140 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 7/20/17 Be Vewy Quiet – I’m Hunting Pixels”

1. (Oh, Underground Airlines also takes on the “it would have withered away” argument, making a reasonably plausible scenario about how slavery withering away in some parts of the country wouldn’t make it wither away in others. The details involve some spoilers, but if you imagine some things that have happened overseas in our world instead happening stateside in the book’s world, you get the general gist.)

2. @Greg Hullender–

   It’s hard to have much respect for people who condemn (or praise) works they haven’t read/seen yet, but condemning works that no one has seen is clearly worse. An alternate future with a victorious Dixie is no worse, in principle, than an alternate future with victorious Nazis. The question is how well it’s done, and that we won’t know until it comes out.

   Yeah, that would be a far more devastating argument if we hadn’t already seen so many “the South won” alternate histories, with most of them seeming strangely nostalgic for a version of the Confederacy that is highly romanticized. The newest planned version could turn out to be a valuable contribution to our culture and to the conversation, but I wouldn’t recommend holding your breath.

   Meanwhile, I think people who are already on the receiving end of entitled white dude backlash against the perceived outrage of eight years of a black President are fully entitled to feel concern and dismay at the possibility of yet another romanticized depiction of black slavery, this time on tv every week, with fairly high production values. There’s really no persuasive reason to be optimistic.

3. @StephenfromOttawa: That excellent story originally appeared in a very good anthology, Other Earths, edited by Nick Gevers and Jay Lake.

   @TYP: I think a more realistic alt history of the South would dwell on just what a society built on white supremacy and chattel slavery would do once the eugenics wave hits in the 1880s and 1890s. The South would be on the cutting edge of even more horror, one imagines, if they can own people as chattel and be as “scientific” as they like. *cough*The Underground Railroad*cough*

4. @Tom Becker: “If all the dead were to rise in the South, the dead white racist masters would be greatly outnumbered by their former slaves. It would be over quickly.”

   You forget the one ironclad rule of zombie fiction: zombies don’t attack each other. It’s always the dead vs. the living. Also, my premise was “modern-day” and “newly dead”; the bones of slaves and slave-owners alike are left in peace.

   Aside from that, I rather like my refinement of the idea to make reanimation based on the dead person’s attitudes. Favor peace, rest in peace; favor oppression, walk the earth. Seems fitting for a curse-induced zombie uprising.

5. 16: This. This is what happens when you win a war against secession and slavery and DON’T grind the losers under your heel for a generation (or two).

   You get a-holes trying to argue that the battle flag has “historic value”; you get a-holes protesting over the removal of statuary; you get a-holes with drawly accents insisting that they coulda-woulda-shoulda won the war and, despite all evidence to the contrary, never lost the war.

   I think the only mistake Lincoln made was on insisting that the secessionist states be brought back into the union. They should have been told the US didn’t want them anymore, stripped of everything and subjected to punitive invasions whenever it looked like they were starting to develop an industrial infrastructure, with a concommitant very liberal immigration policy for any and all non-white “southerners”. (Non-whites would have been given an opportunity right after the war to leave the south.)

   Unlike WWII, where the US turned its enemies into allies following the war (occupation, managed/limited self-rule, Marshall plan), the US ended up with an enemy in its midst.

   Fah! I lived down there for far too long. The NE has its issues, but I’ll take that over anything south of the Mason-Dixon.

6. @Steve Davidson

   There’s an AH by Turtledove where Lincoln gets shot in 1864, and Reconstruction really goes punitive, and the South reacts accordingly. Its a rather unpleasant timeline in its own way too.

   http://www.uchronia.net/label/turtmustan.html

7. As a practical matter you would never have had a war if slavery was not already dying out. It’s not like any of the arguments against it were new. The slave states just stopped having enough economic power to brush them off.

8. (17) I was thinking along the same lines as Matt Y, but he expresses it so much better.

9. #6 — WRT to the Louisville con. Who among us hasn’t forgotten something critical, like booking a room or a flight until almost too late? I mean, POTUS45 forgot to book a room for the G20 meeting and had to bunk at a German government house used for VIPS. (Seriously. That happened. Google it if you missed it the first time.)

