Saturday, April 04, 2020
Professor
I think it is wonderful that you are undertaking such an inquiry. I have been posting bits on these themes, but had not thought that you would take them up seriously.
The discussion in your post seems to me to be one between mainly two dueling Whig interpretations of the causes of the American Rebellion or Revolution, and the role of slavery within it, and as a cause.
My own view is that this debate, interesting as it sometimes is, nevertheless misses most of the actual ideological and theological underpinnings of the colonial rebellion.
It was not, for the colonists themselves, North or South, so much about either losing their slaves (one big element of their trade and commerce both north and south) on the one hand; or about taxes and representation on the other, although that was typically how Northern, mainly religious, publicists framed the issues for southern readers in a secular vernacular, whose religions were different from those of the north.
The slavery card was how Lord Dunmore proceeded, but no one seriously thought that Britain would try to abolish slavery in the colonies with desperate British factories all clamoring for American cotton.
I suggest answers to these questions are best found in The Language of Liberty 1660-1832 Political discourse and social dynamics in the Anglo-American world.
All the best
Professor
To place this debate into a wider more adequate context I suggest referring to Elliott's Empires of the Atlantic World. It is just a much better much more rounded, non negro race Whiggish, and more complete, if now slightly dated, discussion of the context surrounding negro slavery, as well as other forms of labor, in the New World, not just North America, than is presented in The 1619 Project, which leaves everything to be desired at every turn.
All the best
Professor
Revisiting this matter, I tend to think that fear of a slave revolts on a large scale would have been tantamount to emancipation had it occurred. Certainly the evidence is there for the British having tried to foment them.Having read Parkinson's article, from several years before, fleshes out a better case than the 1619 Project account for the importance of this issue.
Friday, September 30, 2016
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/04/opinion/did-a-fear-of-slave-revolts-drive-american-independence.html
Jefferson's rough draft is also a good context source. It does not seem that the Crown forced slavery on the colonies.
Until after the Seven Years War, the Crown had had difficulty forcing anything on them, even when it had tried. The Dominion Of New England is just one isolated example.
All in all, the hypocrisy moniker seems to me to fit rather well with colonial motivations.
All the best
Professor
How about Shaun King? He wants to tear down monuments (presumably including churches) connected with Jesus, a white racist. Trump's new Executive Order specifically references King.I had noted on my site that this would spread much farther than mere Southern token white racists, to Northern founding fathers and beyond to all of Western Civilization.That prediction has already come true.
Now it looks more and more like a full on August 24, 1572 St Bartholomew's Day kind of thing, coming soon to a theater near you.
All the best,
Professor
Your readers may appreciate this analogy, maybe not.The 1619 Project, and the treatment of the George Floyd case, have analogies, in scope, to some stories the NYT has run in the past, as news stories.
The Kitty Genovese Story, a news story, implicitly indicted all Americans, similarly to how the 1619 Story reads for white Americans, and to how the Floyd Story reads for cops.
The Kitty Genovese Story turned out to be completely wrong in every way. She was definitely killed. And unfortunately Floyd was killed too I believe.
I am not suggesting that they falsified the Floyd story, but it seems to function in tandem with the problematic 1619 account nevertheless.
The NYT, many decades later, apologized in print for the Genovese Story.
You can read about it.
All the best
Professor
Just another update, with history unfolding.
This theme, global oppression and white racism, having been long fanned and promoted here by the NYT for its own other agendas, has now erupted in random race related protests in major Western cities, the long conflicts within Ethiopia for example.
It is one thing to have American negroes protesting "American inequality" or "American slavery", right or wrong, in American cities.
As I have noted, however, even this has had an activist non negro ideological globalist Socialist backing, from the beginning.
What we are now seeing, however, is quite another thing altogether, both here and in Europe, even from that pathetic situation.
All the best
Professor
History is unfolding rapidly, and quickening now, on the topic of so called populist protests, however one defines the slippery left or right pejorative term "populism".I give it also a decided racist and religious connotation, left and right, and all creeds, on my site, because it has so often been glossed over here, used mainly by the left to lambast the domestic right, leaving a world brimming with vigorous racist sectarians of color largely unexamined.
While it may seem that such protests as the yellow vests, for example, or the Polish abortion legislation protests, or protests in East Russia, or HK, or COVID return to lockdown protests everywhere, are not connected, according to some analyses, I would argue that they all, recently now, somehow, parasitically even, feed on the postmodernist, widening, legitimization of nonviolent or violent protests, in any and all societies, on any political social or religious issue whatsoever, for which the 1619 Project, and then the related BLM initiative, served to widen the opening in awareness, globally, of the lack of political and law and order obstacles to protest actions.
All the best
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