#Constance Sublette

[leftistfeminista]

What are the driving forces behind this development, and what does it tell us about the transformations that are taking place in the global economy and in the social position of women? Answers to these questions have varied, but it is my objective to demonstrate that, while this new surge of violence takes different forms, a common denominator is the devaluation of women’s lives and labor that globalization promotes. In other words, the new violence against women is rooted in structural trends that are constitutive of capitalist development and state power as such, in all time periods.

Capitalist development begins with a war on women. The witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Europe and the New World led to the deaths of thousands. As I wrote in my 2004 book Caliban and the Witch, this historically unprecedented phenomenon was a central element of the process that Marx defined as primitive accumulation, for it destroyed a universe of female subjects and practices that stood in the way of the nascent system’s main requirements: the accumulation of a massive workforce and the imposition of a more constraining discipline of labor. The naming of women as witches and the persecution of them for their witchcraft paved the way for the confinement of women in Europe to unpaid domestic labor. It legitimated their subordination to men in and beyond the family. It gave the state control over their reproductive capacity, guaranteeing the creation of generations of new workers. In this way, the witch hunts constructed a specifically capitalist, patriarchal order that has continued into the present, though it has been constantly adjusted in response to women’s resistance and the changing needs of the labor market.

From the tortures and executions to which women accused of witchcraft were subjected, other women soon learned that they would have to be obedient and silent, and would have to accept hard labor and men’s abuses, in order to be socially accepted. Until the eighteenth century, those who fought back might be condemned to the “scold’s bridle,” a metal and leather contraption, also used to muzzle slaves, that enclosed the wearer’s head and, if she attempted to speak, lacerated her tongue. Gender-specific forms of violence were also perpetrated on American plantations where by the eighteenth century (per Ned Sublette and Constance Sublette’s 2015 study The American Slave Coast) masters’ sexual assaults on female slaves had turned into a systematic politics of rape, as planters attempted to replace the importation of slaves from Africa with a local breeding industry centered in Virginia.

Violence against women did not, of course, disappear with the end of the witch hunts or with the abolition of slavery. On the contrary: It was normalized. The sterilization of women of color, poor women, and women who practiced their sexuality outside marriage continued into the 1960s. Similarly, until feminists forced its recognition, rape in the family did not exist, as far as the state was concerned. As Giovanna Franca Dalla Costa pointed out in Un lavoro d’amore (The Work of Love, 1978), violence has always been present as a subtext, a possibility, in the nuclear family, because men, through their wages, have been given the power to supervise women’s unpaid domestic labor, to use women as their servants, and to punish their refusal of this work. This is why domestic violence perpetrated by men was, until recently, not considered a crime. In parallel with the state’s legitimation of parents’ right to punish their children, who must be trained in obedience so that they’ll be tractable workers, domestic violence against women was tolerated by the courts and the police as a legitimate response to women’s noncompliance in their domestic duties.

It’s essential to emphasize that violence against women is a key element in this new global war not only because of the horror it evokes or the messages it sends, but also because of what women represent in their capacity to keep their communities together and, equally importantly, to defend noncommercial conceptions of security and wealth. In Africa and India, for instance, until recently, women had access to communal land and devoted a good part of their workday to subsistence farming. But both communal land tenure and subsistence agriculture have come under heavy institutional attack, criticized by the World Bank as one of the causes of global poverty, the argument being that land is a “dead asset” unless it is legally registered and used as collateral to obtain bank loans with which to start some entrepreneurial activity.

[nathanalbright151]

Book Review: The American Slave Coast: A History Of The Slave-Breeding Industry

The American Slave Coast: A History Of The Slave-Breeding Industry, by Ned and Constance Sublette There seems to be a mistaken assumption among many writers about slavery that the historically minded contemporary person looks with horror at the thought that slaveowners, particularly those in areas where soil had been declining, engaged in slave-breeding. Considering, though, that the United…

[fairest]

The Architect of the Vagina

The “father” of modern gynecology, generally portrayed in medical historiography as an innovative figure, was the South Carolina surgeon J. Marion Sims, whom one historian refers to as “the Architect of the Vagina.” Sims refined his innovations by operating experimentally on the genitals of enslaved women he kept for that purpose. In this way, he developed a surgical repair for vesico-vaginal fistulas, using an infection-resistant silver suture, and more generally he popularized the use of surgery for gynecological problems, becoming quite wealthy in the process. 

In a “hospital” he built in his backyard in Montgomery, Alabama, he operated on a woman named Anarcha thirty times, sewing her insides without anesthesia and giving her opium afterward. He also kept women named Lucy and Betsy for this purpose, describing the expense of their maintenance as a research cost. After perfecting his treatment, he subsequently moved to New York, where he founded the Women’s Hospital and continued experimenting surgically; since there was no slavery in New York, he practiced on poor Irish women, performing thirty surgeries on one Mary Smith.

--Quoted in The American Slave Coast, Ned and Constance Sublette (2016) 

[sarcastic-salem]

PSA

Saw that the slur “breeder” has been trending in homosexual and incel spaces. Someone pointed out to me that despite being used as a bi/panphobic slur that’s pretty much applied to anyone with children or in a straight passing relationship, the term also has deep roots in American slavery.

