Potentially sensitive PoAC

[velvetpage]

This came from a comment I made in ursulav's journal, about how I found the association of slave ownership with an evil character to be sloppy character portrayal or a serious misunderstanding of historical realities. The return comment could be read a calling me a racist, and certainly did say that this was a cop-out to diminish the impact of slavery and apologize for the oppressors. (The comment wasn't from Ursula, btw.)

Here is my response.

I am not negating the evil of slavery. I am not negating the trials that slaves went through. I make it very clear to my students that those were very real, and very serious, and that they still occur and the values that inspire them still need to be fought.

I am, however, arguing against one point. This was not dehumanization. It was a different value system placed on life in general - all life, human included. They didn't decide, "Yes, all humans have value just because they're human, but we're going to make it so these humans have less value so that we can use them." They didn't acknowledge human value in the same way we do. NONE OF THEM DID. There was no serious effort at any point in history until modern times (i.e. the Renaissance and later) to abolish slavery, as far as I know. It was simply not seen as evil in and of itself.

To say that it was a conscious violation of human dignity, and that it's the grossest we have seen in a very long time, implies several things I don't think are true. First, it implies a similar concept of human dignity to ours. Second, it implies a blip in history. Third, it implies that there were those who disagreed with it vocally and that the oppressors were aware of the disagreements. NONE OF THOSE THINGS WERE TRUE until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

If you're arguing only nineteenth-century America, you'd have a point. You couldn't have known the history that I teach my kids, so I'll fill you in: I teach ancient civilizations to ten-year-olds. A completely different context.

It is not necessary to downplay the evils of slavery in order to point out that most people throughout history have not seen it as evil. That is simply a fact. Even the Bible, the document that was most often cited as the reason for the great social change that was abolition in the West, never said slavery was wrong; in fact, it laid down quite extensive guidelines for how people should treat their slaves if they were Christians.

If you're telling me that my race and class have impacted my perspective, of course they have. I'm from a social group that were undereducated working-class people until two generations ago. My ancestors were slaves too - admittedly much longer ago than two hundred years. If you go back far enough, every ethnic group has slavery in its past, with the possible exception of most Han Chinese. Slavery was a fact of life in most parts of the world until quite recently in historical terms.

Comments

[greybeta.livejournal.com]

I remember my ancient Roman professor hammering home this point. Rome grew large because of slavery. Roman citizens didn't pay taxes. Roman subjects and slaves did. The Roman system worked because people wanted to be freed and eventually become citizens under the empire.

[tormentedartist.livejournal.com]

Well said ! Or written.

Dictionary.com:

[winters-edge.livejournal.com]

To deprive of human qualities such as individuality, compassion, or civility: slaves who had been dehumanized by their abysmal condition.

The issue of the point in history is a good one, except that by the above definition, it can be argued that the slaves of that era were still dehumanized. Why? Because the peers of their owners were treated in an entirely different- and much more civil, individual, and compassionate- manner.

Re: Dictionary.com:

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I don't like the sentence with that definition. To deprive someone of something is to take away something they already had, in this case, humane treatment. The definition doesn't fit if they never had it to begin with. The sentence only fits if large segments of society felt that slaves were deserving of the same treatment as everyone else, i.e., in nineteenth-century America, the sentence would fit. It would not fit almost any other time period, because the prerequisite assumption of a certain level of treatment just because one belongs to the human race was not present.

Re: Dictionary.com:

[winters-edge.livejournal.com]

Ah, but the owners had it between them in their social groups, and the slaves had their own version of it before they were taken from their homelands. It is not ours to say- nor was it the owners- what was civilized versus not merely because we were not or are not culturally sensitive.

The problem with this debate is that it's mixing two areas. You're trying to argue the historical aspects of the case against someone who is arguing the anthropological ones, and it's like fighting apples with oranges. You are not wrong historically, but you will offend and in their opinion, lose no matter how correct you are because you're not disproving the argument from their science. Do you see?

