Today at Boone Hall plantation, an experience I haven’t had since visiting Auschwitz several years ago: to stand in the center of a hell-on-earth and wonder how it’s even possible. We wandered around the plantation while waiting for a tour, weaving in and out of slave quarters.
The irony of America has never been more palpable. We are country that, from its inception, was about freedom. Yet our wealth was created on the backs of slaves. When people exclaim that, as twenty-first century whites, they are not responsible in any way for the actions of their ancestors, they are absolutely right. But for three hundred years, whites in America have built upon the foundation of those very slave holders and, until very recently, had a clear advantage for being on the lighter side of the color divide. Our free country was built, in the first century of its existence, at the expense of others’ freedom.
The fruits of that brutal labor still exists. At Boone Hall, the number one product was bricks. Those bricks went into many of the houses in Charleston and so provide a literal foundation for at least one American city.
And so we made our way through the house and grounds, seemingly free individuals in a seemingly free country. Our chains are less obvious, and less insidious. In fact, I would say most of us don’t even realize we’re shackled to our way of life, our point of view, our idiosyncrasies, our ambitions. Perhaps that’s not a bad thing: after all, this kind of slavery can hardly be called such in comparison. Yet we saw sixteen or so months ago that when our way of life, our point of view, our idiosyncrasies, our ambitions start to sink, we feel the weight.
What happened in America 250 to150 years ago was atrocious. That it had happened in just about every other nation in the world is not any reason to excuse a nation that was established on the concept of personal freedom. However, some you your comments need some balance. For instance, there was no slavery in the North and west only in the south by rich plantation owners — agrarian society. Even the average southerner couldn’t afford a slave. While the fact that black “slavers” captured other blacks and brought them to America to sell doesn’t exonerate those rich plantation owners but should mitigate some of the harsh judging — especially of our present society that had nothing to do with slavery.
Slavery is a stain on our history that can never be removed regardless of what happens now. Again, there is no nation that cannot be singled out for criticism of their past treatment of their citizens. Like the 6 million Jews slaughtered by the Germans — how long do we hold the current German society responsible for what their ancestors did.
Africans did indeed sell other Africans into slavery. If white Europeans hadn’t been buying them, I’m fairly sure that, despite the practice of slavery in Africa itself, the number of slaves would have been significantly lower. It is true that most southerners couldn’t afford slaves. It is also a fact that the present generation had nothing to do with slavery.
However, the present generation is built on the foundation of the previous, and so on through history. A great deal of wealth was created through slave labor. Society’s expectation of and support for individuals based on their race, only relatively recently corrected (and not fully to this day), can be traced back to the views of previous generations. So while we might not have had anything to do with it, we whites have benefited indirectly because of it, and blacks have suffered indirectly because of it. This is not to say that all whites who are successful are so because of their race; it is not to say that all blacks who are in poverty are there because of racism. It is to say that opportunities and privileges have, for the most part of American history, favored lighter hues.
Regarding Nazi German: We don’t hold them responsible for it because the Germans themselves do a fine job of that. Many Germans still feel guilty about any sense of patriotism to the point of cheering for opposing teams at soccer games. There is a national shame about the Holocaust that seems to be eclipse the shame America feels about slavery
I wasn’t aware of the current German attitudes toward the Holocaust – an interesting point. Doubtless we all gleaned a lot from the wealth of others who could afford slaves – I can only wonder how much longer it would require to do it the right way as opposed to the use of slavery. Another intersting point however, is that the rich are necessary in any successful society. For instance poor people don’t provide jobs for anyone but rich people do – not to excuse the use of slavery to achieve that wealth – but a simple fact.