[treethymes]

When a “founding father’s” remarks about “liberty” don’t seem to make sense, substitute the word “property” and they do. Taking over Havana would have created an empire of liberty, all right---for slaveowners. Jefferson wasn’t fantasizing about freeing the two hundred thousand or so slaves who were being systematically worked to death on Cuba’s sugar plantations and replaced by new arrivals from Africa. Cuba was at that time a fantastically productive sugar machine that was still in the early phase of its multi-decade peak of importation of kidnapped Africans. Acquiring Cuba would have been a windfall for Virginia slave breeders and would have added two reliably pro-slavery senators.

In 1861, slaveowners went to war with the North over slavery, as South Carolina’s planter class had been inciting them to do for decades. The idea that the South fought a war so that it could be left in peace to have slavery merely within its settled boundaries is sometimes voiced as a cherished myth today, but it does not fit the facts on the ground, nor did anyone think so at the time. Quite the contrary: the war was fought over the expansion of slavery. Southern rulers feared being restricted to the boundaries they then occupied. The dysfunctional-from-the-beginning Confederate States of America was set to have an aggressively annexationist foreign policy.

Premised on infinite reproduction into an ever-expanding market, the slave-breeding economy was like a chain letter or a Ponzi scheme: sooner or later someone would be left holding the bag. [...]

The clash between slave labor and free-soil---the “irrepressible conflict” to use William Seward’s phrase of 1858---resulted in the overthrow of slavery. But it was not merely a clash between labor systems; it was a clash between monetary systems.

When slavery was abolished and the on-paper value of flesh-and-blood capital disappeared from the balance sheet, the wealth of the South evaporated. Since the South’s economy had been built entirely on a foundation of slavery, there was nothing to substitute it for. There were as many laborers as before, but they could no longer be coerced. There was nothing to pay labor with, because the labor had been the money. The security for hundreds of millions of dollars in debt walked away, leaving the obligations valueless, the credit structure imploded, the hundred-dollar Confederate notes trampled in the mud, and the planters owning worthless land.

Emancipation destroyed an entirely legal form of property, which is why it was a revolution.

Ned and Constance Sublette, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

[jkottke]

The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes

For Slate's 2015 podcast series The History of American Slavery, Andrew Kahn created an interactive visualization of the 20,000+ voyages that made up the Atlantic slave trade that lasted 315 years. A video of the interactive map is embedded above.

As we discussed in Episode 2 of Slate's History of American Slavery Academy, relative to the entire slave trade, North America was a bit player. From the trade's beginning in the 16th century to its conclusion in the 19th, slave merchants brought the vast majority of enslaved Africans to two places: the Caribbean and Brazil. Of the more than 10 million enslaved Africans to eventually reach the Western Hemisphere, just 388,747 -- less than 4 percent of the total -- came to North America. This was dwarfed by the 1.3 million brought to Spanish Central America, the 4 million brought to British, French, Dutch, and Danish holdings in the Caribbean, and the 4.8 million brought to Brazil.

Roughly 400,000 enslaved Africans were brought to the United States before the practice was banned in 1808. The ban was mostly (but not entirely) enforced and yet in 1860, the population of enslaved persons was almost 4 million in the South. That's because the 1808 ban, according to Ned & Constance Sublette's book The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry, was a form of trade protectionism that protected the forced breeding of enslaved peoples by American slaveowners. From a review of the book:

In fact, most American slaves were not kidnapped on another continent. Though over 12.7 million Africans were forced onto ships to the Western hemisphere, estimates only have 400,000-500,000 landing in present-day America. How then to account for the four million black slaves who were tilling fields in 1860? "The South," the Sublettes write, "did not only produce tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton as commodities for sale; it produced people." Slavers called slave-breeding "natural increase," but there was nothing natural about producing slaves; it took scientific management. Thomas Jefferson bragged to George Washington that the birth of black children was increasing Virginia's capital stock by four percent annually.

Here is how the American slave-breeding industry worked, according to the Sublettes: Some states (most importantly Virginia) produced slaves as their main domestic crop. The price of slaves was anchored by industry in other states that consumed slaves in the production of rice and sugar, and constant territorial expansion. As long as the slave power continued to grow, breeders could literally bank on future demand and increasing prices. That made slaves not just a commodity, but the closest thing to money that white breeders had. It's hard to quantify just how valuable people were as commodities, but the Sublettes try to convey it: By a conservative estimate, in 1860 the total value of American slaves was $4 billion, far more than the gold and silver then circulating nationally ($228.3 million, "most of it in the North," the authors add), total currency ($435.4 million), and even the value of the South's total farmland ($1.92 billion). Slaves were, to slavers, worth more than everything else they could imagine combined.

You can read more about the economics of slavery in this post from 2016, including how American banks sold bonds that used enslaved persons as collateral to international investors. (via open culture)

[bimlenugna657678-blog]

history of audiobooks : The American Slave Coast by Constance Sublette, Ned Sublette | Non-Fiction

Listen to The American Slave Coast new releases history of audiobooks on your iPhone, iPad, or Android. Get any BOOKS by Constance Sublette, Ned Sublette Non-Fiction FREE during your Free Trial

Written By: Constance Sublette, Ned Sublette Narrated By: Robin Eller Publisher: Tantor Media Date: June 2016 Duration: 30 hours 41 minutes

[benaquiagua]

Listen to The American Slave Coast by Ned Sublette, Constance Sublette on Audible. https://www.audible.com/pd/B01H7S4MGU?source_code=ASSORAP0511160007

[protoslackeranon]

A Few More Links in re the Civil War

This thoughtful lesson plan about Sojourner’s Truth ‘s  Ain’t I a Woman speech references references A Patterned Way of Reading and Talking. I was unfamiliar with the  approach but it seems really useful. 

