You know, I’ve been conflicted about this subject for a while. You see, my grandfather’s great grandfather was a confederate soldier. He was injured and sent back home to Alabama where he helped people during a cholera outbreak.
He was a complicated man without whom I wouldn’t be here. Was he racist? I’m sure he was. That wasn’t unusual back then for the north or the south.
Race relations are complicated everywhere. Not just in the south. Hell, not just in the USA. We lack the proper words in the English language to explain just how fucking awful slavery is. Slavery is abhorrent. Slavery is repugnant. Yet those descriptors don’t seem to properly convey just how fucked up slavery is. But believe it or not in the eyes of history that’s kind of a new take.
I’m sure that a lot of people will not appreciate what I’ve said, and that’s ok. I decided that the racism in my family stops at me. My kids have never met my family. Instead I tell my kids about the lessons I learned from the parental figures I collected like Pokémon. Like Ronnie if any of you read that comment a while back.
But also, when I was a kid, every Memorial Day we would go to the cemetery where a lot of my family is buried. We’d put flowers on everyone’s graves including a confederate soldier. Not because he was racist, but because he was family. For better or for worse.
But believe it or not in the eyes of history that’s kind of a new take.
That is not, in any way, a new take. That was very much the take at the time, even among certain slaveholders. For example, here’s Thomas Jefferson, a famous slaveholder, talking about the subject of slavery:
I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that, considering numbers, nature, and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.
Here he is, saying that God hates slavery, that slavers richly deserve death by the hands of their enslaved populace, and that slavery is a great injustice. All this while having about 200 slaves himself, including several of his own children.
Slavery is not now, and was not back then, a “complicated issue”. It wasn’t a moral gray area. It was a great evil perpetrated by incredibly evil people. Whether or not the slavers themselves thought that they were doing evil is irrelevant. All this hand wringing about “Oh, the times were different back then!” is complete hogwash. Do you think that abolitionists didn’t exist? That they didn’t tell people that slavery was evil even as the first American colonists adopted the practice? Do you think that the people back then were some kind of proto-human who didn’t have the capacity for empathy or morality?
Fuck that. Your grandfather’s great grandfather fought for and defended evil. He picked the wrong side. Oh, he helped some people who were sick? Bully for him. He was still a fucking prick. Fuck him forever.
So, I think you misunderstood what I was saying. I’m going to attempt to explain, but I just want it to be known that I don’t condone slavery. Because I think that you think that I’m celebrating my ancestry. I am not. I am acknowledging that without that person I wouldn’t be here, and maybe don’t piss on his grave. Maybe don’t piss on anyone’s grave except for GG Allen’s grave. I think he would have been cool with it.
So, here we go with the explanation.
Even Thomas Jefferson wasn’t that long ago in the eyes of history. I’m talking for all of human history. The Greeks, The Romans, the Egyptians. All of these cultures had slaves far longer than the US has been a thing.
Slavery was a thing for thousands if not 10s of thousands of years. I’m sure that the occasional person thought slavery was bad, but it wasn’t really a movement of any kind until a 2 to 3 hundred years ago.
I’ll give you that slavery as a concept is not a new invention, though the type of chattel slavery that the US participated in really stands out among the greater tapestry of global slavery. That being said, I think it is very difficult to say with any degree of certainty that the Greeks, Romans, or Egyptians didn’t really view slavery as being wrong. Literacy wasn’t a common thing in those civilizations; wealthy people and the non-inheriting sons of wealthy people pretty much held the monopoly on reading and writing. So while quite a lot of things were documented, most of what we’ve got were boring governmental administration documents. Things like tax receipts and livestock tallies. And also, very occasionally, the odd complaint about substandard copper. Most people didn’t record their thoughts on things because most people couldn’t write, and the people who did write were usually tied to the aristocracy, so it would be unusual for them to give a fair shake to the people who wanted them to free their slaves.
So while we have a lot more evidence of abolitionists in America and England going back to the start of the African slave trade than we do of, say, the Roman Empire, I think a big reason for that is just the prevalence of writing. Abolitionists could produce morality tracts for relatively little money, after all. So the idea that abolitionism is a relatively new thing in historical terms is not exactly a well-grounded thing because there are really good explanations for the absence of evidence, and there’s equally little evidence that everybody was on board with it.
So I’m going to take the opposite opinion here, and say that I don’t think that people now are fundamentally different than they were back then. Which means that there are a lot of amoral assholes who value their own wealth and societal status more than the personhood of their fellow man, but it also means that there are people who think that that’s fucking evil.
As for your relative, I mean… I’m glad that through chance he spawned a family that would eventually include you, but that doesn’t make him a good person, or even a person worthy of respect. Shitty people have kids all the time. I get that you want to include him in your thoughts because he’s family, but just because you share genetic information with someone doesn’t mean that they are worthy of your time, energy, or respect. I, for example, have quite a lot of family members who are traitors, and I refuse to talk to any of them. And if someone were to piss on their graves, I wouldn’t be the least bit upset about it.
My extended family’s ancestors stole land from indigenous people that their descendants sold to provide a comfortable upper middle class life for their family. Fuck them for destroying the livelihood, culture and lives of those people. If people want to piss on their graves I wouldn’t stop them.
Well, cheers I guess. People are complicated. I guess that I can acknowledge that a person is flawed. While still admitting that they were probably a flawed human doing the best they could with the flawed information they had. You and I included.
I hope that one day you too will be able to see monsters for the humans they really are.
I don’t believe in monsters. Monsters are just people who broke the social contract to treat all people around them with respect and dignity, so they don’t get to then demand respect and dignity in death.
People keep saying ‘it was a different time’ completely ignoring the fact there were people back then literally fighting for the rights of the oppressed.
They are dead and gone. What ever feelings the dirt and stone provoke are your own. The dead flowers too are only for yourself. Me, I despise the unempethic people who brought suffering to others. They did live in a different time and any one person alone couldn’t have done enough to change all of society. If I’m going out of my way to honor a thought in my head I would chose to honor the few that did put society on the right track.
