The president of Emory University, James W. Wagner, has been censured by faculty members.\u00a0 He may even be forced to resign. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In his school\u2019s magazine, Wagner, you see, cited \u201cthe three-fifths compromise over slavery\u201d as illustrative of the art of political comprise. \u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
In response to the backlash, Wagner issued the obligatory mea culpa and deplored the \u201cclumsiness and insensitivity\u201d of his piece.\u00a0<\/p>\n
There was a time when the average American elementary school student could be expected to know that of which our current academics remain invincibly ignorant: the three-fifths compromise was intended to retard <\/em>the expansion of slavery, to weaken <\/em>the power of the slave states.\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n Yet this is historical fact.\u00a0 Along with reason, logic, and truth itself, fact is routinely treated by my colleagues in the academy as an ideological <\/em>\u201cweapon\u201d with which white men have been bludgeoning the entire planet into submission for millennia.\u00a0 Still, there is more than one way to expose a position for the species of folly that it is.<\/p>\n The Emory faculty and their president believe that the latter was both clumsy <\/em>and insensitive <\/em>for mentioning slavery in a way that could give offense to the sensibilities of those who continue to suffer from slavery\u2019s legacy (or something like this). The faculty thinks that such is the gravity of Wagner\u2019s transgression that he just might deserve to lose his job.\u00a0 \u00a0But if this is true, then most of our racial activists, and, particularly, our academics who write on slavery for their livelihood, are clumsy and insensitive as well.\u00a0 Maybe they<\/em> deserve to lose their<\/em> jobs.<\/p>\n The word \u201cslave\u201d derives from the word \u201cSlav\u201d\u2014as in the Slavish <\/em>people.\u00a0 It grew out of the experience of being enslaved that untold numbers of the Slavish endured for centuries.\u00a0 Interestingly, for all of our generation\u2019s tireless talk over slavery, this little detail is seldom stated.\u00a0<\/p>\n But while this omission may be interesting, it is not surprising.\u00a0 The Slavish, of course, are white.\u00a0 <\/em>Current talk over slavery centers almost exclusively on American<\/em>\u2014i.e. black<\/em>\u2014slavery. \u00a0<\/em>\u00a0<\/p>\n However, is this not clumsy?\u00a0 After all, by focusing solely upon blacks in bondage in America, don\u2019t we present a wildly distorted vision of slavery?\u00a0 Don\u2019t we delude ourselves into thinking that, historically speaking, slavery has always equaled the enslavement of blacks by whites?\u00a0 And isn\u2019t it the case that this severely truncated account of slavery is deeply insensitive to those whites of Slavish descent (like my wife and son) whose ancestors were subjected to the hardships of slavery?\u00a0<\/p>\n As if the failure of racial activists to mention any of this didn\u2019t already convict them of \u201cclumsiness\u201d and \u201cinsensitivity,\u201d at least<\/em> two other considerations convict them all the more.<\/p>\n First, aside from the ubiquity of slavery throughout Europe prior to the rise of Christianity, the modern world witnessed the enslavement of millions of white Europeans\u2014and not just the Slavish.\u00a0 Moreover, they were enslaved by and large by Africans, <\/em>North African Muslims.\u00a0 <\/em>Robert Davis is one brave scholar who relays this conveniently neglected chapter of history in his, Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800. <\/em>Paul Baepler is another. In White Slaves, African Masters: An Anthology of American Barbary Captivity Narratives, <\/em>Baepler covers this ground that few dare to tread.<\/p>\n Second, even the conventional story of American slavery is woefully inaccurate.\u00a0 The first slaves in America were white.\u00a0 <\/em>I know of two books that do a meticulous job showing that both in route to America aboard British vessels, as well as once they arrived here, America\u2019s first (white) slaves endured conditions just as horrific, and just as humiliating, as those suffered by blacks. The one is Don Jordan\u2019s, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain\u2019s White Slaves in America.\u00a0 <\/em>The other is Michael Hoffman\u2019s, They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America. <\/em><\/p>\n This episode at Emory University is just the latest reminder of the sham that is the politically correct orthodoxy regarding slavery and race in America.<\/p>\n originally published at World Net Daily\u00a0<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The president of Emory University, James W. Wagner, has been censured by faculty members.\u00a0 He may even be forced to resign. \u00a0\u00a0 In his school\u2019s magazine, Wagner, you see, cited \u201cthe three-fifths compromise over slavery\u201d as illustrative of the art of political comprise. \u00a0\u00a0 In response to the backlash, Wagner issued the obligatory mea culpa…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-763","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n