How Long Would It Take?

[Joshism]

Reading yesterday's blog post by @PatYoung I started wondering: how long would it have taken?

In 1865, the vast majority of white Southerners earnestly believed whites were inherently superior to blacks. They believed various stereotypes about the laziness, barbarousness, etc. of blacks. Their northern counterparts were by no means immune to this, but many had their opinions changed by the USCT, as others would later by the Buffalo Soldiers of later wars on through WW2.

Let us suppose the North had the willpower to enforce some semblance of civil rights in the South for an extended period of time (I don't think they did, but let's imagine). How long would it have taken most of the white Southerners to come around to some semblance of accepting the equality, at least legally, maybe socially, of black and white? A generation? Two generations?

Keep in mind this is without any equivalent to denazification (deslavificiation?) for the South. That isn't simply improbably, but both too ahead of its time to be remotely plausible and the North simply didn't have enough of a morale high ground on the issue to pull it off.

Do we have any frame of reference? Has any another country effectively overcome centuries of deeply-ingrained stratified racism? Is South Africa the closest example? Or maybe the change of opinions about the Irish - from only one step above an African American in much of the public's mindset to everyone loves St. Patrick's Day?

 

[Joshism]

I thought I had included a link to the blog post in question, but something apparently went wrong. It's here: https://thereconstructionera.com/op...white-victimization-to-oppose-black-equality/

 

[diane]

There's an interesting, very short, article about this type of problem in a society from the BBC:

What is India's caste system?

India's complex caste system is among the world's oldest forms of surviving social stratification.

www.bbc.com

One point noted in this very, very simplified example is the usefulness of the caste system to the British colonial power. It was more firmly set after their arrival and was a good tool to separate - unified people are hard to control. This may be translated to what happened when Union troops withdrew from the South, when Grant failed to effectively deal with white supremacist groups. These groups were able to retain white power for the next 100 years, giving barely lip service to the 14th Amendment. It required the Civil Rights Act in the 60s and federal troops to begin dismantling the remnants of the antebellum South. The social stratification affected many whites as well but blacks most keenly.

There is also reference in Pat's blog to the application of Reconstruction in the West. That is pertinent to the discussion because, under the 14th Amendment, blacks were now citizens but Natives were not. The non-compliance of white Southerners with the government, and the government's disregard of Native nations isn't apples and oranges, but quite peas in the same pod! Again, as in the South, many Western states and territories were able to interpret federal policy and law as they saw fit with little if any federal input.

 

[5fish]

We have to look at Brazil for they were the last to end slavery...

Slavery in Brazil

www.wilsoncenter.org

.

The legal end of slavery in Brazil did little to change the lives of many Afro-Brazilians. Brazil’s abolitionist movement was timid and removed, in part because it was an urban movement at a time when most slaves worked on rural properties. Yet the abolitionist movement was also more concerned with freeing the white population from what had come to be viewed as the burden of slavery. Abolitionist leaders were unconcerned with the aftermath of abolition. There were no policies to promote integration, or plans to help former enslaved persons become full citizens through providing access to education, land, or employment.

Indeed, Brazilian elites largely opposed to the idea that Brazil would have a majority Afro-Brazilian citizenry. After slavery was formally abolished as a legal institution, the government implemented a policy of branqueamento, or “whitening”—a state-sponsored attempt to “improve the bloodline” through immigration: Brazil was to accept only white Europeans or Asian immigrants. Meanwhile, with nowhere to go and no other way to earn a living, many freed slaves entered into informal agreements with their former owners. These amounted to food and shelter in exchange for free labor, thereby maintaining the status quo.

Today, vestiges of the slave system can still be witnessed in Brazilian society. It is not a coincidence that only 53 percent of the Brazilian population identify as Afro-Brazilian or mixed, but make up two-thirds of incarcerated individuals and 76 percent of the poorest segment of the population. More than any other nation in the Americas, Brazil was profoundly shaped by slavery—a legacy that the country still struggles to address more than 350 years after the first enslaved African landed on its shores.

Here is this... they did it in phases...

Slavery in Brazil

www.wilsoncenter.org

.

In 1871, the Brazilian Parliament passed the so-called “Free Womb Law,” declaring that all children born to enslaved women would be free. However, children had to work for their parents’ owners until they were adults in order to “compensate” the owners. At the time, many notaries–with the knowledge of local parishes–forged birth certificates to prove that child slaves were born before the law had been passed. According to Joaquim Nabuco, a lawyer and abolitionist leader, thanks to this piece of legislation alone, slavery would remain in effect in Brazil until the 1930s.

In 1884, a new law came into effect that freed enslaved persons who were 60 years of age or older. More perverse than the latter, this law gave owners the power to abandon enslaved persons once they had become less productive and more susceptible to diseases. Moreover, it was rare that an enslaved person even made it to his or her 60th birthday.

The Catholic Church ended its support of slavery by 1887, and not long after the Portuguese Crown began to position itself against it. On May 13, 1888, the remaining 700,000 enslaved persons in Brazil were freed.