Not new
Ah yes, disdain for the idea that slavery was something of a mistake on the part of the people who colonized what became the US. (The forcible colonization also a mistake btw.)
“New” – it’s not new. As many wiser heads pointed out.
Tip Jar
Ah yes, disdain for the idea that slavery was something of a mistake on the part of the people who colonized what became the US. (The forcible colonization also a mistake btw.)
“New” – it’s not new. As many wiser heads pointed out.
While I 100% agree with the sentiment about the “original sin” it really lets the European powers off the hook for their complicity in it all (the textile mills of England were fed by American cotton) and the shitty Africans that dealt with the slavers.
It is of utmost importance that no one cut Americans slack for continuing the trade and keeping slavery long after it was abandoned everywhere else, but at the same time it was (and continues to be) a very dirty world.
Oh yes, but that’s not what the conceptual dude meant.
I will say that the phrase original sin does nicely underline the biblical underpinnings of slavery. The Bible certainly didn’t invent it, but it did nothing to condemn it (except for laws that said you had to go easier on Hebrew slaves).
@ #1 It’s an idiotic comment by James, and I’m not here to cut the Americans any slack, but I would point out that Brazil didn’t abolish slavery until 1888, and Saudi Arabia waited until 1962, and Mauritania until 1981 and again in 2007, and that it still continues today in various forms in various countries, and indeed the United Kingdom is one of them (though we do try to do something about it).
I tend to think of it not as original sin, but as a fatal flaw, as in a Greek tragedy.
‘the textile mills of England were fed by American cotton’
Well you know who put their lives and livelihoods on the line to protest that….
https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/from-the-archive-blog/2013/feb/04/lincoln-oscars-manchester-cotton-abraham
This is missing some of the story, which I’ve read elsewhere–that it was the women mill workers who created the momentum for this act, and that they said, along with the women who boycotted sugar from the West Indies a generation before, that they would not touch cotton which had been last touched by slaves.
I think his modest fame has gone to Lindsay’s head. It’s one thing to criticize identity politics and the excesses of Wokeism–something he’s done capably in the past. It’s another to see Critical Theory and “neoMarxism” everywhere you look.
He’s fighting strawmen lately.
Oh he’s always been mostly an asshole, part of the whole “who are these women criticizing Richard Dawkins” backlash.
To be entirely fair, the same metaphor can have different significance to different people. Existing metaphors can be adopted by groups and ideologies with subtle modification. So it’s plausible that the woke relate to “original sin” in a way that is not isomorphic with the way the rest of us might.
That all said, the phrase is an established cliche. The default interpretation is the common one, not the variant. So, James, seriously: go read something aside from critical theorists for a while, ’cause you’re jumping at shadows.