Do you get as pedantic if I were to say âthe Americans benefited from chattel slaveryâ
Not the person you replied to, but Iâd like to jump in on that question. Yes, we should be; do you think Black Americans benefited in any way from slavery?
You didnât say âAmericaâ though, you said âthe Americansâ:
Do you get as pedantic if I were to say âthe Americans benefited from chattel slaveryâ
Versus
Saying that black Americans did not benefit from slavery, doesnât mean that America itself didnât benefit from slavery.
You had to change your language from the American people to the American state in order to be able to claim that people are putting words in your mouth because theyâre not doing that and you conflate people and states all over this thread.
The thing people are trying to get you to not do is conflate people and states because that kind of rhetoric is inherently nationalistic and invites belief in a unified immutable polity where none exists.
America itself didnât benefit from slavery.
My point is perhaps best expressed as follows:
Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.
â Howard Zinn, A Peopleâs History of the United States (1980)
When you frame your arguments in this nationalist way, youâre concealing these conflicts of interest. It would be clearer if you frame it in a way that specifies exactly who you mean.
