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A modest proposal: It's time to stop calling slavery America's 'original sin'
CNN ^ | February 16, 2021 | James Goodman

Posted on 02/17/2021 7:09:23 AM PST by SJackson


There is no need for me to name names. So many people do it. Secular people as well as religious people; lay historians as well as men and women of the cloth; rabbis as well as ministers and priests; people who believe that Adam and Eve's disobedience resulted in their expulsion from paradise and the estrangement of human beings from God, and people who have never given the Fall and its consequences a moment's thought; left-wingers, right wingers and just about everyone in between. It is one of the few things about which longtime political opponents Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and former President Barack Obama agree: Slavery was America's original sin.

The habit might seem harmless, shorthand for saying that slavery was distant, deeply embedded and bad. All history is hindsight. We often see things that people couldn't or didn't see at the time. We tell stories and offer interpretations that depend on our knowledge of events that happened between then and now. We make comparisons and all kinds of judgements. We employ metaphors.

The idea that slavery was America's original sin is one such metaphor, used at least as far back as the debate, in 1819, about the admission of Missouri to the union as a slave state. The problem is that it is a weak, misleading metaphor, concealing much more than it reveals about early American history, the institution of slavery, the aftermath of slavery and the messy business of making a nation. We should abandon it. Here are a few of the reasons why.

For starters, the phrase is a theological characterization of a secular institution.

As history, it is anachronistic.

Then there is the question of who committed "our" original sin.

(Excerpt) Read more at cnn.com ...


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Editorial; Government
KEYWORDS: cancelcommunism; cancelcommunists; cancelmaoism; cancelmarxism
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1 posted on 02/17/2021 7:09:23 AM PST by SJackson
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To: SJackson

From CNN? Looks like someone was ready to retire and was ready to turn in their notice. He’s toast.


2 posted on 02/17/2021 7:12:28 AM PST by DesertRhino (Dog is man's best friend, and moslems hate dogs. Add that up. .... )
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To: SJackson

Might as quote from Roger Tawney’s decision in the Dred Scot decision. This position has always been the Democrat / progressive / racist and now multicultural position.

The Republican position was well stated by Abraham Lincoln in his Cooper Union address.

https://www.aier.org/article/what-would-lincoln-do/


3 posted on 02/17/2021 7:12:45 AM PST by Redmen4ever
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To: SJackson
Unless I'm mistaken slavery was rather widespread back then. For example,I've seen it written that at least twice as many African slaves were brought to Brazil (by the Portuguese,presumably) as were brought to the US (by the British).
4 posted on 02/17/2021 7:17:52 AM PST by Gay State Conservative (Trump: "They're After You. I'm Just In The Way")
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To: SJackson

Slavery was ended in 1865, less than 100 years after the founding of the United States. It was ended by moral and just white men. Leave it in the past. That would be possible, save for those who profit from keeping the hate alive.


5 posted on 02/17/2021 7:22:33 AM PST by bk1000 (Banned from Breitbart)
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To: SJackson

Slavery was NOT America’s sin.

It was here before the Europeans and African and Middle Easterners brought THEIR brand of it here...

Sheesh... we broke from those idiots, formed a nation and got RID of slavery within a hundred years...

Why is this NEVER celebrated???


6 posted on 02/17/2021 7:24:02 AM PST by joethedrummer
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To: joethedrummer

Meanwhile, slavery STILL goes on in countries our government continues to send our tax $$$$ to!

Not a PEEP about that tho!..


7 posted on 02/17/2021 7:26:26 AM PST by joethedrummer
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To: SJackson
People can't look at the culture of early America through 21st prejudices. What is so stupid is that instead of tackling current problems, "progressives" have a nostalgia for the past, and live in the past. They never address the real problems; they are still fighting mid-20th century problems.

They are never honest and answer the question "why LaQueefa can't read?". My mother went barefoot to a one room schoolhouse, ate white bread with margarine sprinkled with sugar for lunch. No electricity at home. A wood stove to cook and heat the house with. Ma had far more in common with "slaves" and poor blacks than do the EBT Section 8 WIC welfare crowd.

Ma was way, way poorer than any of ghetto dwellers can imagine. Yet my mother was one of the most well read persons I've ever known. She could quote Kipling by heart, and Charles Dickens too. Ma imparted that love of knowledge and morality to all her children. And thanks to training in the US military, ma acquired a skilled career and met a good man, stayed married, and they provided us kids with a wonderful home, pointing us onto the straight and narrow.

8 posted on 02/17/2021 7:30:54 AM PST by Governor Dinwiddie (Guide me, O my great Redeemer, pilgrim through this barren land.)
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To: Gay State Conservative

Really most humans that ever lived before 1776 were slaves of one kind or another. Call them what you want, coolies, peasants of a king, serfs, captives of another tribe, life under the Soviets, or Mao, etc.
Most humans alive came from slavery.
Those pyramids and megaliths all over earth weren’t built by hired labor under the rules of capitalism.

We are the people who ended slavery. We hear all kinds of chatter about how it was the British who ended it. What the Brits did was cynical self interest. After they lost the colonies and had none in South America, they wanted the transatlantic slave trade killed so they could work their Indians and coolies.

They didn’t want competition.


