Jeremiah

The first is that it seems to hold people to a very high standard.

At a societal level, I'm glad they even noticed the conflict and tried to take coordinated action to address it at all.

A lot of problems never make it that far.

And expecting people with no background in history to notice historical trends extending into times they weren't alive for, especially ones going back before modern digital record-keeping that they can easily Google, is a lot to ask.

The second is that, well, imagine there's a slave on a southern plantation being whipped.

Yes, in a certain sense, the master holding the whip...

is not unusual from any other master holding any other whip on any other plantation.

And the system of slavery implemented across all of those plantations is not unusual from any other systems of slavery that have existed across human history.

In a sense, yes, the slave's real problem is with the institution of slavery itself, or the facets of human nature and economics that make it a recurring pattern across human societies.

That's the real villain here.

But I don't think that he's wrong to also hate or to blame the individual person holding the whip.

Scott writes, I find this a useful framing too.

Don't hate the player, hate the game, but if the game is bad enough, hating the player is a natural human response.

This does, however, remind me of the following story, which I recently encountered on Twitter, hat-tip DocNito, and I can't stop thinking about.

Quote,

In 1767, two princes, in quotes, of a ruling family in the port of Old Calabar, on the slave coast of Africa, were ambushed and captured by English slavers.

The princes, little Ephraim Robin John and Ancona Robin Robin John, were themselves slave traders who were betrayed by African competitors, and so began their own extraordinary odyssey of enslavement.

Their story, written in their own hand, survives as a rare first-hand account of the Atlantic slave experience.

Randy J. Sparks made the remarkable discovery of the prince's correspondence and has managed to reconstruct their adventures from it.

They were transported from the coast of Africa to Dominica, where they were sold to a French physician.