Casting this as a slave narrative may be under-selling it.
The whole point was that he went far enough away (sailing, Australia) to not only speak with the anger of the injustice (what happened to him), but to target the structural aspects (how enslavers are made) and how the justification was built in to the Constitution. In so doing, he anticipated the evolution of structuralism, post-structuralism, and critical theory.
It seems to have been just one historian who found and validated the story. The author sister was the subject of fawning but incomplete treatment (her story was sympathetic, not damning); the historian found the author's work and traced the author's sailor gigs to validate the connections.
There can be an element of passivation to history: "don't worry, we're understanding more and getting better". Thanks to both the author and the historian, it appears much was understood even then, and we shouldn't rest on tides that might not be rising.
Critical theory has fatal flaws and anger almost never leads to insight or the right incentives, but how else would normalized and profitable injustice be stripped of a legal veil?
You're not using the terms "structuralism" and "post-structuralism" correctly. The term "structuralism" has its roots in Saussure, in linguistics and the notion of l'arbitraire du signe. Semiotics and the post-structuralists then took this further. While today people might talk of "structural racism", the similarity to the term "structuralism" is merely coincidental, through sure, one might try to apply the idea there, too.
Structuralism can mean different things based on the context, I think the post you're replying to is meaning Structuralism in the philosophical context, but I think the post they're replying to is meaning it in the literary context (which derives from the philosophical), while the author of the post you're replying to seems to think they(the original poster) are somehow referring to structural Racism, which that interpretation of the primary poster does not make sense to me (hence my saying I think they mean Literary structuralism)
So structuralism in literary theory is that the structure of a text is the important thing which can end up being a lot like those articles you see every now and then "There are only 10 basic plots in the world, here they are" or some stuff like that (I obviously say this as someone who does not much care for structuralism so take my words with a giant grain of salt)
> You're not using the terms "structuralism" and "post-structuralism" correctly.
The first sentence is the important part. "Structuralism" is in no way related to "structural" or "institutional" racism. "Structuralism" is what the next sentences are describing, and it doesn't matter if you understand them; they were probably added as ample evidence that the first sentence was true, and possibly as stuff to google if you're interested in a subject completely unrelated to this discussion about the article.
Structuralism is some French theories about how creative writing should be structured.
> The whole point was that he went far enough away (sailing, Australia) to not only speak with the anger of the injustice (what happened to him), but to target the structural aspects (how enslavers are made)
Going far away won't help with targeting enslavers. If you're enslaved in Africa, the enslavers are in Africa.
I don't think you can rightly claim that the US was late to free the slaves when it happened so soon after the formation of the country, and the practice was globally accepted for thousands of years prior to that. It continued in Africa long after it was abolished in the West.
Lateness can be debated. But the US wasn't just coasting on history.
And your link makes clear the Barbary form of slavery had little in common with the extreme form practiced in the US.
The violent rejection of England and monarchy allowed the founders to make a dramatic break from the past. A new approach to human rights, a government of the people, for the people. Ideals broadcast and institutionalized via the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, ..."
All the mindful attention, negotiation and agreements, toward implementing a system explicitly establishing liberty and justice for all, adds a thick layer of criminal responsibility for the systematic exception made, to continue upholding one form of extreme injustice. The complete violation of all those principles, held dear, for one unfortunate group.
It is hilarious to refer to the US practice as extreme in comparison to the Barbary practices. I'm curious what makes you think that?
And I am sympathetic to pushback. Many of these discussions are thinly veiled "slavery in the states wasn't bad" nonsense. Slavery in all forms is bad. Period.
It's easy to see African chattel slavery in the US as worse than the Barbary practices: European slaves of Barbary owners could be and often were ransomed out of slavery by their societies back home, but West Africans were rarely in a position to do that for abducted Africans in the US. Secondly, African chattel slavery in the US was bound up with rigid notions of blood purity, which can seem bizarre to us today, that severely hobbled the opportunities of former slaves and their descendents even after manumission.
>European slaves of Barbary owners could be and often were ransomed out of slavery by their societies back home, but West Africans were rarely in a position to do that for abducted Africans in the US.
Perhaps but the difference is that the West African tribes often sold the slaves to Europeans. Why would they pay a ransom to get those people back?
There were certainly racist connotations associated with slaves and ex-slaves. But it seems a stretch to say that white slaves in a non-white country fared better than black slaves in a white country.
> the West African tribes often sold the slaves to Europeans
I think that you are being disingenuous here. The African tribes that sold slaves were not necessarily the slave’s own tribe, but rather a different tribe that proved victorious in war or raiding. The slave’s own tribe, as I mentioned, would hardly have been unable to ransom its own people from the US due to lack of literacy, lack of communications, and lack of financial means. Meanwhile, postal connections between North Africa and Europe were reliable enough by the 17th and 18th centuries that slaves could message home for ransom, and this was frequently allowed as it proved highly lucrative for Barbary slaveholders.
> white slaves in a non-white country
This is a completely ahistorical way of describing the matter. In terms of race linked to skin colour, Barbary slaveholders very much considered themselves white in opposition to the black African populations to the south whom they exploited. (This survives in modern Mauritanian slaveholding.)
Moreover, Muslim slaveholding here and in the broader region was bound up with with issues of religion, not race as the modern USA understands it. In as little as a single generation post-manumission, those descendants of raided European slaves were no longer necessarily regarded as an outcaste, provided they were observant Muslims, which is why so much of the power in the Ottoman Empire famously ended up in the hands of men of Eastern European descent. At least in terms of knowing your progeny would be better off, they had privilege that African chattel slaves in the USA could only dream of.
In Muslim society, one can choose not to believe in Islam and have no problem, as long as one continues to outwardly perform the expected public rituals, recite the shahada etc. (Quiet personal atheism is much more widespread in the Muslim world than outsiders might suspect.) But if you are a black slave or a descendant thereof in a society based on blood purity, you can’t change your skin colour or descent no matter hard you try. So, while both bases for slavery and segregated society are indeed bad, it’s hard to claim that one might not be a more preferable fate for some unfortunate people than the other.
This is a bit of a non-sequitur? You couldn't just "choose to pretend to believe in Islam" and somehow escape slavery. And with castration having been a common practice, anything that was dependent on descendants was going to be different at face value. So, kudos to them for not allowing their slaves to continue their bloodline?
