|
In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation. By Matthew Desmond AUG. 14, 2019 A couple of years before he was convicted of securities fraud, Martin Shkreli was the chief executive of a pharmaceutical company that acquired the rights to Daraprim, a lifesaving antiparasitic drug. Previously the drug cost $13.50 a pill, but in Shkreli’s hands, the price quickly increased by a factor of 56, to $750 a pill. At a health care conference, Shkreli told the audience that he should have raised the price even higher. “No one wants to say it, no one’s proud of it,” he explained. “But this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules.” This is a capitalist society. It’s a fatalistic mantra that seems to get repeated to anyone who questions why America can’t be more fair or equal. But around the world, there are many types of capitalist societies, ranging from liberating to exploitative, protective to abusive, democratic to unregulated. When Americans declare that “we live in a capitalist society” — as a real estate mogul told The Miami Herald last year when explaining his feelings about small-business owners being evicted from their Little Haiti storefronts — what they’re often defending is our nation’s peculiarly brutal economy. “Low-road capitalism,” the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Joel Rogers has called it. In a capitalist society that goes low, wages are depressed as businesses compete over the price, not the quality, of goods; so-called unskilled workers are typically incentivized through punishments, not promotions; inequality reigns and poverty spreads. In the United States, the richest 1 percent of Americans own 40 percent of the country’s wealth, while a larger share of working-age people (18-65) live in poverty than in any other nation belonging to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (O.E.C.D.). Or consider worker rights in different capitalist nations. In Iceland, 90 percent of wage and salaried workers belong to trade unions authorized to fight for living wages and fair working conditions. Thirty-four percent of Italian workers are unionized, as are 26 percent of Canadian workers. Only 10 percent of American wage and salaried workers carry union cards. The O.E.C.D. scores nations along a number of indicators, such as how countries regulate temporary work arrangements. Scores run from 5 (“very strict”) to 1 (“very loose”). Brazil scores 4.1 and Thailand, 3.7, signaling toothy regulations on temp work. Further down the list are Norway (3.4), India (2.5) and Japan (1.3). The United States scored 0.3, tied for second to last place with Malaysia. How easy is it to fire workers? Countries like Indonesia (4.1) and Portugal (3) have strong rules about severance pay and reasons for dismissal. Those rules relax somewhat in places like Denmark (2.1) and Mexico (1.9). They virtually disappear in the United States, ranked dead last out of 71 nations with a score of 0.5. Those searching for reasons the American economy is uniquely severe and unbridled have found answers in many places (religion, politics, culture). But recently, historians have pointed persuasively to the gnatty fields of Georgia and Alabama, to the cotton houses and slave auction blocks, as the birthplace of America’s low-road approach to capitalism. Slavery was undeniably a font of phenomenal wealth. By the eve of the Civil War, the Mississippi Valley was home to more millionaires per capita than anywhere else in the United States. Cotton grown and picked by enslaved workers was the nation’s most valuable export. The combined value of enslaved people exceeded that of all the railroads and factories in the nation. New Orleans boasted a denser concentration of banking capital than New York City. What made the cotton economy boom in the United States, and not in all the other far-flung parts of the world with climates and soil suitable to the crop, was our nation’s unflinching willingness to use violence on nonwhite people and to exert its will on seemingly endless supplies of land and labor. Given the choice between modernity and barbarism, prosperity and poverty, lawfulness and cruelty, democracy and totalitarianism, America chose all of the above. Women and children in a cotton field in the 1860s. J. H. Aylsworth, via the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture Nearly two average American lifetimes (79 years) have passed since the end of slavery, only two. It is not surprising that we can still feel the looming presence of this institution, which helped turn a poor, fledgling nation into a financial colossus. The surprising bit has to do with the many eerily specific ways slavery can still be felt in our economic life. “American slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American capitalism,” write the historians Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman. The task now, they argue, is “cataloging the dominant and recessive traits” that have been passed down to us, tracing the unsettling and often unrecognized lines of descent by which America’s national sin is now being visited upon the third and fourth generations. They picked in long rows, bent bodies shuffling through cotton fields white in bloom. Men, women and children picked, using both hands to hurry the work. Some picked in Negro cloth, their raw product returning to them by way of New England mills. Some picked completely naked. Young children ran water across the humped rows, while overseers peered down from horses. Enslaved workers placed each cotton boll into a sack slung around their necks. Their haul would be weighed after the sunlight stalked away from the fields and, as the freedman Charles Ball recalled, you couldn’t “distinguish the weeds from the cotton plants.” If the haul came up light, enslaved workers were often whipped. “A short day’s work was always punished,” Ball wrote. Cotton was to the 19th century what oil was to the 20th: among the world’s most widely traded commodities. Cotton is everywhere, in our clothes, hospitals, soap. Before the industrialization of cotton, people wore expensive clothes made of wool or linen and dressed their beds in furs or straw. Whoever mastered cotton could make a killing. But cotton needed land. A field could only tolerate a few straight years of the crop before its soil became depleted. Planters watched as acres that had initially produced 1,000 pounds of cotton yielded only 400 a few seasons later. The thirst for new farmland grew even more intense after the invention of the cotton gin in the early 1790s. Before the gin, enslaved workers grew more cotton than they could clean. The gin broke the bottleneck, making it possible to clean as much cotton as you could grow. At the start of the Civil War, only states could charter banks. It wasn’t until the National Currency Act of 1863 and the National Bank Act of 1864 passed at the height of the Civil War that banks operated in this country on a national scale, with federal oversight. And even then, it was only law in the North. The Union passed the bills so it could establish a national currency in order to finance the war. The legislation also created the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (O.C.C.), the first federal bank regulator. After the war, states were allowed to keep issuing bank charters of their own. This byzantine infrastructure remains to this day and is known as the dual banking system. Among all nations in the world, only the United States has such a fragmentary, overlapping and inefficient system — a direct relic of the conflict between federal and state power over maintenance of the slave-based economy of the South. Both state regulators and the O.C.C., one of the largest federal regulators, are funded by fees from the banks they regulate. Moreover, banks are effectively able to choose regulators — either federal or state ones, depending on their charter. They can even change regulators if they become unsatisfied with the one they’ve chosen. Consumer-protection laws, interest-rate caps and basic-soundness regulations have often been rendered ineffectual in the process — and deregulation of this sort tends to lead to crisis. In the mid-2000s, when subprime lenders started appearing in certain low-income neighborhoods, many of them majority black and Latino, several state banking regulators took note. In Michigan, the state insurance regulator tried to enforce its consumer-protection laws on Wachovia Mortgage, a subsidiary of Wachovia Bank. In response, Wachovia’s national regulator, the O.C.C., stepped in, claiming that banks with a national charter did not have to comply with state law. The Supreme Court agreed with the O.C.C., and Wachovia continued to engage in risky subprime activity. Eventually loans like those blew up the banking system and the investments of many Americans — especially the most vulnerable. Black communities lost 53 percent of their wealth because of the crisis, a loss that a former congressman, Brad Miller, said “has almost been an extinction event.” The United States solved its land shortage by expropriating millions of acres from Native Americans, often with military force, acquiring Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee and Florida. It then sold that land on the cheap — just $1.25 an acre in the early 1830s ($38 in today’s dollars) — to white settlers. Naturally, the first to cash in were the land speculators. Companies operating in Mississippi flipped land, selling it soon after purchase, commonly for double the price. Enslaved workers felled trees by ax, burned the underbrush and leveled the earth for planting. “Whole forests were literally dragged out by the roots,” John Parker, an enslaved worker, remembered. A lush, twisted mass of vegetation was replaced by a single crop. An origin of American money exerting its will on the earth, spoiling the environment for profit, is found in the cotton plantation. Floods became bigger and more common. The lack of biodiversity exhausted the soil and, to quote the historian Walter Johnson, “rendered one of the richest agricultural regions of the earth dependent on upriver trade for food.” As slave labor camps spread throughout the South, production surged. By 1831, the country was delivering nearly half the world’s raw cotton crop, with 350 million pounds picked that year. Just four years later, it harvested 500 million pounds. Southern white elites grew rich, as did their counterparts in the North, who erected textile mills to form, in