What if whites had been slaves

Subconscious racism in police forces, enduring bias against black Americans in the courts and financial institutions are some examples of that subtle violence, he adds. But support for reparations today remains largely divided along racial lines.

A Data for Progress survey also found reparations to be unpopular among the general public, and especially so among white Americans. One argument against reparations echoes what Fox's Ms Pavlich said - that they would only build walls between Americans. Some contend that the reason reparations have worked elsewhere, namely Germany, which has paid billions to Holocaust survivors since the end of World War Two, is because the reparations are between nations, not within one.

That is the only conception of reparations that could possibly be politically viable. It would also be utterly toxic, ultimately widening divisions that we're trying to shrink. Even for some black activists reparations seem an unreasonable ask. He later expanded on the views, writing that a payout would demean "the integrity of blacks" and exploit white guilt. A monetary payout to black Americans usually comes to mind when discussing reparations in the US.

And critics are quick to point out such a payment would cost the US trillions. But just throwing cash at the issue, advocates say, would not address the root of the problem. Prof Hamilton told the BBC he supports a payout mostly as a symbolic gesture.

But acknowledgement isn't "trivial", he says - it would help refute existing narratives that dehumanise black Americans as lazy or dysfunctional.

Economist William Darity has also suggested a "portfolio of reparations" that would combine payments with black-oriented policies focusing on funding black education, healthcare, and asset building as well as ensuring that public schools properly teaches the full impact of slavery.

President Barack Obama never endorsed a reparations policy - nor did candidate Hillary Clinton - but next year's presidential contenders have been more outspoken, if vague. Senator Kamala Harris has said she is in favour of "some type" of reparations. Senator Elizabeth Warren has also expressed support for reparations, calling racial injustices "a stain on America" that has "happened generation after generation" at a CNN town hall this month.

Many of the freedoms we take for granted were fought for and won by those who were originally excluded by discriminatory laws and practices. In struggling for their own inclusion, nonwhites have guaranteed fair treatment and equal rights for everyone.

Which came first - slavery or race? Throughout human history, societies have enslaved others due to conquest, war or debt, but not based on physical difference. The word "slave" in fact comes from "Slav": prisoners of Slavonic tribes captured by Germans and sold to Arabs during the Middle Ages. Prior to the Enlightenment, slavery was simply a fact of life, unquestioned.

Race, on the other hand, is a much more recent idea, tied up with the founding of the U. In colonial America, our early economy was based largely on slavery. When the new concept of freedom was introduced during the American Revolution, it created a moral contradiction: how could a nation that proclaimed equality and the natural rights of man hold slaves?

The idea of race helped resolve the contradiction by setting Africans apart. The notion of natural Black inferiority helped our founding fathers justify denying slaves the rights and entitlements that others took for granted. Later, as the abolitionist movement gained popularity and attacks on slavery grew, so did arguments in its defense. Slavery was no longer explained as a necessary evil, but justified as a positive good. The rationale for slavery was so strong that after emancipation, ideas of innate inferiority and superiority not only persisted but were intensified.

For more on this topic, look in the Background Readings section. Were Africans enslaved because they were thought to be inferior? In colonial America, Africans weren't enslaved because they were thought to be inferior. On the contrary, they were valued for their skill as farmers and desired for their labor. Planters had previously tried enslaving Native Americans, but many escaped and hid among neighboring tribes or were stricken by diseases brought to the New World by Europeans.

As sites, such homes hide the real purpose of these places, which was to make African Americans toil under the hot sun for the profit of the rest of the world. The truth can set us free, if we can find the right questions. But back in the little house in Danville, Anderson was reading from a list of leading ones, designed by white officials—some well-meaning, some not so well-meaning.

He surely felt how the gravity of the questions pulled him toward the planet of plantation nostalgia. Ivy listened politely. He sat still. He was a mean man. Everyone was dying to get down south and grow cotton to sell. So old Tunstall separated families right and left. He took two of my aunts and left their husbands up here, and he separated altogether seven husbands and wives.

One woman had twelve children. Pervasive separations. Tears carving lines on faces. Lorenzo remembered his relief at dodging the worst, but he also remembered knowing that it was just a lucky break. No white person was reliable, because money drove their decisions. So Anderson moved to the next question. Did Ivy know if any slaves had been sold here? Now, perhaps, the room grew darker.