Look, I'm open to the idea that slavery in the US was somehow the worst slavery ever. But most arguments used to prop up the idea rely on laughably naive views on slavery elsewhere. Worse, much of it seems to stem from a naive "US bad" gullibility in taking in information.
Ironically, most people using that line are trying to say American slavery was worse than other forms of slavery, as a weird way of trying to make America out to be the worst place in the world.
As you say, slavery is pretty bad and trying to figure out which one is "better" is rarely a productive exercise.
Apologies, I meant my argument against US slavery being the worst. As you say, the common framing is usually a willingness to believe any framing that can support the US being the villains. I truly don't get it.
The US is frequently called late to ending African chattel slavery because it already happened in France and England decades before, and even English conservatives were calling for an end (of various degrees of gradualness) to slavery long before American emancipation.
Why is that odd? Slavery is explicitly legal for felons in america right now. We don't typically compare our principles against the worst of history, we try to be better than that.
Thanks, I was trying to find a way to word the caveat that you put here really well. I am glad writings like this can be found. Further glad that people study it.
But the point of slave narrative being a genre that was "homegrown" in the states is so awkwardly touched here. Calling in to question the influence of white editors and how that likely silenced some narratives completely ignores why there aren't similar narratives from many other places.
Worse, it continues with the common narrative that slavery was solely a United States thing. Specifically pushing that the published narratives were specifically edited to shape a more positive view of the nation. Ignoring any other reason edits may have happened.
Nevermind that the US gets an unfair share of criticism for slavery. It is almost always portrayed as whites versus the world when it was really the case that seemingly anyone who could take slaves would do it. Africa was full of slaves, many of them being white. Certainly the Roman slaves were almost 100% white.
It’s true that slavery was practiced by many civilizations throughout history, and it continues today. I’m also not a fan of the contemporary, “critical” approach, or at least the way it has unfolded in mainstream public life in the US (happy to elaborate as to why). That said, chattel slavery as it existed in the US really was exceptionally bad for a lot of reasons.
(1) slavery and treating people of other ethnicities badly wasn’t a new thing, but the ideology of there being a natural hierarchy of races was a new idea and it led to new cruelties.
(2) In the European Middle Ages, there had been a taboo against Christians holding other Christians as slaves.
The western slavers knowingly took advantage of the chaos in early modern Europe and did it anyway, over opposition, constructing the above ideology to justify it.
(3) the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was unprecedented. It dwarfed the Barbary and Indian slave trade. Maybe Rome or the golden age Islamic slave network were on a comparable scale when various factors are accounted for, but neither were chattel systems, and they lacked the whole racial dimension.
This is not actually held together that well, sadly.
Your first point, I suspect, is almost certainly not true. The concepts of racial or familial lineage with divine connotations is pretty old. The entire "divine right of kings" and related hierarchies have long been there. I /think/ you are trying to say that it was a scientifically supported hierarchy and it was bad for that reason. I think that is defendable?
Not clear what point 2 has to do with US slavery? Similar existed in the Barbary area, where it was just a different religion being preferenced.
Your third point is the most amusing of them to hold against slavery as it existed in the US, though. Yes, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was unprecedented. With the majority of those enslaved not going to north america...
I think I said this in another thread, but worth repeating. There is nothing at all "well actually" in what I'm saying. Slavery is bad. Period. I wish people didn't plaster over how bad it was elsewhere in a rush to attack the US, though.
I don’t think you’re defending slavery and I think the US is a good country. I dislike the contemporary progressive account of history. It’s the same genre of justificatory political manga as the Whig history it seeks to upend.
That said, I stand by every word of my argument.
I used the word natural as in naturalism, the intellectual movement that emerged in Europe in the Renaissance and came to fruition in the Enlightenment. Naturalistic racism was indeed new. I can point you to the texts where it was developed. It was accepted as cutting-edge science among enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Kant. I object strongly to the term, “scientifically-supported” racial hierarchy. Science in the post-baconian sense cannot support a concept of a racial hierarchy. Such a concept is a value judgement. Values are and can only be extrinsic
to modern, empirical science (another lesson of history our progressive friends have failed to learn).
When it comes to the nature of this value judgement, I do think it makes things worse that the western slavers should have known better. Christian society had been agonizing over slavery for more than a millennium; what does this mean for our own seemingly invincible moral convictions that it all melted away so quickly? I don’t think our contemporary political discourse, left or right, can handle serious answers to the question.
As to the exceptional evil of the US system, there was nowhere else that the hereditary and permanent racial chattel system was implemented and enforced so thoroughly (I could maybe grant Haiti as a possible exception). Spanish and Portuguese slavers used religious justifications carried over from suspicions of Jewish and North African converts after the reconquista. This was disgusting, but it also meant that the slaves’ status was impermanent and mutable. Manumission was vastly more common, and social-racial boundaries were much more permeable. This is reflected today, where racial relations are far less damaged in Latin America than in the North.
So, yeah, my read is you are basically arguing that it was the first time "science" was used to try and justify slavery. I meant my "defensible" statement to be that I think that argument is defensible. But, largely because the scientific revolution was so recent. Before that, it was divinity that set up hierarchies of people. It was still based on "blood and soil," all told, though? In fact, I largely view that as trying to use the new tool of "science" to justify what the old system had setup? (Again, I think this argument has legs, so I'm not trying to completely "debunk" it.)
I'm far too removed from any time in my life where I was reading history documents, but the christianity slant is still odd to me. Specifically, I remember reading back in the day that some anti-slavery groups were instrumental in converting slaves to christianity in an effort to undermine it. That, in turn, was itself coopted, such that it was not necessarily a success. (And I'll throw in the caveat that I didn't find history that engaging.)
My gripe on the "nowhere else had hereditary slavery" is that this is complicated. Firstly, many places basically ended bloodlines of their slaves. Castration and executions were the norm. So, hard to see that this is really a comparison that you'd want to stake a "which is worse" debate on. They are both abhorrently evil. (And, not shockingly, serfdom has its own curve ball to this debate. That was hereditary and while slavery has obviously worse aspects, I don't understand why people seem to think serfdom was mostly fine.)
Bringing it fully to this general topic. The slave narratives being a US literary thing is largely because that is allowed in the US. Do I think the US should get a pass and kudos for amplifying voices of people that they used to enslave? Complicated question.
