Posted on 08/17/2021 7:21:23 AM PDT by deport
In 5 years this will be a mandatory class in high school and college. And in twenty it will be another official language along with Spanish and English.
lol
Hey, I thought ebonics was the language of slaves and AAs.
More evidence that blacks and whites can never peacefully coexist in the same country.
Better each go their own way and control their destinies as they wish.
This dysfunctional marriage never worked, isn’t working, and never will.
You are reading way too much into the story.
“You are reading way too much into the story.”
If it was just that one story I would agree with you.
It’s more like thousands of stories and many much worse than that. All you have to do is skim through the posting here in FR.
CRT is a good example, but there are many more like that, (I’m sure you can think of some yourself) and new ones keep coming up almost daily.
As time progressed the newcomers rounded up the natives and put
them on reservations. Then as things continue to progress they
went to Africa and brought in the natives to plow the fields, grow
and harvest the crops. And the females were brought over to cook
the food, clean the house, wash the clothes, etc.
Yep times have changed and will continue until the planet no longer
exist or someone else comes in to conquer and rule.
Pride in being ignorant ..,,
I made a serious mistake many years ago with a book, the name of which I cannot remember. This was the best book on slavery I have ever read. (I am a Civil War buff but don’t read much on slavery because we Civil War types have it figured out. Slavery bad, emancipation good, the southerners should have picked their own cotton, case closed. Now let’s get on with the important stuff, i.e. the military history.) Unfortunately I loaned the book to another member of a Civil War roundtable and never got it back. A sad lesson learned.
Anyhow, one of my takeaways was a fascinating discussion of the very different collective memory about slavery among white and black southerners.
Holding here for uninformed laughter....
Yeah, yeah ... most of the black folks were enslaved. Yes, 10% of blacks in the South were free and some were property owners and even slaveholders themselves, but that’s another story. The “white” people were free, with very rare exceptions. Yes, technically there were a few legally white slaves in the south because one’s status depended on the status of one’s mother, and some enslaved people of mixed race were actually legally white. Generally speaking, 7/8 white ancestry made you legally white, though if your mother was a slave, so were you. In some times and places, 3/4 was the magic line. Sally Hemmings, for example, was 3/4 white, although I don’t know what Virginia law said on the subject at the time.
White slaves of course found it relatively easy to run off, and I suppose they tended to be social embarrassments to their masters, because a family of white slave children made it a bit too obvious that the master was cheating on his wife with the slave women and was also driving his own illegitimate children into the fields. A lot of white slaves were freed, or their masters turned a blind eye when they ran off. Thomas Jefferson, for example, had promised Sally Hemmings that he would free their children when they reached age 21. He saw that they were trained up in skilled crafts so that they could make a good living. A couple of them left before reaching age 21, so they technically ran off, but Jefferson apparently gave them money to speed them on their way. I don’t know if Sally Hemmings could have passed for white, but of her four children who survived to adulthood, three passed into the white community.
Shadow families were not unusual. Jubal Early, for example, had families with two women, one white and one black. He openly acknowledged both relationships and all his children. He never bothered to marry. There were good reasons why Lee called Jubal his “mean old man.”
The one-drop rule, by the way, was a malignant stupidity courtesy of several southern legislatures in the early 20th century. Their ancestors in the anti-bellum and colonial periods were sophisticated enough to avoid that kind of imbecility, because they understood that there were an awfully lot of mixed race people running around the old South. In small rural communities where everyone knew everyone else, that poor white farm family knew perfectly well that the poor black family down the road were cousins and second cousins, because they all knew who their grandpa was, and they all knew that grandpa slept around on both sides of the line. And then there were the complications involving partial Indian ancestry, which was common among the old founding families and was not quite respectable, although being related to Pocahontas apparently was an exception. Anyhow, no one at in those early days would have been foolish enough to traffic in the one drop rule.
