Is America a racist nation?

[cradleandshoot]

The folks at Nyack middle school, at least the Aramark people, can't possibly be this insensitive. The lunch menu for the first day of Black History Month was fried chicken and waffles with watermelon for dessert. What were these stupid people thinking?? I'm surprised they didn't throw in collard greens and fatback as a veggie. FTR, I love fried chicken, waffles and watermelon. I don't have fried chicken that often for good reasons.

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The 1619 Project kicked over a hornets nest in it's latest tv episode on Hulu. National Review Online had 3 articles in rebuttal.
For the benefit of non-subscribers who might be interested, I'll post each individually, in my following 3 posts.
So as not to stretch out the thread by re-posting their content, quote this short introductory post when you attack me.
Enjoy. You're welcome.

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https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/n ... erm=second

‘No, Slavery Didn’t Create Capitalism’

by RICH LOWRY, February 7, 2023

If there were any doubt about the radical agenda of the 1619 Project — which has made a pretense of a neutral pursuit of the historical truth — the Hulu show should remove it.

It argues that, as Hannah-Jones puts it, our “economic system was founded on buying and selling black people.” Imprinted by this legacy, American capitalism is brutish and exploitative to this day. In fact, there is a direct line from antebellum cotton plantations to 21st-century Amazon warehouses.

Yes, there’s very little difference between, say, Joshua John Ward, “the king of the rice planters” who owned more than a thousand slaves in South Carolina, and Jeff Bezos.

The point is that the only way to fully reject racism and the legacy of slavery is to reject American capitalism. QED.

This is poisonous dreck.

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https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/ ... term=first

The 1619 Project Gets Its Facts Wrong Yet Again

by DAN MCLAUGHLIN, February 15, 2023

The 1619 Project miniseries keeps getting its timelines backward.

Readers who have followed the 1619 Project from its inception in 2019 as a New York Times Magazine special edition through its metamorphoses into a classroom curriculum in 2020, a book released in November 2021, an ongoing campus and library-lecture tour by 1619 Project impresario Nikole Hannah-Jones, and now a slickly photographed miniseries on Hulu narrated by Hannah-Jones, should by now not be surprised at four things.

First, while the project contains some useful perspective on the history of slavery, segregation, and racism in America, it is wrapped in a highly tendentious ideological framework that ranges from rank Democratic partisanship to Marxist economic and political theory. Second, it gets important facts glaringly wrong. Third, it advances arguments without the slightest shame or self-reflection after being called out publicly on getting the supporting facts for those arguments glaringly wrong in the past.
And fourth, it remains a lucrative brand entirely without regard to whether it gets its facts straight or peddles partisan or ideological agitprop. That’s why Hannah-Jones has been showered with the highest awards the American intelligentsia can bestow, including a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “genius grant,” an endowed chair in “Race and Journalism” at Howard University, and an entire Center for Journalism and Democracy at said school, which will fund her in producing a next generation of imitators of her approach to historical truth. These accolades are based entirely on the 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones, who was scarcely known before the publication of the project, has done little else since.

The Counter-Revolutionary

The first episode of the miniseries, on “Democracy,” shows that Hannah-Jones is still at it. The core of what made the original 1619 Project so controversial was the insistence by Hannah-Jones on treating the preservation of slavery as a major cause — perhaps the major cause — of the Americans’ rebellion against Britain in 1775 and their declaration of independence in 1776. This stance led a historian who reviewed an advance copy of Hannah-Jones’s lead essay to warn against publishing it as written. It triggered a fusillade of criticism for the project from eminent liberal historians of the Revolutionary and Civil War periods. It finally compelled the Times to issue a reluctant “clarification” through gritted teeth — a correction Hannah-Jones has clearly never accepted.

To defenders who contend that the 1619 Project is something other than radical, fringe history with serious credibility problems, the controversy over the American Revolution is a minor quibble that should not detract from the broader message of the project about the legacy of slavery. But Hannah-Jones evidently does not agree with her own apologists. Not only has she reacted with belligerence, scorn, and sometimes racial invective aimed at anyone who takes issue with her framing of the Revolution, she has continued to ignore the First Rule of Holes (if you’re in one, stop digging) by searching for any fig leaf to retroactively justify her argument, then trot it out in each successive iteration of the project.

Why does she do this? I can’t read her mind. Perhaps she cannot admit that she is wrong. Perhaps she cannot let go of the conspiratorial mindset that is unable to separate the aims of the Revolution from the contemporaneous reality of slavery — even when the key colonies that triggered the Revolution also outlawed slavery and/or the slave trade during or immediately after the war. But the explanation that best explains her behavior is that letting go of her theory of the Revolution would undermine the central narrative goal of the 1619 Project, which is to rewrite the history of the American Founding so as to make it not a flawed thing but an affirmatively bad thing. If your ideological project demands that the Founding be bad from the outset, you can never admit that it was driven by anything but the worst possible motive. Certainly, Hannah-Jones has acted for the past three and a half years as if preserving that narrative is more important than the credibility of all the rest of the 1619 Project or of the New York Times as an institution. And nobody around her has deterred her from that course.

Wrong about the Revolution

That brings us to the first episode of the miniseries. Once again, Hannah-Jones dedicates crucial space and time to casting the Revolution as depending for its success on people motivated to fight by British threats to slavery, and strongly implies that it would have been better if the British had won the war and the United States had never existed as an independent nation. This is a jarring posture when juxtaposed with her repeated framing of black Americans as the true patriots, such as her American-flag-flying father; it suggests that her radical politics are out of step with the very people her miniseries celebrates.

The original magazine version of the 1619 Project, in the sentence that was since “clarified,” blandly asserted as fact that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” At the time, Hannah-Jones did not even bother to cite facts or scholarship to back up her theory, other than asserting generically that “in London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South.” This was false history: As Sean Wilentz of Princeton notes, “the colonists had themselves taken decisive steps to end the Atlantic slave trade from 1769 to 1774. During that time, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island either outlawed the trade or imposed prohibitive duties on it. Measures to abolish the trade also won approval in Massachusetts, Delaware, New York, and Virginia, but were denied by royal officials.”

In fact, at the time, there was more opposition in the American colonies to the slave trade than there was in Britain, which did not ban it until 1807 (the same year it was banned by Congress). Hannah-Jones centers her colonial narrative almost entirely on Virginia, but it escapes her notice that Virginia banned the transatlantic slave trade by statute in 1778, in a bill signed and probably authored by Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson (the same man who signed the federal ban in 1807). It makes no sense whatsoever to say that Americans revolted against something the British were not prepared to do, then did it themselves once British opposition had been removed.

More broadly, actual historians of the period are all but unanimous that the anti-slavery movement organized itself and enacted laws earlier in America than in Britain. The world’s first anti-slavery society was organized in Pennsylvania in 1775 at the urging of Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet, over a decade before the nascent anti-slavery movement began seriously organizing in Britain in 1786–87. Between 1777 and 1784, slavery was banned in Vermont, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. It was banned by Congress in the Northwest Territory in 1787, and by statutes passed in New York in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804. Parliament, by contrast, did not ban slavery in the British colonies until 1833, long after most of the American revolutionaries were in their graves. These are historical facts, and Hannah-Jones has never made any effort to address them. Indeed, historian Woody Holton, who features in the miniseries and has been one of the few academics to attempt a factual defense of the 1619 Project’s theories about the Revolution, has observed in his academic work that Hannah-Jones “vastly exaggerates the size and strength of the British abolition movement” at the time of the Revolution.