the words of the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, an “unhallowed alliance between the lords of the lash and the lords of the loom.” The large-scale cultivation of cotton hastened the invention of the factory, an institution that propelled the Industrial Revolution and changed the course of history. In 1810, there were 87,000 cotton spindles in America. Fifty years later, there were five million. Slavery, wrote one of its defenders in De Bow’s Review, a widely read agricultural magazine, was the “nursing mother of the prosperity of the North.” Cotton planters, millers and consumers were fashioning a new economy, one that was global in scope and required the movement of capital, labor and products across long distances. In other words, they were fashioning a capitalist economy. “The beating heart of this new system,” Beckert writes, “was slavery.” Perhaps you’re reading this at work, maybe at a multinational corporation that runs like a soft-purring engine. You report to someone, and someone reports to you. Everything is tracked, recorded and analyzed, via vertical reporting systems, double-entry record-keeping and precise quantification. Data seems to hold sway over every operation. It feels like a cutting-edge approach to management, but many of these techniques that we now take for granted were developed by and for large plantations. African-Americans preparing cotton for the gin at a plantation on Port Royal Island, S.C., in the 1860s. Timothy H. O’Sullivan, via the Library of Congress When an accountant depreciates an asset to save on taxes or when a midlevel manager spends an afternoon filling in rows and columns on an Excel spreadsheet, they are repeating business procedures whose roots twist back to slave-labor camps. And yet, despite this, “slavery plays almost no role in histories of management,” notes the historian Caitlin Rosenthal in her book “Accounting for Slavery.” Since the 1977 publication of Alfred Chandler’s classic study, “The Visible Hand,” historians have tended to connect the development of modern business practices to the 19th-century railroad industry, viewing plantation slavery as precapitalistic, even primitive. It’s a more comforting origin story, one that protects the idea that America’s economic ascendancy developed not because of, but in spite of, millions of black people toiling on plantations. But management techniques used by 19th-century corporations were implemented during the previous century by plantation owners. Planters aggressively expanded their operations to capitalize on economies of scale inherent to cotton growing, buying more enslaved workers, investing in large gins and presses and experimenting with different seed varieties. To do so, they developed complicated workplace hierarchies that combined a central office, made up of owners and lawyers in charge of capital allocation and long-term strategy, with several divisional units, responsible for different operations. Rosenthal writes of one plantation where the owner supervised a top lawyer, who supervised another lawyer, who supervised an overseer, who supervised three bookkeepers, who supervised 16 enslaved head drivers and specialists (like bricklayers), who supervised hundreds of enslaved workers. Everyone was accountable to someone else, and plantations pumped out not just cotton bales but volumes of data about how each bale was produced. This organizational form was very advanced for its time, displaying a level of hierarchal complexity equaled only by large government structures, like that of the British Royal Navy. Like today’s titans of industry, planters understood that their profits climbed when they extracted maximum effort out of each worker. So they paid close attention to inputs and outputs by developing precise systems of record-keeping. Meticulous bookkeepers and overseers were just as important to the productivity of a slave-labor camp as field hands. Plantation entrepreneurs developed spreadsheets, like Thomas Affleck’s “Plantation Record and Account Book,” which ran into eight editions circulated until the Civil War. Affleck’s book was a one-stop-shop accounting manual, complete with rows and columns that tracked per-worker productivity. This book “was really at the cutting edge of the informational technologies available to businesses during this period,” Rosenthal told me. “I have never found anything remotely as complex as Affleck’s book for free labor.” Enslavers used the book to determine end-of-the-year balances, tallying expenses and revenues and noting the causes of their biggest gains and losses. They quantified capital costs on their land, tools and enslaved workforces, applying Affleck’s recommended interest rate. Perhaps most remarkable, they also developed ways to calculate depreciation, a breakthrough in modern management procedures, by assessing the market value of enslaved workers over their life spans. Values generally peaked between the prime ages of 20 and 40 but were individually adjusted up or down based on sex, strength and temperament: people reduced to data points. This level of data analysis also allowed planters to anticipate rebellion. Tools were accounted for on a regular basis to make sure a large number of axes or other potential weapons didn’t suddenly go missing. “Never allow any slave to lock or unlock any door,” advised a Virginia enslaver in 1847. In this way, new bookkeeping techniques developed to maximize returns also helped to ensure that violence flowed in one direction, allowing a minority of whites to control a much larger group of enslaved black people. American planters never forgot what happened in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) in 1791, when enslaved workers took up arms and revolted. In fact, many white enslavers overthrown during the Haitian Revolution relocated to the United States and started over. Overseers recorded each enslaved worker’s yield. Accountings took place not only after nightfall, when cotton baskets were weighed, but throughout the workday. In the words of a North Carolina planter, enslaved workers were to be “followed up from day break until dark.” Having hands line-pick in rows sometimes longer than five football fields allowed overseers to spot anyone lagging behind. The uniform layout of the land had a logic; a logic designed to dominate. Faster workers were placed at the head of the line, which encouraged those who followed to match the captain’s pace. When enslaved workers grew ill or old, or became pregnant, they were assigned to lighter tasks. One enslaver established a “sucklers gang” for nursing mothers, as well as a “measles gang,” which at once quarantined those struck by the virus and ensured that they did their part to contribute to the productivity machine. Bodies and tasks were aligned with rigorous exactitude. In trade magazines, owners swapped advice about the minutiae of planting, including slave diets and clothing as well as the kind of tone a master should use. In 1846, one Alabama planter advised his fellow enslavers to always give orders “in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression on the mind of the negro that what you say is the result of reflection.” The devil (and his profits) were in the details. The Constitution is riddled with compromises made between the North and South over the issue of slavery — the Electoral College, the three-fifths clause — but paper currency was too contentious an issue for the framers, so it was left out entirely. Thomas Jefferson, like many Southerners, believed that a national currency would make the federal government too powerful and would also favor the Northern trade-based economy over the plantation economy. So, for much of its first century, the United States was without a national bank or a uniform currency, leaving its economy prone to crisis, bank runs and instability. At the height of the war, Lincoln understood that he could not feed the troops without more money, so he issued a national currency, backed by the full faith and credit of the United States Treasury — but not by gold. (These bills were known derisively as “greenbacks,” a word that has lived on.) The South had a patchwork currency that was backed by the holdings of private banks — the same banks that helped finance the entire Southern economy, from the plantations to the people enslaved on them. Some Confederate bills even had depictions of enslaved people on their backs. In a sense, the war over slavery was also a war over the future of the economy and the essentiality of value. By issuing fiat currency, Lincoln bet the future on the elasticity of value. This was the United States’ first formal experiment with fiat money, and it was a resounding success. The currency was accepted by national and international creditors — such as private creditors from London, Amsterdam and Paris — and funded the feeding and provisioning of Union troops. In turn, the success of the Union Army fortified the new currency. Lincoln assured critics that the move would be temporary, but leaders who followed him eventually made it permanent — first Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression and then, formally, Richard Nixon in 1971. The uncompromising pursuit of measurement and scientific accounting displayed in slave plantations predates industrialism. Northern factories would not begin adopting these techniques until decades after the Emancipation Proclamation. As the large slave-labor camps grew increasingly efficient, enslaved black people became America’s first modern workers, their productivity increasing at an astonishing pace. During the 60 years leading up to the Civil War, the daily amount of cotton picked per enslaved worker increased 2.3 percent a year. That means that in 1862, the average enslaved fieldworker picked not 25 percent or 50 percent as much but 400 percent as much cotton than his or her counterpart did in 1801. Today modern technology has facilitated unremitting workplace supervision, particularly in the service sector. Companies have developed software that records workers’ keystrokes and mouse clicks, along with randomly capturing screenshots multiple times a day. Modern-day workers are subjected to a wide variety of surveillance strategies, from drug tests and closed-circuit video monitoring to tracking apps and even devices that sense heat and motion. A 2006 survey found that more than a third of companies with work forces of 1,000 or more had staff members who read through employees’ outbound emails. The technology that accompanies this workplace supervision can make it feel futuristic. But it’s only the technology that’s new. The core impulse behind that technology pervaded plantations, which sought innermost control over the bodies of their enslaved work force. The cotton plantation was America’s first big business, and the nation’s first corporate Big Brother was the overseer. And behind every cold calculation, every rational fine-tuning of the system, violence lurked. Plantation owners used a combination of incentives and punishments to squeeze as much as possible out of enslaved workers. Some beaten workers passed out from the pain and woke up vomiting. Some “danced” or “trembled” with every hit. An 1829 first-person account from Alabama recorded an overseer’s shoving the faces of women he thought had picked too slow into their cotton baskets and opening up their backs. To the historian Edward Baptist, before the Civil War, Americans “lived in an economy whose bottom gear was torture.” There is some comfort, I think, in attributing the sheer brutality of slavery to dumb racism. We imagine pain being inflicted somewhat at random, doled out by the stereotypical white overseer, free but poor. But a good many overseers weren’t allowed to whip at will. Punishments were authorized by the higher-ups. It was not so much the rage of the poor white Southerner but the greed of the rich white planter that drove the lash. The violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. It was rational, capitalistic, all part of the plantation’s design. “Each individual having a stated number of pounds of cotton to pick,” a formerly enslaved worker, Henry Watson, wrote in 1848, “the deficit of which was made up by as many lashes being applied to the poor slave’s back.” Because overseers closely monitored enslaved workers’ picking abilities, they assigned each worker a unique quota. Falling short of that quota could get you beaten, but overshooting your target could bring misery the next day, because the master might respond by raising your picking rate. Profits from heightened productivity were harnessed through the anguish of the enslaved. This was why the fastest cotton pickers were often whipped the most. It was why punishments rose and fell with global market fluctuations. Speaking of cotton in 1854, the fugitive slave John Brown remembered, “When the price rises in the English market, the poor slaves immediately feel the effects, for they are harder driven, and the whip is kept more constantly going.” Unrestrained capitalism holds no monopoly on violence, but in making possible the pursuit of near limitless personal fortunes, often at someone else’s expense, it does put a cash value on our moral commitments. Slavery did supplement white workers with what W.E.B. Du Bois called a “public and psychological wage,” which allowed them to roam freely and feel a sense of entitlement. But this, too, served the interests of money. Slavery pulled down all workers’ wages. Both in the cities and countryside, employers had access to a large and flexible labor pool made up of enslaved and free people. Just as in today’s gig economy, day laborers during slavery’s reign often lived under conditions of scarcity and uncertainty, and jobs meant to be worked for a few months were worked for lifetimes. Labor power had little chance when the bosses could choose between buying people, renting them, contracting indentured servants, taking on apprentices or hiring children and prisoners. This not only created a starkly uneven playing field, dividing workers from themselves; it also made “all nonslavery appear as freedom,” as the economic historian Stanley Engerman has written. Witnessing the horrors of slavery drilled into poor white workers that things could be worse. So they generally accepted their lot, and American freedom became broadly defined as the opposite of bondage. It was a freedom that understood what it was against but not what it was for; a malnourished and mean kind of freedom that kept you out of chains but did not provide bread or shelter. It was a freedom far too easily pleased. In recent decades, America has experienced the financialization of its economy. In 1980, Congress repealed regulations that had been in place since the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act, allowing banks to merge and charge their customers higher interest rates. Since then, increasingly profits have accrued not by trading and producing goods and services but through financial instruments. Between 1980 and 2008, more than $6.6 trillion was transferred to financial firms. After witnessing the successes and excesses of Wall Street, even nonfinancial companies began finding ways to make money from financial products and activities. Ever wonder why every major retail store, hotel chain and airline wants to sell you a credit card? This financial turn has trickled down into our everyday lives: It’s there in our pensions, home mortgages, lines of credit and college-savings portfolios. Americans with some means now act like “enterprising subjects,” in the words of the political scientist Robert Aitken. As it’s usually narrated, the story of the ascendancy of American finance tends to begin in 1980, with the gutting of Glass-Steagall, or in 1944 with Bretton Woods, or perhaps in the reckless speculation of the 1920s. But in reality, the story begins during slavery. Cotton produced under slavery created a worldwide market that brought together the Old World and the New: the industrial textile mills of the Northern states and England, on the one hand, and the cotton plantations of the American South on the other. Textile mills in industrial centers like Lancashire, England, purchased a majority of cotton exports, which created worldwide trade hubs in London and New York where merchants could trade in, invest in, insure and speculate on the cotton—commodity market. Though trade in other commodities existed, it was cotton (and the earlier trade in slave-produced sugar from the Caribbean) that accelerated worldwide commercial markets in the 19th century, creating demand for innovative contracts, novel financial products and modern forms of insurance and credit. Like all agricultural goods, cotton is prone to fluctuations in quality depending on crop type, location and environmental conditions. Treating it as a commodity led to unique problems: How would damages be calculated if the wrong crop was sent? How would you assure that there was no misunderstanding between two parties on time of delivery? Legal concepts we still have to this day, like “mutual mistake” (the notion that contracts can be voided if both parties relied on a mistaken assumption), were developed to deal with these issues. Textile merchants needed to purchase cotton in advance of their own production, which meant that farmers needed a way to sell goods they had not yet grown; this led to the invention of futures contracts and, arguably, the commodities markets still in use today. From the first decades of the 1800s, during the height of the trans-Atlantic cotton trade, the sheer size of the market and the escalating number of disputes between counterparties was such that courts and lawyers began to articulate and codify the common-law standards regarding contracts. This allowed investors and traders to mitigate their risk through contractual arrangement, which smoothed the flow of goods and money. Today law students still study some of these pivotal cases as they learn doctrines like forseeability, mutual mistake and damages. Consider, for example, one of the most popular mainstream financial instruments: the mortgage. Enslaved people were used as collateral for mortgages centuries before the home mortgage became the defining characteristic of middle America. In colonial times, when land was not worth much and banks didn’t exist, most lending was based on human property. In the early 1700s, slaves were the dominant collateral in South Carolina. Many Americans were first exposed to the concept of a mortgage by trafficking in enslaved people, not real estate, and “the extension of mortgages to slave property helped fuel the development of American (and global) capitalism,” the historian Joshua Rothman told me. Or consider a Wall Street financial instrument as modern-sounding as collateralized debt obligations (C.D.O.s), those ticking time bombs backed by inflated home prices in the 2000s. C.D.O.s were the grandchildren of mortgage-backed securities based on the inflated value of enslaved people sold in the 1820s and 1830s. Each product created massive fortunes for the few before blowing up the economy. Enslavers were not the first ones to securitize assets and debts in America. The land companies that thrived during the late 1700s relied on this technique, for instance. But enslavers did make use of securities to such an enormous degree for their time, exposing stakeholders throughout the Western world to enough risk to compromise the world economy, that the historian Edward Baptist told me that this can be viewed as “a new moment in international capitalism, where you are seeing the development of a globalized financial market.” The novel thing about the 2008 foreclosure crisis was not the concept of foreclosing on a homeowner but foreclosing on millions of them. Similarly, what was new about securitizing enslaved people in the first half of the 19th century was not the concept of securitization itself but the crazed level of rash speculation on cotton that selling slave debt promoted. As America’s cotton sector expanded, the value of enslaved workers soared. Between 1804 and 1860, the average price of men ages 21 to 38 sold in New Orleans grew to $1,200 from roughly $450. Because they couldn’t expand their cotton empires without more enslaved workers, ambitious planters needed to find a way to raise enough capital to purchase more hands. Enter the banks. The Second Bank of the United States, chartered in 1816, began investing heavily in cotton. In the early 1830s, the slaveholding Southwestern states took almost half the bank’s business. Around the same time, state-chartered banks began multiplying to such a degree that one historian called it an “orgy of bank-creation.” When seeking loans, planters used enslaved people as collateral. Thomas Jefferson mortgaged 150 of his enslaved workers to build Monticello. People could be sold much more easily than land, and in multiple Southern states, more than eight in 10 