Teaching about cotton is apparently offensive
This doesn’t appear to be some sort of spoof:
A cotton plant growing at Campbell Elementary School [in Arlington, Virginia] drew criticism online today, but Arlington Public Schools said allegations that staff were going to make kids “pick cotton” was a misunderstanding.
“At no time, never, was the school going to have students pick cotton,” said APS spokesman Frank Bellavia.
That prompts me to ask the following question: If the staff had said they were going to make only the white students pick cotton, would those same now-outraged people have applauded them?
Continuing:
Catherine Ashby, the Director of Communications for APS, tells ARLnow that a teacher planted cotton seeds in pots as an experiment to see how they would grow. Social media posts about the experiment from the teacher prompted objections from other educators.
“She tweeted about her experiment and what she was growing, and that’s what got other staff members upset about what she was doing,” said Ashby.
Social media again. The center of our outrage age.
More [emphasis mine]:
Community members started talking online about the incident after an email circulated from Campbell Principal Maureen Nesselrode, who called a staff meeting to discuss what to do with the plant. Bellavia said the plant was destroyed after the meeting.
So the modern Red Guards aren’t content with just destroying reputations of living people or statues of dead people. Offending plants must be destroyed.
By the way, the history of slavery and cotton are indeed intertwined—not that that’s any fault of the cotton. But Founding Fathers who thought (and/or hoped) that slavery might dwindle away in some sort of natural process over time didn’t account for the invention of the cotton gin, which gave slavery a huge boost of energy for a while:
The invention of the cotton gin caused massive growth in the production of cotton in the United States, concentrated mostly in the South. Cotton production expanded from 750,000 bales in 1830 to 2.85 million bales in 1850. As a result, the region became even more dependent on plantations and slavery, with plantation agriculture becoming the largest sector of its economy. While it took a single slave about ten hours to separate a single pound of fiber from the seeds, a team of two or three slaves using a cotton gin could produce around fifty pounds of cotton in just one day. The number of slaves rose in concert with the increase in cotton production, increasing from around 700,000 in 1790 to around 3.2 million in 1850. By 1860, black slave labor from the American South was providing two-thirds of the world’s supply of cotton, and up to 80% of the crucial British market. The cotton gin thus “transformed cotton as a crop and the American South into the globe’s first agricultural powerhouse”.
Because of its inadvertent effect on American slavery, and on its ensuring that the South’s economy developed in the direction of plantation-based agriculture (while encouraging the growth of the textile industry elsewhere, such as in the North), the invention of the cotton gin is frequently cited as one of the indirect causes of the American Civil War.
I wonder whether the cotton-objectors ever wear clothing made of cotton? I think to be ethically consistent they really need to purge King Cotton from their lives entirely.
[NOTE: By the way, that King Cotton link contains a lot of very interesting information, such as this:
When war broke out, the Confederates refused to allow the export of cotton to Europe. The idea was that this cotton diplomacy would force Europe to intervene. However, European states did not intervene, and following Abraham Lincoln’s decision to impose a Union blockade, the South was unable to market its millions of bales of cotton. The production of cotton increased in other parts of the world, such as India and Egypt, to meet the demand, and new profits in cotton were among the motives of the Russian conquest of Central Asia. A British-owned newspaper, The Standard of Buenos Aires, in cooperation with the Manchester Cotton Supply Association succeeded in encouraging Argentinian farmers to drastically increase production of cotton in that country and export it to the United Kingdom…
Stanley Lebergott (1983) shows the South blundered during the war because it clung too long to faith in King Cotton. Because the South’s long-range goal was a world monopoly of cotton, it devoted valuable land and slave labor to growing cotton instead of urgently needed foodstuffs.
In the end, “King Cotton” proved to be a delusion that misled the Confederacy into a hopeless war that it ended up losing.
Watch out for that law of unintended consequences.]
I grew up in Phoenix, Arizona. Surrounding the city were many irrigated cotton fields, which in the 1950s and 1960s were certainly never picked by slaves. They had mechanized harvesting and, of course, mechanical separation of the cotton from the seeds.
What would these idiots in Arlington, Virginia, prefer people to wear? Synthetics? Cotton is comfortable and natural, which I thought such people favored. Sheesh.
Trump’s tariffs anyone?
Also: the South was very upset about the tariffs on imported goods, which affected them much more than the North because of their lack of industry.
But, there was no law prohibiting the South from creating factories…indeed, some entrepreneurs did, but the idea never got a lot of traction. Why? First, social status was much more associated with agriculture than in industry, second, skilled workers from Germany and the North were reluctant to relocate to a slave region.
