Sorry About the Slavery. It Was “Necessary.”
Sen. Tom Cotton recently stated that slavery was a “necessary evil” in the formation of the Union. He’s probably not the first person to say it. That may not even be the first time I have heard it. I can say with certainty, however, that I have a few more questions. One of them is, necessary for what…exactly? Does he mean to say that it was necessary for the compromise? If that is all that he is saying, I wish he would state it more openly. More directly. What he apparently means to say is that the enslavement of humans was necessary so some White men could have power and profit. If he is saying that it was only necessary to form the Union of colonies into a country, then he really doesn’t have a significant conflict with the 1619 project. He merely fails to recognize the cost and meaning of his historical request.
Dear enslaved Africans, we have a favor to ask. We’d like to form a new nation, with principles of freedom and self determination…you know, for White dudes, and we find it to be “necessary” for the enslavement, that you have endured on this continent since 1619, to continue…until further notice. You know how it is, when a family builds an new home, some get to be the people who live in it, and some will have to be the bricks holding it up. As it turns out, since we are doing the deciding, you are going to be the bricks. It’s necessary.
Some of you fans of the enslavement of humans…Republicans, if I may, will likely think I am being a bit cheeky. Yeah, I guess. Sort of. It’s just that, “necessary evil” by a sitting United States Senator struck me as a challenge. Cotton did not go on to explain in any detail how exactly this was necessary. And frankly, I don’t think it can be done without absurdity. I welcome anyone willing to offer an explanation. What exactly is a “necessary evil” when it is literally evil? We are not talking about scarring after surgery, or smoke from a bbq grill. We are talking about how it was necessary to hold humans in bondage to make the “Land of the Free”.
Senator Cotton, unless you drop the “necessary…”, I am afraid this nation will never live up to its creed. I am willing to grant you the “evil.”
07/27/2020 @ 2:32 pm
Good piece. I choked on Cotton’s statement myself, but what do you expect from a man surnamed COTTON.
07/27/2020 @ 2:40 pm
I wanted to work that in, but I decided to rush this piece out while I was still spitting fire.
Thanks, Alan.
07/27/2020 @ 3:39 pm
Articulation of the notion that slavery was a “necessary evil” is an absurdity on its face…
A message clearly not intended for consumption by black people…..
It is a manifestation of white privilege and the idea that white people should be excused and absolved of any culpability for having instituted a slave based economy and having engaged in the practice of slavery…
His comment was made in response to the idea of including the Pulitzer Prize winning materials from the NY Times’ 1619 Project as an component of American History as taught in public schools….
He would rather maintain the status quo on the subject of slavery and rather than teaching or expressing the truth in the history curriculum, continue with the euphemisms and platitudes that cloak the avoidance denial of historical fact…
You may pencil “Necessary Evil” in alongside “Peculiar Institution” as the preferred approach of those who believe that ‘Institutional Racism’ is either a hoax or a myth created by traitors and anarchists who are out destroy the American Dream and the American way of life…
07/27/2020 @ 4:00 pm
If slavery can be justified as a “necessary” evil, then anything can be justified. Cotton either can’t mean necessary, or he can’t mean evil. I started thinking, what would Jesus consider to be a necessary evil? He might say that being crucified was a necessary evil, but he would not say crucifying someone was. It fascinates me that anyone besides the victim could call an evil act necessary.
07/27/2020 @ 4:12 pm
@Bitey;
“If slavery can be justified as a “necessary” evil, then anything can be justified.”
Precisely!
It’s a way of saying that “it wasn’t their fault” and the lingering effects and impact of slavery “isn’t my fault”….
In other words, don’t blame white people for benefiting from slavery and don’t blame white folks for continuing to benefit from the after effects and aftermaths of slavery….
07/27/2020 @ 4:44 pm
It’s just completely fucking embarrassing to be white.
07/27/2020 @ 4:49 pm
You can’t be blamed for Tom Cotton. Even his parents are liberals. Cotton is just a special kind of crazy.
07/27/2020 @ 5:00 pm
This is a little like saying the Holocaust was a necessary evil to free up jobs, housing, and occasionally expensive artwork for gentile Germans. All those gas chamber manufacturers and oven manufacturers didn’t want to be forced to lay off people. They had mouths to feed. Surely we can understand that
07/27/2020 @ 5:49 pm
Logically, I believe you’re absolutely correct. Then, to see it, it is somewhat nauseating. Justifying the Holocaust makes me shake.
Cotton is Harvard educated. He must know that “necessary evil” doesn’t apply to anything that is literally evil. That would be the end of civilization.
07/27/2020 @ 7:11 pm
You’re not giving Cotton credit for the full extent of his weaselry, I fear. He didn’t say slavery was a necessary evil: “This is the definition of fake news,” Cotton wrote on Twitter. “I said that *the Founders viewed slavery as a necessary evil*.”
https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/07/27/us/politics/27reuters-global-race-usa-cotton.html?searchResultPosition=1
He has a Harvard law degree, remember, not just a piddly BA. Of course he’s a precise weasel..
07/27/2020 @ 8:20 pm
Very weaselish. On one hand, saying that the Founding Fathers viewed slavery as a necessary evil is a far cry from saying he did. On the other, he used that argument to attempt to prohibit the NYTimes 1619 Project from being used as part of school curricula. Why? By doing so he is attempting to keep slavery trivialized: We did great things, the Founding Fathers viewed slavery as a necessary evil, slavery’s been gone for a while, let’s move on.
