Only by understanding slavery, and its cost to the enslaved, does the status of their descendants make perfect sense. Want it quantified? The following numbers are approximate:
In 1800, the average life span of a white person was about 48 years. The average life span of a slave was about 32. Post-emancipation, that life span increased to about 44 years, similar to that of Kalihari hunter-gatherers today. That's about twelve years of life stolen from every black man and woman, and the value invested in the community that owned them. Multiplied across the three hundred years or so slavery existed in America, and that comes to hundreds of millions of years stolen, along with the attendant labor. There is no conceivable way that this could have happened, and not have massive effect on descendants who have been free about 1/2 the time they were enslaved. Takes a wound longer to heal than it took to inflict, folks. There are many elements who would like to ignore statistics like this. Justifies their world view.
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Read the Article at HuffingtonPost
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Obama Hits Bob McDonnell: Omission Of Slavery 'Unacceptable' In Confederate History Month Proclamation
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8 comments:
"There is no conceivable way that this could have happened, and not have massive effect on descendants who have been free about 1/2 the time they were enslaved."
What were the comparable statistics for being born Irish in Ireland, prior to the overthrow of British rule? Which didn't happen until 1920? I doubt they were as bad as those for American blacks under slavery; but there was that little "Irish potato famine" that killed a million Irish or so in 1848-1850, and drove several millions to emigrate to North America.
I agree that the historical experience of blacks was very bad. I question whether it was entirely and uniquely bad. And I really hope, for the sake of both blacks and non-blacks, that we're not going to have to wait 350 years for blacks to be able to cope with mainstream American society with the partial competence that the Irish had. Otherwise we'll be hearing how the Middle Passage justifies blacks performing less well than whites in public schools until about 2200 A.D. -- by which time the Chinese will probably have colonized Alpha Centauri, leaving both whites and blacks in the former U.S. to subsist on a "reservation" for technological retrogrades.
--Erich Schwarz
That's about twelve years of life stolen from every black man and woman, and the value invested in the community that owned them.
I agree about the horrendous loss suffered by black slaves, and the serious loss to their communities in the New World and in Africa.
However, I think most of the value of what was taken from them was wasted-- not invested in the white community.
Every experience is unique.
Comparing Black Americans to Irish Americans doesn't tell us very much. Irish Americans (and Scots-Irish) were already in America before the potato famine. In the South some of them were slaveowners and overseers. Irish later immigrants over time were able to identify as "white" which is not an option for most "black" Americans.
To really say something about any differences between Irish and Blacks we'd have to go back thru time and run a thought experiment in which Irish were kidnapped from Ireland, brought to America, taught to despise and deny their Irishness and "whiteness", tried their best to identify as "black" even to the point of self-hatred, and were enslaved or openly discriminated against by a predominantly "black" society for 300-400 years.
Wait a minute. Someone already did that experiment...
actually Irish were also
transported to the Caribbean
and USA as slaves
used in Barbados
(thanks to Cromwell and his genocide plans)
boys for the plantation owners use
and women to bred with black slaves to produce more slaves
until the price of African slaves dropped lower than irish ones
something about it here:
http://www.giftofireland.com/IrishSlaves.htm
1) Never said it was unique in human experience. Was unique in American experience.
2) Looks to me as if we're catching up at a tremendous rate--at least those who are, let's say, 20% above "average"
3) In Britain, if I'm not mistaken, there are many Irish activists who maintain that repression by the Brits has created poverty and death among the Irish--and most Irish can "pass" for Brit far more easily than Africans can "pass" for Europeans.
4) The time stolen from Africans was indeed invested in Europeans. The "cost" of life represents the energy they invested in work, and the paucity of food and shelter offered in return. You're talking about the differential between the market value of that work and what they were "paid." That difference was invested in their masters' families and estates, and is passed down in inherited wealth to this day.
"That difference was invested in their masters' families and estates, and is passed down in inherited wealth to this day."
Some thoughts:
Are you serious? Have you seen the differences between per capita income in Northern vs. Southern states? (That's a rhetorical question -- I'm sure you have ... which leaves me even more agog.)
Remember the Civil War? It seriously killed or injured a lot of whites, both North and South; it left the South prostrate, with two entire cities (Richmond and Atlanta) reduced to ash. Whatever benefits southern whites got from having enslaved blacks, I'd say that God managed to scourge out of them pretty effectively in 1861-1865.
Bluntly, I reject the hypothesis that I am weathier in 2010 today than I'd have been in an America where blacks had never been slaves. That is simply not my observation of how the world works. You don't get a shopping mall from murdering an Indian and having the mall spring magically from his corpse, and you don't get a superpower from keeping millions of blacks in utter poverty and ignorance. Wealth is not a zero-sum game; in fact, it's pretty much impossible to grow wealth as long as one is stuck in the realm of zero-sum games as opposed to win-win solutions.
I agree that blacks were robbed of life, but I don't think that robbery enriched me or any other living white -- it was either wasted, or cancelled out by the punishment of Providence.
I guess you could partially summarize my attitude towards black slavery, in a somewhat bumptious way, by saying, "It was worse than a crime; it was a blunder." In fact I take it more seriously than that; but I do think the idea that whites gained anything but the most evanescent and spurious benefit from it is mistaken. I think both whites and blacks would be wealthier in America today if blacks had never been enslaved -- perhaps much wealthier. If nothing else, we wouldn't have seen an entire generation of young men harrowed in the 1860s, and we wouldn't have wasted literally centuries of emotional energy on keeping blacks "in their place".
--Erich Schwarz
The time stolen from Africans was indeed invested in Europeans. The "cost" of life represents the energy they invested in work, and the paucity of food and shelter offered in return. You're talking about the differential between the market value of that work and what they were "paid." That difference was invested in their masters' families and estates, and is passed down in inherited wealth to this day.
No, a great deal of what was stolen from the slaves was simply wasted.
They could have created much more value if they'd been able to choose their work, get education, and choose where they lived.
Furthermore, just as stolen money is more likely to be frittered away, so is stolen effort.
And some of what was taken from slaves in the US was destroyed in the Civil War.
It might be worth noting that the places which hung onto slavery longest aren't strikingly prosperous.
I'm not saying that no value was produced by slaves or that none of it has been kept, just that it was much less (for the larger society as well as for the slaves themselves) than the slaves would have produced if they'd been free.
"I question whether it was entirely and uniquely bad."
We have more then 7 billion people alive today and thousands of years of recorded history. Nothing is entirely or uniquely anything.
"Otherwise we'll be hearing how the Middle Passage justifies blacks performing less well than whites in public schools "
Actually it's the decades of being prohibited from education followed by decades of inferior schools that makes the argument. I don't completly agree with it; there are plenty of examples of people overcoming bad schools to better themselves but there has been an influence on the culture and infrastrucure of education in US that started with the delibrate effort to not educate blacks.
"You don't get a shopping mall from murdering an Indian and having the mall spring magically from his corpse"
But you do get the land...
"I'm not saying that no value was produced by slaves or that none of it has been kept, just that it was much less (for the larger society as well as for the slaves themselves) than the slaves would have produced if they'd been free."
Only a minority owned slaves and only a small minority of that group owned more then a few. I'm pretty sure they were perfectly happy to trade a lower overall 'wealth in the world' for making sure they got the lion's share of what was produced.
It's true that the civil war and reconstruction largely destroyed or redistributed that wealth but the fact is, it's not about total wealth, it's about power and distribution of the wealth.
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