Sean Andrews wrote: > ... what would you think of a program which advocated the > deportation of all African Americans? It sounds a little racist, eh? > Well that was one of the big abolitionist ideas--free the slaves and > send them back to Africa where they can have their own country > (Liberia). ... Bad Idea: Good people. No?
FWIW, according to a recent book (which was reviewed in the NYT Book Review -- I haven't read it), the slave-owners of the northernmost Southern states (Virginia, etc.) were continually looking at schemes for abolishing slavery such as sending slaves back to Africa (to Liberia, etc.) without actually abolishing slavery. Many abolitionists could have been trying to compromise with these folks in order to get _some_ program passed, just the way many DP liberals are currently trying to compromise with the GOP or DP conservatives on national health-insurance reform. They look for the "left wing of the possible" (to paraphrase the late Michael Harrington). In any event, while it's appropriate to judge people in the past according to our current moral standards and knowledge, we should put such judgment into perspective by remembering the nature of the society in which they grew up and lived. If we had grown up during that period, it's likely that our viewpoints would have been shaped in a similar way. This perspective gets us away from the puerile perspective that sees history as a morality play, i.e., merely a battle between good guys and bad guys: almost everyone is mixed. After all, due to _his_ upbringing, no less than Karl Marx used a lot of language that sounds like anti-Semitic slurs. Did that make him an anti-Semite? Some people have accused him of that, though I'd agree with Hal Draper, who argued that every known Western European writer of the time used similar language. Those slurs were not a marker for anti-Semitism at the time; they lost their widespread legitimacy only with onset of the Nazi crimes. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
