Free Exchange of Ideas

So there's a story about a teaching assistant at the University of Georgia's philosophy department. I've drunk some beers with this guy. He's not going to kill anybody. He is forwarding some explosive ideas, but that's what a philosophy department is for.
“Some white people may have to die for black communities to be made whole in this struggle to advance to freedom,” the TA said. He further claimed that to suggest otherwise is “ahistorical and dangerously naive.”
The point he is making here is one that probably most people agree with, if it is framed instead: "Chattel slavery of blacks in North America probably would not have ended if the North had not defeated the South in the American Civil War." I used to think otherwise, but I realize that I had been persuaded by a teacher with a basically Marxist frame of social analysis. The argument I found persuasive, when I was younger, was that the changing from an agrarian to an industrial capital model would make chattel slavery undesirable as a social form, in favor of having a class of free labor that you could pay only as long as you needed them and then fire or lay off as soon as you didn't. In retrospect, I don't think that's necessary; chattel slavers could have rented out slaves to industry on a piecework basis and still made out OK. Besides, the Confederacy's long-term plan was definitely built around institutionalizing race-based slavery.

So, OK: at least at one moment in history, it was necessary to kill (a lot of) white people in order that black people should be freed. Is that still true? Well, that's the point at which the discussion would become interesting (and worth ordering another round of beers to discuss). It would be nice to think it wasn't true, especially since it was me or mine you'd probably be thinking should be killed. But if you do think it is true, I'd like to know it. I'd like to understand the idea, if only for the purpose of constructing a better defense against it.

We are in a dangerous time, and I think we can see that the racializing angle of the Left is having a perilous effect on our politics. Even so, philosophy departments exist precisely to talk through ideas that are for one reason or another dangerous. Which ideas these are -- Darwinism, evolution, philosophy of race, feminism, Marxism -- that changes from one generation to another. But this is the place for them, whatever they are.

13 comments:

Gringo said...

“Some white people may have to die for black communities to be made whole in this struggle to advance to freedom,” the TA said. He further claimed that to suggest otherwise is “ahistorical and dangerously naive.”

That white people died 150 years ago in a war that resulted in the abolition of slavery is, as you point out, quite true.
Precisely what needs to be done today in order to advance blacks is a very debatable point. For example, is white racism or dysfunctional black social patterns the main problem?

Having taught in black schools, my conclusion is that dysfunctional social patterns among blacks is a bigger problem than racism. For example, I saw hostility to learning among many black students. Black teachers told me the same.


Grim said...

That points to another advantage of this kind of conversation -- it could be educational for someone on his side, too. That might avoid the killing part, which otherwise might have happened if the 'we need to kill some people' talk had continued only in an unchallenged underground community.

Tom said...

"The argument I found persuasive, when I was younger, was that the changing from an agrarian to an industrial capital model would make chattel slavery undesirable as a social form, in favor of having a class of free labor that you could pay only as long as you needed them and then fire or lay off as soon as you didn't."

Interestingly, the antebellum South had the best of both of those worlds. When slaves were too expensive to risk in dangerous jobs, they hired cheap Irish immigrants to do the work.

Grim said...

That's true. I had an Irish history teacher at one point who had made a study of that.

It's also true that some blacks in the South became free labor, and some of them even became slaveowners. Some, indeed, became Confederate soldiers. So the whole thing is more complicated that easy analysis suggests. Still, I don't continue to believe that slavery would have necessarily died a natural death because of the advent of industrial capitalism. I don't accept the Marxist notion that social/cultural forms are determined by economic ones.

Tom said...

I agree with you there. However, many Americans, including Jefferson, also thought America would inevitably do away with slavery. They did not say it was the inevitable advance of economic progress, though.

I wonder if Marxists think it's ironic that the advent of the cotton gin and the advance of industry made slaves even more profitable and therefore more entrenched in the economy.

tljhound said...

Perilous effect on our politics, indeed. Debating over beer is one thing, calling for violence and death or just positing they are a necessary part of change has become too common rhetoric of some who demand racial justice or who call for reinventing modern civilization to save the environment or to grant LGBTQ's the rights they claim they don't have and so on right up to the latest - the expressed desire to punch or feed into a wood chipper Catholic HS students who wear MAGA hats while smiling. While most on the right hang around just to the right of center and are quick to condemn those who stray too far the left appears to be getting crazier and crazier.

Grim said...

Yeah, I don't disagree with that. This weekend's two-minutes-I-mean-days hate showed some real crazy talk. Those folks weren't engaged in philosophical debate, they were talking about murdering children (or beating or assaulting them, at least) because they hate them and everything they think those kids represent.

But mostly those were other white folks, weren't they? It's amusing to me that they think they're in a different class -- that they aren't the ones the UGA TA is talking about, nor the Black Hebrew Israelites, either. Those white folks want to kill your children, and they think that makes them the good guys who should be spared -- nay, praised! perhaps placed in charge, of everything! -- for their conscientiousness.

I'll take the Black Hebrew Israelites over that lot. We could come to some sort of terms, even if it was just to leave each other alone.

E Hines said...

Some white people may have to die for black communities to be made whole in this struggle to advance to freedom

Perhaps it's true. And for much the same reason whites had to die in the Civil War, although I don't think things have reached that point yet. The Progressive-Democrats', and the Left's generally, actively proselytized identity politics are overtly bigoted and segregationist, at best, and they border on an underpinning of slavery: that some humans are inherently inferior and (goes the modern, Wilson-esque refrain) need protection from others--which attitude brings with it Know Betters advising these inferior ones for their own good (and, just as a minor side effect, for the good of those Know Betters). That's right on the ragged edge of slavery.

Actual slavery or not, freedom won't be achieved until the demand to (up)lift and separate and protect some groups of Americans from other groups--the denial that that some have their own inherent ability to see to their own welfare--is ended, humiliatingly for those pushing such bigotry.

And so the pushers of the drug of identity politics need to be washed away. In some fashion. I still hope for a recovery of education and for votes as the detergent.

Eric Hines

Assistant Village Idiot said...

The framing is wrong. There might always be some risky necessities, which might end up with people being killed. War is one of those sometimes. There might be changes in policing or living arrangements or education that we are reasonably sure would work but result in high risk for some people on a temporary basis. Might be. Nothing I can think of at the moment fits that, but I don't rule it out.

But the TA's statement sounded more like some white people might have to be sacrificed, almost executed, to accomplish goals. Black people weren't freed due to white people being executed. The deaths were a natural by-product of war. It's not the same thing.

Texan99 said...

Agreed. It's fair enough to predict that a particular problem likely won't be solved without deadly violence. To frame it as "members of race A will have to die before members of race B are satisfied" is racist garbage, as would be immediately obvious if you reversed the races in the statement. Consider how much more palatable the argument would be if he'd said that black people would have to be willing to risk deadly battle in which they themselves might be killed, and they might have to face the need to kill, before their conflict with the dominant (mostly white) culture could be resolved. That formulation sounds a lot less like crowing over the prospect of the deaths of members of a hated race, and serves them right, too, the worthless crackers.

Roy Lofquist said...

"Even so, philosophy departments exist precisely to talk through ideas that are for one reason or another dangerous."

Would that that were the case. Present day academia is won't to ban more books than they write. George Carlin had something to say on the general subject.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kyBH5oNQOS0


Anonymous said...

Karl Marx set the stage, Stalin and Lenin acted on it.
Are we repeating history here?

Korora said...

I hope this TA was simply careless with his phrasing (I've been there, done that, got the regrets).