WaitingforRuffcorn wrote:
You think writers and thinkers are not products of the times they are writing in? That's what you are saying in your initial response. I would say the culture of the places where professors work has a huge influence on their outlooks. Do you think writers in the 30s weren't influenced by the news and politics of their times?
This heuristic applies equally then to the historians that Baptist, Beckert, and Rothman are responding to as well though (who you seem to have no problem with). If you want to say they're too influenced by PC politics and thus overstate the significance of the Civil War on the impact of the entire US economy, one can just as well respond that earlier historians were too devoted to patriotism and focused on downplaying the centrality of slavery and the contradictions it entails for our nice narratives of American history centered on liberty. At which point, the debate becomes about evidence, rather than just insulting actual scholar for being too influenced by present day politics just because they happen to disagree with your priors.
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As for the rest it's largely semantics. Of course the economies were interlinked in some respects, but what it the purpose of that insight? I don't think you can say that without cotton from the slave South there is no modern United States economy. It's speculative at best. What is undeniable is that American capitalism excelled in non-Slave states after the Civil War.
It's also undeniable that the North benefited from the raw materials extracted by slave labor prior to the Civil War, and it's highly speculative as well whether the economy in those states follows the same trajectory it did without the easy access of cotton from the South. There's also of course the immigrant laborer ltg has been referred to multiple times in the course of this discussion, as well as the influx of cheap labor to those non-slave states brought on by the Souther Diaspora in the early 20th century. The point is you can't just find a hard cutoff and declare that this is the point where we can declare slavery suddenly becomes insignificant, most especially because of the continued oppression of slaves and descendants post-Civil War.
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To try to find ties in the modern economy back to slavery serves what purpose? Capitalism relied on a lot of low pay or no pay workers. I don't think the burden of being at the bottom at one time should eternally lie at the feet of just black people. And if we are going to correct for slavery now where do we go next? Correct for generations of workers who had almost zero rights?
Well it serves the purpose of correcting for histories that try to downplay its effect on the shape of America in comparison to squishy narratives about the triumph of liberalism and American exceptionalism.
And empirically they've basically never not been on the bottom for more than short spurts. No one argues about slavery in isolation being responsible for 21st century outcomes, but as a pattern of continuous oppression that carries over into the present day. It's not a surprise that being unable to even reckon with the reality of slavery in the 19th century may be correlated with myopically focusing on anything but racism that's occurring in the present.
And if you want to correct for other things, I'd say yes, we should definitely do a lot more for the Native Americans we've been mistreating for as long or longer as well.
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The last part is a totally separate argument. People wanted to forget about slavery in the 19th Century is not a significant factor in looking at 21st Century outcomes. It's anecdotal at best. I don't believe it serves anyone's interest to say your people have been wronged in the past, so we can't expect you to compete with other students. I think this is dangerous thinking, and not serving this and future generations well. It would be a lot better to deemphasize racial identity. Rather than say you the living embodiment of hundreds of years of mistreatment. What other group has to live like that?
You seem a helluva lot more concerned by black people possibly having perverse incentives more than any other group having to correct for their own existing perverse incentives to, for instance, downplay or deny the existence and effects of actual racism. One way to avoid having to say "you are the living embodiment of hundreds of years of mistreatment" is to actually stop the mistreatment and also make far more robust welfare benefits available than the comparatively paltry means-tested programs we have in the US.
It's a pain to respond to you because of the way you use quotes, and the glare from my computer. I don't know how much clearer can it be on this last point: I don't care about the benefits blacks receive. I am more concerned with the unintended effects of those benefits, and the impression that those benefits have created that become ingrained into the culture. You can deny those or take the usual tactic of saying it's racially motivated. That serves no purpose.
As for the histories: of course every era has it's biases. I question if the numbers are even close to accurate on records from that time. So it' s going to be a lot of speculation, and a narrative that will be well received by the current audience. Professors want to sell books too. My question is how can we definitively say the economy took off because of slave labor? I don't think that question can be answered, and it's something that I find generally annoying about writing about history. Trying to reduce the end results to a single point. Had it not been for this the the following would have never happened can be fun speculation, but we have no idea how it would have played out.
As for historical corrections- why does it only have to be minority groups? Can't we do a general uplifting rather than say it's only by your racial identity that we care about fixing the past.
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