Here is a link about the Kumbaya song and a deeper dive from the LOC.

There’s a photo of a historical marker about Kumbaya. I rather like the idea of studying history from historical markers. Here’s a link to Civil War Women’s Riot marker.ncle 

I think Uncle Tom’s Cabin is essential to a Civil War as literature unit. But I don’t think it’s worth the time for the class to read the book. Kathleen Lant’s article in American Studies , “the unsung hero of uncle tom’s cabin” JUSTOR or download at KU provides a feminist perspective on the book. 

I mentioned that I’ve been reading Colin Woodward’s American Nations book.  I was rather amazed that patriotic feelings arose when thinking about the Civil War. I’m really not sure where that comes from, but it seems pretty deep. Woodward’s book is good, but the rival cultures are all European so Indigenous and African cultures aren’t much addressed. And that alludes to something else that has amazed me in thinking about the Civil War, how embedded racism is. That makes for real challenges for teaching!

Here is a clip from a 1971 movie Farewell Uncle Tom on Youtube with the title,  boy wants black sex slave. Wait: you may not want to open the link as it’s disturbing. And if you were to show it in a classroom almost certainly you’d be fired. Here’s Roger Ebert’s one star review of the film. The really unsettling thing is, there’s an important historical truth. Ned and Constance Sublette’s book The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry show’s how breeding slaves was central to  capital creation.

On one hand I feel passion for an American Ideal and on the other disgust with the empire. Lyle Jeremy Rubin in The Nation. The Left’s Embrace of Empire The history of the left in the United States is a history of betrayal is sort of a link explosion of the latter theme. The article is based on Nikhil Pal Singh’s scholarship, especially Race  and America’s Long War. Singh observes that the interior and external wars are continuous.  I think he’s right and find that very disturbing.

 Literature can put a reader in someone else’s shoes. Youtube makes some old movie’s available. A student who might not make it through A Red Badge of Courage the book might be moved by the movie. I think an interior perspective like that novel is really important for understanding those colonized. But I don’t have a good bibliography.  

I do think that children’s picture books on Civil War themes are an excellent resource even for 8th graders. Many excellent bibliographies can be found, like this one. I have a sense that a group of reluctant readers could engage in learning if given a task to select some books to teach 5th-graders about the Civil war!

[liberaleffects]

This August, when Hillary Clinton met with Black Lives Matter protesters, they told her that ongoing violence and prejudice against blacks was part of a long historic continuum where, for example, today’s prison system descended from the old Southern plantations. Slavery, Clinton replied, was the “original sin… that America has not recovered from.”

But how much do modern Americans really know about slavery in colonial America? In the genocide of Native Americans? In the War of Independence or the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights? Or afterward for decades until the Civil War? Chances are, not very much. Not that slaves, for example, were money in the antebellum South—currency and credit—which led to the enforced, systematic break-up of black families in generation after generation. There was no national currency, and little silver or gold, but there was paper tied to slaves bought on credit whose offspring were seen as a dividend that grew over time.

That’s just one of the riveting and revolting details from a new book, The American Slave Coast: A History of The Slave Breeding Industry, by Ned and Constance Sublette. They trace other telling details that are not found in traditional American history books, where slavery is usually described as an amoral but cheap labor system. For example, have you read about the rivalry between Virginia and South Carolina, which had competing slave economies?

Virginia was the epicenter of a slave breeding industry, in which enslaved women were expected to be constantly pregnant, were sold off if they didn’t produce children, and sometimes were force-mated to achieve that end. The offspring were sold to newer settlers and those migrating west. Charleston, South Carolina, in contrast, was colonial America’s slave importing and exporting port. In the late seventeenth century, Carolina exported captured native Americans as slaves to Caribbean plantation islands, gradually replacing them with imported laborers. As the South was emptied of native Americans and American plantations grew, South Carolina became the major slave importer in the colonies and in the early republic. Virginia eventually won out when Congress, at President Thomas Jefferson’s urging, banned slave importation as of January 1, 1808—protectionism, say the Sublettes, for Virginia’s slave-breeding industry, and sold to the public as protection against the alleged terrorism of “French negroes” from Haiti. After that, a new interstate slave trade grew, propelled by territories and new states that wanted slavery, and by the breeders who wanted new markets. Thus, the slave-breeding economy spread south and west, driving the expansion of the U.S. into new territories.

Slavery, as the Sublettes describe it, wasn’t a sidebar to early American history and a new nation’s growth. It was front and center—protected by law and prejudice, custom and greed. The enslaved were unloaded, sold, and taken (women’s necks tied with rope, men’s necks put in chains) via major roads, steamboats, and passing through cities and villages to their destination. Newspapers, owned by Benjamin Franklin, sold advertising for buying and selling slaves. All of this unfolded in full sight, with prosperous settlers assuming that slaves were a necessity for daily living and accumulating wealth. For generations, the property value of slaves was the largest asset in America.

