POVERTY AND SLAVERY | 2008-02-10
In the piece below, I explained how my being reared in rural SC in the 40s and 50s gave me experience with the Old South.
When I took a semester in grad school in 1992 one professor was an Afrikaner. When I walked up and addressed him in die Taal, it took him a minute to recognize his native tongue, since he did not expect it HERE.
I was talking to a woman finishing her PhD in Political Science and mentioned that one of apartheid's least-mentioned problems was illegal BLACK immigration from the Glorious Free Countries to her north. There were other students sitting around.
She replied, "Well, they were just coming there so they could EAT."
I replied, "Well, when you're starving, just getting something to eat can be pretty important."
Everybody laughed -- at her.
What she said was condescension of the cruelest sort, but NOBODY else would have called her on it.
Mantra Thinking.
Everybody agrees that slavery was awful while the Secret Six, who financed John Brown, were Liberators. The Secret Six got their money from New England industry, as did the VERY well paid New England abolitionist ministers. They got their money from working children fourteen hours a day.
But the really big difference between industrial slavery of whites and chattel slavery of blacks was much like the difference between me and the Modern, Caring Libservative on Homelessness. As I said, their conscience, such as it is, is OK as long as they sit in a warm house and demand that we become more Third World and at the same time that the homeless get regulation housing from somewhere.
Many, many children got crippled in those factories which paid the monstrous salaries of fashionable New England ministers. What did the factory owners do for them?
Those kids, or the older workers, actually did STARVE. The ministers preaching within a mile of them did not mention that at all. They were busy with Southern slavery, which was what they got paid for.
That sounds a LOT like the Christian Right today.
The girl who thought black starvation in southern Africa was nothing compared to having black faces in government there would have LOVED abolitionist New England. Tens of thousands of whites were crippled and starving there, but that was unimportant.
It's a good thing that nobody who was important to those preachers ever said anything about the mote in someone else's eye and the beam in your own.
Ain't Compassion great?