   Now, one GOOD thing about the new venue in Louisville, there is lots and lots of free parking, which is NOT the case for the downtown venue. And lots of fast food and chain restaurants, plus local eateries. No one will starve to death. The drive isn’t bad, straight up and down I-65 if you have booked a downtown hotel. If you haven’t yet booked a hotel, there’s a slew of them one exit away from the mall, and those will be lots cheaper than downtown, as well.

   So embarrassing faux pas, yes. Might work out for a less expensive experience for the attendees, assuming they get the word out.

   Louisville is a nice town. If anyone is going and wants recommendations for good restaurants, let me know.

   In the twitter chain for alt-histories, one of them sounds a lot like the premise of S.M. Stirling’s ‘Draka’ series. That one still give me nightmares.

10. Heard about Deborah Watling, too. Rest in Peace.

11. steve Davidson: I think the only mistake Lincoln made was on insisting that the secessionist states be brought back into the union. They should have been told the US didn’t want them anymore, stripped of everything and subjected to punitive invasions whenever it looked like they were starting to develop an industrial infrastructure….

    I’ll keep this bizarre thought in the back of my mind the next time I see you holding forth about contemporary politics.

12. Ending slaver or not… it is so black and white. My guess is that slavery would have ended after a while, but continued in other less obvious forms. In Sweden, we had servants that were only allowed to change employer once a year and between were quite a lot at their mercy.

    Not slavery, but definitely not free persons either.

13. Id like to see an alternative reality where the second amendment allows only lances.

14. Lis Carey: “There’s really no persuasive reason to be optimistic.”

    A black friend of mine who works at a low level in the film industry argued this morning that there’s every reason to be optimistic about the results for people of color working in the industry, that of the major developers of “Get Out” only Jordan Peele wasn’t white, and that movie worked out pretty well.

    The reality of the situation now (as he explained it) is that of course people of color aren’t pulling the strings at the top levels of any artistic industry, and that of course any project by a major black artist gets filtered through white people and has white peoples’ names on it, and that good work gets done by them anyway.

    He also had some choice words for internet activists who make their money writing blog posts arguing against (ultimately) black people getting paid in the film industry.

    I’d link to it–it was a public post–but I just feel a little uneasy doing that. But he said it better than I did.

15. I think the only mistake Lincoln made was on insisting that the secessionist states be brought back into the union.

    They would have strangled everything west of the Appalachians, because they’d have held the lower Mississippi. (There was a reason for Vicksburg. And the Red River campaign, as poorly-run as it was.)

16. @John A. Arkansawyer–

    A black friend of mine who works at a low level in the film industry argued this morning that there’s every reason to be optimistic about the results for people of color working in the industry, that of the major developers of “Get Out” only Jordan Peele wasn’t white, and that movie worked out pretty well.

    1. A very legitimate but different issue.

    2. So, I’m supposed to be greatly reassured by someone who is, to me, a completely anonymous “black friend” whose post you don’t want to link to.

    Who is in any case talking about, according to you, a different issue than the one I’m talking about: what the show will actually be like, whether it will romanticize the Confederacy, and what message it will send.

    He also had some choice words for internet activists who make their money writing blog posts arguing against (ultimately) black people getting paid in the film industry.

    Can you identify for me any of these “internet activists who make their money writing blog posts arguing against (ultimately) black people getting paid in the film industry”? Because it certainly doesn’t describe me, and I’d be fascinated to see any evidence you may have that it’s a reality-based description of Meadows or Jemisin.

17. @Lis Carey: I hesitate to expose a Facebook post in that public manner, but check your email. See what you think.

18. @Steven Davidson:
    That’s basically the setting of Robinson’s “The Wild Shore”. It even has the slogan “Make America Great Again”.

19. James Davis Nicoll wrote:

    Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

    I see what you did there! 😀

    Overall, a good list. If I have a minor complaint, it’s that there’s more “boot stomping on a human face…” and not enough of the even-more chilling (IMO) “getting smilies painted on your soul” Brave New World-type dystopias. But that’s more of a complaint about the market than the list.