mortgage-secured loans used enslaved people as full or partial collateral. As the historian Bonnie Martin has written, “slave owners worked their slaves financially, as well as physically from colonial days until emancipation” by mortgaging people to buy more people. Access to credit grew faster than Mississippi kudzu, leading one 1836 observer to remark that in cotton country “money, or what passed for money, was the only cheap thing to be had.” Planters took on immense amounts of debt to finance their operations. Why wouldn’t they? The math worked out. A cotton plantation in the first decade of the 19th century could leverage their enslaved workers at 8 percent interest and record a return three times that. So leverage they did, sometimes volunteering the same enslaved workers for multiple mortgages. Banks lent with little restraint. By 1833, Mississippi banks had issued 20 times as much paper money as they had gold in their coffers. In several Southern counties, slave mortgages injected more capital into the economy than sales from the crops harvested by enslaved workers. Global financial markets got in on the action. When Thomas Jefferson mortgaged his enslaved workers, it was a Dutch firm that put up the money. The Louisiana Purchase, which opened millions of acres to cotton production, was financed by Baring Brothers, the well-heeled British commercial bank. A majority of credit powering the American slave economy came from the London money market. Years after abolishing the African slave trade in 1807, Britain, and much of Europe along with it, was bankrolling slavery in the United States. To raise capital, state-chartered banks pooled debt generated by slave mortgages and repackaged it as bonds promising investors annual interest. During slavery’s boom time, banks did swift business in bonds, finding buyers in Hamburg and Amsterdam, in Boston and Philadelphia. Some historians have claimed that the British abolition of the slave trade was a turning point in modernity, marked by the development of a new kind of moral consciousness when people began considering the suffering of others thousands of miles away. But perhaps all that changed was a growing need to scrub the blood of enslaved workers off American dollars, British pounds and French francs, a need that Western financial markets fast found a way to satisfy through the global trade in bank bonds. Here was a means to profit from slavery without getting your hands dirty. In fact, many investors may not have realized that their money was being used to buy and exploit people, just as many of us who are vested in multinational textile companies today are unaware that our money subsidizes a business that continues to rely on forced labor in countries like Uzbekistan and China and child workers in countries like India and Brazil. Call it irony, coincidence or maybe cause — historians haven’t settled the matter — but avenues to profit indirectly from slavery grew in popularity as the institution of slavery itself grew more unpopular. “I think they go together,” the historian Calvin Schermerhorn told me. “We care about fellow members of humanity, but what do we do when we want returns on an investment that depends on their bound labor?” he said. “Yes, there is a higher consciousness. But then it comes down to: Where do you get your cotton from?” Banks issued tens of millions of dollars in loans on the assumption that rising cotton prices would go on forever. Speculation reached a fever pitch in the 1830s, as businessmen, planters and lawyers convinced themselves that they could amass real treasure by joining in a risky game that everyone seemed to be playing. If planters thought themselves invincible, able to bend the laws of finance to their will, it was most likely because they had been granted authority to bend the laws of nature to their will, to do with the land and the people who worked it as they pleased. Du Bois wrote: “The mere fact that a man could be, under the law, the actual master of the mind and body of human beings had to have disastrous effects. It tended to inflate the ego of most planters beyond all reason; they became arrogant, strutting, quarrelsome kinglets.” What are the laws of economics to those exercising godlike power over an entire people? Desperate for hands to build towns, work wharves, tend farms and keep households, colonists across the American Northeast — Puritans in Massachusetts Bay, Dutch settlers in New Netherland and Quakers in Pennsylvania — availed themselves of slave labor. Native Americans captured in colonial wars in New England were forced to work, and African people were imported in greater and greater numbers. New York City soon surpassed other slaving towns of the Northeast in scale as well as impact. Founded by the Dutch as New Amsterdam in 1625, what would become the City of New York first imported 11 African men in 1626. The Dutch West India Company owned these men and their families, directing their labors to common enterprises like land clearing and road construction. After the English Duke of York acquired authority over the colony and changed its name, slavery grew harsher and more comprehensive. As the historian Leslie Harris has written, 40 percent of New York households held enslaved people in the early 1700s. New Amsterdam’s and New York’s enslaved put in place much of the local infrastructure, including Broad Way and the Bowery roads, Governors Island, and the first municipal buildings and churches. The unfree population in New York was not small, and their experience of exploitation was not brief. In 1991, construction workers uncovered an extensive 18th-century African burial ground in Lower Manhattan, the final resting place of approximately 20,000 people. And New York City’s investment in slavery expanded in the 19th century. In 1799 the state of New York passed the first of a series of laws that would gradually abolish slavery over the coming decades, but the investors and financiers of the state’s primary metropolis doubled down on the business of slavery. New Yorkers invested heavily in the growth of Southern plantations, catching the wave of the first cotton boom. Southern planters who wanted to buy more land and black people borrowed funds from New York bankers and protected the value of bought bodies with policies from New York insurance companies. New York factories produced the agricultural tools forced into Southern slaves’ hands and the rough fabric called “Negro Cloth” worn on their backs. Ships originating in New York docked in the port of New Orleans to service the trade in domestic and (by then, illegal) international slaves. As the historian David Quigley has demonstrated, New York City’s phenomenal economic consolidation came as a result of its dominance in the Southern cotton trade, facilitated by the construction of the Erie Canal. It was in this moment — the early decades of the 1800s — that New York City gained its status as a financial behemoth through shipping raw cotton to Europe and bankrolling the boom industry that slavery made. In 1711, New York City officials decreed that “all Negro and Indian slaves that are let out to hire ... be hired at the Market house at the Wall Street Slip.” It is uncanny, but perhaps predictable, that the original wall for which Wall Street is named was built by the enslaved at a site that served as the city’s first organized slave auction. The capital profits and financial wagers of Manhattan, the United States and the world still flow through this place where black and red people were traded and where the wealth of a region was built on slavery. We know how these stories end. The American South rashly overproduced cotton thanks to an abundance of cheap land, labor and credit, consumer demand couldn’t keep up with supply, and prices fell. The value of cotton started to drop as early as 1834 before plunging like a bird winged in midflight, setting off the Panic of 1837. Investors and creditors called in their debts, but plantation owners were underwater. Mississippi planters owed the banks in New Orleans $33 million in a year their crops yielded only $10 million in revenue. They couldn’t simply liquidate their assets to raise the money. When the price of cotton tumbled, it pulled down the value of enslaved workers and land along with it. People bought for $2,000 were now selling for $60. Today, we would say the planters’ debt was “toxic.” Because enslavers couldn’t repay their loans, the banks couldn’t make interest payments on their bonds. Shouts went up around the Western world, as investors began demanding that states raise taxes to keep their promises. After all, the bonds were backed by taxpayers. But after a swell of populist outrage, states decided not to squeeze the money out of every Southern family, coin by coin. But neither did they foreclose on defaulting plantation owners. If they tried, planters absconded to Texas (an independent republic at the time) with their treasure and enslaved work force. Furious bondholders mounted lawsuits and cashiers committed suicide, but the bankrupt states refused to pay their debts. Cotton slavery was too big to fail. The South chose to cut itself out of the global credit market, the hand that had fed cotton expansion, rather than hold planters and their banks accountable for their negligence and avarice. Even academic historians, who from their very first graduate course are taught to shun presentism and accept history on its own terms, haven’t been able to resist drawing parallels between the Panic of 1837 and the 2008 financial crisis. All the ingredients are there: mystifying financial instruments that hide risk while connecting bankers, investors and families around the globe; fantastic profits amassed overnight; the normalization of speculation and breathless risk-taking; stacks of paper money printed on the myth that some institution (cotton, housing) is unshakable; considered and intentional exploitation of black people; and impunity for the profiteers when it all falls apart — the borrowers were bailed out after 1837, the banks after 2008. During slavery, “Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon,” writes the historian Joshua Rothman in his 2012 book, “Flush Times and Fever Dreams.” That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the Panic of 1837, the stock-market crash of 1929 and the recession of 2008. It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider — one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is.
|
#
?
