Kevin and All,

    Kevin, well said!  To paraphrase Edmund S. Morgan, isn't the United 
States of America, colonial Virginia writ large?  Virginia, the mother 
colony of what was to become the United States, experimented with white 
servitude to run its plantations until a political crisis arose in the 
1670s.  The transition to black enslavement, a labor regime which already 
existed in South Carolina and New York/New England on a small scale, rapidly 
grew to a behemoth on the Chesapeake.  By 1790 50% of all American slaves 
lived in the Chesapeake and the black population of the new United States 
was at least 20%.  A pattern of race/class relations had been put in place 
that has not been fully transcended even now.
    In Nepal, the high caste Hindus tend to look like Indians from the 
contiguous region, usually very brown in complexion.  Meanwhile, the lower 
caste people who work for them, at one time as slaves, tend to look a bit 
more east Asian and have much lighter skins.  I cannot this moment remember 
the name of the ethnicity but that group, the lighter skinned people, were 
the heart of the Maoist insurgency that ripped the social fabric of Nepal 
for the last ten years.
    My point, obviously, is that the thoroughly contingent nature of 
dominance and subalternity, of mastership and slavehood, should be obvious 
to all.  A philosopher from a university in Nigeria explained to me once the 
difference between the American race system and the Indian caste system.  He 
said that in America white people saw a phenotypical difference in human 
beings and gave it a mythic meaning, whereas in India the phenotypical 
difference itself was imagined and then given a mythic meaning.
(Dravidian Brahmans from the south of Indian are ten times darker than 
Chamars [sweepers = untouchables] from Kashmir.)
    Race, slavery, oppression, discrimination are all contingent.  In 
Europe, it was Jews and Romany (Gypsies):  people who generally look to me 
to be Caucasian, who were hated and finally in the 1940s murdered in one of 
the worst genocides in world history.
    We need to develop what Miguel de Unamuno called "the tragic sense of 
life."  Race hatred, slavery, domination are a part of our legacy as 
Americans, and I speak as a black American.  This is my country and I love 
it fiercely but I will not falsify its history.
    Ronald Reagan running for president in either 1976 or 1980, said that he 
could remember a nation that didn't have racism.  The San Francisco comic 
Mort Saul commented, "Jesus, the man must be 400 years old."
    I do not require an apology.  I do suggest that acknowledging that a 
group of people labored for 250 years with no wages in one of the most 
powerful developing capitalist economies in the history of the world seems 
like a pretty good idea.

Harold S. Forsythe
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Sent: Friday, January 19, 2007 9:09 PM
Subject: Re: VIRGINIA LEGISLATURE... Being PC


> Isn't it remotely possible that the legacy of slavery has done
> serious harm to all of us?  Moreover, shouldn't we at take
> into consideration that there are a great may ways to
> acknowledge the evil of slavery, and the complicity of a good
> many of our past statesmen, perhaps even most, in its
> perpetuation?
>
> The issue of slavery, and the damage it has done to all
> Americans, is deeply engrained in our nation's history.  We
> can, broadly speaking, refer to the American political
> tradition as a species of liberalism.  Those of our ancestors
> who wanted to reconcile the ownership of slaves with the
> social contractarian liberalism of the founders faced a tricky
> problem.  They solved it by emphasizing the paternal
> benevolence of slavery, and the perpetual childlike nature of
> those people qualified to be enslaved.  Guys like John C.
> Calhoun (or in Virginia, Stringfellow, Dew, or Fitzhugh)
> suggested that slavery was good for the slaves because it
> civilized and christianized them, just so long, of course, as
> they remained under the paternal supervision of the slave
> owners.  The character of American racism stems from this
> brilliant synthesis of liberalism and its antithesis--the
> slave could not be entrusted to exercise responsible adult
> self-government, and thus was unfit for citizenship.
>
> Its a mistake then to call racism "illiberal."  Rather, the
> peculiar nature of American racism derives from the effort
> that its most able advocates extended to reconcile the
> circumstances of perpetual chattel plantation slavery with the
> liberalism of Locke, and after him Adams, Jefferson, Madison,
> and the rest of the founders.  What had been a racism based on
> English ethno-centrism became fused with the American liberal
> tradition.  Or to put it another way, the corruption
> represented by slavery extended pretty deeply into various
> influential strains of American political thought.
>
> This corruption, needless to say, extended well past the
> ratification of the 13th Amendment.  By the time slavery
> ended, the corruption was deeply entrenched, and it permeated
> American public thought well into the 20th century.  It
> received a strong nudge from social Darwinism in the late 19th
> century, and from the development of Eugenics thought in the
> 20th.  The last professor committed to teaching Eugenics
> retired from UVA in 1954, and the influence of Eugenics
> thinking extended well into the 1970s in the state's mental
> health institutions.  The explicit repudiation of this variant
> of racism is, relatively speaking, a recent phenomenon.
>
> Reparation or apology for the corruption that slavery
> represented, and which, as I have argued above, extended well
> beyond the simple ownership of slaves, does not have to take
> the form of cash transfers.  Its pretty easy to see why that
> is not an option that we have to take seriously, if for no
> other reason than it would have the perverse effect of
> accentuating racist thought in the short term (by introducing
> a calculus of racial genealogy reminiscent of the
> miscegenation laws of early 20th century Virginia).
>
> But there are other ways to repay the debt, and to acknowledge
> publically not only the crime, but the deep taint it left
> behind.  For example, we have an excellent and well funded
> museum on the mall in Washington DC dedicated to the study and
> memory of an historical crime that did not take place in the
> U.S., and in which, the U.S. was not involved to anywhere near
> the same degree as it was in the crime of slavery.  Why is
> there no museum dedicated to the study of plantation slavery
> in our nation's capital, in the space we as a people set aside
> to allocate to the memorialization of our heritage?
>
> Kevin R. Hardwick, Ph.D.
> Department of History
> James Madison University
>
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