@prezbucky - I’ll agree that it’s not all about luck. But hard work and skill have a lot less to do with outcomes than we’d like to think. Or to put it another way – highly successful people do work hard (usually), no doubt about it. But there are a lot of people who also work hard, and never make it off the bottom rung, for a myriad of reasons which have nothing to do with their characters.
One can’t make a choice if there are no choices to make.
You can choose to work only if there is work and if someone chooses to hire you.
You can choose to get an education only if you have the means to do so and the proper K-12 (or alternative) prep.
You can choose to make healthy choices but only if you live in a house without lead/asbestos, in a clean community, in a community with access to healthy food, the list goes on.
“Most of us have little control of the family we are born into. A one-parent birth family, a dreadful school system – neither of which a child can improve with hard work or discipline – push the starting line way back, compared to those of us lucky enough not to start life with those hurdles.”
True, we cannot control the family circumstances into which we are born. However, we often (but not always) can control the circumstances that our children are born into.
“Low SES children have much more to overcome than middle or upper SES children do. Can we agree to that?”
Yes, I agree to that. However, I think it’s more a factor of what family situation people are born into, though obviously poverty follows young, single mothers of all races. I’d bet that many people here were born into lower class families, but that didn’t mean they were neglected or had a terrible living situation.
Great memory! We actually agree on the facts.
However, it is interesting to read how a teacher can subtly change something to make it seem like something that it was not, even if the facts are correct. Let me explain using the exact same facts:
I will start with a philosophical question first that provides the entire context: “If there were no United States, how could slavery be eliminated in the United States?” Well, obviously, it cannot since the United States would not exist. And this is where people forget to start.
Specifically, people forget that the 3/5ths compromise (and a couple other compromises) occurred in 1787 before there was a United States, and the goal of the Constitutional Convention was to form the country we now have.
- One problem was the southern colonies were refusing to join the new country if all "bodies" in their colonies were not counted for congressional purposes. There was one obvious major problem, i.e., slaves were not counted as people by the southern colonies, and thus they (the slaves) would NOT be represented by the Constitution, yet the southern states wanted slaves to count for constitutional representational purposes. That is just crass political maneuvering, and the northern colonies called the southern colonies on it.
It is not about being insulted; It is a straight-forward political calculation - who is stupid enough to give more political power to a group which one disagrees with? Simply, if slaves were counted as a full person for constitutional representational purposes, BUT were not represented in practice by the Constitution, it would effectively give the yet created southern states exaggerated congressional power per voting capita. no opposing political party would agree to that. Insulting is not even part of the equation - it is called protecting your political power and punishing your enemy by reducing his power!
- In addition, intertwined was another problem. The northern colonies were also trying to eliminate the slave trade - that is something that the history books often ignore and do not mention. The northern colonies (and some of the southern ones) actually wanted slavery abolished in the Constitution. This was a major fight of the Constitutional convention. I believe at this time 8 of the colonies had already abolished or banned slavery, but there were major southern holdouts.
- And another real sticky problem was southern slave colonies wanted escaped slaves returned.
The constitutional convention fight came to a head on these issues - Southern colonies did what any political bloc would do, they simply said that unless: 1) they get to keep slavery, 2) slaves were counted somehow for congressional purposes, and 3) escaped slaves were returned to their owners in the South, they would not join newly forming Republic.
THEREFORE, in order for the United States we have today to be “born,” the north and south colonies fashioned three compromises: 1) Congress could not wrote legislation abolishing slavery on the federal level for 20 years; 2) The 3/5ths compromise was agreed to and slaves were counted as 3/5ths of a person of southern congressional purposes; 3) And the Northwest Ordinance allowed escaped slaves found in the north to be returned to the south. That is the deal the northern colonies made in order for the holdout southern colonies to agree to the Constitution.
Think about this - without these three compromises, there would have been no ratification of the Constitution, and no formation of the United States in 1787and thus no Civil War to stamp out slavery for good.
Now, what makes more sense - the 3/5ths compromise was based on the northern colonies being insulted or when viewed together with the two other necessary compromises was actually an integral reason why the United States got formed? The effect of 3/5ths compromise was to reduce the number of southern reps as compared to if slaves were counted as full people. Or in congressional parlance, the south got only a 1/3 increase in the number of reps than it was asking for. The south was still the most powerful bloc, but much less so than it would have been.
