Christopher Brown
speaker
1,098 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2026
last heard 20 Jan
Christopher Brown’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
as a way of revealing a character flaw in your political opponents.
That's how it begins.
Well, so one of the things that happens, of course, is that using the issue this way draws attention to the institution of slavery.
People start thinking about it and sort of like, why do we justify this?
What are the grounds for it?
There's a kind of a secondary set of discussions that take place that are specifically about slavery that are enabled, inspired by these political arguments.
So, you know, scholars have long understood that it's in the 1770s that there's a kind of anti-slavery discourse that's emerging that
And it's emerging at this moment precisely because of the political importance that it acquires.
But the thing that I also think is just so important is that when you position something as a sign of— Depravity?
Thank you, of depravity, yes.
To oppose it is to say something about your virtue, right?
And so what starts to happen is a kind of a positioning—
of, especially first on the American side, when we declare independence, we are also going to be setting slavery on course for extinction.
They either don't mean it or don't realize they don't mean it, or there are some people who mean it kind of, but it becomes something really useful to say, rhetorically, in the fight against Britain.
And the British, on the other hand, at least on the British side,
It happens later there, but ultimately what starts to happen is that the American commitment to slaveholding is proof positive that Britain is different and therefore has a right to rule.
I see.
Well, it's not so much that it's not permitted.
It's that it's...
It's actually literally not permitted in this sense.
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