20. “Slavery dying out”
    1. That’s easy to say after the Confederacy lost. The Confederacy was based on long-held and frequently expressed views that the white South (and its black captives) should secede and form a slavery-based empire, starting by taking over Cuba and a good deal of central and South America. Before the Civil War, slavery was adapted quite well to the limited industrialization of the South and other forms of economic activity than cotton.
    2. Don’t mistake the declining political power of the white South, in the face of the increasing existence and political power of other sections, for the decline of slavery. This reduced the protection that the South could ensure for the “peculiar institution”, and merely shifted to the South’s demands for federal protection of it.
    3. Remember that slavery was simultaneously the most important part of the US economy (in terms of the economic value of 4 million people as property) and that white supremacy was the basis of the Southern social system ( and extremely important in other areas of the country). This means that declining economic power would not be the only consideration for change, as the 20th-century history of the South shows. As late 19th-century history shows, the former Confederates recreated slavery as far as they could, once they had the power to do so.

    If people really want an alternative history, I recommend Terry Bisson’s Fire on the Mountain. The creation and development of Nova Africa would give African American actors a lot more work with a lot less physical and sexual exploitation. But perhaps that would be less interesting to HBO.

21. 40 bucks for the Justice Barbies? That’s–not that bad. When you said “extraordinarily expensive”, I was thinking hundreds, like some other collector’s toys.

    Harry Potter religion: the one time I went to a convention (largely because my area is too small to have a convention close enough for me to be willing to go) was a one day Star Trek convention in the early 1990s. During it, a woman in a Starfleet uniform stood on a stage and talked about how deeply important Star Trek was in shaping her life, like she was someone giving a testimonial in a church. As a bit of a nerd myself I thought–how sad and pathetic. I have the same opinion of someone turning HP into a religion.

22. Steve Davidson–this is a photograph of a set of my great-great-great grandparents and their family, who lived in South Carolina. Just thought you might want to put faces to a few of the people you would have liked to have seen stomped into the ground.

23. 1) I’d be hesitant to call “The Lottery” a dystopia. Certainly the event it depicts is nasty, but it’s a single event in a single place. We have no way of knowing what the rest of the world there is like, and I always thought of it as depicting an isolated community that’s gone bad, cut off from the rest of civilization.

    12) I might pick up the Wonder Woman Barbie. Or I might just stick with the Wonder Woman and Horse action figure that was announced a few months ago, which is probably cheaper.

    14) Glad to see I’m not the only one who thinks that’s a horrible idea.

    @ Paul: Exactly. That’s why we had that discussion about the Iran hostage rescue in the last Scroll. 🙂

    @ Greg: But we have seen it. Over and over and over again. Do we really need yet another version of this hack plot?

24. @Lee
    I remember in the Lottery there was conversation among the villagers about how other nearby towns are talking about giving up the lottery – indicating it is a widespread custom.

25. @Lee: “I’d be hesitant to call “The Lottery” a dystopia. Certainly the event it depicts is nasty, but it’s a single event in a single place. We have no way of knowing what the rest of the world there is like,”

    Since when does a dystopia have to be global in scope? Look back to the bad old days of the “company town” and you’ll see plenty of small-scale dystopias.

26. @P J Evans: just so; Mark figured that any Japanese reaching San Francisco Bay would have felt at home with hills for a city and wet farming within reach. He might have been optimistic about how well they’d adapt to other biomes, but the relative shortage of inhabitants due to disease might have been enough attraction to give it a try.

    @steve davidson: I think the only mistake Lincoln made was on insisting that the secessionist states be brought back into the union. In the Northern view, they were never out of the union; otherwise the war would have been unjustifiable. And 15 years was not long enough to break the attitudes; I’m unconvinced that longer would have, especially with your lack of subtlety — providing Northern-certified schoolteachers might have made a difference, but I doubt it. If Serbs can define themselves by a defeat seven centuries back, how long would it really take to forcibly grow up the ex-CSA?

    @Magewolf: that’s a very … individual … view.

27. One should look at the Confederate Constitution if you want to see how likely it would be that they would ever abolish slavery, given that they made it explicitly against their Constitution to ever pass a law affecting ownership of slaves.

    You think the slave-owners of the South would be able to amend that? For something that was their reason to secede in the first place? That clause would end up like the 2nd Amendment does for people today, an article of faith.

    That’s why lines like General Longstreet’s in the movie Gettysburg don’t make sense to me: “We should have freed the slaves, THEN fired on Fort Sumter.” What the hell? If you don’t have slaves, why are you seceding?