Notice, same facts, but different understanding when all the pieces are put together. Saying the north was insulted is just another way for someone to imply that all the Founders were racist. But, the teacher probably did not say that slavery was already outlawed or banned in 8 of the colonies prior to that compromise.
So another question, if all the Founders were in support of slavery, and just merely insulted but he southern states request, why was slavery banned in so many colonies even before the 3/5ths compromise?
Facts are stubborn things.
Is “anti-intellectual” a code name for some political group these days?
“Anti-intellectual” is the code name for the religious right, as far as the author of this article goes. He is vehemently anti-religion.
I think that is tremendously simplistic. Many of these factors are interrelated, and controlling something for your children is not the same as controlling it for yourself. The fact that one can take conscious effort to improve their situation does not change the fact that the actual difficulty of that change can be heavily, heavily influenced by outside factors.
Then no doubt you will be able to find a good refutation, or otherwise your own skills in statistics and/or social science to refute it in a paper of your own. Soft or not, it is still a science and not properly refuted by “nuh uh!”
“I think that is tremendously simplistic. Many of these factors are interrelated, and controlling something for your children is not the same as controlling it for yourself. The fact that one can take conscious effort to improve their situation does not change the fact that the actual difficulty of that change can be heavily, heavily influenced by outside factors.”
Why yes, it is all related. And it is simple. Don’t have children while you are young and single. Period. It is much more difficult to have children when you are young, it makes your life so much tougher. It’s not like babies just pop spontaneously from your womb. It’s really not that difficult. Birth control, abortion, or…gasp…not having sex when you’re very young. If you must, pills or condoms are pretty easy to get ahold of, most places, and they are cheap. The reality is, many young women are purposefully choosing to have babies.
Making this unacceptable may seem cruel, but it’s more cruel to make it appear the norm. People of influence should be yelling it from the rooftops. Door to door birth control, whatever it takes. It would be worth whatever investment we can make. It actually is simple. Identify the problem, and work to solve it. Fat chance that is going to happen.
One can control their situation, but many refuse to try. If it hasn’t already been stated, laziness is very common, especially in the states. Heck, even when I suggested how good of an idea free CC for 2 years would be, I knew there would be people foolish enough not to take the opportunity if it were available. That’s one problem we have here in the US.
cosmicfish does have a point, though: Outside factors, usually negative, do play a heavy role in someone trying to better their life.
Ermmmm…I don’t recall writing at any point that “all the founders were in support of slavery”. Don’t make this too difficult, awtnctb. Instead, go back and read what I actually wrote, sans your own editorializing. I said that I had been taught in 10th grade Advanced American History that the 3/5 agreement was a compromise between the Northern and Southern delegations. Do you honestly believe that an advanced placement history class would leave out something as fundamental as the philosophical differences between the North and the South over the issue of slavery? That’s covered in most elementary school civic classes.
I did not go into great detail in describing all that we were taught in that class, but only that which I felt confident in having retained through the scrim of 30+ years of memory. Maybe I should have cheated and done of bit of web browsing on the subject prior to weighing in. And perhaps “insulted” was a poorly chosen word to describe the chagrin the North expressed over the proposal by Southern delegates to count their legal chattel as human solely for the purpose of Congressional representation, but I fail to see how it serves to suggest that ALL the founders were in support of slavery.
As far as whether or not the founders were all racists is concerned, I think there’s little reason to believe that they weren’t, given that they were all men of their times, and there prevailed a universal and unquestioned axiom that the white race was superior to the black one. To have argued otherwise would have been considered as preposturous as insisting that water isn’t wet. However, there was indeed vociferous disagreement as to the morality and humanity of the institution is slavery.
A main compromise to balance things was the Senate: the “Connecticut Compromise” gives each state 2 senators no matter the population of the state. These deals were necessary. John Adams, who absolutely hated slavery, was persuaded to compromise his moral principles to make a deal.