Re: Dictionary.com:

[pyat.livejournal.com]

Pfft. Apples can beat oranges any day. They stay fresh longer, for one!

Re: Dictionary.com:

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I know I'm not going to win the argument. I also understand why. I understand the anthropological argument, though I would still argue that the owners didn't have a concept of humanity similar to ours. Frankly, they've already judged me as guilty of racism for simply saying that owning slaves did not make a person inherently evil. The reason I'm arguing it is a) because it's a serious historical misperception no matter the anthropological basis for it (which IMO is somewhat weak, anyway) and b) because I don't like being called a racist, however indirectly.

Re: Dictionary.com:

[collie13.livejournal.com]

I am sorry, but as a former anthropology major I must disagree with your statements.

First, there was indeed rampant injustice and/or deprivation between the "owners" in most slave-owning cultures I've read of. It would be a mistake to regard them as a uniformly generic and privileged class. Further, we tend to view slavery today as a constant -- once one is enslaved, that is their state for life, and the state of all their offspring. This is, however, not the case.

For example, a Greek male land-owner with many slaves would be regarded respectfully, where a Greek girl heiress with many slaves would be regarded as valuable property on the hoof. An ancient Hebrew woman slave would be regarded as a potential source of strong sons by her ancient Hebrew male owner, but the reverse would certainly not be true -- an ancient Hebrew woman who allowed herself to be impregnated by a male slave would be considered defiled, devalued, and possibly nothing more than a slave herself.

Further, many cultures allowed for slaves to purchase their freedom, or even to decide who they wanted their owner to be. In some of these cultures the children of a freeman and a slave were considered free also. Often the children of free parents, who were abandoned due to financial need, could be picked up by slave-traders and sold as slaves. Sometimes childless families would purchase slave children to raise as their own rightful heirs. Again, there were cultural rituals in place which allowed for parents to try to find and recover their now-grown and formerly abandoned children.

Is this civilized behavior? How should I know? All I can say for sure is every culture -- every culture we know of! -accreted rituals which best insured survival for its collective members. The rituals might become outdated or even cruel, but at some point those rituals came into play, and were considered necessary tradition, because they worked -- they helped their participants survive in an often harsh and unforgiving world. This is true even today, even in our respective cultures.

Finally a good anthropological viewpoint must, by definition, acknowledge that culture changes constantly through time. We may talk about "ancient Greece" or "modern America," but these statements are empirically meaningless unless we also recognize time as a factor, i.e. "ancient Greece in the time of Pericles," or "modern America in the 1950's." Anthropology includes archeology and thus, by necessity, the history of those cultures. Or, to put it in simpler terms, "Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."

If you're in the US, happy Thanksgiving! Hope you're enjoying our now-outdated seasonal feasting designed to fatten us up to survive the long, cold winter, and to thank our Indian hosts (whom we seem to have misplaced today) for not killing us but instead saving us from starvation through ignorance. ;)

Re: Dictionary.com:

[winters-edge.livejournal.com]

You don't need to apologize for having an opinion, but thank you anyhow.

I'd like to point out that I am NOT and never was an anthropology major. I probably misused the term from your viewpoint, and I will admit to not having been happy with it from my own, but I couldn't think of the word I wanted, so there you go. My point was to say that one person is thinking in very different, non-historical and more emotional, cultural terms (and I don't mean historically cultural, but rather, what was acceptable within their own system, whether it included castes, slavery, etc), and velvetpage seemed to be responding from a very logical, very technical POV.

Now, that doesn't give anyone the right to be insulting, but did the person come out and call her a racist? I haven't read the post yet, so I can't say. Did they assume they knew all that she did about the history of slavery across several historical periods and had read her correctly? Quite possibly, and that was erroneous. It would, however, be equally incorrect of us to assume that they called her racist or felt she thought one way or another about the matter at all without asking them for clarification on the matter.