9 posted on 02/17/2021 7:33:50 AM PST by DesertRhino (Dog is man's best friend, and moslems hate dogs. Add that up. .... )
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To: SJackson

And he repeats the same ignorant libel. It’s inexcusable because he is a history professor.

“Practically, the three-fifths clause allowed enslavers to maintain political power disproportionate to their numbers.
Symbolically, and horribly, it defined enslaved people (and by extension all African Americans) as subhuman.”

It did the opposite. In the face of the world’s main superpower the colonies had to unite or would face certain death. The compromise was a weakening the political power of the slaveholding south, without a split that would kill the budding nation. It was also a tacit message to the south. “If you insist the slaves are not fully human, you may not count them as such to increase your political power”.

This “professor” has it backwards. the 3/5 compromise is something to be proud of.


10 posted on 02/17/2021 7:40:00 AM PST by DesertRhino (Dog is man's best friend, and moslems hate dogs. Add that up. .... )
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To: DesertRhino
“It was also a tacit message to the south. “If you insist the slaves are not fully human, you may not count them as such to increase your political power”.”

The South advocated counting slaves as fully human for the purpose of representation in Congress - an unintended baby-step by the South toward eventually recognizing full racial equality.

The North was having none of it. They did not want slaves counted at all. The 3/5 compromise was just that: compromise.

It still rankles many that the North advocated giving zero recognition to slaves. To do more would probably brought the North's slave trade into question.

11 posted on 02/17/2021 7:55:20 AM PST by jeffersondem
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To: Gay State Conservative

More unbalanced than that. Most estimates of slaves transported from Africa to the hemisphere range from 11 to 13 million. Around 5 million to Brazil. Transported to the English colonies, all 25 to 31 or 32 of them, about 660-700,000. Of those, about half to the 13 North American colonies. Approximately, Henry Lewis Gates Jr puts the number a little higher, 388,000 to the 13 colonies, of 10.7 million surviving the passage, just over 3.5%.


12 posted on 02/17/2021 8:02:45 AM PST by SJackson (If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun...folks in Philly like a good brawl, BH Obama)
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To: DesertRhino
“Practically, the three-fifths clause allowed enslavers to maintain political power disproportionate to their numbers...The compromise was a weakening the political power of the slaveholding south, without a split that would kill the budding nation.

I'd tend to come down on maintaining slave holders power side, but both are credible. Depends on whether you consider non citizen (free) slaves to deserve representation in Congress. Same argument we're having today over counting illegals in the census, providing non citizens representation in Congress, which I oppose.

13 posted on 02/17/2021 8:05:23 AM PST by SJackson (If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun...folks in Philly like a good brawl, BH Obama)
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To: joethedrummer
Sheesh... we broke from those idiots, formed a nation and got RID of slavery within a hundred years...

Completely, yes as a Federal Republic it was a state issue, Lincoln agreed with that. But before we had states, colonies banned slavery. Vermont the first in 1777, a year after the Declaration of Independence. By 1804, less than 30 years later, all the northern states had banned slavery.

14 posted on 02/17/2021 8:08:59 AM PST by SJackson (If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun...folks in Philly like a good brawl, BH Obama)
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To: Governor Dinwiddie
Sheesh... we broke from those idiots, formed a nation and got RID of slavery within a hundred years...

If you want to change the 21st century nation dramatically, destroying it's heritage is essential. Destroying history at the forefront. The current progressive objective is the destruction and replacement of our mode of government, thus history must be changed, starting with the children. And yes, at some point dissidents will have to be dealt with.

15 posted on 02/17/2021 8:12:55 AM PST by SJackson (If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun...folks in Philly like a good brawl, BH Obama)
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To: DesertRhino

Really most humans that ever lived before 1776

Indeed in the 1600’s to the 1700’s Africa had more slave trading of European’s the Iris were sold for half the price then the blacks.


16 posted on 02/17/2021 8:13:47 AM PST by Vaduz (women and children to be impacIQ of chimpsted the most.)
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To: SJackson

I like to trigger LibTards by saying slavery is Africa’s original sin and Africa’s most consequential export to mankind.


17 posted on 02/17/2021 8:17:03 AM PST by Kid Shelleen (Beat your plowshares into swords. Let the weak say I am strong)
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To: Kid Shelleen
I like to trigger LibTards by saying slavery is Africa’s original sin and Africa’s most consequential export to mankind.

Hope you remind them it includes both black and Arab Africans. That'll get an enhanced response.

18 posted on 02/17/2021 8:20:48 AM PST by SJackson (If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun...folks in Philly like a good brawl, BH Obama)
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To: SJackson

I certainly do. I also ask them why they are obsessed with events that happened 500 years ago but ignore the slavery that exists today.


19 posted on 02/17/2021 8:46:36 AM PST by Kid Shelleen (Beat your plowshares into swords. Let the weak say I am strong)
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To: SJackson

People here in the north fought a war to stop slavery. My family lost several family members and some were wounded during the civil war. To call slavery America’s original sin is just wrong. It was people in the south that tried to hang on to slavery, not the northerners. More Americans than not objected to slavery. We won out in the end. It has been 160 years or so since there were slaves in this country. I object to those who would label all Americans slave owners. We were not!


20 posted on 02/17/2021 11:20:52 AM PST by maxwellsmart_agent (EQ)
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