Jun 27, 2021 12:43
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 16:50 |
|
|
Some Guy TT posted:yeah its weird how jones brings that up just to say that lincoln was racist and just completely ignores that the back to africa movement was a huge thing that had quite a bit of support among the black population It's probably been a decade since I read it, but I remember really liking The Fiery Trial for an in depth examination of Lincoln's thoughts on race and slavery over his life.
|
|
#
?
Jun 27, 2021 15:30
|
|
|
Lucky Greedo posted:the project is definitely mythologizing bullshit and kind of hard to read like the author is hurting herself by trying to tell herself these things almost your white coworker can gently caress over Black coworkers because Black people are more oppressed, not because white people get special treatment. not that working class queer white women are the engines of white supremacy, but they can, as you explained, easily participate and exploit it. if 70% of the population is getting special treatment, it's not special. i think what is most interesting about privilege discourse is that in an time that encourages the centering of non-white perspectives, it explains racism by centering the white experience.
|
|
#
?
Jun 27, 2021 19:15
|
|
|
Lucky Greedo posted:the project is definitely mythologizing bullshit and kind of hard to read like the author is hurting herself by trying to tell herself these things almost there's not really an issue with "white privilege" in the sense that you can use it to describe a phenomenon that is objectively and obviously real, but its used to decontextualize race from class. Atrocious Joe put it really well, IMO: Atrocious Joe posted:"white privilege" is embraced because "Black oppression" is too radical. describing eg. your coworkers in terms of privilege is sort of describing a picture only in terms of negative space. Yes, it's objectively true that you could, like your coworker did, get a black coworker fired on false pretenses for no other reason than you, a white person, and your claims, feelings and livelihood, will supersede those of your black coworkers. This is very obviously and incontrovertibly racism, but the issue lies with describing it. "privilege discourse" and CRT generally, casts racism as a phenomenon that just sort of bubbles up in the white brain (if you're dumb and/or looking to get clicks), or if you're an academic (or playing one on TV) is that there is some sort of base inclination to racism within all humans due to some sort of kin-selection mechanism or something and people are Just Racist, and if you're on top like white people are now, you're going to be racist and create a racist society. the problems with this are, one, it's totally unfounded evo-psych garbage that people regurgitate because it sounds like it might kind of be true but has zero basis in anything. People aren't born racist, the kin selection mechanisms that might describe a kind of biological racism in humans are incredibly weak, and easily disproven by societies that didn't exhibit color-based racism or the many, many times in history where whiteness was shown to be totally fluid and subjective. the second problem is that this view not only doesn't suggest anything to do about racism, it explicitly lays out that nothing can be done about it except for try to set up society in such a way that the worst excesses of racism are sort of reined in. you can even see how the dilettantes of CRT suggest "education" is the way racism is curtailed or even defeated, but the real heads are smart enough to point to the fact that some of the best-educated people in the world are also massive racists to show how it ultimately cannot be resolved. so to find what works, let's go back to your example and look at it through a class-analytical viewpoint. it should be pretty clear that not just your work environment, but the entire structure of a racist and race-conscious society behooves your boss. Your black coworkers know that you could, at any time and for any reason, get them fired. Their livelihoods, maybe their actual lives, are contingent on not pissing you off or even making you feel bad. You can't -- can not -- find any sort of solidarity in a power dynamic this incredibly hosed up (unless you both recognize this and align along class status, which CRT specifically and neoliberalism in general phohibits). You, on the other hand, almost undoubtedly feel some sort of safety in this, even if only subconsciously. You're a white woman, you've been blasted 24/7 with the racist propaganda that black people, black men especially, are dangerous and specifically dangerous to you. Even if you don't believe this on a conscious level, it's going to make going to your boss a lot easier in the event you do start to feel uncomfortable about something. If you are a bigot, if you've uncritically internalized the clear racism that permeates society, this is way easier because you don't like your black coworkers anyway! Your black coworkers are primed not to trust you. You're primed not to trust them. All of this serves your boss, where these racial dynamics make all of you easier to exploit and, more importantly, less apt to come together with thoughts of eg. unions. People who want to talk about race without the class component often call those who do "class reductionists", but its like trying to talk about the smell in the house without being able to talk about your roommate who keeps allowing his cats to piss on everything. The smell is a real thing that exists, this is true just as much as that racism is a thing that exists in the real world and will not be eradicated totally by "more unions" or "m4a". The problem is pretending that race exists in a vacuum, and trying to claim that it's a distinct unique thing that exists independently in and of itself, and it's not epiphenomenal to our economic structure. Racism obviously exists independently of capital, but today, in the real world, it predominantly arises from capital vis a vis class conflict. You can't solve bigotry by resolving class conflict, sure, but you can't do anything about racism without aligning on class exploitation. so anyway this is a lot of words to say that the problem with privilege discourse isn't that "privilege" doesn't exist, it's that talking about it in those terms obfuscates the class structures that generate and propagate racial "privilege" and prevents you from actually doing anything about it, which are all things your boss really likes.
|
|
#
?
Jun 27, 2021 19:24
|
|
|
Some Guy TT posted:In order to understand the brutality of American capitalism, you have to start on the plantation. I think this is a much better piece than Hannah-Jones's introduction. It actually addresses class and uses the nature of capitalism to explain what the author is talking about. This section, for example, makes important points about how slavery intersected with capitalism and how slavery was used to lumpenize white labourers and prevent any kind of colourblind class consciousness from developing in the South. It even briefly calls out the idea that this was all just racism by white people who hated black people for no reason, and instead attributes it to the structures of capitalism: quote:There is some comfort, I think, in attributing the sheer brutality of slavery to dumb racism. We imagine pain being inflicted somewhat at random, doled out by the stereotypical white overseer, free but poor. But a good many overseers weren’t allowed to whip at will. Punishments were authorized by the higher-ups. It was not so much the rage of the poor white Southerner but the greed of the rich white planter that drove the lash. The violence was neither arbitrary nor gratuitous. It was rational, capitalistic, all part of the plantation’s design. “Each individual having a stated number of pounds of cotton to pick,” a formerly enslaved worker, Henry Watson, wrote in 1848, “the deficit of which was made up by as many lashes being applied to the poor slave’s back.” Because overseers closely monitored enslaved workers’ picking abilities, they assigned each worker a unique quota. Falling short of that quota could get you beaten, but overshooting your target could bring misery the next day, because the master might respond by raising your picking rate. I still have two issues with this essay, though. 1. What about international comparisons? The United States was not the only country to have slavery. It wasn't even the last country to abolish slavery! Brazil had widespread enslaved labour for two decades after the US did. Russia only abolished serfdom, a similar agricultural backbone to the Russian economy as slavery was to the US according to this essay, in 1861, the same year the Civil War started. But this essay only explains the rise of American capitalism through the legacy of slavery. Why, if Brazil had slavery two decades longer than the US, does Brazil score so much higher than the US on those metrics Desmond cites at the beginning of the essay? The United States is far from the only "low road" capitalist country, it's also not the only country that you could write an essay about claiming that unfree labour was in its economic DNA (there are famous historians who have made careers out of arguing that Russia is all messed up because unfree labour is in its own DNA, tracing that back through the Soviet economy, the Gulag, serfdom, etc.), and I'm not sure this essay adequately explains why slavery is the explanation for the US being uniquely bad today. 