This sounds like a pretty cool book from Gene Dattel, a Vanderbilt Law alumnus who grew up in Mississippi. The AP reports on Dattel’s book, “Cotton and Race in the Making of America: The Human Costs of Economic Power,” and calls it “a compelling story of how the cash crop shaped the 19th-century global economy and magnified the United States’ racial problems.”
The AP says the book focuses “more on money than morality,” but the review focuses on the latter, mostly. I am always intrigued by histories like these, particularly since I took an economics history course last spring that covered a lot of the economics of slavery. What pulls me in here is that Dattel seems to be telling a larger story about the cotton market and how perferences and demand shaped the continuation of the institution of slavery just as much (or perhaps more than) the racism elements in the South. History of economic institutions can’t be explained entirely by economics, but there can also be too much emphasis on non-economic factors, as well. Getting the story right should be the aim of economic historians, not playing into a bias toward one factor or trying to achieve an artificial balance between all factors.
One aspect of this story that does bother me, however, comes from the interview with the NAACP legal defense fund representative, Lee A. Daniels. Daniels notes approvingly that Dattel’s book addresses the fact that the South was not the lone culprit when it came to racism. This is something I’ve always thought while learning history growing up–the South had slavery and then Jim Crow, but all of the major race riots took place up north in Boston, Philadelphia, Cincinnati, etc. Racism wasn’t and still isn’t a regional problem but a societal problem.
Still, Daniels seems to take some glee in this fact:
Daniels said Dattel challenges a broadly held belief that racial oppression was limited by geography or carried out only by certain groups of people — an assumption Daniels said is “one of the ways America takes comfort from its slave past.”
“In fact, all of America condoned, really, the oppression of all black people,” said Daniels, who read Dattel’s book upon the recommendation of a friend.
This is why folks like the NAACP grate on me. They seem to be joyful whenever something else proves that America is a racist country, through and through. Perhaps this is because it allows them to continue to prosper in their race-baiting industry years after the Civil Rights movement achieved so much for race relations in this country. Too often, America’s history of racism is used to condemn our nation from the outside, as if slavery discounts the virtues of the founding ideas. It reminds me of Rev. Jeremiah “God Damn AmeriKKKa” Wright and 9/11 being America’s “chickens coming home to roost.” I’d prefer the internal critiques, whereby we hold ourselves and our history up against the ideals on which this country was founded. We should place value in that ideal America; we shouldn’t devalue America because we sometimes fail to uphold those ideals. Plenty of folks do this, I think, but you still have your America-hatin’ culprits out there.
Bottom line: let’s get our history right and our focus on the opportunities of life in the United States.
