Comment by zeofig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeofig | Hacker News Reader

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This article is conflating slavery with abusive human disempowerment. Some slavery, like what is described in the article, is abusive and harmful.

But much of it is quite beneficial to both parties. My cousin by marriage was a slave for a while; his master paid for his financial certification and gave him a small allowance, but he had to save up sufficient funds before he could buy his way to freedom. A girl I used to date used to be a slave, but she chose to remain with the family who owned her even after she bought her freedom, and remains an integral and happy member of the household. In fact, many successful members of our community, particularly business owners and managers, are slaves or former slaves!

Economically, slavery with proper laws and regulations is a way for families and moneyed individuals to improve the quality of their household or business, while giving an otherwise hopeless individual the chance to enter into Roman society. Here at the Tinkerers' Forum we often lament the fact that slave owners don't invest in their slaves, and the main reason for this is that they can't recoup their costs if the slave dies or escapes.

In Rome and its provinces there is a lot of slavery and it ranges across the spectrum. Quite a bit of it - particularly in the educated and enlightened centre of the Empire - is not remotely exploitative and is economically beneficial. An informed discussion should acknowledge this.

Whether he's right or wrong, your analogy is so stretched and ill-fitting as to be useless.

My sister chose to enter into this arrangement with crossfit. She could have done something else if she preferred. She made an informed choice that being a crossfit instructor was worthwhile.

Your imagined cousin did not have this option. That's the fundamental distinction.

However, it is very much worth discussing slavery in the Greek/Roman context - it did differ very much from American slavery. And even American slavery is known to us these days mainly from works of propaganda (e.g. Uncle Tom's Cabin, or modern propaganda like Django Unchained), so our perception of it may not be accurate either.

One group of people forced another group of people to labor for them under threat of physical violence. These people were systematically denied freedoms. Their owners were, naturally, extremely racist.

What exactly about Django is meant to be propaganda? How does it misrepresent slavery other than the exaggerated comedic situations? Do you truly believe Quentin Tarantino was attempting to brainwash people about what slavery was like?

Django Unchained was meant to make the viewer enjoy violence against certain people. To do this, they needed to make those people as awful and unsympathetic as possible.

If you had ever done any reading about american slavery, you'd know that Django sugarcoated it. Rape was common, most new families were separated, mandingo fighting existed as a hobby, corporal punishment was handed out with slight provocation.

To be honest, I'm shocked that you're willing to make these sorts of comments with your name attached to your account. You don't think this would make your employer uncomfortable?

Well, it's a Tarantino movie! That's what he does!

But it doesn't mean that slavery isn't evil.

I didn't say it wasn't evil. I said that our perceptions of how it actually worked might not be accurate.

I get what you say about debt bondage, and how it can be voluntary. And the right to bankruptcy more or less guarantees that.

What I don't get is what about our perceptions of how slavery worked in the US might not be accurate. Except maybe in negligible ways. I mean, people were born into slavery. They could be given freedom. But they typically had no way to earn it. What am I missing?

Actually, what's arguably missing is how widespread debt bondage was. Poor white immigrants were sold just like black slaves, and typically worked ten years to pay for their passage. And children who came with them had to work until 18, and could be sold separately.

Edit: typo

What I don't get is what about our perceptions of how slavery worked in the US might not be accurate. Except maybe in negligible ways. I mean, people were born into slavery. They could be given freedom. But they typically had no way to earn it. What am I missing?

What you are missing is that the sadistic behavior seen in Django Unchained was uncommon. Slaves were expensive. People don't usually destroy a $40k Lexus for entertainment - they usually take good care of their expensive capital investments, and they treat their own car far better than a rental.

In fact, slaves were often treated comparably or better than freeman laborers. Here is a modern treatment: http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/slavery/JLE-1977.pdf

Or you can read a contemporary treatment, from a northern unitarian abolitionist who visited the south: http://www.authorama.com/full/pdf/A-Southside-View-of-Slaver...

Note: none of what I've said here should remotely be interpreted as a defense of slavery. Just an acknowledgement that my modern mental picture of American slavery is likely not that accurate.

You've fell into a trap. That's a narrative that was pushed by the slave proponents and has lived on in many circles. it has a veneer of reasonableness that sounds very logical. That argument was used to both justify slavery and to ensure that the people on the second to last rung on the ladder (the Irish) hated the blacks and would failure to see their common ground.

In fact people abuse their cars and slaveowners abused slaves. Both by ignoring human needs, committing acts of brutality, including rape, beating and execution. Following your car analogy, slaves were also leased out, and their renters treated them like rental cars -- even worse.

Like every business decision, chattel life had ROI. Eventually old milking cows are sent off to slaughter. In the case of chattel slavery, read about the Caribbean slave economy, you'll read of high "turnover" among slaves in the sugarcane. I'll assure you they weren't going to school and getting better slave gigs -- "turnover" was mostly from death.

There are good, first person accounts of this world. Read them. The first link is from interviews with former slaves in the 1930s. The second is the tale of a slave auction and the third is the related, very readable acccount of the wife of a plantation owner.

Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1938: http://www.loc.gov/teachers/classroommaterials/connections/n...

The Weeping Time https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/07/the-wee...

Fanny Kemble diaries: https://archive.org/details/journalofresidenceongeorgianplan...

However, if $40k Lexus attempts to flee or disrespect owner multiple times, owner will happily throw away the car or in case of slave violently punish him or her. The "cared about them well due to cost" narrative conveniently ignores situations where ability to be violent toward "property" matters the most.

Especially if it would help keep the other Lexuses in line.

What do you presume Tarantino's motive would be for such a thing?

He says:

> In 2007, Tarantino discussed an idea for a type of Spaghetti Western set in the United States' pre-Civil War Deep South. He called this type of film "a southern", stating that he wanted "to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it, and other countries don't really deal with because they don't feel they have the right to."[3] Tarantino later explained the genesis of the idea: "I was writing a book about Sergio Corbucci when I came up with a way to tell the story. ... I was writing about how his movies have this evil Wild West, a horrible Wild West. It was surreal, it dealt a lot with fascism. So I'm writing this whole piece on this, and I'm thinking: 'I don't really know if Sergio was thinking [this] while he was doing this. But I know I'm thinking it now. And I can do it!' "[4]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Django_Unchained

So you're talking about those exaggerated comedic situations, then? The ones that were obviously unrealistic and meant for cinematic purposes?

An educated mind does not interpret Django as a trustworthy source for information about slavery in early America and knows it shouldn't be cited in any essay on the subject except to make a comparison to actual events. If people are taking Django into account in their view of American slavery then that is an issue of education and not propaganda on behalf of Tarantino.

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