The effort to erase history is truly Orwellian. I’ve given up trying to figure out why these outraged folks choose this tactic of protest.
Exactly correct Neo. With the possible exception of fur trapping, I think tobacco production was the first big cash producer for the early colonies. First crop harvested in 1612.
Charlotte is still something of a banking hub today, because… The first American gold rush was in North Carolina in 1799.
____
This cotton plant in a pot thing is as stupid as leftists idolizing the economy of Norway which is the biggest oil producer per capita on the planet. Helloooh!
That prompts me to ask the following question: If the staff had said they were going to make only the white students pick cotton, would those same now-outraged people have applauded them?
After the Civil War, there were whites who picked cotton. My mother had first cousins who picked cotton during their teenage summers in North Texas- this would have been in the 1910s to early 1920s. Their mother was twice widowed, so money was short. One cousin became a schoolteacher; the other married an Army officer.
When I was 10 years old and our family was visiting our grandmother, I was very pleased when a neighbor gave me a cotton boll. Cotton harvesting was mechanized by then.
I would add that I heard this cotton-picking account directly from my mother’s cousins.
Can’t see the reaction as a tactic steve walsh (which would imply actual thought about aims and means), but as something more like a knee-jerk, the reflex of emotional infantiles teaching emotional infantilism to their unfortunate charges.
The larger societal issue to me is that so many large companies or governmental agencies continue to treat social media and especially twitter as representative of society as a whole.
It is not. Not even close.
But it leads to really warped reactions and decisions that are very damaging.
Apparently 20% of people are on twitter (seems high to me but ok) and only about 10% are active. But those people drive all kinds of decisions and shape major gov’t and corporate policies.
It also leads to election miscalculations as people, once again, get a false read on societal opinion.
The correct response for these large organizations is to do nothing and wait for the mob to move on in a day or two.
And usually all will be forgotten because most people are too busy with real life to care and the others are exhibiting false outrage which just gets transferred to the next target and then the next and so on…
@sdferr
You’re probably correct and I’m guilty of giving these folks too much credit for actual thinking.
A statement from Virginia’s moonwalkin’ governor is in order.
Am i still allowed to like Degas’ “A Cotton Office in New Orleans?”
We are raising kids to be ignorant and calling it virtue. Sugar plantations were at one time very economically important in the Caribbean islands. Tobacco was the main export from the Virginia colony, while colonial South Carolina exported indigo and rice. Conditions were very different in the northern colonies, for agriculture and industry, which is not surprising in a continent-wide landmass.
And during the Civil War, the textile mills, in Britain and elsewhere, just found new sources for cotton from Egypt and India.
I live in Virginia and the governor’s not moonwalking unless it’s in his KKK outfit and blackface. Did you notice how that story just disappeared from the media? Now when Virginia Senator Allen, a Republican, made his macaca comment, there were hundreds of stories in the media for months. Do you ever get the feeling that the media are just shills for the democrats?
Cotton specifically, harvesting generally. The vegans, and perhaps vegetarians, and good omnivores, should be burned as witches (and warlocks) for promoting this progressive pastime. Only petroleum-based products, other synthetic fibers, and silk produced by cage-free worms, are fit to wear. The alternative is to let it all hang loose. It has been a while, perhaps too long, since the last #SlutWalk.
Social justice anywhere is injustice everywhere. #HateLovesAbortion
Yeah, the KKK legacy, and blackface modernity, just disappeared into a “black whore” (h/t NAACP)… I mean, black… theoretically a gray hole. And superior exploitation… Well, ethics is relative, selective, even opportunistic, a many Pro-Choice thing.
David Foster:
Also: the South was very upset about the tariffs on imported goods, which affected them much more than the North because of their lack of industry.But, there was no law prohibiting the South from creating factories…indeed, some entrepreneurs did, but the idea never got a lot of traction.
There is a very interesting discussion of the North-South disagreement on pre-Civil War tariffs in The Latin Americans: Their Love-Hate Relationship with the United Sates, whose author is Carlos Rangel, the Venezuelan journalist. Rangel points out that there was substantial Southern support for the 1816 tariff. The South had some comparative advantages compared to New England for textile manufacturing, such as lower transport costs due to closer proximity to cotton, and better hydropower sites dotting the fall line from the Piedmont to the Coastal Plain. Unfortunately, those comparative advantages did not result in more textile mills in the South compared to New England.