In subsequent versions of the 1619 Project, including the book, she has advanced two theories not mentioned in the original magazine piece. One was that the colonists were alarmed by the 1772 Somerset judicial decision, which held that slaves brought from the colonies into Britain would be free because slavery was disfavored at common law, and Parliament had passed no positive slavery law. This decision did not affect slavery in British colonies, and it produced nothing remotely resembling the colonial reaction to the Stamp Act, the tea tax, or other causes of riots, protests, and bloodshed. At the time, Benjamin Franklin — citing Benezet — derided Somerset as empty virtue-signaling, merely the “setting free of a single negro” while doing nothing against the brutal transatlantic slave trade.

In the miniseries, Hannah-Jones no longer pursues any of these angles but focuses entirely on the November 1775 Dunmore Proclamation, by which the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered to free any adult male slaves of patriot masters if the slaves served in the British army. Hannah-Jones and Holton frame this as an early version of the Emancipation Proclamation. They do not mention that it was Dunmore who had refused to sign a ban on the slave trade in Virginia, which is why it had to await Jefferson to do it after ousting royal authority in the colony.

As I discussed at length in reviewing the 1619 Project book, its narrative gets the chronology backwards. Dunmore was already locked in conflict with the Virginia legislature in 1774. Patrick Henry gave his “Give me liberty or give me death” speech in March 1775 to persuade an assemblage of Virginia’s leading men to raise a militia. George Washington took the most fateful step that summer:

The Dunmore Proclamation was issued in November 1775. Did that turn George Washington into a revolutionary? On July 3, 1775, in Cambridge Massachusetts, Washington assumed command of the Continental Army. He was immediately employed in besieging the British troops occupying Boston, two weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill. In other words, four months before the Dunmore Proclamation, George Washington was not merely considering joining a war against Britain; he was already its commander in chief. This was, as Washington well knew, treason against the Crown, for which he could and likely would have been hanged. By October 1775, Washington was signing off on an American invasion of Quebec. For the Dunmore Proclamation to have turned Washington into a revolutionary, he would have needed a time machine.

The miniseries avoids discussing Washington or Henry or any of these events. The redoubtable Phil Magness has dismantled the revised-for-TV version, noting among other things that Dunmore himself was a slave-owner, and an unrepentant one, as he showed as royal governor of Bermuda after the Revolution. Magness also details how Hannah-Jones and Holton use the visual format to mislead viewers: Sitting in front of the governor’s mansion in Williamsburg, they falsely characterize Dunmore as issuing the proclamation from the mansion, when he had actually already been chased out of the capital months earlier and no longer governed Virginia in any practical sense.

There are more problems with framing the Dunmore Proclamation as a crucial factor in bringing Virginia into a revolution that its troops were already fighting, and in which its most prominent soldier was already commanding the army. The proclamation was quite modest. It exempted the slaves of loyalists, so any colonist who was truly motivated mainly by the protection of slavery could simply switch sides to back the British and retain their slaves. As David North and Eric London explained in a 2019 critique at the World Socialist Web Site:

While there is evidence that thousands of slaves escaped to join the British forces in the hope of securing freedom, the British treated these runaways with such extreme brutality that many runaways soon fled the British. Loyalist forces returned slaves whose owners switched their support to the crown, subjecting the slaves to brutal punishment as captured fugitives. The British armed a small minority of the runaways, but the vast majority were made to perform dangerous and brutal labor with virtually no pay and little food. There is evidence that many were ultimately sold off into the West Indian slave trade. . . . Of the 800 who escaped to Dunmore’s forces, most died of disease by 1776 due to lack of food, clothing and shelter.

If this was truly some sort of radical act of liberation, it would not have wholly excluded black women and children, who were left enslaved. Hannah-Jones simply erases black women from this particular story. Moreover, by casting the Dunmore Proclamation as a red line that triggered Americans because it armed black men and freed slaves in exchange for military service, Hannah-Jones and Holton run into another problem: The Americans did the same thing themselves not long afterward. As North and London note:

Thousands of freed blacks and slaves served in the racially integrated Continental Army after January 1, 1777, when the ban on black conscription was lifted. Baron Von Closen, a German officer serving in the French Royal Deux-Ponts, estimated that up to a quarter of the Revolutionary army was black. In 1783, the Virginia legislature passed an Emancipation Act granting freedom to all slaves who had “faithfully served agreeable to the terms of their enlistment, and have thereby of course contributed towards the establishment of American liberty.”

This was not entirely magnanimous; Virginians had sent slaves to fight as substitutes for enlisting themselves. Some slave-owners did not wish to honor that commitment once the military emergency had passed. But the state legislature honored the deal, concluding that after

representing to . . . recruiting officers that the slaves so enlisted by their direction or concurrence were freemen; and it appearing further to this assembly, that on expiration of the term of enlistment of such slaves that the former owners have attempted again to force them to return to a state of servitude, contrary to the principles of justice, and to their own solemn promise. . . . It appears just and reasonable that all persons enlisted as aforesaid . . . should enjoy the blessings of freedom as a reward for their toils and labours.

Consider the case of James Armistead, a Virginia slave who served as a spy for the Marquis de Lafayette, playing a crucial role in the Yorktown campaign. Armistead faced some resistance to freeing him after the war because he had not served in the regular army, but he was granted his freedom by Congress in 1787 after an appeal by Lafayette testified to his service. He adopted Lafayette’s surname in gratitude.

The practice of freeing slaves in exchange for military service has a long history in warfare, often as a tool of weakening one’s adversaries. Consider, however, how the use of emancipation in the Civil War differed from Dunmore’s approach. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, was (like Dunmore’s proclamation) limited to slaves in Confederate territory, but it differed in freeing all such slaves, not only those who would serve in the Union Army. Indeed, it was originally drafted nearly a year before the Union began enlisting black soldiers. (Hannah-Jones suggests in the miniseries that black soldiers won the war for the Union, which is an exaggeration given that they did not begin fighting until after Gettysburg and Vicksburg had decisively turned the tide of the war.) The Confederacy, near the very end of the war, also offered freedom to slaves who would enlist with their master’s permission, but only when the Confederate cause was already visibly hopeless and the United States Congress had already passed the 13th Amendment, guaranteeing that the slaves would be freed anyway once the war was over.

Wrong about the Present

The misrepresentations of fact in this episode are not confined to long-ago history. Hannah-Jones airs a number of contemporary Democratic Party grievances. She quotes impartial observers such as Chuck Schumer and the “Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda,” a group so closely allied with Stacey Abrams that a link directing Abrams supporters to the GCPA remains on the front page of Abrams’s website; Hannah-Jones simply describes them as “a non-partisan organization working to defend the right to vote.”

The litany of partisan grievances includes complaining about voting laws in states such as Georgia in the past decade, which she describes as “just like laws passed during Jim Crow.” Never mind that Georgia voters of all races in 2022 reported nearly unanimous satisfaction with the convenience of the voting system under the new law, including zero percent of black Georgians reporting a poor voting experience. She claims that the Georgia voting bill “criminalizes passing out food and water to those standing in line to vote,” which is a gross mischaracterization of the law. She touts the allegations in a federal lawsuit against the Georgia voting laws, while failing to tell her viewers that federal courts have found those laws constitutional and consistent with the Voting Rights Act and are even requiring Abrams’s group to repay Georgia’s court costs. She implies (ignoring precedent) that the Senate’s refusing to confirm Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court was somehow about race because he was nominated by Barack Obama.