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The authors, Ned and Constance Sublette, are not traditional scholars, but gifted cultural historians. Ned Sublette, who was born in Lubbock, Texas, and lived in Natchitoches, Louisiana as a boy, was trained as a musician and created the record company Qbadisc  in the 1990s—featuring top Cuban artists long before Ry Cooder’s Buena Vista Social Club. His book Cuba and Its Music is considered by many to be the most authoritative on the island’s unique mix of African and European traditions and musical heritage. He realized that the conditions of different forms of slavery—French, Spanish, American—accounted for key differences between Afro-Latin and African-American culture. His second book, The World That Made New Orleans, deconstructs how successive waves of slave importation, under Spanish, French and then American rule, created that city’s music. But throughout his research, working with his wife, Constance, the Sublettes realized that the history of slavery—especially its most vicious form that took hold in North America—was largely untold, unknown, and explained much about the violence, racism and exploitation that is at the core of U.S. history. The American Slave Coast is the result of 15 years of inquiry.

It’s an epic volume—668 pages before footnotes and citations—and a lot to digest. But if Americans are ever to come to terms with the anti-black violence that endures today, it is necessary to understand the roots of an economy and culture that has needed and feared Africans. For example, take Jefferson and America’s founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. Most Americans know that slaves had no rights. Or they know that the slave-owning Jefferson cynically wrote, “All men are created equal” in the Declaration, and owned slaves and had several slave children. But they probably don’t realize how the Constitution and Bill of Rights enshrined into law an economic system where the major form of property was slaves, and created a government to protect the wealth of that system’s upper class.

Today’s right-wing fetish about the Constitution’s perfection ignores input by prominent Virginians and Carolinians, including many signers of the Declaration of Independence, to protect slave property. As their book points out, the gun-toting militias sanctioned by the Second Amendment were a guarantee that slave owners could hunt and kill escaped slaves and Native Americans. The Sublettes stunningly trace how fear (of slave revolts) and self-interest (protecting slave-tied wealth) played a major role in framing America’s founding documents. But they go further and demonstrate why Jefferson is the founding theorist of white supremacy in America.

It’s not just that Jefferson owned slaves, including his own children who were 7/8ths white. Nor was it his letters with the leading men of his day—like George Washington—explaining how owning slaves was better than other investments. Nor was it his ugly and racist description of blacks in Notes From The State of Virginia, where in the 1780s he wrote, “Their griefs are transient. Those numberless afflictions… are less felt, and sooner forgotten with them. In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” Mostly, it was Jefferson’s lifelong belief that slaves could not be freed but had to be deported en masse, because sizeable numbers of ex-slaves would take up arms and annihilate slave-owning whites. These prejudices, fears and draconian remedies reverberate today—such as Donald Trump’s bid to deport 11 million migrants.

The American Slave Coast starts with the horrible truth that America—unlike the French and Spanish colonies in the Caribbean—was a slave-breeding society from colonial times through emancipation. There was no path to freedom for slaves, because, say the Sublettes, “no escape from the asset column could be permitted.” Black families were intentionally broken up as part of creating an economic system for a new nation. As Ned Sublette said, “Writing this book revolutionized our understanding of our history.” Constance Sublette adds, “No matter how bad you thought slavery was, it was worse than that.”

[yearningforunity]

In fact, most American slaves were not kidnapped on another continent. Though over 12.7 million Africans were forced onto ships to the Western hemisphere, estimates only have 400,000-500,000 landing in present-day America. How then to account for the four million black slaves who were tilling fields in 1860? “The South,” the Sublettes write, “did not only produce tobacco, rice, sugar, and cotton as commodities for sale; it produced people.” Slavers called slave-breeding “natural increase,” but there was nothing natural about producing slaves; it took scientific management. Thomas Jefferson bragged to George Washington that the birth of black children was increasing Virginia’s capital stock by four percent annually. Here is how the American slave-breeding industry worked, according to the Sublettes: Some states (most importantly Virginia) produced slaves as their main domestic crop. The price of slaves was anchored by industry in other states that consumed slaves in the production of rice and sugar, and constant territorial expansion. As long as the slave power continued to grow, breeders could literally bank on future demand and increasing prices. That made slaves not just a commodity, but the closest thing to money that white breeders had. It’s hard to quantify just how valuable people were as commodities, but the Sublettes try to convey it: By a conservative estimate, in 1860 the total value of American slaves was $4 billion, far more than the gold and silver then circulating nationally ($228.3 million, “most of it in the North,” the authors add), total currency ($435.4 million), and even the value of the South’s total farmland ($1.92 billion). Slaves were, to slavers, worth more than everything else they could imagine combined.

The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry by Ned & Constance Sublette

[protoslacker]

The Sublettes have managed to coin the brutal economic system that kept the institution of slavery alive as the “capitalized womb” (p. 24). They argue that the “capitalized womb” illustrates how enslaved women’s bodies served as the engine of the slave breeding industry and powered a global economy for cotton consumption. Their new book ties the violent experiences of enslaved women directly to the market. It tells the brutal story of how the slave industry made the reproductive labor of the people it referred to as “breeding women” essential to the country’s expansion. They contend: “In a land without silver, gold, or trustworthy paper money, enslaved women’s children and their children’s children into perpetuity were used as human savings accounts that functioned as the basis of money and credit.” In short, slaves were money.