Well, sorta complicated. I can firmly say "get a pass and kudos" should be dismissed as a silly statement. But, it is frustrating that places that almost certainly did worse things heavily censor their histories. This isn't even really debated. But, because people hear the US criticisms and the others are largely silenced, so many people take the view that there are only US criticisms.
Edit: Meant to say thanks for the opening. I know this is a topic that is prone to yelling way too easily. I'd also be interested in reading any texts you recommend reading.
The West, and specifically America, is blamed not so much for slavery but for the following things all together:
1. Chattel Slavery
2. Racism as a form of pseudo-scientific theory that established why different "races" were of lower quality than others, and thus any member of the lower race deserved to be enslaved by members of the higher race.
3. Laws in various states of the U.S that established black people could be enslaved when traveling in that state, or that free black people traveling in the region would not be allowed to do so https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-free-slave-8336f214da45
4. After finding slavery unacceptable, the U.S with its pseudo-scientific cover of Racism in much of the country still treated black people as if they were enslaved, and often killed them for no particular reason discernible to reason.
5. One can argue as to the exact point that Black people became equal in the U.S, some might argue that it isn't the case yet, but anyone fairly arguing would have to concede that there are a number of Black people still living who were at least children when it was not the case that this state of equality existed - even if they wanted to argue that it does exist now.
It must be a nice consolation for the various European powers that their colonies breaking away seems to have absolved them of any blame not just the institutionalization of chattel slavery, but apparently also the creation of scientific racism.
Yes, it was - same as I suppose it is a great inconvenience to you that the Brits were calling for the abolishing of slavery long before the Civil War.
That said, sure, scientific Racism was project of Western Civilization, but it seems really that America - at least where Black people were the subject (and maybe also Indians, but they were more to be exterminated - not enslaved) - put a lot more heart and soul into it than other participants.
> The West is blamed for slavery when it is the West that set the norm that slavery is unacceptable.
Not sure who is blaming the West for slavery, but whatever.
The West did set the norm that slavery is unacceptable, but only after embracing slavery on a vast scale for centuries, overlapping to a great degree with the Enlightment and with the birth of representative democracy. I think that is the underlying dissonance - the founding fathers expounded at length on equality, liberty from arbitrary rule and so on, while the South prospered on the back of slavery. A similar criticism could be made of French revolutionaries, and British liberals of the 17th/early 18th centuries.
>The West did set the norm that slavery is unacceptable, but only after embracing slavery on a vast scale for centuries, overlapping to a great degree with the Enlightment and with the birth of representative democracy.
Yes the West abolished slavery after embracing philosophy invented by the West. Then it forcibly ended slavery everywhere else that it could.
>I think that is the underlying dissonance - the founding fathers expounded at length on equality, liberty from arbitrary rule and so on, while the South prospered on the back of slavery. A similar criticism could be made of French revolutionaries, and British liberals of the 17th/early 18th centuries.
Thousands of Southern slave owners were themselves black. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_slave_owners Many slaves were sold to Europeans by their own people. Yet in modern times we only hear about a particular angle that pushes blame solely on the very cultures and nations that forcefully ended slavery, often at great cost.
> Yes the West abolished slavery after embracing philosophy invented by the West. Then it forcibly ended slavery everywhere else that it could.
The reality was a lot less glorious than that. And with a lot of less than glorious moral compromises and cognitive dissonance. Again, I refer you to the founding fathers.
> Yet in modern times we only hear about a particular angle that pushes blame solely on the very cultures and nations that forcefully ended slavery
We don't only hear that angle, it's trivially easy to access balanced and detailed history. Maybe you're spending your time arguing with zealots on social media but the rest of us can actually educate ourselves
> blame solely on the very cultures and nations that forcefully ended slavery
In fairness those societies were also responsible in the first place for the expansion of slavery into an unprecedentedly vast system
Can we just accept that, and not feel so defensive?
Yes in reality a lot of people died to end slavery too. The founding fathers were great men and some of them having slaves at a time when that was very common does not really change my opinion of them.
>We don't only hear that angle, it's trivially easy to access balanced and detailed history. Maybe you're spending your time arguing with zealots on social media but the rest of us can actually educate ourselves
I haven't heard a balanced account of history from any mainstream source. I often see school teachers on social media admitting that they believe these radical narratives. So I am compelled to argue with zealots. Lots of people want to believe that there's some "big reason" they didn't get ahead in life, and what better reason than "systemic racism" going back "hundreds of years"? I actually hate arguing with people about this issue but nobody saying anything against that extreme misrepresentation of things can lead to bigger problems in society.
>In fairness those societies were also responsible in the first place for the expansion of slavery into an unprecedentedly vast system
That is not an inherent characteristic of those societies. They just happened to have ships that could cross oceans.
>Can we just accept that, and not feel so defensive?
I'll stop being defensive when people stop attacking me and my society for things that a tiny fraction of people living hundreds of years ago benefited from. The media is constantly trying to stir up racist sentiments against white people under the pretense of talking about history or some other innocuous thing, and it's disgusting. But their goal is to cause conflict, not to actually fix race relations. I've seen race relations in general decline for at least 10 years because of this.
It might be interesting to compare the two. In fact, I would hope that such a comparison appears in Schroeder's new edition. A university press is exactly where I'd expect to find a "critical edition" or recension of a 150-year-old narrative that exists in multiple versions. If university-press publication is appropriate for a critical edition of Shakespeare or Pulci, it seems equally appropriate for a critical edition of John S. Jacobs. You're not paying for the transcription, you're paying for the scholarship.
The only weird things about this story, to me, are:
(1) The book-jacket design screams modern pop, where I personally would have gone with a more "serious"-looking design, like you'd find on a Penguin Classic, or even on an Erik Larson novel.
(2) It's not clear what they mean "rediscovered"; I scanned the article looking for the traditional discovery narrative, like "he inherited a manuscript" or "a yellowed newspaper clipping" or whatever. Here it looks like the "rediscovery" was basically that it came up in a Google search and he said "oh that's neat, someone should republish that in real print, on paper." Which is fine and great; we should republish more out-of-print work. It's just not the traditional media narrative of a "rediscovered" or "resurfaced" lost work; it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been surgically removed.
