I want to take this moment to reflect on the disdain conservatives presently have for critical race theory, to talk about the Fugitive Slave Acts and the Dred Scott decision. See, the Fugitive Slave Acts decreed that black people were presumed to be slaves--laws were made compelling citizens to assist in the capture of runaway slaves (and any Black person could be suspect) and the basic due process permitted any citizen was explicitly denied to presumed enslaved persons. The Dred Scott decision held that Black people could never be treated as equal citizens because once enslaved, always of a different class.
This is the history , the very basic and essential history necessary for understanding what led up to the Civil War and maybe even the founding of the Republican party itself, And the GOP as presently constituted, would prefer schools talk about none of this. Or so it would seem.
I mean, Senator Tom Cotton and Rep. Dan Crenshaw have certainly done their part to allege that asserting that racism is real is the real racism, but I dunno.
I just feel like neither of them have any opinion on CRT that I am bound to respect. And I guess that goes separately and probably equally for all of the Republican party at this point, also too.
They want to allege they held down their part in the civil rights era, while ignoring what happened to civil rights heroes and how Republicans are currently fucking up all the gains of that era by diluting the Voting Rights Act. So what I'm saying is, Republicans are still trying to cover up their shit, like cats kicking sand over their dirt, and daring us to follow their example and hold to a whitewashed history so as to feel comfortable.
But comfort is for slippers and cocoa mugs. History is for challenge. and I accept the challenge to understand how racist the American forefathers were, how they came up with 3/5ths of anything, and thought they were being adequate, rather than ignoring the whole humans, enslaved, who lived among them and had virtually no say in their governance. We need to know that to make sense of the next fourscore and seven years, let alone the next two hundred. The GOP is comfortable with an inadequate understanding of human events. I say we can not afford to be so negligent of history.
2 comments:
You got your history wrong. The Northern states didn't give a rosy rat's ass about slavery. It was tacky, but profitable and comfortable and somebody else's problem--kind of like greenhouse emissions. (There were some abolitionists, but they were considered to be liberal fruitbats.) The North only got upset when the Southern states--armed with Dred Scott--made clear that they planned to export slavery to the West and North. This was a threat to free labor--who could vote their interest, and had plenty of votes.
Well, I may be a little inaccurate if I gave any impression that the average Northerner was an amalgam of Harriet Beecher Stowe and John Brown--no. There were definitely political and economic concerns that I'm not historian enough to cover--but, I will say there's the weird irony. The struggle over which states would enter the Union slave or free indicates as much. For the North, it might have been what folks ended up calling it: just a "peculiar institution" ( although I don't know that Charles Sumner or John Quincy Adams would be "liberal fruitbats" as be think of the term today). But Southerners were the ones who considered the issue existential: hence seceding when someone who wasn't an actual abolitionist, Lincoln, just a person inimical to slave state expansion, came to the presidency. From my viewpoint, the South was more "upset" because they were going to lose slowly and so took a terrible bloody risk for all concerned--
But would Dred Scott have actually "exported" slavery in the sense the free states would have to allow slaveowners to be resident, voting, etc? And why would that have mattered so much that it would "upset" them? It makes me wonder about the legal issues of a very different timeline. But I think the idea that slave labor was a threat to the Northern white working class (that included my Irish and German immigrant ancestors makes more practical sense than assuming they entirely voted out of sympathy for the plight of folks they barely knew of--shit, it was the past. They did things differently there. But my overarching point is, stuff does change, but Powers That Be definitely make laws to determine Who things change for. It's literally and critically true.
Republicans should be prouder of their liberal history instead of hiding their former light under a bushel, is all.
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