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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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It is unclear that most African Americans’ white ancestry is from the Anglo owner class, though. They may have been victims of sexual predation by lower class and lower status local whites, too, and perhaps even predominantly.

The slave owning class told jokes about light skinned slaves being their owners bastards and the larger groups of poor whites didn’t live near the plantations anyways.

I find that unlikely as plantation slaves would not be intermixing with poor whites, and a poor white harming a rich white’s property would be a crime.

My understanding is that a substantial portion of plantation labor in colonial and early post-Revolution America was white indentured servants, some of whom were Borderers and a great many of whom were Irish. Certainly there were white overseers and staff working on plantations, and they would generally have had more direct contact with field slaves than the owners would.

Anyone with more in-depth knowledge of the period is welcome to correct me, but it’s certainly far from clear to me that slave-owners would have been the whites with the most intimate access to, and proclivity toward, sexual predation upon black slave women.

The slave owning class wrote jokes about themselves raping slaves, and broadly tended to keep borderers as far away as possible IIRC. The poor whites working on plantations might have some borderer descent, but the majority weren’t that different, ethnically, from their betters.

Interestingly, plantation owners tried to keep poor landless whites away from their slaves because they believed the "white trash" would be a poor influence on their slaves.

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