- Thaddeus Russell? That would be the Thaddeus Russell who summed up some of up his ideas in passages like this, in a recent article in the Huffington Post?
(link for the material quoted below: https://bennorton.com/thaddeus-russel-s-right-wing-libertarian-historical-revisionism/)
“I argued not only that many white Americans envied slaves but also that they did so for good reason, since slave culture offered many liberating alternatives to the highly repressive, work-obsessed, anti-sex culture of the early United States. I demonstrated that prostitutes, not feminists, won virtually all the freedoms that were denied to women but are now taken for granted.”
The Thaddeus Russell who gave a talk in which his key points on U.S. labor were these(as described by the writer in the link):
- He argues many workers have the weekend off in the US not because countless workers, leftists, and labor organizers fought and died for it, but rather because lazy drunkards simply refused to show up for work.
- In completely backward history, Russell insists that people work so many hours in the US (more than in other comparable industrialized nations) because of the “Protestant work ethic,” not because capitalists force them to work as much as possible to maximize profit, justifying it using the bourgeois “Protestant work ethic” — an ethic that is much more a product of economics than it is religion or culture.
- He argues France has a shorter working day than the US because it supposedly doesn’t have a legacy of puritanism and the “Protestant work ethic,” not because of a history of strong leftist movements and labor organizing.
The Thaddeus Russell who denies that organizing and political and economic struggle play NO meaningful role in achieving social change?
THAT is your go-to guy on racial history in tis country
2. If Dr. King did give those sermons-and given that your source for that is Thaddeus “women were freed by sex work, not feminism” Russell…so what? Preachers traditionally talk about what they see as sin when they give their sermons. In the Fifties, you’d have seen white preachers giving sermons like that all over the country-in many places you STILL white preachers giving sermons like that? In any case, Dr. King would simply have been saying that some people in the congregations he preached to did things a Baptist preacher would be required to describe as sinful. He did NOT argue, as your quote of Mr. Russell implies, that the black community was collectively morally inferior to the white community, OR that white people were entitled to look down on black people, or that any of the things listed in those sermons somehow justified Jim Crow. It’s not as though black people were not entitled to freedom until they achieved sainthood.
3. The fact that a handful of African countries played a role in the slave trade does not mean that there is moral equivalence between black people and white people in the history of the slave trade. That trade only reached the level of magnitude it did in this country because of the singular way white people stripped everyone else of their fundamental human equality.
4. If anything is better in this country now, it is solely because people organized and struggled collectively for change and forced our political leaders to agree to some of the changes that are needed. No social improvement ever came of the Voting Rights Act being diluted down to nothing, or from tax cuts for the rich, or from the labor movement being weakened. Any meaningful change comes from people getting together and heroically working for it from below-sometimes at the cost of their own lives.
5. None of the changes that might come from having an honest conversation about racism would do you or me or any other white person any harm. We would lose nothing from all of us agreeing that it’s enough to simply live as one equal, decent, basically good person in a land of other equal, decent, basically good people of all races, creeds, identities, genders and all other forms of difference being free to all live on our own terms without fear of retribution or repression, and without fear of want.
