An assistant humanities professor at Shimer College has sparked social media ire after writing on Twitter and in his blog that all white Americans are complicit in slavery.
“Whether or not your individual ancestors owned slaves, you as a white person have benefitted from slavery and are complicit in it. Sorry,” Adam Kotsko, who describes himself on Twitter as “an obscure white professor,” wrote to his more than 8,000 followers on June 25, according to screenshots captured by The Social Memo.
“I know it sucks having a racial identity that exists to legitimate the subordination and exploitation of other races. #whiteness,” he added.
The tweets were eventually deleted, but in a tweet directed at The Daily Caller, Mr. Kotsko clarified that he still stands by his statements.
“I deleted the tweet in question in this article solely b/c I was sick of retweets in my mentions. I stand behind it,” he said.
17 comments
Professor, could you please tell me how my Scottish and Czech ancestors that immigrated after the first world war benefitted from (I'm sure you mean American) slavery? How about my Lakota ancestors?
Further, professor, the word you were looking for was "legitimize". And I find the implication that only Caucasian people exploited and/or enslaved others to show that, despite your being a college professor, there is a reason your subject is not History.
Further still, as all parties involved are dead, the act is nearly universally condemned in western society, and even in the days in which slavery was practiced there were Caucasians that were opposed to it, I have no idea where you could conclude that "Near Universal Opposition" equals "Complicity".
Perhaps you should spend some time with professors of international or ancient/classical history.
I fucking hate the whole inheriting the sins of your ancestors deal, because that's what things like this are. It was bullshit in the Bible, it's bullshit in historical societies, and it's still bullshit now with things like this and trying to make white people pay reparations for slavery.
The only ancestor I know I even had in the US at the time of slavery fought for Rhode Island, not really a slavery hotbed, eh? The rest were Finnish, Irish, and German peasants and miners who didn't come until the end of the 19th and even not until after World War I.
And I think most white Americans have similar stories to tell.
Really? We're going with a "sins of the fathers" style thing now? I've heard this in history circles before, and it's biggest weakness is the idea that racial culture is a collective. Not only have there always been white abolitionists, there are plenty of American settlers whom had no part in the slave system at any point.
Undoubtedly, I've benefitted from slavery, but there is no way I can be complicit in something that happened before I was born, or even before I became a self-sufficient adult. This blaming children for the sins of the fathers crap is entirely too Middle Eastern for me.
What is it with professors lately and the whole "slavery was a white people thing"?
Do you think that displaying your ignorance of history is somehow good? Do you think you're some sort of pioneer in free thought? Sorry to break it to you, but displaying idiocy in public is not what makes great intellectual discussion.
While I certainly think that people and groups that have been wronged (and in many cases continue to be wronged to this very day) like the 1st Nation Tribes and African-Americans deserve to get reparations from our government for their suffering, it is patently ridiculous to blame all white people ever and their descendents for that whole mess.
Inheriting the sins of your fathers is so old testament, I thought these university types were supposed to be progressive, so much for that claim.
Please use a more accurate source than the Moonie Times.
Anyway, this attitude of guilt by association is not justifiable.
The whole slavery was a white person thing? Try asking the black Africans the Arabs enslaved (the "Zanj"). And the Slavs. Please, tell me your extenstive knowledge of history.
Anyways, my family history is 19th century Irish, fleeing from a famine that killed more than a million people. Pure complicity.
Whether or not your ancestors owned slaves, you still benefited from slavery. The wealth of America, America's very geography was borne from slavery. Things you have right now in the present came from those crimes. We're never going to "move on" from racism when we don't admit how we got where we are. I would like to expect better from this site than to bury their heads in the sand and say "not me!"...but you guys are young.
#1830397: So, out of curiosity, what evidence or arguments do you have that Whites are naturally complicit with or without having owned slaves? Most of America's wealth was made in the non-Slave North post-1865. By your logic, if America's wealth was based on slavery, Chinese railroad workers, too, share complicity. As do modern Mexicans. You can't arbitrarily divide that the wealth one produced is immoral but the other is fine when both were produced after 1865 in the same society.
Again, this is the same idiotic "sins of the fathers" type. Are you honestly going to blame a Russian Jew fleeing pogroms in 1890s for the sin of slavery because he/she gained wealth? Seriously, what statistics do you have that all wealth past and present was created by slavery?
Btw: the "you're young" argument is not a good one if you don't have the economic statistics.
So, even though my ancestors were Palermitani, and the only time we may possibly have owned slaves was during the Roman Empire, and they would have been other Europeans, and we didn't come over until 1855 or so, to New York, I'm to blame for the crimes committed by ( for the most part) exceptionally wealthy, predominantly southern Anglo Saxon wackjobs? Sounds fair!
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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