Has David Starkey gone mad?

[Ayahuasca]

The historian has always seemed irascible and cantankerous, but now he has said that slavery was not genocide (a reasonable point) because ‘so many damn blacks survived’.

I think I know what he was trying to convey - that slavery was not genocide because there was no attempt to wipe out a race. That is a perfectly defendable position. But ‘damn blacks’? He has just committed professional suicide. I doubt we will hear much from him again.

[Ayahuasca]

Zirconia said:

I am sure all those poor souls that have been abused and killed for generations and traded like cattle by people like those that end up in Bristol docks will like to know a dictionary is the definition they need.

Slavery and Genocide are both bad things. It does not make them the same bad thing.

[Ayahuasca]

Starkey is not in trouble because of his views on genocide and slavery.

He is in trouble because he said ‘damn blacks’ rather than ‘blacks’.

That is not being contrarian, that - in the current tinderbox climate - is being stupid.

[Ayahuasca]

Esceptico said:

For some time it has been accepted that race, as a biological concept, doesn’t really exist as DNA analyses show that there is no homogeneity within perceived racial groups. Race is now seen as a social construct based mainly on shared culture.

The African slave trade did involve the deliberate destruction of part of African races as they were forcibly removed from Africa and had their culture and language taken from them.

If Hitler has decided to eliminate Jews not by killing them but by forcibly sterilising them all (so stopping the Jewish culture from being passed on) would that not also have been genocide?

So skin colour is just a social construct? Of course ‘race’ exists, and without race there can be no racism can there?

The African slave traders could not care less about eliminating the slaves’ culture, it was purely a financial transaction. And only a small percentage of Africans were enslaved. Evil, certainly. Not genocide (which is also evil, but a different evil).

Hitler sterilising jews genocide? Perhaps. What if he just forcibly converted them to Christianity? Is that also genocide?

As I said in my OP, whether slavery was or wasn’t genocide is a fair topic for rational discussion and argument.

Where Starkey had a moment of madness was referring to black people as “damned blacks”.

[Ayahuasca]

The UN definition of genocide is:

...acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
Killing members of the group;
Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.

_____-

The purpose of American / Caribbean slavery was to work the tobacco, cotton and sugar plantations. A totally different sort of evil.

Starkey must have had a senior moment if the best argument he could come up with to make that point - especially in the current situation where eggshells are being trodden on - is that so many damn blacks survived.