2. This issue hearkens back to Karp's critique of the entire project, the idea that this is in the US's "DNA". If slavery is in the DNA of American capitalism, then how do you solve that problem? The NYT is, of course, unwilling to consider the idea that American capitalism should be abolished. And so instead we end up back at the idea that this is just something we have to live with because it's in the DNA of the American economy and so there's nothing that can be done about it. If American capitalism originates in slavery and 150 years after its abolition we're still not free of the patterns set by slavery, and abolishing capitalism isn't an option, then we're just stuck with this "low road" capitalism and get to just deal with it. It's supposed to be an explanation for the present, but it's deterministic to the point of fatalism. Woe is us, the financial industry has been speculating with our lives since the 1700s, the 2008 crash was basically the 1837 panic. That's it, the end, no solution exists. In addition, this essay doesn't really explain how this "DNA" evolved over time. Desmond adequately explains how the economy of slavery led to the development of some things that still exist in the economy today, like futures markets and so on. But the essay basically stops in the 1860s. It doesn't explain how these developments continued over time, or how they continued to affect economics and class relationships. Or, maybe most importantly, how things changed over time. For example, here's the concluding paragraph: quote:During slavery, “Americans built a culture of speculation unique in its abandon,” writes the historian Joshua Rothman in his 2012 book, “Flush Times and Fever Dreams.” That culture would drive cotton production up to the Civil War, and it has been a defining characteristic of American capitalism ever since. It is the culture of acquiring wealth without work, growing at all costs and abusing the powerless. It is the culture that brought us the Panic of 1837, the stock-market crash of 1929 and the recession of 2008. It is the culture that has produced staggering inequality and undignified working conditions. If today America promotes a particular kind of low-road capitalism — a union-busting capitalism of poverty wages, gig jobs and normalized insecurity; a winner-take-all capitalism of stunning disparities not only permitting but awarding financial rule-bending; a racist capitalism that ignores the fact that slavery didn’t just deny black freedom but built white fortunes, originating the black-white wealth gap that annually grows wider — one reason is that American capitalism was founded on the lowest road there is. There are parallels here, but they beg the question: is this a direct line from 1837 to 1929 to 2008? Did really nothing change from now to then, because the American economy is built on economic patterns set during slavery and that's the end of the story? Personally, I would point to one big break: the 1929 stock market crash, unlike the Panic of 1837 or the 2008 financial crisis, actually led to a meaningful change in the structure of the US economy, in the form of the New Deal. It wasn't the abolition of capitalism by any means, but the combined effects of the New Deal and the levelling of the Second World War led to much stricter restrictions on capital and much more power for labour (think of high unionization levels, for instance) than at any other time in US history. That setup didn't last, but for a few decades it did shift power in the US economy. And explaining that pokes a big hole in the logic Desmond relies on in this essay, because the end of that more-egalitarian economy didn't come about because of a return to slavery-era restrictions, it came about as part of the fight against communism. Desmond isn't necessarily wrong that slavery was an original influence on the US's "low road" economics, but the US didn't have an uninterrupted "low road" economy from 1619 to 2019, and in my opinion if you want to understand the 2019 economy you need more than the plantation, you also need things like the Taft-Hartley Act, which was written to root out communists, not to re-enslave union workers. So essentially I don't think Desmond is wrong necessarily. He makes some interesting points about how slavery was central to the development of early capitalist practices. But I'm not sure that's enough to support his thesis that this explains the DNA of American capitalism. There's just too much additional history between now and then, it's an overly reductionist response and, more importantly, it's reductionist in a fatalistic way. Because if we understand that it's not an uninterrupted line from 1619 to 2019 in America's "low road" economy, but instead that there actually were times when the US and its workers struck blows against that economic paradigm, instead of an uninterrupted thread running from plantations to Uber, then we have to come up with additional explanations for how, when, and why those changes happened and how, when, and why they were undone again. Instead, we're told that slavery is in America's economic DNA but that's just the way things are so maybe we have to deal with it. vyelkin has issued a correction as of 20:50 on Jun 27, 2021 |
|
#
?
Jun 27, 2021 20:40
|
|
|
man that essay is long. halfway thru it, its at least better so far compared to the first. but man it doesn't really want to follow a thread at all
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2021 21:35
|
|
|
Only issue with the essay is it doesn’t do enough on the enslavement of natives and the enslavement of English debtors and Irish rebels in the 17th century. The book “ The Barbarous Years” has a whole chapter on the indignities and barbarism that were inflicted on all enslaved peoples in the English colonies. At that time. Also it was worse in the South then in New England. Almost 100000 debtors and rebels got shipped to Maryland and Virginia from 1607 to the eve of Bacon’s rebellion. Yet there were only 30,000 souls living in the two colonies on the eve of that conflict. The brutality was there from the start and it was in the 18th that it became “scientific” both in who could be enslaved. The reasons they could be enslaved and how they were enslaved. Great piece overall. Especially like the part that looks into the speculation of slaves by banks and how it ruined the economy’s of several states before the war. That reminds me there is a book I came upon once on archive that I thought I saved to favorites but cannot seem to find it was by a southerner in 1859 making just material arguments for why in the long term slavery would be economically harmful to the south anyone here know of it? . Beats the socks off of noted fraud NHJ.
Crowsbeak has issued a correction as of 23:01 on Jun 29, 2021 |
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2021 22:08
|
|
|
comedyblissoption posted:i think this is a common rhetorical blindspot or uncomfortable topic for mainstream discussions of race and wealth. people will avoid comparing a poor white to say herman cain (how barbaric!), sidestepping economic class. or i will listen to npr discuss women pay inequities and they will bemoan that women ceos are paid much less than their male counterparts. and it sounds so absurd and tonedeaf and out of touch to discuss the injustices of people with 7 figure incomes. in the exact same conversation that it is ignored that employers literally make more money if they pay women less and that employers are a dominant factor in setting pay. it's an analysis and discussion absurdly blind to class relations (of course, on purpose). I think in many cases otherwise well-intentioned people feel like they have to take this sort of stuff seriously. It's often a side-effect of being "too online" and constantly feeling a pointless need to preemptively address things you imagine random libs on Twitter (or wherever) saying in response. For example with the Citations Needed guys, it's probably one of the few issues I have with them. People start from a reasonable position of "we should be respectful of other people," but due to being too online "other people" ends up becoming "other people on Twitter or in journalism." To their credit, they're some of the only people I've seen who actually apply this standard earnestly and fairly (they're much better at discussing the topic of addiction/substance abuse than the vast majority of people, which is something I genuinely appreciate), but you still have to keep some perspective about whether what you're doing is *really* something some broad demographic cares about (as opposed to some random people on Twitter). I also generally prefer using the term "material" to "economic," because "material" more accurately describes the realm of things that a government can actually influence. The "economic vs social justice" framework is bad, because it implies that social justice is a separate thing or that "economic justice" is race-blind. I don't like when people buy into the framework by saying things like "we need to pursue both economic and social justice!"
|
|
#
?
Jun 29, 2021 22:29
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1410362751235641350?s=21 well, that whole “tenure” debate turned out to just be delaying the inevitable
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 23:28
|
|
|
the squeaky wheel gets the grease
|
|
#
?
Jun 30, 2021 23:45
|
|
|
good for her say that reminds me ive never heard of this matthew desmond guy who wrote the second essay ill just mosey on to his twitter andquote:Sociologist @Princeton, Contributing writer @NYTmag, PI @evictionlab, Writes books, Country boy, Not supposed to be here huh no tweets since february also hes a sociologist and not a historian or even an economist despite his essay being entirely about the origins of capitalism well this certainly explains his scattershot free association approach to describing history
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 14:36
|
|
|
Some Guy TT posted:good for her say that reminds me ive never heard of this matthew desmond guy who wrote the second essay ill just mosey on to his twitter and I'm fine with him being a sociologist for the parts of the essay where he's talking about punitive contemporary workplace practices and linking them back to similar practices for overseeing enslaved labourers. I think that's a legitimate connection to make and he argues it well, and that kind of knowledge about contemporary social practices is the sort of thing sociologists are good at studying. But yeah, I think it hinders his point a lot when he doesn't extend the argument through the intervening century and a half of history, which makes sense since that's not the sort of thing a sociologist would be trained to do.
|
|
#
?
