The letters you're referring to were written in 1753 and 1755, and has he got older, his views on race softened to the point that he was an outright abolitionist by the end of his life. In 1763 he wrote the following in a letter:
This is chiefly to acquaint you, that I have visited the Negro School here in Company with the Revd. Mr. Sturgeon and some others; and had the Children thoroughly examin’d. They appear’d all to have made considerable Progress in Reading for the Time they had respectively been in the School, and most of them answer’d readily and well the Questions of the Catechism; they behav’d very orderly, showd a proper Respect and ready Obedience to the Mistress, and seem’d very attentive to, and a good deal affected by, a serious Exhortation with which Mr. Sturgeon concluded our Visit. I was on the whole much pleas’d, and from what I then saw, have conceiv’d a higher Opinion of the natural Capacities of the black Race, than I had ever before entertained. Their Apprehension seems as quick, their Memory as strong, and their Docility in every Respect equal to that of white Children.1 You will wonder perhaps that I should ever doubt it, and I will not undertake to justify all my Prejudices, nor to account for them.
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I'm not sure that really that excuses being so racist that he thought _Germans_ weren't sufficiently white for america in his 50s, but he did change his views over time.
That's my point, if you're going to be remotely fair when judging people from a radically different society you have to "grade them on a curve" so to speak. Otherwise, according to the prevailing modern social mores, not a single decent person existed prior to the 1960s or so
That's ahistorical. I'd say Martin Luther King seemed like a fairly decent fellow. Also Rosa Parks, Medgar Evers, Harry Belafonte, J Waties Waring, Andrew Goodman and so on.
But those people are all from the 20th century, historically speaking still quite recent and relatable. I think you'd be hard-pressed to pluck anyone from a truly different time/place (relative to the modern west) and have their moral standards hold up to modern scrutiny, and if you could they'd be a notable exception and not the rule
Well, you have Richelieu's famous quote about six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men and whatnot, but let's just say I think you're wrong.
You're simultaneously underestimating the people who were here before us and our ability to adequately scrutinize their moral fiber. Of course, if by "people", "person" or "anyone", you mean the powerful, wealthy elite of the US, it's another thing entirely.
Its possible that I'm underestimating our ability to fairly judge their moral fiber, but I did not mean to imply that the moral compass of all those who came before is genuinely worse than ours. Quite the opposite, I'm saying many great and noble people who's heart was in the right place are unfairly maligned by future generations for the moral failings of their society as a whole.
A lot of the world had hospitality rules and treated outsiders kindly. Lots of people were allowed to come and go as they pleased they actually provide interesting reads. Borders as we understand them today were invented in the 18/1900s. Mass slavery spanning multiple continents and racism on that magnitude hasn't happened since and hopefully won't happen again (except maybe Rome & Egypt but that wasn't trans continental)
One doesn't exclude the other. You / anybody could be most welcoming to visitors and have your slaves serve them the best you had and treat them very well. Norms change, sometimes shockingly, and even within one's lifespan. Now young generations will most probably realize this when they will become out of touch and rejected by new young generation in maybe 2 decades.
Right, but I'm not saying that these people believe racism still exists somewhere out there, I'm saying they believe that racism is in every person's heart. That would seem to make it ineliminable, which seemingly deflates the purpose to care about racism. Ironically, such people claim to care the most about racism.
I mean, every able bodied person is capable of murder, we cannot get rid of it, and yet we spend a lot of time and effort to make sure people aren't out there doing it.
This analogy fails because virtually everyone goes through life without becoming a murderer, where these people believe literally no one goes through life without being racist. A better analogy would be: is it reasonable to condemn people that refuse to stop being gay? If you really believe it's just something you are, that's part of your core and can't be eliminated...
"Wow, that guys wife is hot and I thought about having sex with her, oh no I guess that means I am an adulterer so I might as well actually have sex with her".
If you turn off binary thinking and start thinking in degrees of effect, the fact you may naturally have some aversion to people that are not like you isn't a fucking excuse to genocide a group of people because of what they look like.
Almost all the excuses worded like the ones above that I've seen are from hard racists on why they shouldn't have to change there harmful behavior to others by wrapping in infantile sayings like "Jon was born gay and I was born to burn crosses".
I mean, if you're trying to point out that the people who believe that everyone is racist is a silly belief because it leads to absurdities, then I agree, welcome to the club. My point is not to justify that thinking, but to point out that they exist and so, to them, moral progress is apparently a fiction and so claims of "who wasn't racist in the past?" is not persuasive evidence that we're better now.
People will read scientific information in ways to support their prejudices.
Franklin would not be different.
We like to idolize these historical figures but if this guy was alive nowadays he'd probably be rage posting in alt-right forums only accessible on the dark-web.
Well, Franklin helped pull off a massive treason against the Rightful Authority of the crown. He would probably be all for toppling our government, and for insurrection.
I kind of think the opposite, that people will basically end up at whatever social status they would be regardless of system so he would just have modern day elite views (instead of mainstream modern day elite views of his time).
Just like people today who think they would have resisted the nazis in 1930s Germany but hold all mainstream opinions in the modern day
>> rage posting in alt-right forums only accessible on the dark-web.
Nah. True rage posters don't have the attention span for Tor. They want the instant feedback of X. And for all the talk of echo chambers, they want to get people angry. So they want their material to be discoverable by outsiders. So, again, X.