Except of course we can’t, and the reason we can’t has little to do with Black actions. The consequences of slavery are still very much with us. The aftermath of slavery continued severe persecution for about another century, at which point the persecution became less obvious but still present. The case Cotton is making is akin to wealthy people accusing poor people of waging class warfare when class warfare is actually waged on the poor (and middle class) by the wealthy. This isn’t about framing American history more reasonably, it’s about trying to conceal America’s greatest crime from our children.
His case echoes the case he attributes, probably correctly, to the Founding Fathers, that racism is a necessary evil, but that’s way too easy for a White person to say. We Whites don’t get to cancel our own debts so simply, and we really don’t get to evaluate the damage done to others when we have a vested interest in minimizing it.
What people like Cotton don’t get is that that is not only morally a terrible idea and socially a terrible idea, it’s also financially a terrible idea. Reparations and the reduction of current racism are viewed as primarily a punishment for White people when they’re actually a path toward greater overall American prosperity and well-being in a whole lot of ways. To correct what I said above: He thinks White people have a vested interest in minimizing the consequences of racism. Actually, we don’t; we have a vested interest in facing it and dealing with it. Like a lot of other politicians who should know better, Cotton looks at the costs without looking at the benefits. As I’ve said ad infinitum: To evaluate costs, you need to ask two questions:
1. What’s the cost of doing this?
2. What’s the cost of not doing this?
The answer to the second question is rarely zero. In this case, for a variety of reasons, I’d argue that the cost of not doing this is greater. I mean that in a whole lot of ways, including the one that would probably interest Cotton most: the cost in actual money.
07/28/2020 @ 6:05 am
I agree with you, of course. Any rational person should.
When I first read Cotton’s statement, I considered the title, ‘Now It’s a Conversation’. Then I thought, ‘Now, It’s a Party’. Those seemed a bit too confusing, so I moved on. The point I was getting at was that his view was so far out there that there was a lot of rhetorical ground between it and what most people think to make for an interesting conversation.
And that, and your equation of “cost of doing versus cost of not doing…” reminded me of a dinner that my wife and I had last year. An old college friend of hers runs a hedge fund, and has kind of made it big. Their college asked him for some money and invited him to town for the star treatment that they give when they ask you to be a become donor. His college is 30 miles from where we live, so he and his wife came over for dinner. During dinner, we discussed something in the news at the time, and I learned that the view of Wall Street types is unbelievably short term. I wish I could recall what the actual elements were, but the way of looking at issues became the issue. They simply don’t plan. They manipulate when they can, and they maneuver when they can’t. They give no thought to the principles, and little thought to consequences down the line.
I started looking for elements of that thought process in other areas. I found that in politics, there is a similar thing going on. If they plan at all, it is to acquire power. When they acquire power, they use it to manipulate and maneuver rather than apply it to constituent’s plans…or principles. So, when it comes to “the cost of doing versus not doing…”, things tend to matter a great deal to us, and planning is advantageous. To politicians, we are lucky if it is an afterthought.
**(I just recalled what the subject was regarding short term thinking. I thought it didn’t matter that much, but it is so extreme that it is worth mentioning.
During dinner, I raised the subject of the economic modeling that investment banks were using prior to the Great Recession. It came out some time after that the weakness in the modeling regarding credit default swaps was that they never considered a possible downturn in the housing market, which would make the securitized debt all collapse, which would take banks under. When creating their “strategy”, they only considered perpetual growth. When I raised this to him, he explained that they take whatever profit comes from status quo, and just start again after whatever failure might occur. They give no thought to stability.)
07/28/2020 @ 8:42 am
Short term/long term is a problem with investors vs. founders. In dealing with businesses, which I do for a living, I’d always rather deal with privately held companies than with corporations. Privately held companies behave far more logically largely because they are concerned with building a company rather than with milking it. This is why I hated Mitt Romney in 2012, though now he’s turned out to be more moral in comparison to his Republican peers, which says a lot about his peers. He came from Bain Capital and their business model was based on milking companies, taking them over and loading them with the debt of the company that bought them. It’s predatory. More to the point as a nation, it’s terrible for the economy. To be successful at production you have to care about production.
07/28/2020 @ 6:39 am
As for Cotton’s statement, he said this. “As the Founding Fathers said, it [slavery] was the necessary evil upon which the union was built,” he told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette over the weekend. “The union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction.“
I read that as Cotton is in total agreement with the statement. If there were daylight between that position and his, he would say so. (Now, for the next portion, pardon my language.) Black people, over time, have encountered a certain type of conversation. It is the one where a White person tells one of us something like, ‘there is a difference between Black people and niggers…’. Often, that bs is followed by, ‘there are white niggers and black niggers…’. More nonsense. These people want license to keep using the expletive. You know full well there there is no time that a White person refers to another White person as a “nigger.” It never happened in the way that we are most familiar.
Cotton is doing the same thing here. There is no difference between saying, “the Founding Fathers believed…”, and what he believes. Privilege means being able to depend upon measurable daylight between Cotton’s position and the Founders.
07/28/2020 @ 8:33 am
I knew one White person who actually used the N word on Whites and meant it as an insult, when I was a teenager (and so was he). He had a dictionary definition from somewhere that included a lot of negatives but didn’t include race. But he was, let’s say, an outlier.
07/28/2020 @ 10:28 am
Yes, I have encountered that theory of usage. I ruminated on it for years before deciding that it really can only be ironic. The theory implies a certain egalitarianism which is something like setting a building on fire which has every type of person in it, but claiming that you only intend to harm one of the types. It just doesn’t work that way.