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PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   25102 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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If that's true (and im inclined to agree with you) the correct move was deporting all the freed slaves back to Africa after the Civil War. Why didn't we do that?

@DradisPing brought up the founding of Liberia, but in fact that was only one of several large-scale but ultimately abortive attempts to achieve what was called, at the time, “colonization” of freed blacks. Liberia was a project primarily of the American Colonization Society, an organization about which I’ve spoken in this forum numerous times, and which included as its members and supporters an absolute all-star cast of American Founding Fathers and political heavyweights. Unfortunately, the ACS could not achieve the level of funding and logistics necessary to undertake the process on anywhere near the scale they had hoped for. They were not the only ones attempting to make it happen, though.

Abe Lincoln, a supporter of the ACS and of “colonization” since early in his political career, invited a delegation of black political/religious leaders to the White House in 1862 to try and convince them to support the mass deportation of blacks - this time, to a proposed Central American colony which he wanted to name Linconia. The black leaders were opposed, though, as were the various Central American nations who felt threatened and/or had their own territorial designs on the region. After Lincoln’s death, his particular proposal was never pursued by any of his successors.

However, in 1869 Ulysses S. Grant attempted to initiate the annexation of what is now the Dominican Republic (called “Santo Domingo” at the time) for similar purposes. Grant was actually able to secure a treaty proposal with the Dominican president; Grant also sent a committee, which included Frederick Douglass, to investigate the country and the feasibility of annexation. Sadly, this treaty was defeated in Congress.

There was also a private initiative in 1862 by Floridian entrepreneur and plantation owner Bernard Kock to purchase the Haitian island of Île-à-Vache and to invite blacks to come work there, offering Haitian citizenship (and revocation of American citizenship) to any takers. This initiative also failed after the financiers reneged on their promised investment.

Ultimately, the staggering costs and logistical realities of mass deportation of blacks were simply insurmountable at the time, to say nothing of the political difficulties and opposition from various important political constituencies.

They set up Liberia, but there was never broad support for mass deportations.

Truthful feels cruel to me to send them back since they have very little connection to Africa at that point.

I’ve probably come to a position of something like a lot of IQ testing to filter and some form of institutionalization for the rest. I’ve just seen too many black homeless that would seem to be better off in a controlled environment doing light manual labor than their ability to be fully functioning adults.

I’m fine with some form of Jim Crow to deal with areas like the south side of Chicago. Semi functioning people with way too much criminality.

Constitutionally probably impossible at this point.

I’d probably be fine though with going back to the deals we had on race in the 1980’s. Small amount of affirmative action, strict policing, and nobody tries to use disparate outcomes to claim everything is about race.

The same reason you can't just send black people back to Africa today. Who's going to take them? No poor African country wants afew million more impovrished mouths to feed, you'd have to pay them massively for it, which is a huge short term cost, much more expedient to let them stay and only bear a small annual cost instead.

Whatever it cost in 1865 would have been worth it

You can say that with the benefit of hindsight, whether the people actually living in 1865 thought the same way is another matter entirely.

The Greeks and Romans used to exile people, there's no reason we can't do the same. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here."

I have posted before about the difficulties with such a scheme. In short, prepare to piss off the entire rest of the world if you go that route. Of course, as a non-American bristling under the pax Americana I would actually welcome a development that would make my country look for the light at the end of Uncle Sam's anal passage again, but do you think that for the US and its citizens, the future you suggest would still be net beneficial if on top of everything its network of allies of ideology rather than convenience cools on it?

And what happens if the exilee can't find another country to take him in?

I don't see why that matters to the society that does the exiling. In fact, if it mattered, it wouldn't really be exile, would it?

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