Heugh. You're right about the cover. It looks like it was made to stand out in a brick-and-mortar Black History Month display. It feels out of place among other Black Studies titles from U. of Chicago in "seriousness" relative to the significance of its subject. [1]
> "...it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been surgically removed."
I think that stories like this represent what's going to be the new normal for discovery practices in the humanities.
Although I understand your disappointment, all that's changed is that physical discovery has gone digital and had that not been the case in this instant the likelihood of Jacob's narrative being resurfaced is altered.
This is an example of it working out well, as far as I can tell. It couldn't get any better than how it turned out.
Who else but a middle-aged post-graduate, in the middle of the first Trump administration, trying to get his dissertation published, looking for work, applying exercising his academic know-how to scratch his own itch, taking advantage of open source intelligence, corresponding with colleagues, transforming "from an interpretive literary scholar into an old-fashioned archive hound", could have pulled this of?
(Because we know there's no way he'd even think about financing a trip to Australia to kick the research off the old fashion way)
What better way for this to return to the fore in 2024?
You say the plot of the beat has been surgically removed, nay, I say beat goes on!
We used to bang on papyrus, and pass credentials for access to microfilm. White-gloved hands daintily turn delicate pages...tired eyes glean call numbers scrawled onto hastily sheared scrap paper.
> It looks like it was made to stand out in a brick-and-mortar Black History Month display.
Or not to stand out, but to blend in. :) ...Ah, but the cover design on the actual publisher's website is different! And indeed more "serious"-looking.
This makes me wonder the modern day slave narratives that will not be understood as such for another 100+ yrs. There are more enslaved people now than ever.
I believe that, in the future, prison labor in the USA will be recognized as one of the largest examples of modern slavery.
On top of that, we could argue that the concept of people depending on the good will of a specific employer/master to be able to survive will also be considered as the capitalist successor to slavery.
Considering that capitalism has consistently led to monopolies since its inception, wouldn't it be reasonable to conclude that monopolies are inherent to the system?
Regrettably, Texas public universities have destroyed most of the original documents about slavery they had from the era of slavery. Almost every document freeing slaves was destroyed.
They destroyed these irreplaceable historical documents because those documents offended their modern sensibilities.
I believe history should be preserved. Even lying propaganda has value to historians.
> Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US population included about one-quarter of the people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere.
> In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the enslaved death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of the US enslaved population was about the same as that of Jamaican enslaved persons, the birth rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United States.
> In the United States enslaved persons were more generations removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. In the nineteenth century, the majority of enslaved in the British Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In contrast, by 1850, most US enslaved persons were third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation Americans.
> Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the enslaved population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. Unlike any other enslaved society, the US had a high and sustained natural increase in the enslaved population for a more than a century and a half.
The last point may be the most important. The US banned the importation of slaves in 1808. The enslaved were treated like livestock and that's why they still had slaves in the 1860s.
For context, that article is focused on the Americas since it is an American History institute. Those stats aren't even including the 1500 years of Arab and Ottoman trade of African slaves.
We've asked you several times to stop posting flamewar comments and political battle comments to HN. I don't want to ban you, because you've been here a long time and have also posted good comments, but if you keep ignoring these requests, we won't have much choice.
I don't agree. It's an interesting historical story, and historical material has always been welcome on HN. There's much to be intellectually curious about there, and no need to be provoked onto an ideological track.
For those who do feel provoked, the appropriate response is (1) not to comment, and (2) to look elsewhere for things that do gratify your intellectual curiosity. There are 29 other threads on the front page, and hundreds more within a single click.
You still need to explain what's wrong with this article for anyone to understand what your objection is. Otherwise the whole thing turns into advocacy for a kind of 'snowflake's veto' on anything someone might dislike or be uninterested in.
It does apply to articles, but classifying this one as "ideological or political battle" is quite excessive. I thought it was intellectually interesting, quite apart from current political affairs, and I'm sure a lot of other readers will as well. They should be allowed to discuss the article in an intellectually curious way [1], without getting drowned out by other people's political reflexes [2].
How is a story that tells the story of someone who was a slave and the brother of a famous American author "flamebait", "political", or "ideological"?
Frankly, take a look at the juxtaposition of your comment to the GP. They're insinuating even printing this story is somehow the mission of American Democrats - more directly that American Democrats are responsible for printing the story of international slaves. If that were even remotely true then that's absolutely shameful. The world had slaves for a long time across multitudes of generations, societies, and cultures. We should know their history lest we be damned to repeat it.
https://archive.is/LsJXJ
Casting this as a slave narrative may be under-selling it.
The whole point was that he went far enough away (sailing, Australia) to not only speak with the anger of the injustice (what happened to him), but to target the structural aspects (how enslavers are made) and how the justification was built in to the Constitution. In so doing, he anticipated the evolution of structuralism, post-structuralism, and critical theory.
It seems to have been just one historian who found and validated the story. The author sister was the subject of fawning but incomplete treatment (her story was sympathetic, not damning); the historian found the author's work and traced the author's sailor gigs to validate the connections.
There can be an element of passivation to history: "don't worry, we're understanding more and getting better". Thanks to both the author and the historian, it appears much was understood even then, and we shouldn't rest on tides that might not be rising.
Critical theory has fatal flaws and anger almost never leads to insight or the right incentives, but how else would normalized and profitable injustice be stripped of a legal veil?
You're not using the terms "structuralism" and "post-structuralism" correctly. The term "structuralism" has its roots in Saussure, in linguistics and the notion of l'arbitraire du signe. Semiotics and the post-structuralists then took this further. While today people might talk of "structural racism", the similarity to the term "structuralism" is merely coincidental, through sure, one might try to apply the idea there, too.
I feel like I didn't know anything more by the end of the comment then at the start.
Can you word it again but more clearly?
It currently reads like a signal of what you have memorised, rather than an effort to increase the knowledge of the reader.
Structuralism can mean different things based on the context, I think the post you're replying to is meaning Structuralism in the philosophical context, but I think the post they're replying to is meaning it in the literary context (which derives from the philosophical), while the author of the post you're replying to seems to think they(the original poster) are somehow referring to structural Racism, which that interpretation of the primary poster does not make sense to me (hence my saying I think they mean Literary structuralism)
So structuralism in literary theory is that the structure of a text is the important thing which can end up being a lot like those articles you see every now and then "There are only 10 basic plots in the world, here they are" or some stuff like that (I obviously say this as someone who does not much care for structuralism so take my words with a giant grain of salt)
on edit: clarification
> You're not using the terms "structuralism" and "post-structuralism" correctly.