In one of these partisan gripes, Hannah-Jones says of voting-rights activists that “in 2020, they helped mobilize a multiracial group of voters who, in a perennially red state, chose Democrats for both Senate seats and the presidency, a move that shifted the balance of power in Washington and prompted President Trump to infamously call Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger,” demanding that he find more votes. Much of this is narrated over scenes of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff rallying together, and of Warnock’s campaign bus. The viewer is led to believe that a Warnock victory was a major impetus for the Trump call to Raffensperger.

The problem? The Trump-Raffensperger call took place on January 2, 2021, and was publicly reported in the Washington Post on January 3. The runoff elections won by Warnock and Ossoff were held on January 5 — after the call was made and publicized. Trump wasn’t calling to protest Democratic Senate victories that hadn’t happened yet; if anything, the call helped cause those victories by further spooking suburban voters worried about Trump’s assault on the electoral system. On Election Day 2020, Ossoff got fewer votes than his Republican opponent David Perdue, and in both Senate races, the Republican candidates got more votes than the Democratic candidates in November. It was only in the runoff election that the Democrats pulled ahead. Hannah-Jones has her chronology of 2020–21 as backwards as her chronology of 1775.

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https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/ ... term=first

The 1619 Project’s Confusion on Capitalism

by PHILLIP MAGNESS, February 12, 2023

The Hulu series has made it abundantly clear that history is no longer the primary purpose of the 1619 Project, assuming it ever was.

A pervasive sense of confusion characterizes Hulu’s new 1619 Project episode on “capitalism,” beginning with the basic definition of its titular term. Project creator Nikole Hannah-Jones opens the episode by conceding that “I don’t feel like most of us actually know what capitalism means.” This should have provided her an opportunity for self-reflection on how the embattled project has, over the last three years, trudged its way through the economic dimensions of slavery.

The original New York Times version of the project assigned the topic to Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, a novice without any scholarly expertise or methodological training in one of economic history’s most thoroughly scrutinized topics. The resulting essay blended empirical error with a basic misreading of the academic literature to almost comical ends. He casually repeated a thoroughly debunked statistical claim from a “New History of Capitalism” (NHC) scholar Ed Baptist, who erroneously attributes the growth of the antebellum cotton industry’s crop yield to the increased beating of slaves (it was actually due to improved seed technology). At one point, Desmond even asserted a lineal descent from plantation accounting books to Microsoft Excel — the result of misreading a passage in another book that explicitly disavowed this same connection.

Desmond is conspicuously absent from the new Hulu episode, although Amazon warehouses do apparently supplant Microsoft as the modern-day iteration of plantation economics — a message repeatedly emphasized as the camera shots flash between historical photographs of slaves working in the cotton fields of the antebellum South and footage of an Amazon distribution center. The cinematic juxtaposition is intended to provoke. Instead, it simply ventures into morally offensive analogy, stripped of any sense of proportion or understanding of slavery’s abject brutality. Though she stops just short of saying as much, Hannah-Jones wishes for her viewers to identify an hourly-wage job with the internet retail giant as a modern “capitalist” continuation of chattel slavery.

And thus, we return to the matter of definitions. Seeking a succinct explanation of “capitalism,” Hannah-Jones first consults historian Seth Rockman of Brown University. Rockman is an unusual choice, not only as a fellow traveler of Baptist’s embattled NHC school but for his own definitional confusions about the same term. He wrote a widely referenced 2014 article asserting that the NHC “has minimal investment in a fixed or theoretical definition of capitalism” while simultaneously insisting that slavery is “integral, rather than oppositional, to capitalism.” Capitalism cannot even be defined, but it is definitionally wedded to slavery. And so goes Rockman’s answer in the docuseries. After brushing aside a common dictionary’s association of the term with “a system of private property in which the free market coordinates buyers and sellers,” he settles on “it’s not really clear.” Nonetheless, capitalism, in his mind, still clearly encompasses slavery, with no further explanation needed.

Hannah-Jones’s semantic exercise shifts as she brings in a new consultant to the 1619 Project, UCLA historian Robin D. G. Kelley. Unlike Rockman’s self-contradictory equivocation, Kelley minces no words: “The reality is that capitalism is based on the exploitation of labor. It’s that simple.” And with that assertion, the 1619 Project episode further stumbles through its investigation of “capitalism” by adopting an unvarnished Marxist conceptualization of the term.

Equating capitalism with the exploitation of workers certainly serves the purpose of designating chattel slavery as a capitalistic institution, but it is simply not an accurate — or even functional — definition of the concept. Ancient Roman slavery, medieval feudalism, Soviet-era gulags, and North Korean prison camps today would also qualify as “capitalism” if we reduce the concept to exploitative worker conditions, and indeed that is how Hannah-Jones, under Kelley’s aggressively ideological guidance, proceeds.

From this dubious starting point, Hannah-Jones then opens the floodgates for almost every economic fallacy and pejorative denigration imaginable to describe economic development under market-based capitalism. Aided by Rockman, Hannah-Jones begins in palpable circularity by assuming the very premise she purports to demonstrate. American slavery “can never be separated from the history of capitalism,” Rockman tells us, resting this claim on the banal observation that slave-produced goods were bought and sold outside of the slaveholding regions and were used in economic production all over the world. The same reductionist logic could be used to deem the entire modern American economy a simple appendage of the economic system of China, Venezuela, or any other autocratic regime with which we trade or have financial entanglements. Yet the simple presence of trade, exchange, and financial institutions is not exclusive to capitalism. These have been features of almost every society in human history, free and unfree.

Seeking to drive home Rockman’s point, Hannah-Jones informs her viewers that slave-produced cotton accounted for more than half of all U.S. exports before the Civil War. The number is accurate for the period after 1820, but the claim lacks perspective. In the antebellum period, total U.S. export volume never exceeded 7 percent of GDP. As economist Gavin Wright notes, “The chief sources of U.S. growth were domestic.” In this same period, Wright shows, the American South was a diminishing market compared to the rest of the country. The share of total income arising from the southern states dropped from 57.4 percent on the eve of the American Revolution in 1774 to just 30.5 percent in 1860 at the outbreak of secessionism. Immigration patterns favored the free states in this era, and the Civil War itself provided a real-time demonstration of the industrialized North’s superior economic position vis-à-vis an underdeveloped South. Business with slave-owners undoubtedly implicated some northern banks and financial institutions in the practice, but did they “create [the] entire financial industry in the nascent United States” as Hannah-Jones purports? Only if one double-counts intermediate transactions to exaggerate the magnitude of slavery’s economic reach until it includes the lion’s share of economic output. In the NHC literature, no relevant adjustments are made to the remainder of the economy outside of the roughly 5–6 percent of antebellum GDP tied up in cotton production.

The docuseries episode nonetheless proceeds from the NHC literature’s faulty empirical assumptions, unencumbered by any need to show its math. “If you don’t have slave-grown cotton, you don’t have an American industrial revolution,” Rockman declares. “It’s as simple as that.” And yet economic reality is anything but simple. History provides numerous examples — Canada, Japan, several European states — of economies that underwent massive industrialization in the 19th century without the alleged benefits of slavery. It also offers examples such as Brazil, which maintained a large slave economy for several decades longer than the United States did without industrializing. Indeed, one empirical analysis of U.S. economic growth over time reveals that counties with slavery lagged behind free-labor regions long after slavery’s abolition. The plantation system may have enriched a small, elite group of slave-owners during its existence, but slavery is unambiguously harmful to economic development in the long run.

