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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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I thought at least some of the minor Southern aristocracy was descended from transported and otherwise indigent emigres, and that there were overall more situations of modest households owning 1-2 slaves than of big aristocratic plantations?

While there were some descendants of involuntary transportees who owned plantations, they were by definition upwardsly mobile and successful- eg not with typical borderer genetics. And it’s my understanding that while the average slave-owning household had a single digit number of slaves, slaves were more likely to live on big plantations because those households didn’t own very many people- and that the slaves on smaller farms skewed maler than the slave population as a whole.

by definition the failsons who will rape the most servant girls are not the ones carrying the best genes for impulse control and orderly prosociality.

No doubt there was some forcible rape going on, and male promiscuity seems to be correlated mostly with bad things, it seems a lot more plausible that most slave women having babies with members of their owner’s family were essentially mistresses/concubines- the documented examples, like plaçage in southern Louisiana, or Thomas Jefferson/Sally Hemings, certainly seem to have been that, and most historical examples of slave systems that were less embarrassed about such things seem to have worked that way.

I am not saying that these relationships meet modern- or other reasonable- standards of consent. But I doubt that would occur to men OK with owning people.

It also seems plausible that even the enslaved women on big estates would be highly vulnerable to opportunistic sexual assault from random employees and other poor whites in the vicinity.

While this doesn’t sound implausible, plantation owners themselves didn’t seem to think it was happening- they thought half-white children born on plantations were all the descendants of the owners.