28. I feel the need to at least bring up the point that The North is also virulently, vehemently racist. We just think we’re cool because we were born on the right side of the country.

29. @Msb, David H:

    The reality was that slavery was slowly dying, even before the Civil War. As a practical matter, slavery needed to be able to continually expand beyond its current boundaries in order to remain viable. In states where it was becoming less necessary and desirable, it was already on its last legs (for example, Delaware and Maryland, which did not secede).

    Southerners realized that once the executive branch decided that slavery would not be permitted in any of the territories, that was the beginning of the end. Gradually, as the border states, which had less and less involvement/need of slavery either saw more manumission of slaves by owners upon their deaths or more slaves being sold into the deep south, slavery would retract into fewer and fewer states.

    Words in a document notwithstanding, sooner or later, the southern states would have been forced by economic realities to become more industrialized and less dependent on the agrarian society south society revolved around. It’s not a case of them refusing to give up slavery. It’s a case of them having the whole thing collapse as unsustainable. As I said in another post, southerners would have been dragged, kicking and screaming, into industrialization but blacks would still be screwed. They just wouldn’t be property.

    To take the hypothesis under discussion, even if the CSA had been able to somehow become independent and not have been defeated and stripped of its slaves, the northern states were still there, the territories were still the property of the USA and the border states remaining in the Union would still have shed slavery as it continued to spiral down. Slaves would still run away, a fair number would reach the US and there was no need to help southerners regain their escaped property. Slavery couldn’t last forever, no matter how much southern whites wanted it to do so.

30. (17) DEL ARROZ ON JEMISIN. What a loser. He has nothing better to do than prove why he should be blocked by everyone on the planet? Le sigh.

    @Iphinome in re. #12: Wow, the “make your own” Wonder Woman’s better! If one has the skillz, at least.

31. @PhilRM

    Illl have to check it out, thankee.

    @steve Davidson

    I’ve been accused of being an iron unionist with a near psychotic lack of concern for the old South, but damn.

    @kathodus

    I’ve always used, as a yardstick for how bad slavery was, that the North of the time was better… it’s a terrible thought.

32. I don’t know if slavery would have somehow faded away or not. However, a separate Confederacy or some sort of North-South compromise that allowed slavery to continue without the civil war would, regardless, have been an ongoing violent disaster for the black population of the Southern US states. The discussion of slavery fading away seems to assume that the only possible outcomes are continuing chattel slavery or full civil rights – whereas even in the actual history (rather than alt-history) civil rights required another hundred years of struggle and a struggle that is still ongoing.

    We know as well, just from the history of nations other than the USA, that powerful interests are prepared to find multitudes of ways to keep targetted sections of the populations marginalised, impoverished and without access to political power and legal rights without actually having overt slavery. It was only FIFTY years ago that Australia recognised that indigenous people were citizens. It was only 24 years ago that Apartheid was ended in South Africa.

33. An alternate future with a victorious Dixie is no worse, in principle, than an alternate future with victorious Nazis.

    Personally, I could live without either scenario ever cropping up again in alternate histories at least for the next twenty years or so.

    @Steve Davidson
    Crap like this is what nurtures the resentment that still divides and poisons the US to this very day. You can’t condemn whole swathes of people just because they happen to live in a country/part of a country you don’t like. I’m German and have lived almost a year in Mississippi, which means a lot of people think I don’t deserve to live and I’m sick of this shit.

    I’m of the opinion that slavery in the US would have ended within fifteen to twenty years anyway, Civil War or not. Brazil, the last western country to end slavery, formally abolished slavery in 1888, though it had been on the decline since the early 1870s. The Ottoman Empire formally abolished slavery in 1890 after a long decline, but inofficially held on until it collapsed at the end of WWI.

    A US South after slavery withered away would still have been racist as crap, but more along the lines of Apartheid South Africa or the real Jim Crow South, but an Underground Airlines scenario of slavery surviving into the 21st century isn’t really feasible.

34. I’m pretty sure we tried that crush-them-under-our-boots thing after WWI and it didn’t end well.

35. If you read the Turtledove books that this series is based on the confederacy is s shitty place. They side with the nazis in ww2 and have their own holocaust. The premise sounds very losely based. The first book I think took place in the 1880s.