Economists have long rejected the class of monocausal development theories that purport to find the economic engine of an entire epoch in a single good or product, such as oil or railroads in more recent times. Aside from seldom exceeding single-digit shares of economic output, one-industry theories of economic development must contend with the counterfactual presented by the allegedly dominant industry’s closest substitutes. In the case of cotton, alternative sources could be found outside of the American South — and indeed they were during the Civil War, when the blockade induced the textile mills of Europe to turn to Egypt, India, and South America for their raw materials. In this respect, the 1619 Project repeats the same economic error that led the Confederacy to mistakenly proclaim that “cotton is king,” assuming none would dare make war upon its plantation system for risk of amputating the alleged source of their own wealth. In practice, King Cotton was but a garish pretender to an economic throne that did not even exist.

Although the 1619 Project’s anti-capitalism arises from ideological roots, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that the series’s elementary misrepresentations of American economic history arise from the abject ignorance of its creator and her chosen guests. A revealing moment occurs shortly after their botched foray into economic statistics, with Hannah-Jones declaring that “the education I received has long said that slavery wasn’t profitable.” Rockman appends a conspiratorial twist, asserting that American society “has very aggressively tried to erase those connections.”

The unprofitability thesis traces back to the turn-of-the-century writings of historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who depicted slavery as a declining institution on the eve of the Civil War. Phillips’s argument was conclusively debunked back in 1958 by economists Alfred Conrad and John R. Meyer, who used plantation records to show that slavery was profitable at the time of its abolition. Hannah-Jones and Rockman, therefore, build their case against an obsolete theory that few academics have taken seriously in over 60 years. Furthermore, Phillips’s position was almost certainly not being taught with any regularity in universities by the 1990s, when each completed their undergraduate studies in history. As with much of the NHC literature, the 1619 Project’s derivative interpretation of slavery emerges from a branch of the academy that has chosen to isolate itself from most modern scholarly works on the economics of slavery, even as it advances an unfounded assertion of its own novelty.

The ideological core of the series’s “capitalism” episode, however, is based not on NHC literature but rather on a droning foray into Marxist theorizing. Kelley, the project’s newest contributor, hails from an idiosyncratic branch of the communist philosopher’s followers, as filtered through an explicitly racial lens. Hannah-Jones summarizes his take about halfway through the episode when she states that “capitalism is designed to exploit labor and human beings, but all people are not exploited equally.” Race explains the difference in exploitative severity that each laborer faces. Kelley’s explication on this point is little more than muddled aphorism, with a string of circular declamations simply asserting that “racial capitalism is capitalism — they’re one and the same.” The viewer is left to make the next deduction, namely that capitalism itself is inherently racist and therefore deserving to be jettisoned.

Racial exploitation also functions as Kelley’s theoretical fix to a conundrum of the Marxist world. Marx famously predicted that the numerical advantages of the proletariat classes would eventually allow them to rise and seize the means of production from the capitalists. In practice, true proletarian revolutions seldom materialize. Instead, most Marxian socialist regimes get their start from small, violent bands of left-wing ideologues staging coups. Other branches of Marxist theory have retrofitted self-serving explanations into this gap, usually either faulting capitalists for obstructing class-based collective action or appointing themselves as a vanguard to usher in a broader socialist movement.

The 1619 Project takes a different route, starting with Desmond’s essay in the book version of the series. The failure of labor to collectively assert itself in the United States, Desmond alleges, is due to the capitalists’ using racial division to segment the working class. “As Northern elites were forging an industrial proletariat of factory workers,” he explains, “Southern elites . . . began creating an agrarian proletariat,” and never the twain shall meet on the revolutionary picket lines. As Kelley elaborates in the Hulu episode, “white workers choose racial solidarity over their own economic interest” and accordingly undermine the organizing mechanism of the proletarian whole, the labor union.

At this point the episode thrusts itself into a political crusade to unionize an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Ala., bringing the narrative full circle. If Amazon is the modern successor to the slave plantation, and Amazon workers sharply divide during several successive votes to unionize, as happened at the Bessemer facility, then the outcome cannot possibly reflect the triumph of any legitimate argument against unions. It must be “racial capitalism,” parsing the workers from their scientifically discerned collective labor interests and leading some of them into the service of their own capitalist exploiters.

Hannah-Jones cannot help but see this batty narrative lurking behind every single setback to the Amazon unionization organizers, whose cause she advances as self-evidently sacrosanct. Indeed, the United States’ relatively low rates of union membership becomes their own evidence that an exploitative “racial capitalism” has thoroughly corrupted our labor market. “For the last 40 years we’ve experienced a kind of onslaught against labor,” Kelley asserts.

Hannah-Jones nods in agreement, volunteering her own declarative assessment that unionization and civil rights are synonymous causes. In doing so, she repeats what historian Paul Moreno dubs “one of the hoariest myths in the history of the American labor movement” — the notion that racial animus is externally imposed on the working class to keep it divided and weak. In reality, the long history of unionization in the United States is replete with homegrown racism, as organized labor has sought to increase white workers’ wages by driving African Americans out of the competitive workforce. Many early-20th-century union initiatives, including working-hour restrictions, minimum wages, and collectively codified seniority privileges for existing workers allowed organizers to cartelize white labor against wage competition from African Americans and immigrants. The mostly white union sector benefited from artificially higher pay under these measures, whereas blacks found themselves excluded from employment entirely.

Even as some African Americans attempted to unionize separately during this era, with varying degrees of success, many civil-rights leaders recognized organized labor as a bulwark of institutional racism. A 1930s NAACP publication declared that the Wagner Act, a pro-union measure from the New Deal, was “fraught with grave danger to Negro labor” because it “empowers organized labor to exclude from employment in any industry all workers who do not belong to a union.” Since many unions in this era excluded non-white members entirely and others maintained soft discriminatory practices, the “closed shop” provisions of the act would effectively bar black workers from entire companies and industries. Writing almost a century later, Hannah-Jones looks past the overt racism that plagues the history of the American labor movement. To her, “right to work” laws are nefarious tools of racial-economic oppression, in contrast with the 1930s, “when the U.S. had one of the highest unionization rates in the world.” This rosy picture of a unionized golden age is not only in direct conflict with the position of the New Deal–era NAACP, it also contradicts Hannah-Jones’s own statements in a different episode of the Hulu series in which she acknowledges the discriminatory effects of the Wagner Act as part of her case for reparations.

Returning to Kelley, we find an answer as to why this historical omission of organized labor’s racism is made in the “capitalism” episode, but not in the others. The Marxist academic is best known for his heterodox history of the “long civil rights movement,” the thesis of which is that the Communist Party during the 1930s was among the most important organizations for the African-American civil-rights cause. Kelley comes from a far-left intellectual tradition that traces its roots to the late-life work of W. E. B. Du Bois, when the famous black intellectual split from the avowedly anti-communist leadership of the NAACP.