For more than a century, white people in the United States had been singling out slave traders as an exception: unscrupulous lower-class outsiders who pried apart paternalist bonds. Scapegoaters had a noble precedent. Slavery was not about any of these things—not about slave trading, or moving people away from everyone they knew in order to make them make cotton.

Therefore, modern America and slavery had nothing to do with each other. But Ivy spilled out a rush of very different words. Over the hills they came in lines reaching as far as the eye can see. They walked in double lines chained together by twos. To this, day, it still has not. In the span of a single lifetime after the s, the South grew from a narrow coastal strip of worn-out plantations to a sub-continental empire.

Entrepreneurial enslavers moved more than 1 million enslaved people, by force, from the communities that survivors of the slave trade from Africa had built in the South and in the West to vast territories that were seized—also by force—from their Native American inhabitants. For white enslavers were able to force enslaved African-American migrants to pick cotton faster and more efficiently than free people. The returns from cotton monopoly powered the modernization of the rest of the American economy, and by the time of the Civil War, the United States had become the second nation to undergo large-scale industrialization.

The idea that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich is not an idea that people necessarily are happy to hear.

Yet it is the truth. Forced migration had shaped their lives, and also had shaped what they thought about their lives and the wider history in which they were enmeshed. Even as they struggled to stay alive in the midst of disruption, they created ways to talk about this half untold. I sensed that the true narrative had been left out of history—not only American history in general, but even the history of slavery. I began to look actively for the other half of the story, the one about how slavery constantly grew, changed, and reshaped the modern world.

Of how it was both modernizing and modern, and what that meant for the people who lived through its incredible expansion. Once I began to look, I discovered that the traces of the other half were everywhere. The debris of cotton fevers that infected white entrepreneurs and separated man and woman, parent and child, right and left, dusted every set of pre—Civil War letters, newspapers, and court documents. Most of all, the half not told ran like a layer of iridium left by a dinosaur-killing asteroid through every piece of testimony that ex-slaves, such as Lorenzo Ivy, left on the historical record: thousands of stanzas of an epic of forced separations, violence, and new kinds of labor.

The most difficult challenge was simply the fact that the expansion of slavery in many ways shaped the story of everything in the pre—Civil War United States. Newspapers dripped with speculations in land and people and the commodities they produced; dramatic changes in how people made money and how much they made; and the dramatic violence that accompanied these practices. The story seemed too big to fit into one framework. Even Ivy had no idea how to count the chained lines he saw going southwest toward the mountains on the horizon and the vast open spaces beyond.

From the s to the s, enslavers moved 1 million people from the old slave states to the new. They went from making no cotton to speak of in to making almost 2 billion pounds of it in Stretching out beyond the slave South, the story encompassed not only Washington politicians and voters across the United States but also Connecticut factories, London banks, opium addicts in China, and consumers in East Africa.

It would have to avoid the old platitudes, such as the easy temptation to tell the story as a collection of topics—here a chapter on slave resistance, there one on women and slavery, and so on. That kind of abstraction cuts the beating heart out of the story.

For the half untold was a narrative, a process of movement and change and suspense. Things happened because of what had been done before them—and what people chose to do in response. True, politicians and planters and bankers shaped policies, the movement of people, and the growing and selling of cotton, and even remade the land itself.

In the midst of our conversation he posed the following question: what would America look like if slavery had not existed here? If all African Americans had come as willing immigrants to this country, would we still have the issues I and many other progressives claim find their roots in generations of institutionalized and systemic racism?

The material reality of racism is embedded in the lived experiences of Black and brown people in this country. There is no area of public discourse where race is not a factor, be it health care and outcomes, employment, education, finances, criminal justice, politics and voting, civil liberties, housing, or foreign policy.

There is little doubt that had there been no slave trade or slavery in this nation, the United States of America would be different. There would have been no Civil War where , brave Black men fought for their own freedom and the liberty of their loved ones.

The traumatic experiences detailed by Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth would not have happened in the same ways. Yet, I think the answer that my friend and many of you reading this are looking for is that their would be no racism in America.