Evidently, he’d be perfectly fine with the system as long as the slave owners weren’t allowed to egregiously abuse their slaves.
Slavery is intrinsically abusive. I didn’t think I needed to bother saying that. Chattel slavery is intrinsically more abusive than other forms of slavery, especially as was practiced in the South.
Thus he even argues that the modern prison slavery in US is not comparable to chattel slavery.
Comparable? Hell no, in the same way that the Holocaust is not comparable with a few dozen people being murdered. Obviously both are evil, but one is terrible on a completely different scale than the other.
I’m not whitewashing the current state of things as being perfect. If that wasn’t already obvious from our numerous interactions, I don’t know what to tell you. Chattel slavery was incredibly brutal on a systemic level, far beyond anything present in the US today. Yes, you could cherrypick parallels and try to cast them as the current system being worse, like this meme does. You would just be utterly wrong to the point where most Black people in the US would find this meme incredibly offensive.
Your white supremacist friends see these facts and advocate going back to slavery
Neo-confederates are primarily of the “Lost Cause” variety, where they diminish the horrors of slavery, make comparisons with the industrialized North, and romanticize the South. I’m not exaggerating when I say that you are snatching words right out of their mouth.
Chattel slavery was never ended in US.
While the prison system arguably allows a form of slavery via the felony exception to the 13th Amendment, it is not chattel slavery since no ownership is involved. There are of course plenty of pieces of history that I could in depth on like Black Codes, debt traps, and terrorism by the KKK and other white supremacist groups. Still not chattel slavery.
I am amazed just how ignorant you are about your own country. A quintessentially American moment here.
Oh teacher, I was unaware that you required a ten page single spaced Times New Roman paper on African American history following the period between Reconstruction and the present day. I’m quite well versed in US history around slavery, thank you.
Except that I’m not making the same argument that a white supremacist makes, that’s just your deranged reading what my argument.
Every single one of the points in that image could be coming out of a neo-confederate’s mouth. Yes, the North had its problems with exploitation and industrialization, this is well known. But it was nothing close to chattel slavery.
The fact that capitalism outcompeted chattel slavery is itself an indicator that it reduces the costs for the slave owner.
My dude, we fought a fucking war over it. That’s how chattel slavery ended in the US.
A kind of interesting case here is Liberia. In the early 19th century it was colonized by former enslaved people from the United States under the blessings of white people from the US. They turned right around and essentially enslaved the indigenous people. That created a small wealthy upper class with support from the US that was resented by the rest of the population. Eventually around 1980 the indigenous people toppled the ruling class, but unfortunately that led to 20 years of turmoil. It’s only recently that things have started to really show progress.
Come on, this is just lazy.