Du Bois, in turn, spent his final years gallivanting with Mao Zedong and touting the alleged credentials of Joseph Stalin as a leading anti-racist. But there’s an older radical tradition undergirding this line of reasoning and the NHC literature more generally. Desmond’s print version of the “racial capitalism” thesis openly ponders why American industrialization didn’t follow the course that “Karl Marx and a long list of other political theorists predicted,” namely “the formation of a Labor Party or even ushering in a socialist revolution.” This “new” take on capitalism’s history is really the repackaging of a stale thesis. It traces back to the German philosopher Werner Sombart, himself an adherent of a branch of Marxian heterodoxy (and later a collaborator with National Socialism), who observed in 1906 that “the Negro question has directly removed any class character from each of the two [American political] parties.” This split allegedly rendered both unable to serve as a locus of labor organizing. And in Desmond’s telling, the resulting weakening of laboring-class consciousness is the real economic legacy of slavery — a legacy he sees manifest today in every defeat that the far-left incurs at the ballot box.

In the 1619 Project’s peculiar political economy, slavery is the root of the American electorate’s resistance to Piketty-style wealth taxes. It’s also the reason we don’t have a fully socialized health-care system, why the IRS doesn’t hire enough auditors, and why the Green New Deal has thus far failed to advance through Congress. The Hulu episode adds one more political grievance to the list. Slavery, we learn, is the also why Amazon warehouses remain insufficiently unionized.

The historical evidence behind each of these claims is thin at best; it more often consists of NHC scholars venturing beyond their own competencies while attempting to interpret complex events in economic history. As with the NHC scholars’ hapless rehabilitation of the “King Cotton” theory, the Amazon narrative unintentionally evokes late-antebellum-era defenses of slavery, namely that wage earners were “free but in name — the slaves of endless toil,” to quote the slaver-poet and politician William J. Grayson. But the Hulu series has made it abundantly clear that history is no longer the primary purpose of the 1619 Project, assuming it ever was.

The informed viewer cannot help but notice an element of accident in Hannah-Jones’s economic misadventures. Progressive policy aims characterized the 1619 Project from the beginning, to be sure, but its confused economics left the project’s creator adrift in a sea of withering criticism. As she cast about for new sources to salvage her narrative, she eventually landed in the fringes of academic Marxism. But there’s no reason for outrage over the many errors of fact and economic reasoning that result from this witless embrace of anti-capitalist crankery. The incoherent narrative that the 1619 Project builds in its attempt to link modern Amazon warehouses to slavery offers no meaningful insights about the history or economic workings of either institution. But it is sufficiently self-discrediting to dissuade most viewers outside of the already converted.

PHILLIP MAGNESS is the director of research and education at the American Institute for Economic Research. He is the author of more than two dozen scholarly works on the economic dimensions of slavery and the American Civil War.

[MDlaxfan76]

https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/02/ ... term=first

The 1619 Project Gets Its Facts Wrong Yet Again

by DAN MCLAUGHLIN, February 15, 2023

The 1619 Project miniseries keeps getting its timelines backward.

Readers who have followed the 1619 Project from its inception in 2019 as a New York Times Magazine special edition through its metamorphoses into a classroom curriculum in 2020, a book released in November 2021, an ongoing campus and library-lecture tour by 1619 Project impresario Nikole Hannah-Jones, and now a slickly photographed miniseries on Hulu narrated by Hannah-Jones, should by now not be surprised at four things.

First, while the project contains some useful perspective on the history of slavery, segregation, and racism in America, it is wrapped in a highly tendentious ideological framework that ranges from rank Democratic partisanship to Marxist economic and political theory. Second, it gets important facts glaringly wrong. Third, it advances arguments without the slightest shame or self-reflection after being called out publicly on getting the supporting facts for those arguments glaringly wrong in the past.
And fourth, it remains a lucrative brand entirely without regard to whether it gets its facts straight or peddles partisan or ideological agitprop. That’s why Hannah-Jones has been showered with the highest awards the American intelligentsia can bestow, including a Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur “genius grant,” an endowed chair in “Race and Journalism” at Howard University, and an entire Center for Journalism and Democracy at said school, which will fund her in producing a next generation of imitators of her approach to historical truth. These accolades are based entirely on the 1619 Project. Hannah-Jones, who was scarcely known before the publication of the project, has done little else since.

The Counter-Revolutionary

The first episode of the miniseries, on “Democracy,” shows that Hannah-Jones is still at it. The core of what made the original 1619 Project so controversial was the insistence by Hannah-Jones on treating the preservation of slavery as a major cause — perhaps the major cause — of the Americans’ rebellion against Britain in 1775 and their declaration of independence in 1776. This stance led a historian who reviewed an advance copy of Hannah-Jones’s lead essay to warn against publishing it as written. It triggered a fusillade of criticism for the project from eminent liberal historians of the Revolutionary and Civil War periods. It finally compelled the Times to issue a reluctant “clarification” through gritted teeth — a correction Hannah-Jones has clearly never accepted.

To defenders who contend that the 1619 Project is something other than radical, fringe history with serious credibility problems, the controversy over the American Revolution is a minor quibble that should not detract from the broader message of the project about the legacy of slavery. But Hannah-Jones evidently does not agree with her own apologists. Not only has she reacted with belligerence, scorn, and sometimes racial invective aimed at anyone who takes issue with her framing of the Revolution, she has continued to ignore the First Rule of Holes (if you’re in one, stop digging) by searching for any fig leaf to retroactively justify her argument, then trot it out in each successive iteration of the project.

Why does she do this? I can’t read her mind. Perhaps she cannot admit that she is wrong. Perhaps she cannot let go of the conspiratorial mindset that is unable to separate the aims of the Revolution from the contemporaneous reality of slavery — even when the key colonies that triggered the Revolution also outlawed slavery and/or the slave trade during or immediately after the war. But the explanation that best explains her behavior is that letting go of her theory of the Revolution would undermine the central narrative goal of the 1619 Project, which is to rewrite the history of the American Founding so as to make it not a flawed thing but an affirmatively bad thing. If your ideological project demands that the Founding be bad from the outset, you can never admit that it was driven by anything but the worst possible motive. Certainly, Hannah-Jones has acted for the past three and a half years as if preserving that narrative is more important than the credibility of all the rest of the 1619 Project or of the New York Times as an institution. And nobody around her has deterred her from that course.

Wrong about the Revolution

That brings us to the first episode of the miniseries. Once again, Hannah-Jones dedicates crucial space and time to casting the Revolution as depending for its success on people motivated to fight by British threats to slavery, and strongly implies that it would have been better if the British had won the war and the United States had never existed as an independent nation. This is a jarring posture when juxtaposed with her repeated framing of black Americans as the true patriots, such as her American-flag-flying father; it suggests that her radical politics are out of step with the very people her miniseries celebrates.

The original magazine version of the 1619 Project, in the sentence that was since “clarified,” blandly asserted as fact that “one of the primary reasons the colonists decided to declare their independence from Britain was because they wanted to protect the institution of slavery.” At the time, Hannah-Jones did not even bother to cite facts or scholarship to back up her theory, other than asserting generically that “in London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South.” This was false history: As Sean Wilentz of Princeton notes, “the colonists had themselves taken decisive steps to end the Atlantic slave trade from 1769 to 1774. During that time, Maryland, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Rhode Island either outlawed the trade or imposed prohibitive duties on it. Measures to abolish the trade also won approval in Massachusetts, Delaware, New York, and Virginia, but were denied by royal officials.”

In fact, at the time, there was more opposition in the American colonies to the slave trade than there was in Britain, which did not ban it until 1807 (the same year it was banned by Congress). Hannah-Jones centers her colonial narrative almost entirely on Virginia, but it escapes her notice that Virginia banned the transatlantic slave trade by statute in 1778, in a bill signed and probably authored by Virginia governor Thomas Jefferson (the same man who signed the federal ban in 1807). It makes no sense whatsoever to say that Americans revolted against something the British were not prepared to do, then did it themselves once British opposition had been removed.