Jul 1, 2021 14:45
|
|
|
this is a good thread. thank you
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2021 10:19
|
|
|
a pity it doesnt have much longevity its legit really weird how 1619 project has become such a vanity project for nicole hannah jones its difficult to so much as engage with the rest of it her nutty interpretation of american exceptionalism completely overshadows the more mundane aspects of the rest of the series really its only natural thats the focus since with the second essay you can definitely see that the guy has a clear easily defensible idea namely how the plantation economy came to define american capitalism as we know it and hes forced to awkwardly shoehorn in references to revolutionary history to make this point despite these being almost completely irrelevant to his thesis like check this out quote:Consider, for example, one of the most popular mainstream financial instruments: the mortgage. Enslaved people were used as collateral for mortgages centuries before the home mortgage became the defining characteristic of middle America. In colonial times, when land was not worth much and banks didn’t exist, most lending was based on human property. In the early 1700s, slaves were the dominant collateral in South Carolina. Many Americans were first exposed to the concept of a mortgage by trafficking in enslaved people, not real estate, and “the extension of mortgages to slave property helped fuel the development of American (and global) capitalism,” the historian Joshua Rothman told me. these parts arent describing a plantation economy or even something that could reasonably be called capitalist by any modern definition and its extremely weird how desmond implies that it does given how the rest of the essay goes to great pains to emphasize that it was the massive expansion of the cotton economy in the early nineteenth century that created the death spiral of bad conditions
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2021 11:02
|
|
|
Yadoppsi posted:I enjoyed Adolph Reed's takedown of the 1619 project from a materialist perspective against Jones' idealistic conception of history. Anyone willing to share simular pieces? Right: 1619 sucks because it doesn't include Jefferson! Left: 1619 sucks because it doesn't include Marx!
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2021 14:18
|
|
|
Troy Queef posted:https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1410362751235641350?s=21 lol she hosed off to Howard just to stick it to them
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2021 14:18
|
|
|
zegermans posted:Right: 1619 sucks because it doesn't include Jefferson! see this is exactly what i mean because 1619 project does include jefferson but in confusing ways that just detract from the thesis quote:The Constitution is riddled with compromises made between the North and South over the issue of slavery — the Electoral College, the three-fifths clause — but paper currency was too contentious an issue for the framers, so it was left out entirely. Thomas Jefferson, like many Southerners, believed that a national currency would make the federal government too powerful and would also favor the Northern trade-based economy over the plantation economy. So, for much of its first century, the United States was without a national bank or a uniform currency, leaving its economy prone to crisis, bank runs and instability. here we see desmond using it to argue that actual the lack of a national currency was because america loved slavery and using jefferson to argue intent in spite of the fact that the actual arguments regarding national banking were stupidly convoluted in the very next paragraph he notes that the south used it during the civil war too just not as competently for reasons rather beyond the scope of the essay quote:When seeking loans, planters used enslaved people as collateral. Thomas Jefferson mortgaged 150 of his enslaved workers to build Monticello. People could be sold much more easily than land, and in multiple Southern states, more than eight in 10 mortgage-secured loans used enslaved people as full or partial collateral. As the historian Bonnie Martin has written, “slave owners worked their slaves financially, as well as physically from colonial days until emancipation” by mortgaging people to buy more people. Access to credit grew faster than Mississippi kudzu, leading one 1836 observer to remark that in cotton country “money, or what passed for money, was the only cheap thing to be had.” here too jefferson is used as shorthand to describe the slavery market despite the fact that as noted basically the entire economy worked like this its doubtful that jefferson or anyone else thought through the ontological implications of using slavery as collateral because it was just an arbitrary collateral to them the same way land might be arbitrary collateral today hilariously enough to be clear im not saying its inappropriate to use jefferson in such a way because all of this market stuff is true but the 1619 project as a whole badly conflates american ideology with the american economy and ignores the fact that basically the entirity of pre civil war political thought was leaders stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that the two were actually connected in any way the inherently farcical nature of this situation makes a lot more sense when you realize that most of these people literally predate marx and even the ones who dont predate him probably never heard of him but by not discussing marx at all the 1619 project writers* make the exact same mistake the founding fathers did *im assuming i havent actually read the other essays yet theyre the threads reward for managing to keep discussion alive for more pages
|
|
#
?
Jul 8, 2021 15:32
|
|
|
Troy Queef posted:https://twitter.com/washingtonpost/status/1410362751235641350?s=21 https://twitter.com/leetema/status/1410367786027728901?s=20
|
|
#
?
Jul 10, 2021 02:39
|
|
|
I thought it was specifically an endowed position that was created for non academic journalists
|
|
#
?
Jul 10, 2021 03:33
|
|
|
thats correct jones might hypothetically be taking an academic position from an academic person at howard because the knight chair at howard appears to have been newly minted just for her but thats a little too pedantic even for me
|
|
#
?
Jul 10, 2021 08:06
|
|
|
regardless, one person isn't loving over every person on their 4th postdoc who works for $15k a year teaching a full course load while desperately trying to find a tenure track job. academia's problems are deeply systemic and only going to shift more and more towards contract teaching as time goes on
|
|
#
?
Jul 10, 2021 12:48
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/OsitaNwanevu/status/1430153928025550848 this article is extremely funny because despite opening up with an implied defense of critical race theory it contains this little nugget that in fact completely contradicts the entire premise of both it and the 1619 project quote:That habit of self-deception can imbue the reading of work like Taylor’s with the thrill of accessing illicit knowledge. And one of the most subversive and challenging ideas all good works of history offer is a sense that history can also move backward. In American Colonies, Taylor takes a moment to describe the initial racial order in Virginia, where Black slaves were, at first, allowed to accumulate enough property to purchase their freedom and go into planting themselves. “Because the colonial laws did not yet forbid black progress, the black freedmen and women could move as they pleased, baptize their children, procure firearms, testify in court, buy and sell property, and even vote,” he writes. “Some black men married white women, which was especially remarkable given their scarcity and high demand as wives for white men. A few black women took white husbands.”
|
|
#
?
Aug 25, 2021 17:47
|
|
|
what happened next op
|
|
#
?
