Thread by @Freesoilyeah

1/ What if "slavery" was just called something else? Blacks worked fewer hours per year than free white farmers, had better nutrition as inferred from height (blacks are actually slightly shorter than whites today), and their life expectancy ratio was roughly the same today.

2/ And their literacy rate was ~20%, higher than most of the world. Certainly higher than black africa

When you actually break down what data there is on slavery, and how most former slaves who had a choice after the civil war actually chose to stay on with their former...

3/ masters, how horrible is this really compared to how most of the world actually was at the time? In Russia, you weren't a "slave", you were a "serf", though every metric of human development was worse than a US slave.

4/ So I think a lot of this comes down to the word "slave" and the emotional connotation injected into it. People wonder how those in 1840 could be so sanguine about SLAVERY. Probably because the reality was far more mundane than abolitionist propaganda portrayed it.

5/ This isn't to say it's good or ideal. BUT (yes, BUT, as in there's something else to consider) being a negro slave was not a bad place to be in in the global context of the time.

6/ Imagine what myths are going to be told about the Trump movement, when the reality was far more mundane. Or segregation. People who lived in segregation, including blacks, had greater support for it than people who didn't experience segregation.

7/ And those blacks who opposed it, if it were measured, were probably less totalistic in their opposition than even Trump-supporting whites are. Because segregation was a real thing, it was mundane, not some mythologized horror.

8/ And when you peel the onion on many of the supposed crimes of segregation, you find that blacks and whites face a worse situation today. For example, the racial disparity in prisons is higher today than it was in 1960, and the former CSA states actually had a LOWER racial...

9/ ...disparity than the former Union states. Being unable to get a job, being unable to start a family - these were the actual stated crimes at the time. Such talk sounds absurd today when everyone is struggling to achieve what was once a crime to supposedly deny.

10/ And think about what's presented in schools today. The "back of the bus", the "whites only" diners, schools. Basically, the parallel white society. That's what they have to use today. They can talk wages but if you peel that onion, blacks had the same ratio for a given region

11/ that they lived in. If they talk about unemployment they'll have a REALLY bad time, especially if you start to needle modern measurements of unemployment. And there's no context to any of it. Okay, blacks in US vs. Romanians in 1950. Can't make that comparison, it's "invalid"

12/ But instead blacks in the US were somehow entitled to the same material existence as whites in the US? Some of the richest people on the planet? They were given their own parallel society, one which was richer than most European countries until recently.

13/ The propagandizing against segregation has morphed from "harm caused" to "a sin unto itself". Because if you break down segregation, the "harms" fall apart like a tissue. And it has since been transmuted into "segregation is a sin unto itself". And again, no context on it.

14/ Vietnam is richer than Laos. Or Ukraine and Poland. In fact I'm pretty sure the Vietnam-Laos & Ukraine-Poland gap is bigger than the US black-white gap ever was. Are Ukranians and Laotians being oppressed by Poles and Vietnamese for being "forced" into segregate countries?

15/ Or separate, apart. That's all "segregate" means. But once something is banned, it's then mythologized. Because the reality of it isn't readily apparent, and the void is filled by myth.