The first sentence is the important part. "Structuralism" is in no way related to "structural" or "institutional" racism. "Structuralism" is what the next sentences are describing, and it doesn't matter if you understand them; they were probably added as ample evidence that the first sentence was true, and possibly as stuff to google if you're interested in a subject completely unrelated to this discussion about the article.
Structuralism is some French theories about how creative writing should be structured.
I feel like critique in an academic context is a tool for communication, one way among many of understanding a system (or systems).
However, that same critique is easily moralized in a political context, and communication stops cold.
In the political context it is just blame, in academia it is structural analysis.
> In so doing, he anticipated the evolution of structuralism, post-structuralism, and critical theory.
That is a bit of a word salad. How about just calling spade a spade. This is an account of hypocricy of america's freedom mythology
> The whole point was that he went far enough away (sailing, Australia) to not only speak with the anger of the injustice (what happened to him), but to target the structural aspects (how enslavers are made)
Going far away won't help with targeting enslavers. If you're enslaved in Africa, the enslavers are in Africa.
Dunno. A lot of the slavery in Africa went partly as the result of British abolitionists.
[flagged]
The united states of america was pretty late to the party of abolishing slavery.
I mean, in the West, sure? Notably was not the last place in the world to do so. And debtor prisons are still a thing. As is trafficking.
I don't think you can rightly claim that the US was late to free the slaves when it happened so soon after the formation of the country, and the practice was globally accepted for thousands of years prior to that. It continued in Africa long after it was abolished in the West.
One of the first wars fought by the US was over slavery: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War
Anti-slavery sentiments built up over time. Abraham Lincoln was moved by this popular book for example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufferings_in_Africa
Of course these things aren't often taught in school.
Lateness can be debated. But the US wasn't just coasting on history.
And your link makes clear the Barbary form of slavery had little in common with the extreme form practiced in the US.
The violent rejection of England and monarchy allowed the founders to make a dramatic break from the past. A new approach to human rights, a government of the people, for the people. Ideals broadcast and institutionalized via the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, ..."
All the mindful attention, negotiation and agreements, toward implementing a system explicitly establishing liberty and justice for all, adds a thick layer of criminal responsibility for the systematic exception made, to continue upholding one form of extreme injustice. The complete violation of all those principles, held dear, for one unfortunate group.
It is hilarious to refer to the US practice as extreme in comparison to the Barbary practices. I'm curious what makes you think that?
And I am sympathetic to pushback. Many of these discussions are thinly veiled "slavery in the states wasn't bad" nonsense. Slavery in all forms is bad. Period.
It's easy to see African chattel slavery in the US as worse than the Barbary practices: European slaves of Barbary owners could be and often were ransomed out of slavery by their societies back home, but West Africans were rarely in a position to do that for abducted Africans in the US. Secondly, African chattel slavery in the US was bound up with rigid notions of blood purity, which can seem bizarre to us today, that severely hobbled the opportunities of former slaves and their descendents even after manumission.
>European slaves of Barbary owners could be and often were ransomed out of slavery by their societies back home, but West Africans were rarely in a position to do that for abducted Africans in the US.
Perhaps but the difference is that the West African tribes often sold the slaves to Europeans. Why would they pay a ransom to get those people back?
There were certainly racist connotations associated with slaves and ex-slaves. But it seems a stretch to say that white slaves in a non-white country fared better than black slaves in a white country.
This is also little-known information: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_slave_owners Some slave owners in the colonies and early US, maybe even the very first one, were black.
> the West African tribes often sold the slaves to Europeans
I think that you are being disingenuous here. The African tribes that sold slaves were not necessarily the slave’s own tribe, but rather a different tribe that proved victorious in war or raiding. The slave’s own tribe, as I mentioned, would hardly have been unable to ransom its own people from the US due to lack of literacy, lack of communications, and lack of financial means. Meanwhile, postal connections between North Africa and Europe were reliable enough by the 17th and 18th centuries that slaves could message home for ransom, and this was frequently allowed as it proved highly lucrative for Barbary slaveholders.
> white slaves in a non-white country
This is a completely ahistorical way of describing the matter. In terms of race linked to skin colour, Barbary slaveholders very much considered themselves white in opposition to the black African populations to the south whom they exploited. (This survives in modern Mauritanian slaveholding.)
Moreover, Muslim slaveholding here and in the broader region was bound up with with issues of religion, not race as the modern USA understands it. In as little as a single generation post-manumission, those descendants of raided European slaves were no longer necessarily regarded as an outcaste, provided they were observant Muslims, which is why so much of the power in the Ottoman Empire famously ended up in the hands of men of Eastern European descent. At least in terms of knowing your progeny would be better off, they had privilege that African chattel slaves in the USA could only dream of.
Moroccan black slave status being by descent was majorly opposed by the ulema there
It is only easy to see it as worse if you ignore all of the bad things they did.
As an easy rebuttal to one of your points, yes blood purity is bad; and so is religious purity.
In Muslim society, one can choose not to believe in Islam and have no problem, as long as one continues to outwardly perform the expected public rituals, recite the shahada etc. (Quiet personal atheism is much more widespread in the Muslim world than outsiders might suspect.) But if you are a black slave or a descendant thereof in a society based on blood purity, you can’t change your skin colour or descent no matter hard you try. So, while both bases for slavery and segregated society are indeed bad, it’s hard to claim that one might not be a more preferable fate for some unfortunate people than the other.
This is a bit of a non-sequitur? You couldn't just "choose to pretend to believe in Islam" and somehow escape slavery. And with castration having been a common practice, anything that was dependent on descendants was going to be different at face value. So, kudos to them for not allowing their slaves to continue their bloodline?
Look, I'm open to the idea that slavery in the US was somehow the worst slavery ever. But most arguments used to prop up the idea rely on laughably naive views on slavery elsewhere. Worse, much of it seems to stem from a naive "US bad" gullibility in taking in information.
Um, you might want to ask certain minorities about that.
Ironically, most people using that line are trying to say American slavery was worse than other forms of slavery, as a weird way of trying to make America out to be the worst place in the world.