Oct 13, 2022 22:23
|
|
|
How False Beliefs in Physical Racial Difference Still Live in Medicine Today The excruciatingly painful medical experiments went on until his body was disfigured by a network of scars. John Brown, an enslaved man on a Baldwin County, Ga., plantation in the 1820s and ’30s, was lent to a physician, Dr. Thomas Hamilton, who was obsessed with proving that physiological differences between black and white people existed. Hamilton used Brown to try to determine how deep black skin went, believing it was thicker than white skin. Brown, who eventually escaped to England, recorded his experiences in an autobiography, published in 1855 as “Slave Life in Georgia: A Narrative of the Life, Sufferings, and Escape of John Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Now in England.” In Brown’s words, Hamilton applied “blisters to my hands, legs and feet, which bear the scars to this day. He continued until he drew up the dark skin from between the upper and the under one. He used to blister me at intervals of about two weeks.” This went on for nine months, Brown wrote, until “the Doctor’s experiments had so reduced me that I was useless in the field.” Hamilton was a courtly Southern gentleman, a respected physician and a trustee of the Medical Academy of Georgia. And like many other doctors of the era in the South, he was also a wealthy plantation owner who tried to use science to prove that differences between black people and white people went beyond culture and were more than skin deep, insisting that black bodies were composed and functioned differently than white bodies. They believed that black people had large sex organs and small skulls — which translated to promiscuity and a lack of intelligence — and higher tolerance for heat, as well as immunity to some illnesses and susceptibility to others. These fallacies, presented as fact and legitimized in medical journals, bolstered society’s view that enslaved people were fit for little outside forced labor and provided support for racist ideology and discriminatory public policies. Over the centuries, the two most persistent physiological myths — that black people were impervious to pain and had weak lungs that could be strengthened through hard work — wormed their way into scientific consensus, and they remain rooted in modern-day medical education and practice. In the 1787 manual “A Treatise on Tropical Diseases; and on The Climate of the West-Indies,” a British doctor, Benjamin Moseley, claimed that black people could bear surgical operations much more than white people, noting that “what would be the cause of insupportable pain to a white man, a Negro would almost disregard.” To drive home his point, he added, “I have amputated the legs of many Negroes who have held the upper part of the limb themselves.” These misconceptions about pain tolerance, seized upon by pro-slavery advocates, also allowed the physician J. Marion Sims — long celebrated as the father of modern gynecology — to use black women as subjects in experiments that would be unconscionable today, practicing painful operations (at a time before anesthesia was in use) on enslaved women in Montgomery, Ala., between 1845 and 1849. In his autobiography, “The Story of My Life,” Sims described the agony the women suffered as he cut their genitals again and again in an attempt to perfect a surgical technique to repair vesico-vaginal fistula, which can be an extreme complication of childbirth. Thomas Jefferson, in “Notes on the State of Virginia,” published around the same time as Moseley’s treatise, listed what he proposed were “the real distinctions which nature has made,” including a lack of lung capacity. In the years that followed, physicians and scientists embraced Jefferson’s unproven theories, none more aggressively than Samuel Cartwright, a physician and professor of “diseases of the Negro” at the University of Louisiana, now Tulane University. His widely circulated paper, “Report on the Diseases and Physical Peculiarities of the Negro Race,” published in the May 1851 issue of The New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal, cataloged supposed physical differences between whites and blacks, including the claim that black people had lower lung capacity. Cartwright, conveniently, saw forced labor as a way to “vitalize” the blood and correct the problem. Most outrageous, Cartwright maintained that enslaved people were prone to a “disease of the mind” called drapetomania, which caused them to run away from their enslavers. Willfully ignoring the inhumane conditions that drove desperate men and women to attempt escape, he insisted, without irony, that enslaved people contracted this ailment when their enslavers treated them as equals, and he prescribed “whipping the devil out of them” as a preventive measure. Today Cartwright’s 1851 paper reads like satire, Hamilton’s supposedly scientific experiments appear simply sadistic and, last year, a statue commemorating Sims in New York’s Central Park was removed after prolonged protest that included women wearing blood-splattered gowns in memory of Anarcha, Betsey, Lucy and the other enslaved women he brutalized. And yet, more than 150 years after the end of slavery, fallacies of black immunity to pain and weakened lung function continue to show up in modern-day medical education and philosophy. Even Cartwright’s footprint remains embedded in current medical practice. To validate his theory about lung inferiority in African-Americans, he became one of the first doctors in the United States to measure pulmonary function with an instrument called a spirometer. Using a device he designed himself, Cartwright calculated that “the deficiency in the Negro may be safely estimated at 20 percent.” Today most commercially available spirometers, used around the world to diagnose and monitor respiratory illness, have a “race correction” built into the software, which controls for the assumption that blacks have less lung capacity than whites. In her 2014 book, “Breathing Race Into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics,” Lundy Braun, a Brown University professor of medical science and Africana studies, notes that “race correction” is still taught to medical students and described in textbooks as scientific fact and standard practice. Recent data also shows that present-day doctors fail to sufficiently treat the pain of black adults and children for many medical issues. A 2013 review of studies examining racial disparities in pain management published in The American Medical Association Journal of Ethics found that black and Hispanic people — from children who needed adenoidectomies or tonsillectomies to elders in hospice care — received inadequate pain management compared with white counterparts. A 2016 survey of 222 white medical students and residents published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences showed that half of them endorsed at least one myth about physiological differences between black people and white people, including that black people’s nerve endings are less sensitive than white people’s. When asked to imagine how much pain white or black patients experienced in hypothetical situations, the medical students and residents insisted that black people felt less pain. This made the providers less likely to recommend appropriate treatment. A third of these doctors to be also still believed the lie that Thomas Hamilton tortured John Brown to prove nearly two centuries ago: that black skin is thicker than white skin. This disconnect allows scientists, doctors and other medical providers — and those training to fill their positions in the future — to ignore their own complicity in health care inequality and gloss over the internalized racism and both conscious and unconscious bias that drive them to go against their very oath to do no harm. The centuries-old belief in racial differences in physiology has continued to mask the brutal effects of discrimination and structural inequities, instead placing blame on individuals and their communities for statistically poor health outcomes. Rather than conceptualizing race as a risk factor that predicts disease or disability because of a fixed susceptibility conceived on shaky grounds centuries ago, we would do better to understand race as a proxy for bias, disadvantage and ill treatment. The poor health outcomes of black people, the targets of discrimination over hundreds of years and numerous generations, may be a harbinger for the future health of an increasingly diverse and unequal America. Correction January 10, 2020 An earlier version of this article misstated the proportion of medical students and residents surveyed who believed that black skin is thicker than white skin. It was a third of those surveyed, not a majority. The article also misidentified the medical condition of children described in a 2013 review. They had conditions that required adenoidectomies or tonsillectomies; they did not have appendicitis. Linda Villarosa directs the journalism program at the City College of New York and is a contributing writer for the magazine. Her feature on black infant and maternal mortality was a finalist for a National Magazine Award.
|
|
#
?
Oct 13, 2022 22:43
|
|
|
this ones actually a pretty unambiguously good essay as far as i can tell tbh but it has gently caress all to do with the central premise of the 1619 project that the country was founded on racism when all this deranged mad scientist poo poo only started in the nineteenth century
|
|
#
?
Oct 13, 2022 22:45
|
|
|
gotta say the decreased lung capacity thing is a new one to me met guys who generally believe the tougher skin thing, or that slavery made Blacks epigenetically tougher
|
|
#
?
Oct 13, 2022 23:00
|
|
|
Dr. Killjoy posted:gotta say the decreased lung capacity thing is a new one to me I was taught in high school that slavery is why black people are good athletes which that would have been the 90s and how many people had the same curriculum and just blindly accepted it and are employed throughout society now in all manners of fields?
|
|
#
?
Oct 13, 2022 23:07
|
|
|
HashtagGirlboss posted:I was taught in high school that slavery is why black people are good athletes which that would have been the 90s and how many people had the same curriculum and just blindly accepted it and are employed throughout society now in all manners of fields? a generation mystified by capitalist propaganda will never learn the truth about the extra bones in the ankle
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2022 03:55
|
|
|
Some Guy TT posted:this ones actually a pretty unambiguously good essay as far as i can tell tbh but it has gently caress all to do with the central premise of the 1619 project that the country was founded on racism when all this deranged mad scientist poo poo only started in the nineteenth century It may not be connected to the year 1619 specifically, but it's definitely intimately connected to the central thesis of the project, that the legacy of slavery remains alive in US institutions because slavery had a formative impact on those institutions that has never been eradicated.
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2022 04:31
|
|
|
yeah as comically out of date as the threads premise feels a year later i do agree with that the pedantic history slapfight that makes the discourse funny is that nikole hannah jones shoves the start date for racism back a hundred and fifty years from where most historians put it not because theyre racist sympathizers but because the institutions of the colonial era change so radically over time they cant really be compared to the government that dates its legitimacy to the american revolution like if youre a slave in french louisiana you could actually own property and even buy your own freedom the story of how that turned into chattel slavery makes the historical people involved look much worse my big beef with the whole critical race theory thing nikole hannah jones jumpstarted is that it actually takes agency away from the very bad very evil people who made those changes to just blame white people in the abstract i mean hell if you look at essay number three i just posted you can tell that the people who did this phrenology torture crap were bougie as all hell and probably used THIS IS SCIENCE STOP HATING SCIENCE YOU MORON as their main defense against criticism which points to classism as being a core contributing factor to racism which is a very antithetical idea to the liberals who championed this stuff until the republicans started complaining at which point instead of defending it they just pretended like it didnt say any of these things at all
|
|
#
?
Oct 14, 2022 05:16
|
|
|
jfc
|
|
#
?
Jun 20, 2023 19:47
|
|
|
Don't blaspheme.
|
|
#
?
Jun 26, 2023 05:28
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 9, 2024 16:50 |
|
|
How was this related to retrogames again?
|
|
#
?
Jun 26, 2023 06:02
|
|
