When I write, I write both as a historian and a pastor. After all, opinions about slavery don’t necessarily help or hurt the poor and the marginalized today. That is, the great value of pieces like Huneycutt’s piece is that they continue to drive home the fact that those who argue that participation in a system that necessitated manstealing, economic and sexual exploitation was just a “blind spot” rather than a damnable sin do so ignoring the testimony of the enslaved and those with more faithful moral compasses.īut this is only one of the points that needs to be made. But the context of Huneycutt’s piece must be considered: he writes first and foremost as a historian. Jacob Huneycutt wrote an excellent short piece for the Anxious Bench that eviscerates the historical claim that slaveholding was a moral “blind spot”, always a rhetorical move to dilute a profound moral evil. Said another way, it is often the case that in arguing with another person, in order to do so, you must argue on their terms, even if those terms are wrong. One of the most frustrating things to me in general is the fact that polemic often dictates the categories of an argument. There is the risk of our arguments descending into just so much railing against the wind.īut there is also the risk of polemic capture. On the one hand, it becomes a platform battle: who are you writing to? What do you hope to accomplish? Will we go back and forth on a historical issue merely to reach the stalemate that we have not moved past since the Civil War? Said another way, the historical institution of racialized chattel slavery did not cease because of good arguments that instantiation of white supremacy ceased because of war. There are two risks when railing against those who defend the beneficiaries (or more precisely, exploiters) of racialized chattel slavery: futility and polemic capture.
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