    Its not a lost cause series where the confederacy is a nice place to live at all.

36. I did not expect anyone to want to implement the Morgenthau plan inside US.

37. Hampus Eckerman: I did not expect anyone to want to implement the Morgenthau plan inside US.

    It’s been a while since I read Ben H. Winters’ Underground Airlines, but as I recall, the non-slavery states refuse to support the slave-owning economy by not buying anything from the 4 remaining slave-owning states, severely inhibiting their economy in a way that makes further rebellion infeasible (of course, manufacturers find ways around this via purchasing raw materials through “cotton-laundering” schemes, a la conflict diamonds).

    In addition, Japan and Europe have imposed economic sanctions against the U.S. on humanitarian grounds, which contribute to the country not becoming prosperous enough to wage war against other countries.

38. I don’t like the truth any better than most folks do, but here it is: The first American Civil War lasted from 1861 through 1877 and was won by the South. They had to give up the formal Confederacy and formal chattel slavery but kept pretty much everything else, including the legal right to control black people’s lives and destinies.

    Where are the alternate histories where Reconstruction proceeded apace? That’s a story I’d like to read.

39. People on twitter recommendee this one as an alternative:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_on_the_Mountain_(Bisson_novel)

    Anyone read it?

40. @ Hampus
    Yes, I’ve read Bisson’s book and it’s terrific. Strongly recommend it to all.

    @ Robert Reynolds
    An institution that reached its peak profits in 1859 cannot be called dying. You’re right that slavery required expansion, that’s why the White South planned to extend southwards. More of that William Walker/filibuster stuff seen earlier. Again, the problem was not merely economic but also social, and thus harder to eradicate.

41. @kathodus–

    I feel the need to at least bring up the point that The North is also virulently, vehemently racist. We just think we’re cool because we were born on the right side of the country.

    Yeah, we’re far more virulently racist than the people still celebrating the Lost Cause, the Confederate battle flag, and bitterly resenting the slow removal of statues and monuments to the “heroes” of the War to Preserve Slavery.

    Fuck that shit.

    I grew up with parents and teachers whose views on race were deeply imperfect, but who squelched firmly any suggestion that there were any “two sides” to questions of slavery or legal equality of the races. That there could be any “debate” about treating human beings as property.

    No, they weren’t perfect. I’m not perfect. My neighbors then and now are not perfect.

    But treating human beings as property, being okay with that concept, regarding as cultural heroes people who fought and died for the “right” to treat human beings as property, crosses a hard moral line.

    My parents had views we recognize as wrong now, but they knew slavery and legal discrimination were wrong. I recognize lingering racist ideas in myself, but I’ve grown up with the understanding I’m better off because my own parents’ racism has mostly withered away, that it leaves me living in a richer, more interesting world. And that my niece and nephew and my nephew’s kids, and my cousins’ kids, are growing up with a healthier view of the world.

    Most southerners are going the same way.

    But anyone who thinks it’s okay to call Robert E. Lee an American hero, who denies that the Civil War was about the right to treat human beings as property, has no moral compass.

    And it ain’t in the north that there are streets named after the leaders of the Confederacy, or where a leader of the KKK very nearly got elected governor of a state as recently as the 1990s.

    I’m proud of the fact that Ed Brooke was the first black American elected by popular vote to the US Senate, and the first black US Senator since the end of Reconstruction. I’m proud of the fact that Deval Patrick was the second black governor of a US state since the end of Reconstruction–and that as both he and his opponent, Kerry Healy, noted in happy surprise, that fact that we were going to have either our first black governor or our first woman governor was mostly not an issue. There was no notable misogyny in the campaign, and one ad thst I’ll unhesitatingly call racist, but a)It hurt Healy rather than helping her as intended; b)Reasonable people didn’t all agree that it was racist in content; c)IIRC, it was run by an outside group, not the Healy campaign. (Note that I’m going on memory on that last point, and might be wrong.)

    We’re far from perfect. There’s a lot to criticize us for, on matters of race.

    Our “virulent” racism, though, exists mainly in the minds of people trying to defend the continued existence of the KKK, monuments to Confederate “heroes,” and the popularity of the Confederate battle flag.