Kelly Carter Jackson in Black Perspectives. The ‘Capitalized Womb’: A Review of Ned and Constance Sublette’s The American Slave Coast

The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry

[sun-cheyne]

He was vain, brash, intolerant, impulsive, an unrepentant speculator, a literal slave driver and eager warmonger. And now, according to Trump’s White House advisers and President Trump himself, he’s the role model for what they hope a Trump presidency will be like.

News arrived Wednesday that Trump had a portrait of Andrew Jackson hung in the Oval Office. In his first televised address from the office on Wednesday, Trump compared his election to Jackson’s. That followed Trump’s boasts to 500 GOP donors last week: “There hasn’t been anything like this since Andrew Jackson. Andrew Jackson! What year was Andrew Jackson? That was a long time ago!”

Right-wingers in Trump’s orbit, from chief strategist Stephen Bannon to ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich have been talking up the seventh president to Trump and the press for months, emphasizing Jackson’s anti-establishment populism that is best known for his breaking up northeast bank cartels in his day.

“Like Jackson’s populism, we’re going to build an entirely new political movement,” Bannon declared in November. “The only president remotely like Trump is Andrew Jackson,” Gingrich told Breitbart last March, adding that Trump had the mental fitness for office. “Sure. I mean, he is at least as reliable as Andrew Jackson, who was one of the most decisive presidents in American history.”

“What Mr. Trump borrows from Jackson is not an issue, but a way of thinking about the world,” wrote Steve Inskeep, NPR’s “Morning Edition” host and author of Jacksonland, in The New York Times. “Mr. Trump promises to fix his supporters’ problems, no matter who else is hurt. He’s a wealthy celebrity always ready for a fight, a superpatriot who says he will make America great again. He vows to attack government corruption and defend the common man. All this could be said of Jackson.”

There’s quite a bit more that could be said of Jackson. To hear suggestions that he is the role model for the Trump White House’s internal compass, political instincts and willful aggressions is revolting. Trump’s populism, pulled from this century’s shadows of racism, sexism, economic jealousies and grievance politics, is ugly enough. Are the new president’s men also aglow about Jackson’s less-known traits — perhaps as the only president who drove trains of naked slaves shackled by their necks? The frontier soldier whose ethnic cleansing emptied the south of Native Americans and launched the era of plantation slavery?

In their book “The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave Breeding Industry,” authors Ned and Constance Sublette offer unvarnished portraits of Jackson, the only slave driver to be president, the wily businessman who sought war to profit, whose 1813 call to wipe out the Creeks — “to carry a campaign into the heart of the Creek nation and exterminate them” — sounds eerily close to Trump’s exhortation last Saturday for the CIA to do the same to ISIS, the Islamic State (without comparing the Creek people to ISIS).

”We have not used the real abilities that we have. We’ve been restrained,” Trump told the militarized intelligence agency. “We have to get rid of ISIS. Have to get rid of ISIS. We have no choice. Radical Islamic terrorism. And I said it yesterday — it has to be eradicated just off the face of the Earth. This is evil. This is evil.”

What follows are some excerpts from “The American Slave Coast” that describe these facets of the life of Andrew Jackson, the purported role model for the 45th president.

Not slaveholder — slave driver

This is not just any get-rich quick story. “Young men in the South wanted to get rich now, before they died of some fever or distemper, so they went into cotton, plunging into debt to buy as many slave laborers, plant as much acreage, and get as fast a return as possible, then plow the profits into more land and slaves,” the authors wrote, setting up the background. “But cotton acreage could only expand as fast as labor could be acquired to clear and cultivate it.”

“As a young man, Jackson relocated to the western part of North Carolina, which was now being called Tennessee and was where many veterans of the war with the British were settling. Jackson set up shop as a lawyer in the frontier town of Nashville, which was becoming a business center for the settlers who were pouring into the area. By 1789, he was traveling down the hazardous Wilderness Road — a 450-mile forest path through Native American territory plagued by ‘land pirates’ — to do business in Natchez [Mississippi] . . . Like other merchants, he bought and sold slaves as part of his commercial activity. He was also a horse breeder and a racing enthusiast; a lawyer, land speculator and plantation owner; a pathological hater of English, Spanish, Creek Indians and anyone who crossed him; and a master of intimidation — all of which was consonant with being a slave trader.”

When one of his cotton deals failed, Jackson’s business partner took slaves to Mississippi to sell, but got nowhere — partly because the British, a year before the War of 1812, were blockading cotton exports via New Orleans. “Failing to sell the slaves himself, Jackson drove the unsold slaves back to Nashville, taking the unheard-of step of driving a coffle [chained train] of slaves from the destination back to the point of origin, through Choctaw and Chickasaw territory . . . Given the documentation of this episode that exists, it appears safe to say that Andrew Jackson is the only U.S. president that we know of who personally drove a slave coffle. But then, Jackson was also the first president to have been a merchant.”

Southern ethnic cleansing

Jackson rose to military prominence as part of the system of locally armed militias — protected under the Second Amendment — that sought to violently rule the frontier. When the War of 1812 broke out, he used the war as the start of a years-long campaign to drive Native Americans and any slavery opponents out, starting with stretches of southern territory east of the Mississippi River.

