Thread by @Freesoilyeah

I had an epiphany that needs to be better generally known.

It started with a few "strange facts", and there are two sides to it.

The first is that blacks were taller than free whites during slavery. This is important. Very important, as it's a reflection of nutrition, which...

... in pre-industrial times is used as an indicator of general wealth before modern or modern-ish econometrics existed.

And black life expectancy relative to whites after age 8 was better than it is today. That's complicated because it's lower if you count years before age 8.

Blacks have a higher infant mortality rate than whites TODAY, but, that doesn't impact life expectancy as it used to. The literacy of blacks in the US was around 20% by emancipation, vs. ~40% for southern whites.

Now when talking to normies, this seems like it reflects better educational opportunities for free whites in the south than for blacks slaves. But not necessarily given genetic differences - which is a whole ball of wax that reframes EVERYTHING.

On the whole, literacy-opportunity was probably about the same between free whites in the south and black slaves.

Moreover, after 1865, most blacks chose to keep working for their former "masters" for a wage, and these plantations didn't go bankrupt.

Based on the profitability of plantations, black slaves in agriculture were getting about 90% of what they produced. Given that plantations were probably on better land and they had better economies of scale, this all points to material conditions better than free whites in...

... the south. So that's one side of it - the measurable material standards of living was pretty close, if not better, for black slaves than free whites. Moreover, there's all sorts of narrative that the slaveowners preferred their slaves to free whites.

Which shouldn't seem too far-fetched. And following emancipation, most black writers commented that this period was "worse than slavery" - which makes sense, as slavery probably wasn't very bad in strictly material terms. But what it did was thrust black slaves into the general..

... free white population of the south. McWhiney describes these people with a narrative-deluge of accounts, with at least one piece of statistical data, that free whites in the south were extremely violent, but in an "honor code" way. They would fight or duel at the slightest...

...insult. But then, if you're black, having lived "protected" on a plantation, now you have to deal with Irish-Scottish-Welsh descended people who would kill you at the slightest disrespect. Something which Northern whites looked down on.

I think the Southern Plantation class was moreso Anglo-descended, and thus didn't carry the "extreme honor" norms from the Celtic fringe that most of the Southern white population had. I.e. they were more like Northern whites.

But with the collapse of the plantations after the war - well, about half of them - suddenly these former slaves were no longer a, in some ways, privileged class, or at least protected class. This is also when you start to see anti-black sentiment in the south - after 1865.

And it's kinda my fault for having taken so long to see this, because I kinda just dismissed the ocean of accounts of southern whites being brutes. But if you LISTEN to what they literally say, they say:
- This is "worse than slavery" (of course, b/c slavery wasn't actually bad).

- Plantation owners saying southern whites are bigger brutes than the black slaves.
- Black slaves singing "I'd rather be a nigger than a poor white man"

And I say to take these things seriously, don't just dismiss them based on how things are framed in modern times.

Which then creates a very different view of things. Black slaves had it pretty well on the plantations. One thing that's forgotten is that things like branding, flogging, being put in stocks were normal punishments for crimes generally. So a black man who was subject to these...

things is not necessarily unique. And given what we know about race and crime, well, the important factor would be the numbers. The kinds of punishments blacks on plantations received were not QUALTIATIVELY different from how things were done, esp. in the south, generally.

And I have a hunch - that once cut loose into the wider world, blacks in the south started getting flogged, pilloried and yes hanged a lot more than when they were slaves and worked under a more gentile "massa".

This also puts the Emmit Till affair in a different context. First off, Emmit Till didn't just "whistle at a white woman", that's a myth. He did a lot more.

Now there's no shortage of accounts of men being killed for that. So killing Emmit Till over that was not abnormal.

Ironically, the slave-owners, retconned as the most anti-black people there ever were, actually shielded blacks from southern whites. And the war took down that shield.