But move beyond the obvious dimension of “we were slaves and they were free.” The remembered pattern of slavery was very different. Two thirds of white southern families did NOT own slaves. Of the slaveholding southerners, most owned very few slaves. A farmer might have a field hand or two, and those hands likely had families. These people worked side by side in the field and lived in neighboring cabins. The boys grew up together. They hunted and fished together. They lived in close quarters and with substantial familiarity. A business or professional man living in town might have an enslaved cook or housekeeper or manservant; Dredd Scott is the obvious example. The plantation aristocrats with vast landholdings and large slave gangs were a tiny elite class.
As those days were remembered in the decades after the Civil War, most white southerners fell into the camps of “we didn’t own any” or “we worked side by side with our slaves, who were treated as family retainers.” For black people, however, it was very different. The considerable majority of black slaves were owned by the slaveocracy grandees with 100 or more slaves. The black cultural memory of slavery is dominated by the large, anonymous work gangs driven to labor by overseers.
Does this make a cultural difference even today? Yes.
Anyhow, there were regions in the South where the slave populations were very large, isolated and quasi autonomous. The most extreme examples were probably in the coastal lowlands and the Sea Islands, where the climate was miserable and malaria and other tropical diseases were rampant. Many of the owners decamped to healthier climes, or at least into Charleston and other cities, leaving direction of their plantations to white overseers and trusted, loyal slaves willing to be conscientious servants. (This is a common enough thing in slave societies throughout history.) Master might show up for occasional visits in the cooler winter months, but as long as the work got done, the slaves lived pretty autonomously. It was hard to run, and if they were decently treated, many accepted their lot.
The resulting low country and Sea Island slave cultures have been well studied. Gullah is the best known slave language. That’s the kind of setting where I would expect something like Tut to thrive.
As to reading: I don’t know how many slaves learned surreptitiously to read. Frederick Douglass learned the rudiments from a kindly mistress before running off; he was self taught after that. My favorite example is Stonewall Jackson, who was fiercely religious and taught Sunday School to slave children while teaching at VMI before the war. Jackson and another like-minded man of his church were teaching the children to read, which of course was illegal. Someone called them out on the questions. Jackson did exactly what you would expect Stonewall to do. I paraphrase: “We are commanded by the Lord Almighty to preach the gospel to all men. This is the Great Commission. It is our Christian duty. And we believe (being good Presbyterians ...) that every man’s soul is his own, and that every man should be able to read the Gospel for himself, because he too will stand someday before the throne of God and be judged. Yes, we are teaching these children to read. It is a duty we owe to God. If Virginia has a law denying the Great Commission, the law be damned.”
That settled the matter. Jackson went on teaching slave children to read.
Thanks! It is such a pleasure to read something intelligent and true in this world of imbecility and lies.
Actually I am in favor of this. Tut was taught to kids so they could learn to read, write and spell in English. It was a work around the restrictions imposed by slavery and demonstrated the wisdom of older slaves in preparing their children for freedom and education.
There were multigenerational slaves. Their primary language was English.
The Bible has been translated into Gullah. Here is a sample: De Nyew Testament
Yes things change, but they don’t change randomly.
They change in the direction of those with the greater will, as, for example, is happening in Afghanistan as we speak.
The taliban, though small in numbers and poorly equipped compared to our side, have managed to get their way because of their greater will.
Same thing happened in Vietnam.
Reality always seems to be different from the narrative.
Lol. Vibranium.
Thanks Sphinx. Very interesting. I’ve only read one book on the civil war. Legends and Lies: Civil War. I only read it because I found it in a store for $4 and I figured out that Bill OReilly did not write it, even though his name is on it. It really triggered my interest. Have you read that book? If so, what did you think of it?
I stand corrected. I never saw the movie. I’m just vaguely aware of the idea.
Haven’t read Legends and Lies. There’s so much written on the Civil War that I’m always at a loss as to what to recommend to people. It’s still hard to beat Shelby Foote’s trilogy for those interested enough to plow through three volumes. Foote was a novelist first, and it shows. It’s classic narrative history, beautifully written. My own reading these days tends to be battle and campaign specific and pretty granular.
I live in Civil War country and spend a lot of time exploring the old roads and routes of approach, and locating the old fords on the rivers. This is tour guide level stuff, calling for exact knowledge of the ground. The slavery thing is background noise.
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