More broadly, actual historians of the period are all but unanimous that the anti-slavery movement organized itself and enacted laws earlier in America than in Britain. The world’s first anti-slavery society was organized in Pennsylvania in 1775 at the urging of Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet, over a decade before the nascent anti-slavery movement began seriously organizing in Britain in 1786–87. Between 1777 and 1784, slavery was banned in Vermont, Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. It was banned by Congress in the Northwest Territory in 1787, and by statutes passed in New York in 1799 and New Jersey in 1804. Parliament, by contrast, did not ban slavery in the British colonies until 1833, long after most of the American revolutionaries were in their graves. These are historical facts, and Hannah-Jones has never made any effort to address them. Indeed, historian Woody Holton, who features in the miniseries and has been one of the few academics to attempt a factual defense of the 1619 Project’s theories about the Revolution, has observed in his academic work that Hannah-Jones “vastly exaggerates the size and strength of the British abolition movement” at the time of the Revolution.

In subsequent versions of the 1619 Project, including the book, she has advanced two theories not mentioned in the original magazine piece. One was that the colonists were alarmed by the 1772 Somerset judicial decision, which held that slaves brought from the colonies into Britain would be free because slavery was disfavored at common law, and Parliament had passed no positive slavery law. This decision did not affect slavery in British colonies, and it produced nothing remotely resembling the colonial reaction to the Stamp Act, the tea tax, or other causes of riots, protests, and bloodshed. At the time, Benjamin Franklin — citing Benezet — derided Somerset as empty virtue-signaling, merely the “setting free of a single negro” while doing nothing against the brutal transatlantic slave trade.

In the miniseries, Hannah-Jones no longer pursues any of these angles but focuses entirely on the November 1775 Dunmore Proclamation, by which the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, offered to free any adult male slaves of patriot masters if the slaves served in the British army. Hannah-Jones and Holton frame this as an early version of the Emancipation Proclamation. They do not mention that it was Dunmore who had refused to sign a ban on the slave trade in Virginia, which is why it had to await Jefferson to do it after ousting royal authority in the colony.

As I discussed at length in reviewing the 1619 Project book, its narrative gets the chronology backwards. Dunmore was already locked in conflict with the Virginia legislature in 1774. Patrick Henry gave his “Give me liberty or give me death” speech in March 1775 to persuade an assemblage of Virginia’s leading men to raise a militia. George Washington took the most fateful step that summer:

The Dunmore Proclamation was issued in November 1775. Did that turn George Washington into a revolutionary? On July 3, 1775, in Cambridge Massachusetts, Washington assumed command of the Continental Army. He was immediately employed in besieging the British troops occupying Boston, two weeks after the Battle of Bunker Hill. In other words, four months before the Dunmore Proclamation, George Washington was not merely considering joining a war against Britain; he was already its commander in chief. This was, as Washington well knew, treason against the Crown, for which he could and likely would have been hanged. By October 1775, Washington was signing off on an American invasion of Quebec. For the Dunmore Proclamation to have turned Washington into a revolutionary, he would have needed a time machine.

The miniseries avoids discussing Washington or Henry or any of these events. The redoubtable Phil Magness has dismantled the revised-for-TV version, noting among other things that Dunmore himself was a slave-owner, and an unrepentant one, as he showed as royal governor of Bermuda after the Revolution. Magness also details how Hannah-Jones and Holton use the visual format to mislead viewers: Sitting in front of the governor’s mansion in Williamsburg, they falsely characterize Dunmore as issuing the proclamation from the mansion, when he had actually already been chased out of the capital months earlier and no longer governed Virginia in any practical sense.

There are more problems with framing the Dunmore Proclamation as a crucial factor in bringing Virginia into a revolution that its troops were already fighting, and in which its most prominent soldier was already commanding the army. The proclamation was quite modest. It exempted the slaves of loyalists, so any colonist who was truly motivated mainly by the protection of slavery could simply switch sides to back the British and retain their slaves. As David North and Eric London explained in a 2019 critique at the World Socialist Web Site:

While there is evidence that thousands of slaves escaped to join the British forces in the hope of securing freedom, the British treated these runaways with such extreme brutality that many runaways soon fled the British. Loyalist forces returned slaves whose owners switched their support to the crown, subjecting the slaves to brutal punishment as captured fugitives. The British armed a small minority of the runaways, but the vast majority were made to perform dangerous and brutal labor with virtually no pay and little food. There is evidence that many were ultimately sold off into the West Indian slave trade. . . . Of the 800 who escaped to Dunmore’s forces, most died of disease by 1776 due to lack of food, clothing and shelter.

If this was truly some sort of radical act of liberation, it would not have wholly excluded black women and children, who were left enslaved. Hannah-Jones simply erases black women from this particular story. Moreover, by casting the Dunmore Proclamation as a red line that triggered Americans because it armed black men and freed slaves in exchange for military service, Hannah-Jones and Holton run into another problem: The Americans did the same thing themselves not long afterward. As North and London note:

Thousands of freed blacks and slaves served in the racially integrated Continental Army after January 1, 1777, when the ban on black conscription was lifted. Baron Von Closen, a German officer serving in the French Royal Deux-Ponts, estimated that up to a quarter of the Revolutionary army was black. In 1783, the Virginia legislature passed an Emancipation Act granting freedom to all slaves who had “faithfully served agreeable to the terms of their enlistment, and have thereby of course contributed towards the establishment of American liberty.”

This was not entirely magnanimous; Virginians had sent slaves to fight as substitutes for enlisting themselves. Some slave-owners did not wish to honor that commitment once the military emergency had passed. But the state legislature honored the deal, concluding that after

representing to . . . recruiting officers that the slaves so enlisted by their direction or concurrence were freemen; and it appearing further to this assembly, that on expiration of the term of enlistment of such slaves that the former owners have attempted again to force them to return to a state of servitude, contrary to the principles of justice, and to their own solemn promise. . . . It appears just and reasonable that all persons enlisted as aforesaid . . . should enjoy the blessings of freedom as a reward for their toils and labours.

Consider the case of James Armistead, a Virginia slave who served as a spy for the Marquis de Lafayette, playing a crucial role in the Yorktown campaign. Armistead faced some resistance to freeing him after the war because he had not served in the regular army, but he was granted his freedom by Congress in 1787 after an appeal by Lafayette testified to his service. He adopted Lafayette’s surname in gratitude.

The practice of freeing slaves in exchange for military service has a long history in warfare, often as a tool of weakening one’s adversaries. Consider, however, how the use of emancipation in the Civil War differed from Dunmore’s approach. Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, issued on January 1, 1863, was (like Dunmore’s proclamation) limited to slaves in Confederate territory, but it differed in freeing all such slaves, not only those who would serve in the Union Army. Indeed, it was originally drafted nearly a year before the Union began enlisting black soldiers. (Hannah-Jones suggests in the miniseries that black soldiers won the war for the Union, which is an exaggeration given that they did not begin fighting until after Gettysburg and Vicksburg had decisively turned the tide of the war.) The Confederacy, near the very end of the war, also offered freedom to slaves who would enlist with their master’s permission, but only when the Confederate cause was already visibly hopeless and the United States Congress had already passed the 13th Amendment, guaranteeing that the slaves would be freed anyway once the war was over.