If I may, Franklin and some of the other Founders had it right: making a revolution is a messy business and reflects the compromises needed at that moment to keep people with disparate interests together. If Virginia hadn’t been a slave state, I think things would have come out very differently: the other Southern colonies didn’t have the strength to stand alone but with Virginia, the most populous, the most powerful colony at the time, they could extract the power necessary to protect their “peculiar institution”. They estimated where expansion would occur and thus which future areas might be slave or free and gained enough power in the House through the 3/5th compromise to make sure they could maintain and expand slavery. Then history threw a curveball: the end of the Atlantic slave trade in 1805 (if I remember the date), changed the internal dynamic dramatically. It was long thought that slavery would shrink in the original colonies, that as the nation expanded westward the settled areas along the coast would rely more on wage labor. But that idea depended on a supply of slaves for the interior of the South and now that need was served by the old slave states, which meant slave populations in the old colonies grew (fairly dramatically) and the value of young slaves, particularly fertile age women, increased dramatically. This sort-of-accident of history meant slavery became more, not less important, not because slave labor was in greater use in places like VA but because the value of the human chattel property rose so much. And that meant the arguments and conflict over which states would be slave grew more fierce and that hardened the positions and so … BTW, there was little academic work about this subject until recent years. An old book is the economic origins of the civil war, but there are now more popular accounts that talk about the domestic slave trade. A favorite is Carry Me Back, which is quite readable and well sourced.
As a note about history in general, I try to remember that people in the moment were just trying to live their lives. An example is the role pigs played in the destruction of native American society in the early colonies (and in King Philip’s War). Say you’re a hard-scrabble person trying to cut a living out of what was then “wilderness” - in quotes because it was inhabited in part. Early colonists actually settled around river mouths because they could let their cattle wade in among the wetlands to graze without having to create meadows. But when you move into the forests, you need animals for food beyond what you hunt. Pigs are an obvious choice. If you around pigs now, they’re always penned but you would have to cut down trees and make a pen and then gather food and tend the pigs. Better to let them run around and fend partly for themselves - remember, these are domesticated pigs, not boars, so they tend to stay around and will eat what you toss out while they forage. Problem: your native neighbors have crops and your pigs eat those crops and the native shoots your pig or takes you to court (actually happened) and then violence erupts because you’re too poor to keep your pigs penned and the natives need their food and tempers run hot and natives don’t get much justice in white courts and war breaks out and the natives are killed or run off. In part because poor people couldn’t afford the money or time to pen their pigs. I try to remember that people who owned slaves actually owned slaves so they didn’t think about slaves as we do: they were people but they were property. We can’t think that way today - though the Islamic State is reviving the idea with captured women.
As to anti-intellectualism, I think any “solution” so simple is the opposite of intellectual and thus is wrong. I have this conversation with a Constitutional law professor friend in the context of “originalism”, which we find an absurd idea except for the fact that it’s an attempt to impose limits rather than float with the wind. Example: how exactly is the idea that a corporation is a person “originalist”? Or that a corporation as a person has free speech rights? And that these free speech rights constitutionally express themselves as cash in politics? How can any of these things be “originalist” when Courts much closer in time to the actuality of the Constitution never found any of those?
If you’ll forgive a short further digression - a la Sterne’s Tristram Shandy? - the gay marriage opinions are perfect example of the way we use labels one way and then another. If indeed corporations are people, etc. though no Court had held such, then it’s because those rights have always existed and not been recognized previously because the human, American context didn’t expose them properly. Those who objected say the right is made up and those who won say it was always in there. Same with gay marriage: marriage is obviously a right because, using Originalist reasoning, it existed so commonly in society it didn’t require mention as a specific right, and now change in social context has revealed that gay people also have that right. It isn’t a new right but rather a recognition that gay people are actually full human beings and thus as full human beings they have the same right to marry as any other humans of age, not already married, etc. I included those last bits because societies put restrictions on marriage so children can’t marry (sometimes without consent), etc. but those apply to all human beings who can marry and thus they’d apply to gay people as well (so a 12 year old gay person can’t marry). To one side, this is a “new right” that never existed and to the other it’s obviously an existing right exposed by the context of the times just as black people were seen over time to be full human beings, just as corporations came to be seen as people. And one side says the other is anti-intellectual and the other side says the other is anti-intellectual.
Poetsheart, Alexander Hamilton was the only founding father I know of who was not merely an abolitionist, but affirmatively believed and stated that white and black people had exactly the same mental and other capacities. Of course, there have long been theories that through his maternal grandmother, he was part black and/or part Jewish himself. (He was born and spent his childhood in the Caribbean island of Nevis until he became an orphan in his teens and emigrated to the American colonies.)