“Jackson under cover of the War of 1812 . . . [created] the land-and-slaves boom remembered as ‘Alabama Fever,'” the authors write. “Jackson’s subsequent taking of Florida by military conquest and removing the South’s remaining Native Americans from their ancestral lands — we now call it ‘ethnic cleansing’ — made the entire Deep South safe for plantation slavery and further increased the demand for slave labor.”

The Alabama massacres are generally not mentioned in War of 1812 histories, because they do not entail fighting with the British. But it was a deliberate ethnic cleansing and land grab “under cover of war,” the Sublettes note. “The United States — in the person of the most effective general in the U.S. Army, Andrew Jackson — grabbed a vast area of Native American land in Georgia and Alabama; and the Gulf South, whose seaports of New Orleans, Mobile and Pensacola were essential for control of trade with the interior. Here the British were vanquished . . . a tremendous victory for Southern slaveowners against the power that had dared to offer freedom to their property.”

Petty, vindictive, vengeful

Whether dealing with slaves, soldiers or politicians, Jackson was an authoritarian leader who, another historian noted, “could hate with a biblical fury and would resort to petty and vindictive acts to nurture his hatred and keep it bright and strong and ferocious.” In 1804, “he advertised in the Tennessee Gazette for the return of a runaway slave, he made the extraordinarily vicious offer of ‘ten dollars extra, for every hundred lashes any person will give him, to the amount of three hundred.'” Jackson also relished killing a man who owed him money from a gambling debt, who wounded him in a duel. “After Jackson’s pistol jammed and did not reset during the rest of the exchange, he was allowed to recock his pistol and fire a second shot . . . Streaming blood from his chest wound, Jackson took aim and shot Charles Dickinson in cold blood from a distance of 24 feet.”

Jackson gained political power because, as the Sublettes write, he “spoke the plain language of a warrior, wanted a weak federal government that would distribute as much former Indian land and as much specie as possible to individuals in an expanding slave society.” His faithful created what became the Democratic Party, and he was elected president in 1828 — his second run for that office — and again in 1832.

Trump channels Jackson?

It says something quite dark that Trump and his supporters see themselves as Jackson’s heirs in modern America. While Trump clearly shares Jackson’s crude, coarse, selfish, racist leanings — as evidenced from endless remarks — Trump never served in the military, never fought in a war and seems to have absolutely none of Jackson’s mythic ability to endure pain. Trump cannot stop feeling aggrieved toward those who point out anything critical, including the trivial fact that his inauguration was not the best-attended ever, for example.

However, the notion that Trump and his top advisers see Jackson, a populist whose bonafides rest in being a racist, rapacious warmonger, as a role model for 21st-century America is as twisted as it is repugnant. With vain fantasies like that, one can only wonder what they are capable of doing while they hold power.

[lodelss]

ACLU: Why have a forum on reparations in Charleston and why now?

Why have a forum on reparations in Charleston and why now?

This year marks 400 years since enslaved, kidnapped people were purchased by the forefathers and – mothers of America. Are the events that began 400 years ago connected to today? William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 

On June 19, 2019, the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) held a forum on H.R. 40 in the historic Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C. As a follow up to that event, NAARC and the ACLU are joining with the ACLU of South Carolina and Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream to sponsor a second forum on H.R. 40 and reparations entitled: From Enslavement to Reparations: A 400-Year Journey for Justice.  

The event will be held on Saturday, November 2nd at 1 pm at the Gaillard Center in Charleston, South Carolina.

Why Charleston?

The first step to any successful reparations program is a reckoning – acknowledging and addressing the effects of past mistakes. When you attempt to understand America’s 246-year history of enslaving Black people, it is critical to understand that the Civil War didn’t end white supremacy in America. Rather, it heralded in a new era of white supremacy in different forms – Jim Crow Laws and Black Codes, “separate but equal” being affirmed by the Supreme Court, redlining to prevent Blacks from becoming homeowners and the war on drugs ushering in mass incarceration. When trying to understand how these legacies of white supremacy have impacted America in 2019, there is no better place to begin than Charleston.

The American Slave Coast by Ned and Constance Sublette explains how Charleston played a key role in the two primary phases of the slave trade. Charleston’s location was an ideal landing place for ships carrying human cargo during the importation phase, which lasted until around 1808. The domestic breeding stage, which began after America outlawed the importation of enslaved people, helped maintain the slave populations through the mass rape of Black women to produce new slaves. . The American Slave Coast reminds us that many white plantation owners used the term “natural increase” to describe this horrific practice. The International African American Museum estimates that 80 percent of African Americans can trace their roots back to Charleston. 

Founded in 1670, Charleston was the 5th largest city in the country just 30 years later in 1700. By 1708, a census found that South Carolina was 42.5 percent white, 42.5 percent Black, and 15 percent enslaved Native American.

While the existence of slavery was never a question to the new American nation, who was going to profit from slavery was a matter of great concern. The newly ratified United States Constitution guaranteed that the “Migration or Importation of such persons” (enslaved human beings) could not be prohibited by Congress until 1808.

South Carolina was concerned that although a state could not pass a law prohibiting the trade until 1808, the Constitution itself could be amended before then South Carolina was concerned that because a state could not pass a law prohibiting the trade until 1808, the Constitution would be amended before then. South Carolina doubled down to protect its interests and found its answer in Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution which prevented any amendment of Article 1 Section 9 until 1808.  Not surprisingly, in 1807, South Carolina merchants imported the highest volume of enslaved people in any one-year period in the history of the North American slave trade. 