Wrong about the Present

The misrepresentations of fact in this episode are not confined to long-ago history. Hannah-Jones airs a number of contemporary Democratic Party grievances. She quotes impartial observers such as Chuck Schumer and the “Georgia Coalition for the People’s Agenda,” a group so closely allied with Stacey Abrams that a link directing Abrams supporters to the GCPA remains on the front page of Abrams’s website; Hannah-Jones simply describes them as “a non-partisan organization working to defend the right to vote.”

The litany of partisan grievances includes complaining about voting laws in states such as Georgia in the past decade, which she describes as “just like laws passed during Jim Crow.” Never mind that Georgia voters of all races in 2022 reported nearly unanimous satisfaction with the convenience of the voting system under the new law, including zero percent of black Georgians reporting a poor voting experience. She claims that the Georgia voting bill “criminalizes passing out food and water to those standing in line to vote,” which is a gross mischaracterization of the law. She touts the allegations in a federal lawsuit against the Georgia voting laws, while failing to tell her viewers that federal courts have found those laws constitutional and consistent with the Voting Rights Act and are even requiring Abrams’s group to repay Georgia’s court costs. She implies (ignoring precedent) that the Senate’s refusing to confirm Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court was somehow about race because he was nominated by Barack Obama.

In one of these partisan gripes, Hannah-Jones says of voting-rights activists that “in 2020, they helped mobilize a multiracial group of voters who, in a perennially red state, chose Democrats for both Senate seats and the presidency, a move that shifted the balance of power in Washington and prompted President Trump to infamously call Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger,” demanding that he find more votes. Much of this is narrated over scenes of Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff rallying together, and of Warnock’s campaign bus. The viewer is led to believe that a Warnock victory was a major impetus for the Trump call to Raffensperger.

The problem? The Trump-Raffensperger call took place on January 2, 2021, and was publicly reported in the Washington Post on January 3. The runoff elections won by Warnock and Ossoff were held on January 5 — after the call was made and publicized. Trump wasn’t calling to protest Democratic Senate victories that hadn’t happened yet; if anything, the call helped cause those victories by further spooking suburban voters worried about Trump’s assault on the electoral system. On Election Day 2020, Ossoff got fewer votes than his Republican opponent David Perdue, and in both Senate races, the Republican candidates got more votes than the Democratic candidates in November. It was only in the runoff election that the Democrats pulled ahead. Hannah-Jones has her chronology of 2020–21 as backwards as her chronology of 1775.

I've read a lot of these right-wing screeds about the 1619 Project, and more specifically it's primary editor and proponent.

This one exaggerates for effect, just as most of them do. And misrepresents as most of them do.

Are there disputable areas of emphasis, and even factual assertions, in the 1619 Project? certainly.
All historical analyses should be subject to challenge.

But to say that the Project and its editor asserts, and continues to assert, that the sole or even primary reason for the Revolution was the perpetuation of
slavery is to misrepresent her point (intentionally IMO). The Revolution, for many key members who were essential to its success, the core motivation was indeed the perpetuation of slavery. But for others it certainly was not...without both's participation, the Revolution would have likely failed. It is entirely fair to say that the perpetuation of slavery was a key driver of that success...without that motivation it would have failed.

To then say that the purpose of that point is to say that the Founding was "bad" is to again misrepresent the point...the Founding, indeed the Constitution itself, is "flawed", or "imperfect", in its acceptance of slavery, requiring an ongoing struggle to actually realize the ideals we mythologize as "American ideals".

That's the point of the 1619 Project, not to denigrate the Founding, but rather to more accurately recognize the history of the ongoing struggle over the centuries to become indeed a "more perfect union".

[Kismet]

Ironically, had the colonies not won their independence from Great Britain in 1783 - Parliament outlawed slavery in 1833 in both Great Britain and all parts of the empire. Wonder what they would have done then?

Looking back on American history, although the Confederates lost to Civil War and had to give up slavery, they ended up, after making a deal to resolve the disputed 1876 Presidential Election, with the ability to perpetuate their views and customs on racial equality for almost 100 years without actually employing slavery. This also enabled them to essentially rewrite their history into The Lost Cause which Salty still apparently attaches himself to.

[Typical Lax Dad]

I wonder why this wasn’t an issue in the north after the Confederates were put down:


Peonage, or the New Slavery
By Charles W. Chesnutt
Something more than a year ago the country was startled by the announcement that numerous indictments had been made in the Federal Court for the District of Alabama, for the crime of peonage. The dictionary failed to disclose the exact nature of this novel offense, but the facts stated in the news despatches, made it clear that human slavery, with its most revolting features, was openly practiced, under color of local law, and in violation of a Federal statute, in certain remote districts of the South. The machinery of the crime was simple. By conspiracy between the officers of the law—justices and constables, mostly white men of the baser sort—and heartless employees, all white men—ignorant and friendless Negroes were arrested on trumped up charged, fined to the full limit of harsh laws, sold at hard labor, worked under armed guards, cruelly flogged, and kept in this worse form of slavery long after the fines and costs imposed upon them had been worked out.

By the efforts of the Department of Justice, at the suggestion of Federal Judge Jones of Alabama, one of President Roosevelt's appointees, and at the personal instance of the President himself, it was ascertained and made known that this iniquitous system of involuntary servitude was flourishing widely and had been practiced for years in the "black belt" of Alabama and adjoining States, and was spreading to the upland counties. Convictions followed the indictments: many of the guilty were punished, and warning was given that the Federal Government would no longer tolerate this sate of things. The State press acknowledged the existence of the evil, and declared that owing to local conditions and feeling upon the race question, the Federal Government alone was competent to deal adequately with it. So general was the condemnation of this new slavery that not even the morbid and diseased politics of the Southern States could find in it a political issue. There are still some indictments pending, but the crime, as far as can be seen at present, is no longer safe.

Now, why was this evil permitted to grow up? It was due, in the first place, to perfectly natural causes, and would have happened almost anywhere under like conditions. Nothing is slower than social movements. A form of government may be radically changed and laws easily enacted without modifying for a long period thereafter the social customs, the habits of thought, the feelings, in other words the genius, of a people. The labor system of the South had grown upon a basis of slavery, under which the black laborer worked for the benefit of the white masters, receiving as his hire merely the simplest necessaries of life; this not only by law but with the warrant of Scripture. Had not St. Paul written, "Servants, obey your masters?" That a people who still retained to their former slaves the relation of employers, should immediately and cheerfully pay them a fair wage for their labor, was highly improbable. That there were just men who paid the market price is true enough, but the market price was inadequate. Fifteen dollars a month for a farm laborer who has to "find" himself, is not a liberal wage. This is far more than the average Negro laborer receives.

[Andersen]

Kismet wrote:

Looking back on American history, although the Confederates lost to Civil War and had to give up slavery, they ended up, after making a deal to resolve the disputed 1876 Presidential Election, with the ability to perpetuate their views and customs on racial equality for almost 100 years without actually employing slavery. This also enabled them to essentially rewrite their history into The Lost Cause which Salty still apparently attaches himself to.

Yep, the saying is that the Confederates "lost the war, but won the peace".

[old salt]

This also enabled them to essentially rewrite their history into The Lost Cause which Salty still apparently attaches himself to.

Cheap shot, but that's how you roll.
The good guys won. I'm an admirer of W.T. Sherman.

[Kismet]

This also enabled them to essentially rewrite their history into The Lost Cause which Salty still apparently attaches himself to.