@ awcntdb:
The battle over the value of slaves in terms of the census was a political battle as you say, and in a sense had nothing to do with defining blacks as ‘less than whites’. The anti slavery people in Congress wanted slaves to count as nothing, the stated reason was that as property, slaves had nothing to do with apportionment for voting persons, since property could not vote (property, despite what some say, was not used in voting, it was used in taxation, though). If slaves had been counted in full, as the slaveholders wanted, it would have given more political power to the South. The anti slavery people wanted 0, arguing slaves were property, because they didn’t want the south to have that kind of power in the house and the electoral college.
The one thing that leaves out is the Senate system gave undo power to the South already, so the issue with the house was kind of moot. Because the south had more senators than the northern states did, thanks to the 2 per rule, they already had outsize power in the Senate (which remember, was not elected, and had de facto veto power over the house and didn’t have to worry about political ramifications), and also in the electoral college as well.
The 3/5ths itself was typical of the constitution, it was not a magic number, it was a compromise cooked up to split the difference between the two sides. The racism wasn’t in the number, the racism was that slaves existed at all. There was racism in the north, the anti slavery northerners (since not all northerners were anti slavery, as not all southerners were pro slavery) might have seen this as a way to end slavery, by making them valueless, there also were not a small number of northerners who saw the slaves as property and didn’t want that counted, the way horses and houses and such were not counted in terms of apportionment, which obviously is racist. The constitution is full of less than great compromises in many ways, the electoral system is an albatross, in large part because it was never fully defined and left the apportionment of that to the states, the senate with 2/state is not exactly democratic, it violates 1 man, 1 vote, the fact that the constitution was wishy/washy with outlawing slaves (it states that importation was to end in 1808, but it deliberately didn’t say anything about the breeding of new slaves or abolishing the horrible law that someone was born into slavery if his/her parents were).
The reality is that had slaves been made a non person, a full person, or 3/5ths of one, didn’t really matter much in the political system, there would have been a standoff the way it happened, because of the senate, and as a result things would have played out the same way. There would have been more conflict between the house and senate, but in the end the same thing would have happened.
Now if you want to see a perfect case of anti intellectualism, or rather sloppy non intellectualism, read this one from a right wing website:
http://americanvision.org/3918/the-original-constitution-and-the-three-fifths-myth/
The writer isn’t wrong about the 3/5ths, but his ranting about Democrats and Republicans is idiotic, he i s implying that this was part of the process of the 3/5ths being in the constitution, how Democrats wanted full representation based on slaves and the Republican abolutionists wanted none…the problem with that is so manifold it isn’t funny, the big one being that at the time of the constitution, there were no political parties, let along the Democrats and republicans. The Democrats came out of the old “Democrat/Republican” party of Jefferson, the GOP didn’t come about until the collapse of the Whigs in the 1850’s, whose roots were in the old Federalist party…the writer is right that the 3/5ths was about political power, but it also simplifies what those who wanted it to be 0 felt about that, some were abolitiionist, some simply saw slaves as property that had no meaning in apportionment (it did in the right to vote, but that is a state issue, not federal).
I think the problem of intellectualism is the belief they have the answer for our problems without remembering the past when other intellectual promises were made and the promised results have never materialized,. The 20s had Eugenics, the 60s had the promise of the Best and Brightest, Peace in our Times after every war, economic down cycle has been eliminated, etc.
Of course we can’t forget all the food warnings we get which the government comes back and tells us never mind and our recommended substitute was worse than the original food.
After all, they were the Founding Fathers. 
" the thing about intellectualism is that there is always the right to dissent."
Really? Not anymore, by many people who consider themselves intellectual. If you have a differing opinion, you are racist, sexist, homophobic, Uncle Tom, nitwit, idiot.
Not only will we shut you up, we will shut you down. We will get you fired, and destroy your business.
I see all the posts and will read later tonight.
Not sure it is possible to respond given so much info, but I will pick and choose short specifics if I think warranted. I believe the major benefit is that everyone gets to read other points of view, not necessarily to keep going back and forth where it is clear we disagree. Thanks for taking the time to present your viewpoints.
Also, I assume you all caught the nomenclature error in my Post #203. I caught it after the editing time ran out, so did not get to change. I kept writing “colonies” when I meant to write “states.” So much for writing when one should be sleeping instead.
MODERATOR’S NOTE: Stay away from political commentary, please, or the thread will be closed.
No. If you are racist, sexist, homophobic…you are racist, sexist, homophobic.