The Quiet Part Out Loud
God bless them. Every once in awhile you catch them saying the quiet part out loud. That’s what happened to Justin Lafferty in the Tennessee legislature when he tried defending the three-fifths compromise. According to the mangled synapses in his brain, the compromise was a way forward to ending slavery. It just took 78 years and a bloody civil war to do it. Sometimes it is hard to fathom that people can be this stupid. Then, they open their mouths and end all doubt.
The gambit is akin to those that try to find ways to defend Adolf Hitler. Sure, you can enter any qualifier you like, but you are almost always better off stopping before you start. The results of both end up being the same. We are left wondering whether you are the biggest jackass south of the Mason-Dixon line or whether you are an ardent racist. The answer is usually yes and furthermore we often are left wondering whether the distinction matters. That’s all the commentary I can waste on that one. Everyone enjoy their weekend.
Good job of putting that jackwagon’s words into Mama acceptable terms, Nick!
But for those of us who object to the notion “3/5 of a person” it gets worse. The QOP personified by Ron DeSantis and certain red state governors and leges passing voter restriction laws, mow protestors down in the streets murder passes, and maintaining a number of metaphorical and literal boots to the throat as ‘legal’ activities, it’s the 0/5 and 1/5 bits of a person movement that concerns us.
So yeah, 3/5 is probably the QOP ‘compromise.’ The standard for laws to be challenged by the current DOJ with AG Merrick Garland should be 5/5, the whole person. That would pretty much cover poor people, people of color, LGBTQ, and the women from assault by laws aimed at depriving them of life or otherwise curtailing their quality of life as regards all the issues. Gun safety, voting rights, healthcare, reproductive rights, education, etc.
Simply put, if proposed legislation isn’t 5/5, we can smell the nefarious from several states distant. Go get them, Merrick!
1I am closer to slavery than anybody else here; my grandfather owned a slave.
i have spent a lot of effort studying slavery, though not as much as David Brion Davis, who took 2 700-page volumes just to describe the varieties of slavery in the western tradition. (He never got to the varieties elsewhere.)
While it is true that there is nothing good about slavery — the concept in itself is offensive to the human spirit — just being agin’ slavery is not such an edifying spectacle.
The same people who want to pull down Confederate statues are the ones who try to teach us that slavery in Africa was a benign system, akin to adoption.
Not all bullshit comes out of the same end of the cow.
2My sense is that many of these variants are sophisticated versions of what our daughter starting doing at age three. Instead of saying no, she would say, “yeah….but.”. So, for instance, I have a coworker that pointed out the African slave trade and the fact that some African Americans owned slaves in the south. This whataboutism is somehow supposed to erase and/or mitigate the horrible.
Again, this is not a universal, but my sense is that people bringing up the African portion of the slave trade are doing so as a “see, they were doing it to their own people, so it couldn’t have been that bad….” mode of thinking. It is repugnant no matter how you slice it and how you present it.
This is all just to say that I haven’t heard any progressives defending slavery from any angle. That’s usually a conservative province, but I’m not saying it doesn’t happen.
3“mow protestors down in the streets murder passes…”
Does this mean that I can drive my SUV through a crowd of neo-nazis and white Supremacists without any legal consequences or does it only apply to people protesting criminal behavior on the part of law enforcement?
Inquiring minds want to know.
4I’m sure the troglodyte that uttered this is at least a deacon in the local Southern Baptist Church. There’s something about Evangelicals/GOP/Male always leads straight to racism.
5Bob Boland:
I was triggered by your question about being allowed to drive….
I am not an attorney … The ACLU, in its sober assessment, said the NC act (passed by the House, now in the Senate) on “hit and kill” “would create immunity for anyone who hits a protestor blocking traffic, unless the protest had a permit.” So, I guess you need to know if a permit was pulled before driving through a column of protesters impeding your right of way.
6There is no “Yes, but” to the 3/5ths compromise. It was clearly, obviously, a loss for the Southern states. All you need to understand it as such is to understand which side was pushing which side, and why.
The slave states wanted their slaves, their property, to count as residents. This meant that they would have more seats in Congress and within the Electoral College.
The non-slave states didn’t think the slave states should have it both ways: Slaves being property with no rights within the slave state but counting as independent persons with agency for the purpose of the census, apportionment, and the Electoral College.
In a nutshell: the slave owners wanted their slaves, property, to count as freemen because it would give them more political power. The free states didn’t think slaves, being treated as property within the slave states, should count. The 3/5ths compromise forced onto the southern states effectively reduced the near-hegemonic political power of the South within the federal system. It was a bitter pill for them to swallow.
The South still had a lot of power. Enough to push through the fugitive slave acts but the iron grip of Southern power was, from that point on, waning.
Most people, not having looked into it, assume that it was the Southerners who wanted their slaves to count for less and that the non-slave states demanding they count as freemen. The exact opposite is true.
This was a fight over apportionment, how many seats in congress a state has, and how many votes within the electoral college.
There is all sorts of speculation as to how the 3/5ths compromise would play out in the years following. Perhaps considering the later Missouri Compromise and such. But, at the time, it was a major loss for the South and their preferred economic system, slavery.
7https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa
8Thank you for the history lesson Art. Considering I’ve taught U.S. History I was well aware. The key here is not understanding motive (which is important) but in the understanding that it was repugnant either way.
9And Now, This
10https://youtu.be/ph1GU1qQ1zQ