Cheap shot, but that's how you roll.
The good guys won. I'm an admirer of W.T. Sherman.

As opposed to that's how you TROLL? A fact that you ADMIT to.
War is Hell, you know. ' How ironic that Sherman has no active base or military facility named for him inside the USA unlike those upstanding patriots like Benning, Bragg, Polk, Gordon and Hood - who weren't even decently competent commanding officers.
Let us know when you can then stop defending celebrating/recognizing those you consider the BAD guys.

I'm reminded of a REAL quote on slavery by someone who saw ii prevalent in his time -

"Whenever I hear anyone arguing for slavery, I feel a strong impulse to see it tried on him personally." – President Abraham Lincoln, 1865

For the record, 17 of the 55 delegates who signed the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. Only one, William Whipple of New Hampshire freed his enslaved servant at the same time, believing "that no man could fight for freedom and hold another in bondage.".

[Farfromgeneva]

This also enabled them to essentially rewrite their history into The Lost Cause which Salty still apparently attaches himself to.

Cheap shot, but that's how you roll.
The good guys won. I'm an admirer of W.T. Sherman.

As opposed to that's how you TROLL? A fact that you ADMIT to.
War is Hell, you know. ' How ironic that Sherman has no active base or military facility named for him inside the USA unlike those upstanding patriots like Benning, Bragg, Polk, Gordon and Hood - who weren't even decently competent commanding officers.
Let us know when you can then stop defending celebrating/recognizing those you consider the BAD guys.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen you say someone committed a cheap shot, yelled about unfairness here or the like. I know some people like to do that frequently though.

[Typical Lax Dad]

This also enabled them to essentially rewrite their history into The Lost Cause which Salty still apparently attaches himself to.

Cheap shot, but that's how you roll.
The good guys won. I'm an admirer of W.T. Sherman.

As opposed to that's how you TROLL? A fact that you ADMIT to.
War is Hell, you know. ' How ironic that Sherman has no active base or military facility named for him inside the USA unlike those upstanding patriots like Benning, Bragg, Polk, Gordon and Hood - who weren't even decently competent commanding officers.
Let us know when you can then stop defending celebrating/recognizing those you consider the BAD guys.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen you say someone committed a cheap shot, yelled about unfairness here or the like. I know some people like to do that frequently though.

Old Stain.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://twitter.com/baruchsandhaus/stat ... aJHDbMzkUA

[PizzaSnake]

“Academic studies and a 2018 Washington Post project show that arrests for these crimes are the least likely to happen in the pockets of US cities – such as Oakland, Baltimore and Indianapolis – where Black residents are most often killed.

Homicides of young Black and Latino men are the most likely to be left unsolved, said David Bjerk, the Russell Bock professor of Public Economics at Claremont McKenna College in California, while “other demographics have not seen the same or as notable declines”.

In a study published in July 2022, Bjerk found that the clearance rate for the homicides of “minority” men was 15-30 percentage points lower than that of any other racial demographic.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... don-cheese

[youthathletics]

“Academic studies and a 2018 Washington Post project show that arrests for these crimes are the least likely to happen in the pockets of US cities – such as Oakland, Baltimore and Indianapolis – where Black residents are most often killed.

Homicides of young Black and Latino men are the most likely to be left unsolved, said David Bjerk, the Russell Bock professor of Public Economics at Claremont McKenna College in California, while “other demographics have not seen the same or as notable declines”.

In a study published in July 2022, Bjerk found that the clearance rate for the homicides of “minority” men was 15-30 percentage points lower than that of any other racial demographic.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... don-cheese

What is your point?
How do police solve a crime in a community that does not want to talk with or be seen talking to a cop, often out of fear of retaliation?

This part of the article is so accurate and buried in the middle with very little further explnation.
“You hear every cop saying, ‘We can’t do better because they don’t cooperate,’” said John Skaggs, a retired homicide detective for the Los Angeles police department who has more than two decades of policing experience. “But these young cops don’t know how to talk to people and get them to cooperate.”

From the retired Homicide Cop they reference in the article you cited...

We often hear that public mistrust of the police is a big problem, and contributes to rising crime. Ghettoside talks a lot about problems with witnesses not cooperating. Do you think the problem is mistrust of the police, fear of retaliation, or both?

Sadly, your question deals with issues in high crime areas. In high crime areas, rule number one on the streets is “don’t snitch,” and don’t cooperate with the police. I did not encounter many people that truly did not trust the police and most of my career was in South-Central and Watts. To the opposite, they were afraid of the criminal element in their area enforcing rule number one. My biggest police supporters were from these high-crime neighborhoods, yet they couldn’t put a sign in their yard that says, “I Love LAPD.” They would be confronted or have their home vandalized. Even the criminal element is not afraid of the police. They are afraid the police will do their jobs correctly and vigorously.

[MDlaxfan76]

https://twitter.com/baruchsandhaus/stat ... aJHDbMzkUA

sadly, this sort of thing is significantly increasing.

[Typical Lax Dad]

https://twitter.com/baruchsandhaus/stat ... aJHDbMzkUA

sadly, this sort of thing is significantly increasing.

Amazing how this gets no response.

[Farfromgeneva]

https://twitter.com/baruchsandhaus/stat ... aJHDbMzkUA

sadly, this sort of thing is significantly increasing.

Amazing how this gets no response.

This is where stereotypes have value-specifically Floridians..

[PizzaSnake]

“Academic studies and a 2018 Washington Post project show that arrests for these crimes are the least likely to happen in the pockets of US cities – such as Oakland, Baltimore and Indianapolis – where Black residents are most often killed.

Homicides of young Black and Latino men are the most likely to be left unsolved, said David Bjerk, the Russell Bock professor of Public Economics at Claremont McKenna College in California, while “other demographics have not seen the same or as notable declines”.

In a study published in July 2022, Bjerk found that the clearance rate for the homicides of “minority” men was 15-30 percentage points lower than that of any other racial demographic.”

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... don-cheese

What is your point?
How do police solve a crime in a community that does not want to talk with or be seen talking to a cop, often out of fear of retaliation?

This part of the article is so accurate and buried in the middle with very little further explnation.
“You hear every cop saying, ‘We can’t do better because they don’t cooperate,’” said John Skaggs, a retired homicide detective for the Los Angeles police department who has more than two decades of policing experience. “But these young cops don’t know how to talk to people and get them to cooperate.”

From the retired Homicide Cop they reference in the article you cited...

We often hear that public mistrust of the police is a big problem, and contributes to rising crime. Ghettoside talks a lot about problems with witnesses not cooperating. Do you think the problem is mistrust of the police, fear of retaliation, or both?

Sadly, your question deals with issues in high crime areas. In high crime areas, rule number one on the streets is “don’t snitch,” and don’t cooperate with the police. I did not encounter many people that truly did not trust the police and most of my career was in South-Central and Watts. To the opposite, they were afraid of the criminal element in their area enforcing rule number one. My biggest police supporters were from these high-crime neighborhoods, yet they couldn’t put a sign in their yard that says, “I Love LAPD.” They would be confronted or have their home vandalized. Even the criminal element is not afraid of the police. They are afraid the police will do their jobs correctly and vigorously.

Hmm, maybe we need better police officers?

“But these young cops don’t know how to talk to people and get them to cooperate.” -- your "find".

Regardless, are you suggesting that the issue is insoluble and therefore we will accept it? Maybe that induces an increasing level of lawlessness? Further erosion of the rule of law? That good with you? Nice problem-solving.