The trade routes and contacts that were used during the international trade continued to create wealth and privilege for white people in Charleston even after the international slave trade ended, via the domestic slave trade.

Charleston’s recent apology for the role it played in the buying and selling of enslaved people in America is a start, but not enough.  If Charleston – and America – is to truly have a reckoning with our past, action must follow the apology. For example, Charleston’s segregated schools and neighborhoods withstood the test of civil rights laws and the Fair Housing Act, and Charleston is still one of the most segregated cities in America. A jury in North Charleston refused to convict the police officer who murdered Walter Scott. Most recently, the murder of nine innocent African American churchgoers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston are still painfully fresh in our collective consciousness.

Charleston continues to be proud of John C. Calhoun, who was a prominent South Carolina politician for almost three decades. Calhoun also was a proud racist who made it clear that he saw a major difference between white people and Black people being quoted as saying, “with us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals, if honest and industrious; and hence have a position and pride of character of which neither poverty nor misfortune can deprive them.”” Calhoun also believed that the freedom of one race depended on the bondage of the other. “I fearlessly assert that the existing relation between the two races in the South, against which these blind fanatics are waging war, forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions.” 

The Gaillard Center in downtown Charleston, where this forum will be hosted, shares a disturbing commonality with Mother Emanuel AME Church – they are both located on Calhoun Street. The remains of enslaved people were also found in the 2013 structural renovations of the Gaillard Center. It’s clear that in Charleston, the past is not dead – it’s alive and well.

Why Now?

The arguments in favor of reparations have been known and recognized for decades. Individual efforts began immediately following the Civil War. Members of the National African American Reparations Commission have fought for reparations since before Representative John Conyers introduced H.R. 40 for the first time in 1988. This is not a new struggle, so what is different now?

The advocacy of those who have been engaged in the struggle for reparations for decades have worked like water on stone, never letting the potential promise of reparations die. Additionally, new voices have added to the movement for America’s reckoning with its past. Ta-Nehisi Coates article “The Case for Reparations” continues to impact people. Groups like Movement for Black Lives and efforts like The 1619 Project from the New York Times have brought new ideas to the table. H.R. 40 now has 118 cosponsors – before this year it never had more than 52.

Much of the critique of the renewed light shone on the history of enslaved people by projects like the New York Times 1619 Project can be put into two broad categories: 1) Why do you hate America? 2) Reparations would unfairly hold people accountable for something they never did or benefitted from.  Here is why both are wrong.

Some people confuse critiquing America with hating America. True love allows for and encourages criticism, especially when it relates to an issue like racial justice. The refusal to look at our history and our present circumstance in order to find the unvarnished truth is a betrayal of the principles our country claims to hold dear. At the end of the day, you cannot support reparations unless you truly love America. Not a superficial love, but rather the kind of love that demands that we face the truth because we will be better for it.

What about the complaint that the Civil War ended 154 years ago and Blacks in America need to get over it?  Our history is full of proof that demonstrates the legacy of slavery has had a continual impact on criminal law, economic and educational opportunity, access to quality health care, and housing in America. This objection is countered by the provisions of H.R. 40. Before there can be any recommendations about reparations, a committee will have to investigate our history to see if the facts justify a system of reparations and let the truth come out.

In We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke to the true reason why a caricature has been made of the movement for reparations. He said, “Mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter”. It’s time for our country to quit hiding behind that mask of fear and finally reckon with our past.

Published November 1, 2019 at 01:27AM via ACLU https://ift.tt/2BWnHmm from Blogger https://ift.tt/2N7ogjH via IFTTT

[nancydhooper]

Why have a forum on reparations in Charleston and why now?

This year marks 400 years since enslaved, kidnapped people were purchased by the forefathers and – mothers of America. Are the events that began 400 years ago connected to today? William Faulkner wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” 

On June 19, 2019, the National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC) and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) held a forum on H.R. 40 in the historic Metropolitan AME Church in Washington, D.C. As a follow up to that event, NAARC and the ACLU are joining with the ACLU of South Carolina and Ben and Jerry’s Ice Cream to sponsor a second forum on H.R. 40 and reparations entitled: From Enslavement to Reparations: A 400-Year Journey for Justice.  

The event will be held on Saturday, November 2nd at 1 pm at the Gaillard Center in Charleston, South Carolina.

Why Charleston?

The first step to any successful reparations program is a reckoning – acknowledging and addressing the effects of past mistakes. When you attempt to understand America’s 246-year history of enslaving Black people, it is critical to understand that the Civil War didn’t end white supremacy in America. Rather, it heralded in a new era of white supremacy in different forms – Jim Crow Laws and Black Codes, “separate but equal” being affirmed by the Supreme Court, redlining to prevent Blacks from becoming homeowners and the war on drugs ushering in mass incarceration. When trying to understand how these legacies of white supremacy have impacted America in 2019, there is no better place to begin than Charleston.

