were super lucrative red hot buttons in mailed fundraising, and so steered politics in ways that allowed him the most profits from taking his cut and growing his lists.
I think I have heard that narrative before, that the religious “thought leaders” latched on to abortion as the new “cause” to get their flock wound up about, so they could pocket more money.
As offered here before, I see organized religion as the promoter of bigotry and hate.
When the narrative started that Africans brought to the US and sold into slavery “benefited” from being slaves, I was waiting for the “thought leaders” to drop the big one “they benefited from being slaves because they could learn about Jesus and be saved”.
Steve, from this summer, just a reminder of what the College Board Advanced Placement course in African American Studies has to say (point EK 2.8.A.4):
“In addition to agricultural work, enslaved people learned specialized trades and worked as painters, carpenters, tailors, musicians, and healers in the North and South. Once free, American Americans used these skills to provide for themselves and others. ”
They did not have those skills for the most part. And the truth is those same people would almost certainly have been slaves back home anyway. They were already hot and heavy into slavery on the continent and had been “trading” with the Arabs for hundreds of years in East Africa before Europeans showed up. None of it was good for the slaves. I don’t know how they think they can sell that. Again I ask: Do these people ever monitor themselves when they talk?
They didn’t know how to pick cotton or dig up vegetables from the ground? That’s what 90% of slaves did.
Partly true, but misleading. The kind of slavery that was practiced in Africa was not the same as it was here. In Africa you could work your way out of slavery, (not everyone did), but it was more “indentured servitude” for a period of time. In the US slaves were owned. Full stop. They were property and an owner could sell them, trade them, break up families, and require extraordinarily cruel work.i Your assertion is what some would call “lying with facts.”
C’mon you know that’s not what I’m talking about. Nuff said.
Partly true, but misleading. The kind of slavery that was practiced in Africa was not the same as it was here. In Africa you could work your way out of slavery, (not everyone did), but it was more “indentured servitude” for a period of time. In the US slaves were owned. Full stop. They were property and an owner could sell them, trade them, break up families, and require extraordinarily cruel work.i Your assertion is what some would call “lying with facts.”
In fact that’s what you are doing. Slavery in sub saharan Africa was ongoing for hundreds or thousands of years. No White people required. It was as cruel and barbarous any slavery anywhere in history. (Still ongoing. See Pygmy slaves Bantu Masters. Don’t Blame the English.) To cite what little you’ve heard of some slaves somewhere at some time in Africa as that which monolithically defines some kind of “good or acceptable or kind slavery” because Non Euros were doing it is beyond absurd.
Also, No European ever went on slave roundups. The Portuguese tried and gave up due to diseases. The others were smarter. The Chieftans ordered roundups of, who else… other Black people they didn’t like who would have been captured as slaves anyway. Sold them via slave cartels to Europeans who were made to wait at the beach and bid. They had been doing this sans making money off of White people, for centuries. They were not of a lovey dovey slaving class. What you are citing is rather a) knowlegeless of the big picture. A common problem on the internet. Or B) that phony, ersatz “feel good” history far left and far right tropists like to effect.
Now, quickly, what was the net? Well for thousands of years they were slaving each other. Got nowhere. All brutality, all barbarism. Some good jobs for indoor slaves I guess, as you suggest. Compare to The West. At least we ended slavery. That was not on anybody else’s to-do list. There are no angels here, there never are, and I do not understand purported grown ups insisting there are or can be. What’s the net? Everything else is a pile coming from a very deep dangerous hate place.
True enough all of these posts except for the crux:
19th century USAian slavery added early mechanized agriculture and capitalist management and accounting to the mix. Cotton and sugar cane agro-industrial farming under professional slavedrivers in places such as the Mississippi delta took slavery to what the Romans did only at their most cruelly punitive with sentences such as sulphur mining – exhaustive working to death. Women under the system were a prime resource not as workers but as breeders, and so they were repetitively bred (often coercively to ‘prime stock’ slave men) and raped (for pleasure doled out as rewards or owners rights) while young, and then they too were worked to death as hard as accountancy required.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin was villified precisely because it cast some light on that hideous system. And the great song “My Old Kentucky Home” was originally similarly suppressed, and then the verses shifted to idolize poor white people losing their home to carpetbaggers. Originally it told the tale of a Kentucky slave family broken up and sold because the owners were low on cash. The third verse addressed the slaves fate, with the men “sold down the river” to the sugar cane fields of Mississippi, and an early death.
The head must bow and the back will have to bend,
Wherever the darky may go;
A few more days, and the trouble all will end,
In the field where the sugar-canes grow;
A few more days for to tote the weary load,
No matter, ’twill never be light;
A few more days till we totter on the road,
Then my old Kentucky home, goodnight.
This topic devolved quickly. I thought it was interesting to hear in the video how opportunists stoked division and fear to get rich. Common ground - slavery is bad. No need to be divided friends.
The issue with skills in today’s mind matters more.
The stereotype is the farm kid coming up north. All innocent and naive. IQs were lower.
That is long over with the stereotype that needs to be dropped.
Plenty of other people came off the farm in the 1880 to 1920 period. We do not insult them as gaining skills based on slavery.
The slaves did not gain skills.
Moving to the cities later on raised IQs. The skills were organizational. Farming was not the skillset that mattered.
Who cares what an indentured servant did to gain skills in 1800? That is a footnote that has nothing to do with today’s urban and suburban job organizational skills.
Anyone else see the howler put put by a candidate for POTUS, yesterday, in a “town hall” in New Hampshire? Asked about the cause of the Civil War, the candidate said
“I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” … “And I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people.”
Not one word about slavery. Today, in the face of blistering blowback, the candidate is trying to walk back the comment, and is claiming the questioner was a “plant” by the opposition.
Steve…still waiting for someone to insist the slaves benefited by “learning about Jesus”.
Not one word about slavery. Today, in the face of blistering blowback, the candidate is trying to walk back the comment, and is claiming the questioner was a “plant” by the opposition.
She’s running in today’s GOP, you have to be careful not to offend the base with your wokeness.
Feeding their narrative that the objective is saving people from that big, bad, government. You know the wokie sort, the type that argued against slavery. The sort that, a few years later started demanding government regulation of food processing and drugs (I read a comment attributed to that later POTUS, that he lost more men, in Cuba, to the canned meat, than he did to the Spanish) Interfering with the “JC’s” right to maximize profit. The nerve! Adulterated food is a “traditional American value”. Clearly, the POTUS that did such a thing, in addition to all the tree-hugging, must “hate America”.
/sarcasm