I didn't mean to raise your hackles about anthropology by using it in place of the word I couldn't remember, but it was close to what I was trying to say and I assumed the gist would be perceived by the other things surrounding it.

Assumptions are terrible, aren't they?

Re: Dictionary.com:

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

In other words, the person commenting was doing so out of exactly the type of emotional reaction that I try to encourage my students to question in themselves. :)

She didn't come out and call me a racist in so many words, but she did say that the only people who could afford the attitude I had were white middle-class people who would never have to deal with the ramifications of this. This was after stating that my viewpoint was a social cop-out that downplayed the horror and apologized for the oppressors. I resisted the urge to ask her if she thought I was racist, because that wouldn't have solved anything. Lines in the sand were not my goal.

[purplkat.livejournal.com]

I think a really important point about why we need to understand that slave owners were not all diabolical eeeevil people cackling in their grand estates and twirling their mustaches in between their daily slave beatings is because we need to be able to recognize similar evils that go on today. If you say: "The only people who perpetuated these travesties against human dignity had hooved feet and horns sticking out of their heads!" then you can go ahead and think that unless you see some hooved horned people running around, nothing like slavery is ever going to happen again (or indeed, is happening now). If you recognize that what we now see as a travesty against human dignity was, in its time, actually quite acceptable, then we can look at things that are acceptable now with a different eye.

When I talk to the 'ALL SLAVERY IS BAD!' group, I generally ask them how much do they pay for their produce? Do they make sure that they only buy from farms where the farmhands get a living wage? Also, where do they buy their clothes? Do they know that all of the companies they buy clothes from have fair business practices in terms of their factory conditions, etc? What about the inexpensive jewelry that they wear? I recently read an article that talked about children in India who are, quite literally, bought and sold and who make cheap bangle bracelets all day. Their parents sell them to the factories for about US $35.

The truth is that our society still rests on the shoulders of an underclass that, while not actually enslaved, might as well be, and someday, there are going to be immature people looking back at us and calling US demons because we didn't raise arms and do something about it. But the economic realities for many people are that they quite simply cannot afford to only buy produce from farms where the farmhands are all paid a living wage, and they cannot afford to only buy clothing that was made in good working conditions.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

You've hit on exactly the point I try to stress with my students: if we make them out to be evil, what we're doing is divorcing ourselves from them morally, turning it into an us-and-them situation, where "those bad people" did something WE would never do. I believe that everyone has within them the capacity both for great good and for great evil, and that great evil can be done when a few people do horrible things and everyone else stands back and does nothing. This is a fundamental concept of citizenship, and to negate it is to reduce the level of responsibility that we need to take in our society.

So, by branding all slaveowners as inherently evil and allowing that perception to stand in my class, this person has unwittingly created a bunch of bystanders to modern evil.

Oh, that's a sweet thesis. I need to write an essay about that one.

[winters-edge.livejournal.com]

BTW, I do not believe that all people who were slaveholders were evil. Some who owned slaves were not, and were no "worse" than those who have businesses now and can only afford to pay minimum wage with no benefits. It is what they have and what they can manage, and many of them treat their employees better than companies that offer much, much more. It's about the individual situation/person, not the whole of the term.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

Exactly.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

*nodnods*

I haven't pushed this point in Sythyry's Journal, but in the World Tree sourcebook, we discuss slavery on the World Tree. It's a minor facet of Ketherian prime civilization, and has a rather fuzzy boundary with other low social statuses. However, it's not the lowest social status around. For most slaves, it's simply a job with crappy terms of employment, slightly worse than most people who have that job. There are several worse facets of Ketherian prime civilization.

And yes, that's in part to perplex whatever admirers of the D&D-crossover novels where fighting slavers is the greatest good possible, and others who think that the honest-to-gods awful variations of slavery that have shown up in the last few centuries (possibly together with the ridiculous ones of Gor) are the only choices.