As you say, slavery is pretty bad and trying to figure out which one is "better" is rarely a productive exercise.
Apologies, I meant my argument against US slavery being the worst. As you say, the common framing is usually a willingness to believe any framing that can support the US being the villains. I truly don't get it.
Agreed.
The US is frequently called late to ending African chattel slavery because it already happened in France and England decades before, and even English conservatives were calling for an end (of various degrees of gradualness) to slavery long before American emancipation.
Which is odd, because it still hasn't actually ended in africa....
Why is that odd? Slavery is explicitly legal for felons in america right now. We don't typically compare our principles against the worst of history, we try to be better than that.
Thanks, I was trying to find a way to word the caveat that you put here really well. I am glad writings like this can be found. Further glad that people study it.
But the point of slave narrative being a genre that was "homegrown" in the states is so awkwardly touched here. Calling in to question the influence of white editors and how that likely silenced some narratives completely ignores why there aren't similar narratives from many other places.
Worse, it continues with the common narrative that slavery was solely a United States thing. Specifically pushing that the published narratives were specifically edited to shape a more positive view of the nation. Ignoring any other reason edits may have happened.
Nevermind that the US gets an unfair share of criticism for slavery. It is almost always portrayed as whites versus the world when it was really the case that seemingly anyone who could take slaves would do it. Africa was full of slaves, many of them being white. Certainly the Roman slaves were almost 100% white.
How many people know about this? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Barbary_War or the Barbary slaves in general?
Or this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sufferings_in_Africa
It’s true that slavery was practiced by many civilizations throughout history, and it continues today. I’m also not a fan of the contemporary, “critical” approach, or at least the way it has unfolded in mainstream public life in the US (happy to elaborate as to why). That said, chattel slavery as it existed in the US really was exceptionally bad for a lot of reasons.
(1) slavery and treating people of other ethnicities badly wasn’t a new thing, but the ideology of there being a natural hierarchy of races was a new idea and it led to new cruelties.
(2) In the European Middle Ages, there had been a taboo against Christians holding other Christians as slaves. The western slavers knowingly took advantage of the chaos in early modern Europe and did it anyway, over opposition, constructing the above ideology to justify it.
(3) the scale of the trans-Atlantic slave trade was unprecedented. It dwarfed the Barbary and Indian slave trade. Maybe Rome or the golden age Islamic slave network were on a comparable scale when various factors are accounted for, but neither were chattel systems, and they lacked the whole racial dimension.
This is not actually held together that well, sadly.
Your first point, I suspect, is almost certainly not true. The concepts of racial or familial lineage with divine connotations is pretty old. The entire "divine right of kings" and related hierarchies have long been there. I /think/ you are trying to say that it was a scientifically supported hierarchy and it was bad for that reason. I think that is defendable?
Not clear what point 2 has to do with US slavery? Similar existed in the Barbary area, where it was just a different religion being preferenced.
Your third point is the most amusing of them to hold against slavery as it existed in the US, though. Yes, the trans-Atlantic slave trade was unprecedented. With the majority of those enslaved not going to north america...
I think I said this in another thread, but worth repeating. There is nothing at all "well actually" in what I'm saying. Slavery is bad. Period. I wish people didn't plaster over how bad it was elsewhere in a rush to attack the US, though.
I don’t think you’re defending slavery and I think the US is a good country. I dislike the contemporary progressive account of history. It’s the same genre of justificatory political manga as the Whig history it seeks to upend.
That said, I stand by every word of my argument.
I used the word natural as in naturalism, the intellectual movement that emerged in Europe in the Renaissance and came to fruition in the Enlightenment. Naturalistic racism was indeed new. I can point you to the texts where it was developed. It was accepted as cutting-edge science among enlightenment figures like Voltaire and Kant. I object strongly to the term, “scientifically-supported” racial hierarchy. Science in the post-baconian sense cannot support a concept of a racial hierarchy. Such a concept is a value judgement. Values are and can only be extrinsic to modern, empirical science (another lesson of history our progressive friends have failed to learn).
When it comes to the nature of this value judgement, I do think it makes things worse that the western slavers should have known better. Christian society had been agonizing over slavery for more than a millennium; what does this mean for our own seemingly invincible moral convictions that it all melted away so quickly? I don’t think our contemporary political discourse, left or right, can handle serious answers to the question.
As to the exceptional evil of the US system, there was nowhere else that the hereditary and permanent racial chattel system was implemented and enforced so thoroughly (I could maybe grant Haiti as a possible exception). Spanish and Portuguese slavers used religious justifications carried over from suspicions of Jewish and North African converts after the reconquista. This was disgusting, but it also meant that the slaves’ status was impermanent and mutable. Manumission was vastly more common, and social-racial boundaries were much more permeable. This is reflected today, where racial relations are far less damaged in Latin America than in the North.
So, yeah, my read is you are basically arguing that it was the first time "science" was used to try and justify slavery. I meant my "defensible" statement to be that I think that argument is defensible. But, largely because the scientific revolution was so recent. Before that, it was divinity that set up hierarchies of people. It was still based on "blood and soil," all told, though? In fact, I largely view that as trying to use the new tool of "science" to justify what the old system had setup? (Again, I think this argument has legs, so I'm not trying to completely "debunk" it.)
I'm far too removed from any time in my life where I was reading history documents, but the christianity slant is still odd to me. Specifically, I remember reading back in the day that some anti-slavery groups were instrumental in converting slaves to christianity in an effort to undermine it. That, in turn, was itself coopted, such that it was not necessarily a success. (And I'll throw in the caveat that I didn't find history that engaging.)
My gripe on the "nowhere else had hereditary slavery" is that this is complicated. Firstly, many places basically ended bloodlines of their slaves. Castration and executions were the norm. So, hard to see that this is really a comparison that you'd want to stake a "which is worse" debate on. They are both abhorrently evil. (And, not shockingly, serfdom has its own curve ball to this debate. That was hereditary and while slavery has obviously worse aspects, I don't understand why people seem to think serfdom was mostly fine.)
Bringing it fully to this general topic. The slave narratives being a US literary thing is largely because that is allowed in the US. Do I think the US should get a pass and kudos for amplifying voices of people that they used to enslave? Complicated question.