    Reconstruction was very effective while it lasted, and probably could have made more lasting useful changes had it not been abruptly ended too soon. The “crush them under our bootheels” idea, though: Meredith is right; it didn’t work out so well after WWI. The Marshall Plan after WWII was far more effective. I think we lost a real opportunity as a nation in not running with the “give every freed slave forty acres and a mule” idea, but we’ll never know for sure, now.

    @Cora–Sadly, I see no evidence that slavery would have been gone so quickly without the War. Economics was against the slave system, and would have killed it eventually, but southerners had a lot of non-economic interest invested in it, and cherished cultural beliefs, however repugnant to the test of the world, don’t die that easily. I think it would have lasted the remainder of the 19th century in a substantial part of the South at any rate. The determined efforts to preserve as much of the social system as possible via share-cropping and Jim Crow doesn’t really leave much room for a more hopeful viewpoint.

    And the damned traitors started the war. Its a bit late to argue that it wasn’t their fault, or that it wasn’t really about the right to treat people as property, whern the CSA constitution, the Confederate state constitutions, and their secession resolutions all say it was.

    As I think I already said, but just in case I didn’t: Most southerners of Gen-X and later aren’t part of that culture and legacy anymore. Change is happening. I believe Trump represents an extinction burst.

    But I am so, so sick of the lingering romanticism about the Confederacy, and I’ll remain deeply suspicious of this latest project until I actually see it doing something different and healthier.

42. Coincidentally I just bought a copy of Fire On The Mountain last week. Don’t know when I’ll get it read…

43. @Robert Reynolds

    It’s highly interesting to see someone argue that the federal government’s bar if slavery in the territories meant it was doomed, for several reason.

    The first reason is that slavery was practiced in the territories, with Southern emigrants bringing the enslaved with them, and then proposing slavery be legal. May I recommend you read up on bleeding Kansas?

    Additionally, if you are going to say that the Federal government had banned slavery in the territories, and that inevitably dooming it, I’d like to make you aware of Dread Scott vs. Sanford, which said that the Federal government could do no such thing.

44. Steve Davidson I can only hope you choke on your own hatred.

45. @Lis Carey: The south carries the unique burden of having attempted secession. That’s undeniable. But racism is not a strictly southern problem. Consider the Boston busing crisis. That was as ugly as any southern school desegregation fight, in a city with a long and honorable history of militant abolitionism and diversity in political representation.

46. There was an alternate history some years back in _Analog_ (I think) in which Great Britain allies with the South, leading to the continuing existence of the Confederacy into the modern era; a British time traveler makes changes resulting in our timeline.

47. @Hampus:

    I also recommend Fire On the Mountain. I thought it an excellent book.

    @Msb: Yes, an enterprise which hit its peak profitability in 1853 can be considered to be “dying” if, like slavery, it is slowly becoming less and less profitable to practice in more areas. Economic factors apply and slavery was becoming less viable. It would have survived into the 20th century without the Civil War, but it was essentially doomed, just as coal is on its way out.

    @TYP: I’m aware of “Bleeding Kansas”, the Lecompton constitution and the various other aspects of slavery in the territories. I also know that northern Democrats in the Senate joined Republicans in opposing the Lecompton constitution. It was, in part, the opposition to the Lecompton constitution by Stephen A. Douglas and many other northern Democrats which helped convince many southerners that their ability to dominate the senate was coming to an end.

    In 1860, the Republicans ran on a platform which, among other things, said that they opposed expansion of slavery beyond where it was currently legal. I’m aware that Scott included a statement that the federal government couldn’t ban slavery from the territories. But Republicans could refuse to admit any future slave states.

    Given that the people of Kansas overwhelmingly rejected the pro-slavery Lecompton constitution in 1858 and that there were a whopping two slaves in Kansas per the US Census of 1860, Kansas was never going to come in as a slave state. Republicans, with their numbers in Congress and Lincoln in office, would have had zero trouble preventing the admission of any more slave states.

    It was a moot point in any case, because more people were flowing into the territories from non-slave states than from slave states and southerners knew they couldn’t possibly win that battle. They were outnumbered. They couldn’t even tip Kansas.

