Re: Is white racism nec. all bad?
Donald Edwards (warrl@blarg.com)
22 Apr 1995 02:09:00 -0700
Gary Strand (gary@ncar.ucar.edu) wrote:
"rh> Robert Hartman
"gs> Gary Strand
" OK, OK, OK. I'll concede that American blacks have been victimized, oppres-
" sed, and have suffered as much as or more than any other group in the his-
" tory of humankind, and that the oppression and victimization of today has
" barely changed since the 17th century and earlier. Satisifed?
"rh> Actually that war [US Civil War] was about how to divvy up the West--after
" getting rid of the Native Americans of course.
" In part - it was also about whether "All men are created equal" applies to
" men without white skin, if humans can be property, whether states can leave
" the Union, industrialism vs. feudalistic agrarianism, and so on.
It was mostly about whether the federal government has the authority
to demand that the states deal in a certain way with issues where,
under the Constitution, the federal government has no authority.
It was partially about whether the 10th Amendment -- which reads, "The
powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor
prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively,
or to the people" -- means that the power to decide that a state is no
longer part of the United States (a power nowhere mentioned in the
Constitution, therefore clearly neither delegated to the United
States nor prohibited to the states) is a state power, or a federal
power.
In clear contravention of logic and the Constitution, it was made
clear that the federal government has the power and the authority.
The matter of whether blacks could be slaves, was in historical fact
a side issue -- the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed precisely
zero slaves, was issued for the primary purpose of making it
politically impossible for England to enter the war on the side of
the South. (England had ended slavery many years before and found
it quite repugnant; but in fact it would have been in England's
economic best interest to see the South win; and further, England
had a major grievance, an act of piracy on the high seas by a
ship of the Union navy, to settle.)
|