Well, sorta complicated. I can firmly say "get a pass and kudos" should be dismissed as a silly statement. But, it is frustrating that places that almost certainly did worse things heavily censor their histories. This isn't even really debated. But, because people hear the US criticisms and the others are largely silenced, so many people take the view that there are only US criticisms.
Edit: Meant to say thanks for the opening. I know this is a topic that is prone to yelling way too easily. I'd also be interested in reading any texts you recommend reading.
The West, and specifically America, is blamed not so much for slavery but for the following things all together:
1. Chattel Slavery
2. Racism as a form of pseudo-scientific theory that established why different "races" were of lower quality than others, and thus any member of the lower race deserved to be enslaved by members of the higher race.
3. Laws in various states of the U.S that established black people could be enslaved when traveling in that state, or that free black people traveling in the region would not be allowed to do so https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-free-slave-8336f214da45
4. After finding slavery unacceptable, the U.S with its pseudo-scientific cover of Racism in much of the country still treated black people as if they were enslaved, and often killed them for no particular reason discernible to reason.
5. One can argue as to the exact point that Black people became equal in the U.S, some might argue that it isn't the case yet, but anyone fairly arguing would have to concede that there are a number of Black people still living who were at least children when it was not the case that this state of equality existed - even if they wanted to argue that it does exist now.
on edit: changed either to still
It must be a nice consolation for the various European powers that their colonies breaking away seems to have absolved them of any blame not just the institutionalization of chattel slavery, but apparently also the creation of scientific racism.
Yes, it was - same as I suppose it is a great inconvenience to you that the Brits were calling for the abolishing of slavery long before the Civil War.
That said, sure, scientific Racism was project of Western Civilization, but it seems really that America - at least where Black people were the subject (and maybe also Indians, but they were more to be exterminated - not enslaved) - put a lot more heart and soul into it than other participants.
> The West is blamed for slavery when it is the West that set the norm that slavery is unacceptable.
Not sure who is blaming the West for slavery, but whatever.
The West did set the norm that slavery is unacceptable, but only after embracing slavery on a vast scale for centuries, overlapping to a great degree with the Enlightment and with the birth of representative democracy. I think that is the underlying dissonance - the founding fathers expounded at length on equality, liberty from arbitrary rule and so on, while the South prospered on the back of slavery. A similar criticism could be made of French revolutionaries, and British liberals of the 17th/early 18th centuries.
>The West did set the norm that slavery is unacceptable, but only after embracing slavery on a vast scale for centuries, overlapping to a great degree with the Enlightment and with the birth of representative democracy.
Yes the West abolished slavery after embracing philosophy invented by the West. Then it forcibly ended slavery everywhere else that it could.
>I think that is the underlying dissonance - the founding fathers expounded at length on equality, liberty from arbitrary rule and so on, while the South prospered on the back of slavery. A similar criticism could be made of French revolutionaries, and British liberals of the 17th/early 18th centuries.
Thousands of Southern slave owners were themselves black. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African-American_slave_owners Many slaves were sold to Europeans by their own people. Yet in modern times we only hear about a particular angle that pushes blame solely on the very cultures and nations that forcefully ended slavery, often at great cost.
> Yes the West abolished slavery after embracing philosophy invented by the West. Then it forcibly ended slavery everywhere else that it could.
The reality was a lot less glorious than that. And with a lot of less than glorious moral compromises and cognitive dissonance. Again, I refer you to the founding fathers.
> Yet in modern times we only hear about a particular angle that pushes blame solely on the very cultures and nations that forcefully ended slavery
We don't only hear that angle, it's trivially easy to access balanced and detailed history. Maybe you're spending your time arguing with zealots on social media but the rest of us can actually educate ourselves
> blame solely on the very cultures and nations that forcefully ended slavery
In fairness those societies were also responsible in the first place for the expansion of slavery into an unprecedentedly vast system
Can we just accept that, and not feel so defensive?
>The reality was a lot less glorious than that.
Yes in reality a lot of people died to end slavery too. The founding fathers were great men and some of them having slaves at a time when that was very common does not really change my opinion of them.
>We don't only hear that angle, it's trivially easy to access balanced and detailed history. Maybe you're spending your time arguing with zealots on social media but the rest of us can actually educate ourselves
I haven't heard a balanced account of history from any mainstream source. I often see school teachers on social media admitting that they believe these radical narratives. So I am compelled to argue with zealots. Lots of people want to believe that there's some "big reason" they didn't get ahead in life, and what better reason than "systemic racism" going back "hundreds of years"? I actually hate arguing with people about this issue but nobody saying anything against that extreme misrepresentation of things can lead to bigger problems in society.
>In fairness those societies were also responsible in the first place for the expansion of slavery into an unprecedentedly vast system
That is not an inherent characteristic of those societies. They just happened to have ships that could cross oceans.
>Can we just accept that, and not feel so defensive?
I'll stop being defensive when people stop attacking me and my society for things that a tiny fraction of people living hundreds of years ago benefited from. The media is constantly trying to stir up racist sentiments against white people under the pretense of talking about history or some other innocuous thing, and it's disgusting. But their goal is to cause conflict, not to actually fix race relations. I've seen race relations in general decline for at least 10 years because of this.
Cool story, but I wish this were published into the public domain online.
It's kind of weird that a 150-year-old slave narrative is being sold by a University press.
At any rate, here's the original text from the Australian paper: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...
Excellent find! That text actually begins here, much more poorly OCRed:
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...
so that the GUI version is probably easier to read ( https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/60178733 , https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/60177234 ).
Also, TFA itself links to a transcription of the (according to TFA, "chopped ... excising most of its political arguments") Leisure Hour reprint:
https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jjacobs/jjacobs.html
It might be interesting to compare the two. In fact, I would hope that such a comparison appears in Schroeder's new edition. A university press is exactly where I'd expect to find a "critical edition" or recension of a 150-year-old narrative that exists in multiple versions. If university-press publication is appropriate for a critical edition of Shakespeare or Pulci, it seems equally appropriate for a critical edition of John S. Jacobs. You're not paying for the transcription, you're paying for the scholarship.
The only weird things about this story, to me, are:
(1) The book-jacket design screams modern pop, where I personally would have gone with a more "serious"-looking design, like you'd find on a Penguin Classic, or even on an Erik Larson novel.