    So the “fire eaters” in the south did everything they could to fracture the Democratic party in order to destroy Douglas’s chances of election. Lincoln’s election was the last straw and permitted the pro-secession faction to finally convince enough politicians that seceding was the only choice left. Ironically, by trying to leave, they ultimately caused the thing they fought to save (slavery) to wind up being destroyed much more rapidly-a point that many pro-union southerners kept trying to make.

48. Ok, well… I may regret posting this as I’m not as eloquent as most of you…

    Slavery is still happening. In the United States and all around the world.

    In some places it’s open, like pre-Civil War South. Most places it’s underground or barely visible – like the workers in a local field whose passports are “held for protection” by their bosses while they are told they will be arrested and beaten by ICE agents if they try to get help. People who don’t speak English being treated like slaves every day, living in crappy shacks without the freedom to move around.

    And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. That’s the *good* kind of slavery. Where you are worked for a season for no gain then shipped back home. The vast majority of slavery in the United States involves the illicit sex industry. People are pacified with drugs, and told that if they go to the police they will be treated like drug addicts and tossed in jail – which is unfortunately true for most of them. These victims rarely get out of slavery alive. They are too scared to go to the police and end up traded around like another commodity by their “owners”.

    Human trafficking is happening now. All over. Just because we don’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not there. Just because it’s no longer only about skin-tone doesn’t mean it’s not there.

    The idea that slavery would die out in the Confederate states is probably true enough – but it would have taken another form. One more insidious and horrible. If the series addresses that, then it will succeed. If it addresses the real-world problem of modern slavery in a way that will make people understand it, then it will more than succeed.

49. @ John A Arkansawyer
    Nobody in this discussion has attempted to deny Northern racism; I believe I alluded to it in my first comment. Northen racism is often used as a mote-and-beam argument to distract from the evils of slavery. The fact remains that Northerners (and Westerners) didn’t treat people as property and sell their and other people’s children. That’s a really low bar, but the white South couldn’t clear it.

    @ Robert Reynolds
    Glad you too liked Bisson’s book. The next item on my reading list is Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo.
    I see the same facts as you but do not share your conclusions. Perhaps the white South’s loss of dominance in the US government would have been a determining factor. What I see is an economic and social problem so profitable and difficult that the US government continually kicked the can down the road, starting in 1776, until it ran out of road in 1860. Nobody had the political courage or the political power to handle it, so the white South turned to war to solve it, ironically hastening the doom they were trying to prevent.
    Maybe it’s a personality difference. I’ve never encountered an evil that came slower or was less damaging than I feared, so I doubt slavery would have died a speedy natural death. In fact, it ain’t dead yet.

50. @Lis Carey

    @kathodus–

    I feel the need to at least bring up the point that The North is also virulently, vehemently racist. We just think we’re cool because we were born on the right side of the country.

    Yeah, we’re far more virulently racist than the people still celebrating the Lost Cause, the Confederate battle flag, and bitterly resenting the slow removal of statues and monuments to the “heroes” of the War to Preserve Slavery.

    I’m not sure how you got “far more” out of “also.”

    I grew up in Northern State in an almost all-white town (1 Malaysian family, and a small Mexican population) full of proudly anti-Confederacy, anti-racist people who, when confronted with brown people, crossed to the other side of the street, called each other and/or the police to warn about the “black fella casing the gas station” any time someone black passed through town and fueled up, have consistently fallen for the Southern Strategy, never could see why the Birther campaign was racist… These are people who are totally accepting of PoC as long as they look, dress, talk, and generally act just like good, small town white folk. The NIMBYs of racial diversity.

    They aren’t proud of their ancestors’ treachery, unlike some of my Southern relatives, but they’ve broken multiple arms patting themselves on the back for the enlightened, non-Southern views, while living in one of the traditional strongholds of the KKK and voting in racist politicians.

    So yeah, fuck that shit. The South’s racism is blatant and celebrated, commemorated in road names and statuary, and a wistful nostalgia for the good ‘ol days of slavery… err… state’s rights. The North’s racism is buried underneath a smug veneer of superiority – ultimately, an illusion. No region of the US has any right to pride over its handling of race.

    Addendum, because I see people talking about “both sides are racist” as an argument for the South… I was responding to Steve Davidson’s “burn it down and salt the earth” rhetoric, not to any romanticizing of the antebellum South, which, yeah, is disgusting.

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