The American Slave Coast by Ned and Constance Sublette explains how Charleston played a key role in the two primary phases of the slave trade. Charleston’s location was an ideal landing place for ships carrying human cargo during the importation phase, which lasted until around 1808. The domestic breeding stage, which began after America outlawed the importation of enslaved people, helped maintain the slave populations through the mass rape of Black women to produce new slaves. . The American Slave Coast reminds us that many white plantation owners used the term “natural increase” to describe this horrific practice. The International African American Museum estimates that 80 percent of African Americans can trace their roots back to Charleston. 

Founded in 1670, Charleston was the 5th largest city in the country just 30 years later in 1700. By 1708, a census found that South Carolina was 42.5 percent white, 42.5 percent Black, and 15 percent enslaved Native American.

While the existence of slavery was never a question to the new American nation, who was going to profit from slavery was a matter of great concern. The newly ratified United States Constitution guaranteed that the “Migration or Importation of such persons” (enslaved human beings) could not be prohibited by Congress until 1808.

South Carolina was concerned that although a state could not pass a law prohibiting the trade until 1808, the Constitution itself could be amended before then South Carolina was concerned that because a state could not pass a law prohibiting the trade until 1808, the Constitution would be amended before then. South Carolina doubled down to protect its interests and found its answer in Article 5 of the U.S. Constitution which prevented any amendment of Article 1 Section 9 until 1808.  Not surprisingly, in 1807, South Carolina merchants imported the highest volume of enslaved people in any one-year period in the history of the North American slave trade. 

The trade routes and contacts that were used during the international trade continued to create wealth and privilege for white people in Charleston even after the international slave trade ended, via the domestic slave trade.

Charleston’s recent apology for the role it played in the buying and selling of enslaved people in America is a start, but not enough.  If Charleston – and America – is to truly have a reckoning with our past, action must follow the apology. For example, Charleston’s segregated schools and neighborhoods withstood the test of civil rights laws and the Fair Housing Act, and Charleston is still one of the most segregated cities in America. A jury in North Charleston refused to convict the police officer who murdered Walter Scott. Most recently, the murder of nine innocent African American churchgoers at Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston are still painfully fresh in our collective consciousness.

Charleston continues to be proud of John C. Calhoun, who was a prominent South Carolina politician for almost three decades. Calhoun also was a proud racist who made it clear that he saw a major difference between white people and Black people being quoted as saying, “with us the two great divisions of society are not the rich and the poor, but white and black; and all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals, if honest and industrious; and hence have a position and pride of character of which neither poverty nor misfortune can deprive them.”” Calhoun also believed that the freedom of one race depended on the bondage of the other. “I fearlessly assert that the existing relation between the two races in the South, against which these blind fanatics are waging war, forms the most solid and durable foundation on which to rear free and stable political institutions.” 

The Gaillard Center in downtown Charleston, where this forum will be hosted, shares a disturbing commonality with Mother Emanuel AME Church – they are both located on Calhoun Street. The remains of enslaved people were also found in the 2013 structural renovations of the Gaillard Center. It’s clear that in Charleston, the past is not dead – it’s alive and well.

Why Now?

The arguments in favor of reparations have been known and recognized for decades. Individual efforts began immediately following the Civil War. Members of the National African American Reparations Commission have fought for reparations since before Representative John Conyers introduced H.R. 40 for the first time in 1988. This is not a new struggle, so what is different now?

The advocacy of those who have been engaged in the struggle for reparations for decades have worked like water on stone, never letting the potential promise of reparations die. Additionally, new voices have added to the movement for America’s reckoning with its past. Ta-Nehisi Coates article “The Case for Reparations” continues to impact people. Groups like Movement for Black Lives and efforts like The 1619 Project from the New York Times have brought new ideas to the table. H.R. 40 now has 118 cosponsors – before this year it never had more than 52.

Much of the critique of the renewed light shone on the history of enslaved people by projects like the New York Times 1619 Project can be put into two broad categories: 1) Why do you hate America? 2) Reparations would unfairly hold people accountable for something they never did or benefitted from.  Here is why both are wrong.

Some people confuse critiquing America with hating America. True love allows for and encourages criticism, especially when it relates to an issue like racial justice. The refusal to look at our history and our present circumstance in order to find the unvarnished truth is a betrayal of the principles our country claims to hold dear. At the end of the day, you cannot support reparations unless you truly love America. Not a superficial love, but rather the kind of love that demands that we face the truth because we will be better for it.

What about the complaint that the Civil War ended 154 years ago and Blacks in America need to get over it?  Our history is full of proof that demonstrates the legacy of slavery has had a continual impact on criminal law, economic and educational opportunity, access to quality health care, and housing in America. This objection is countered by the provisions of H.R. 40. Before there can be any recommendations about reparations, a committee will have to investigate our history to see if the facts justify a system of reparations and let the truth come out.

In We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates spoke to the true reason why a caricature has been made of the movement for reparations. He said, “Mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter”. It’s time for our country to quit hiding behind that mask of fear and finally reckon with our past.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/why-have-a-forum-on-reparations-in-charleston-and-why-now via http://www.rssmix.com/

[treethymes]

tagged by @nietp

last song: naan yaar

last movie: ponyo. my seething hot take? it’s navy propaganda

currently watching: don’t trust the b---- in apartment 23 (i love it)

currently reading: the american slave coast by ned and constance sublette (it’s taking a while but i will finish it this time. it’s blowing my mind)

currently craving: loacker wafers