Potentially sensitive PoAC
Nov. 24th, 2005 04:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
velvetpageThis 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.
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.
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Re: Dictionary.com:
Date: 2005-11-24 11:53 pm (UTC)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:
Date: 2005-11-25 04:32 am (UTC)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
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:
Date: 2005-11-25 12:07 pm (UTC)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.