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.

[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.

[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.