Quillette columnist Coleman Hughes on why he and some other prominent black intellectuals have created the “1776” project, a response to the New York Times‘s 1619 Project. Quillette recently published an article on the “1776” project by Wilfred Reilly, another of the people involved.
Published on February 29, 2020
PODCAST 79: Coleman Hughes on the “1776” Project
Even JBP does not say so much so well in so few words. This guy is a treasure. Hughes for president. I may be a grey supremacist, but Coleman is welcome in my pod.
I dunno about that: last I heard, JBP was rakin’ in $200K/month. Those people who pay for his services think his services worth that much.
It was only my opinion. JBP certainly has higher sales so perhaps that makes his products objectively more valuable. But I get Hughes for free and find his product to be valuable in a way that is not monetary. You will say that value without money is a null concept, yes?
Alrighty then.
For me the worst aspect of slavery in the Americas was that it was based on the enslavement of an immediately distinguishable group of people — because their skin color was so different from that of most European settlers to the New World. (Among other things it made it difficult for them to escape.) An ideology was needed to justify such a grotesque injustice: white supremacy. All of us are still suffering from its effects today, despite the fact that few people still believe such nonsense.
White supremacy has absolutely nothing to do with slavery in the US. Trading in slaves was the absolute norm for the world in the 17th century, and the Europeans came late to the trade. No discussion of slavery can take place without examining the centuries of Arab involvement. Arabs harvested black slaves from Africa, often abetted by the Africans themselves, These slaves were then traded by the Arabs, even far away as China.
Records show that there were free black Americans who owned black slaves in early America, which illustrates how normal and usual it was for people of any colour to own slaves.
The only white supremacy in the trans Atlantic trade is that Europeans and Americans very quickly recognized its cruel nature and abolished it. There was agitation in both England and the US virtually from the inception of the trade for its abolition. This makes white people of the time supreme over the rest of the world in recognizing the inhumanity of the trade.
Slavery of any hue is considered a terrible evil by all modern peoples (with a few exceptions among north African tribes who reportedly still keep slaves). But I doubt skin color was a determining factor in slave taking; losing a war in early times was more likely then not to lead to (or sold into) slavery. The other choice was to be killed.
Haiti abolished slavery a few years after France despite the Haitian Revolution.