>>> JKSCHW at aol.com 10/14/00 04:38PM >>>
In a message dated 10/14/00 3:54:45 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
CharlesB at CNCL.ci.detroit.mi.us writes:
<< You and Genovese play true devil's advocates by trying to coverup and deny the evidence of how world historically brutal , continuously and openly, American slavery was. >>
Charles, happily, lets the cat out of the bag. The objection to the Genovese theory is really that it is supposed to be apologetic for slavery, minimizing its horrors. It is a moral rather than an empirical or a theoretical objection. Charles is worried that if the slaves consented, slavery would be less bad.
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CB: Justin is full of it. I didn't say it was bad. I said it was brutal. The queston of brutality vs consent is exactly what is at issue here. Your interpretation of "what I am worried about" is as inaccurate as your claims about the consciousnesses of the slaves.
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But this misses the point that the notion of consent here is not legitimating. For Gramsci, Genovese (then), and me, it does not legitimate oppression if workers or women or slaves do consent to it. It just frames the problem--how do we undermine that consent to foster rebellion and resistance?
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CB: In my post, I didn't say a word about the legitimacy of slavery. I said the brutality , not consent, was the main cause preventing slave revolution. You take a post in which I discussed at length brutality vs consent , clip out one sentence in which I still was addressing brutality , and on the merely stylistic reference to devil's advocates make the patently false claim that my real argument was based on my worry about legitimizing slavery - an evident perversion of what I said to fit your own preconceptions. What should be said is "ahha, Justin really thinks that Charles just thinks slavery is bad"
On fostering slave rebellion, it is you who misses the point. Slavery was ended , not mainly by the slaves revolting, but by MASSES OF WHITE PEOPLE MAKING ENORMOUS SACRIFICE IN A WAR. So, on the sentence from me you quote, it is important that the slaveowners ( and you and Genovese; well less important you and Genovese since slavery has been overthrown) covered up the brutality and claimed that the slaves were CONSENTING. The slaveowner propaganda against the abolitionists' propaganda was that the slaves were consenting and happy in slavery. So, the coverup of the major and main role of brutality was critical in delaying other whites from opposing slavery.
You and Genovese are involved in a modern version of the slaveowners arguments. Anybody who thinks about this thread for a while can see that clearly. I'm not sure what the implications are of it for practice today. In reading the essay that Yoshie linked to the list a few posts ago, it occurred to me that Genovese's works, given that some people seem to think that he is so goddamned brilliant, and he tries to derive some kind of third way based on nostalgia for heavenly days in Dixie, might serve as some kind of ideological base a populous Klu Klux Klanism, like Nazism and Nietzche or whatever. But thankfully, the U.S. masses' anti-intellectualism makes it unlikely that many people will ever read Genovese.
Perhaps this: ending racism in the year 2000 does not need to focus on Black people "consenting" to it, rather on changing white people from "consenting" to it.
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Frederick Douglass knew this. His life's mission was precisely to formulate a radical justice to win over first the slaves and then the freemen, so that they would frame their harms as wrongs and stand up and fight.
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CB: The slaves were ready to overthrow slavery from the beginning. It was the white masses fighting and dying to end slavery that tipped the balance. It was when the abolitionists obtained major force and fought fire with fire, not the dissolution of consent among the slaves. Fredrick Douglass' life mission was not to dissolve consent to slavery among the slaves. That is a patently false claim. The vast majority of people Douglass propagandized were white. His life mission was to dissolve white people's " consenting" to the enslavement of Black people.