(2) It's not clear what they mean "rediscovered"; I scanned the article looking for the traditional discovery narrative, like "he inherited a manuscript" or "a yellowed newspaper clipping" or whatever. Here it looks like the "rediscovery" was basically that it came up in a Google search and he said "oh that's neat, someone should republish that in real print, on paper." Which is fine and great; we should republish more out-of-print work. It's just not the traditional media narrative of a "rediscovered" or "resurfaced" lost work; it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been surgically removed.
Heugh. You're right about the cover. It looks like it was made to stand out in a brick-and-mortar Black History Month display. It feels out of place among other Black Studies titles from U. of Chicago in "seriousness" relative to the significance of its subject. [1]
> "...it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been surgically removed."
I think that stories like this represent what's going to be the new normal for discovery practices in the humanities.
Although I understand your disappointment, all that's changed is that physical discovery has gone digital and had that not been the case in this instant the likelihood of Jacob's narrative being resurfaced is altered.
This is an example of it working out well, as far as I can tell. It couldn't get any better than how it turned out.
Who else but a middle-aged post-graduate, in the middle of the first Trump administration, trying to get his dissertation published, looking for work, applying exercising his academic know-how to scratch his own itch, taking advantage of open source intelligence, corresponding with colleagues, transforming "from an interpretive literary scholar into an old-fashioned archive hound", could have pulled this of?
(Because we know there's no way he'd even think about financing a trip to Australia to kick the research off the old fashion way)
What better way for this to return to the fore in 2024?
You say the plot of the beat has been surgically removed, nay, I say beat goes on!
We used to bang on papyrus, and pass credentials for access to microfilm. White-gloved hands daintily turn delicate pages...tired eyes glean call numbers scrawled onto hastily sheared scrap paper.
The same beat carries on my friend...
[1]: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/subject/su10.html
> It looks like it was made to stand out in a brick-and-mortar Black History Month display.
Or not to stand out, but to blend in. :) ...Ah, but the cover design on the actual publisher's website is different! And indeed more "serious"-looking.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo213795...
How strange. I was referring to the cover as I had found it on the publisher’s website and now it’s that one.
The original text is public domain. So you can copy it to your Website, or submit it to archive.org, etc.
It's ironic even after 150 years, the person is still facing the same issue.
This makes me wonder the modern day slave narratives that will not be understood as such for another 100+ yrs. There are more enslaved people now than ever.
I expect we'll see stories out of Saudi Arabia or trafficked labor in SEA more and more as it becomes historical
I believe that, in the future, prison labor in the USA will be recognized as one of the largest examples of modern slavery.
On top of that, we could argue that the concept of people depending on the good will of a specific employer/master to be able to survive will also be considered as the capitalist successor to slavery.
Personally I would relate the latter to feudalism, especially as monopolies grow ever imminent within the majority of fields.
Considering that capitalism has consistently led to monopolies since its inception, wouldn't it be reasonable to conclude that monopolies are inherent to the system?
Regrettably, Texas public universities have destroyed most of the original documents about slavery they had from the era of slavery. Almost every document freeing slaves was destroyed.
They destroyed these irreplaceable historical documents because those documents offended their modern sensibilities.
I believe history should be preserved. Even lying propaganda has value to historians.
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> Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US population included about one-quarter of the people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
For people wondering how this is possible:
> In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the enslaved death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of the US enslaved population was about the same as that of Jamaican enslaved persons, the birth rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United States.
> In the United States enslaved persons were more generations removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. In the nineteenth century, the majority of enslaved in the British Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In contrast, by 1850, most US enslaved persons were third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation Americans.
> Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the enslaved population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. Unlike any other enslaved society, the US had a high and sustained natural increase in the enslaved population for a more than a century and a half.
The US prohibited importing slaves in 1807-08 so a forced breeding program evolved to continue slavery in the South.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_breeding_in_the_United_S...
The last point may be the most important. The US banned the importation of slaves in 1808. The enslaved were treated like livestock and that's why they still had slaves in the 1860s.
Yep.
The US and Brazil knew how to breed enslaved people.
Therefore today, Brazil has the largest slave descended population, and the US has the second largest.
For context, that article is focused on the Americas since it is an American History institute. Those stats aren't even including the 1500 years of Arab and Ottoman trade of African slaves.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
If you want to share statistics, it's not hard at all to find them.
Though I wonder what point, if any, you're trying to make?
Either way, it was taking humans and using them as forced labor, treating them as if they didn't deserve human rights.
I made the point because it seems to be a relatively unknown fact.
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This post is not only off topic but abusive.
We've asked you several times to stop posting flamewar comments and political battle comments to HN. I don't want to ban you, because you've been here a long time and have also posted good comments, but if you keep ignoring these requests, we won't have much choice.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
p.s. Threads are especially sensitive to initial conditions, so posting flamebait as the first comment is especially bad.
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I don't agree. It's an interesting historical story, and historical material has always been welcome on HN. There's much to be intellectually curious about there, and no need to be provoked onto an ideological track.
For those who do feel provoked, the appropriate response is (1) not to comment, and (2) to look elsewhere for things that do gratify your intellectual curiosity. There are 29 other threads on the front page, and hundreds more within a single click.
What political agenda is the OP pushing? Please be specific.
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You still need to explain what's wrong with this article for anyone to understand what your objection is. Otherwise the whole thing turns into advocacy for a kind of 'snowflake's veto' on anything someone might dislike or be uninterested in.
The only political "agenda" I see it's sharing is a narrative that wasn't possible to share at the time due to the horror of slavery.
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It does apply to articles, but classifying this one as "ideological or political battle" is quite excessive. I thought it was intellectually interesting, quite apart from current political affairs, and I'm sure a lot of other readers will as well. They should be allowed to discuss the article in an intellectually curious way [1], without getting drowned out by other people's political reflexes [2].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
What about this particular article makes it flamebait or narrative-pushing?
It's a feature for the art section and far as NYT articles go...mild.
How is a story that tells the story of someone who was a slave and the brother of a famous American author "flamebait", "political", or "ideological"?
Frankly, take a look at the juxtaposition of your comment to the GP. They're insinuating even printing this story is somehow the mission of American Democrats - more directly that American Democrats are responsible for printing the story of international slaves. If that were even remotely true then that's absolutely shameful. The world had slaves for a long time across multitudes of generations, societies, and cultures. We should know their history lest we be damned to repeat it.
What about the article is flamebait?
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