Wealthy Southerners, instead of investing in textile mills, banks, or shipping companies, invested in more land and more slaves.
Southerners then proceeded to blame the North for their investment decisions.
When the North prospered during the Civil War with greatly restricted access to Southern cotton, the theory of the industrial north screwing the agricultural south/Third World should have been put to rest. But Marxists revived it.
I bought the book in Venezuela, in its original Spanish version: Del Buen Salvaje al Buen Revolucionario. (From the Good Savage to the Good Revolutionary.) The book helped articulate my observations that the “progressive” narrative on Latin America did not fit the realities of Latin America at ground level.One of the best books I have ever read.
Gringo said “After the Civil War, there were whites who picked cotton. My mother had first cousins who picked cotton during their teenage summers in North Texas- this would have been in the 1910s to early 1920s.”
Saying there were whites who picked cotton is true but a little like saying there were whites who ate biscuits. I.e. almost everybody, black and white, did in the areas where cotton was a big crop. And it was going on before the Civil War among whites who were not wealthy enough to own slaves. And it went on well into the 1960s. I’m white, and I and probably every single one of my rural Alabama schoolmates picked cotton. Most of them lived on small family farms and picking cotton was just one among many jobs that had to be done. It was no more a racial thing than any other work. Mechanization came more slowly in some places than others. I don’t think it was complete where I lived until late in the ’60s. I had left home for college by then so am not sure exactly.
It’s sobering to me to realize that I’m part of a dwindling number of people who actually experienced it.
As for the incident on which Neo is reporting: this is only the latest of several similar ones. I can’t muster any response other than “Have they completely lost their minds?”
It’s weird how slavery is at once The Thing Of Which We Must Not Speak and The Thing Of Which We Must Always Speak.
“The effort to erase history is truly Orwellian. I’ve given up trying to figure out why these outraged folks choose this tactic of protest.” steve walsh
Perhaps the accumulation of influence and self-validation account for much of it?
Griffin
“The larger societal issue to me is that so many large companies or governmental agencies continue to treat social media and especially twitter as representative of society as a whole. It is not. Not even close.”
The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
“usually all will be forgotten because most people are too busy with real life to care and the others are exhibiting false outrage which just gets transferred to the next target and then the next and so on…”
The media undoubtedly knows just how far they can milk the latest outrage before moving on. Result: half the country believe that those on the right are ignorant at best and evil at worst. Gullible ignorance is a requirement for useful idiocy, which they demonstrate by supporting those who are busily cutting off the branch upon which the “useful idiots” sit.
“We are raising kids to be ignorant” Yankee
The schools and mass media are the real culprits, as for the parents… ignorance begets ignorance.
“Do you ever get the feeling that the media are just shills for the democrats?” Ray
That’s been the case since at least Cronkite. They’re simply not hiding it anymore.
“The book helped articulate my observations that the “progressive” narrative on Latin America did not fit the realities of Latin America at ground level.” Gringo
I have yet to see a “progressive” narrative that, at ground level fits the realities of any society.
Mac, thanks for your “cotton-picking” addition on cotton-picking. Not many people outside the South or without Southern relatives of a certain age realize that cotton-picking was an activity that both races did. Your dating the end of cotton picking by hand jibes with what I had read about mechanization.
My two cents worth here, most anywhere in West Texas and Oklahoma where cotton was grown in the late 1800’s and first half of the 1900’s there were black populations, willing to work for what ever wages, working in cotton gins and cotton seed plants which were a second crop and still are. Picking cotton was grueling back breaking work, paid by the pound and not by the hour and cotton was pulled out of the boles instead of the whole bole pulled which I did as a grade school kid for extra pocket money.
There is a lot of history about how the cotton gin invention made slaves, in the south very valuable and the crop which really takes every thing out of the soil important. Those slaves were cotton pickers, which required a lot of stoup labour and then crawling down rows on their knees picking the cotton our of the boles which left hands torn up and crippled and cotton was a very expensive wonder fiber, for the time, when made into textiles.
Cotton strippers which came later and used now replaced the cotton pullers of my time when we rode school buses out to the fields, took our cotton sacks thrown over one shoulder and made our way down rows pulling cotton in the early 1950’s. Us town kids did it for pocket money and we could take a break when we wanted but the families who were working for their livings had every mom, dad and kid working their butts off getting as much up to the scale each time the sack was full and drinking a little bit of water out of the communal cup and then going back for more and we kind of felt sorry for them, both the black and white kids and families. We did take a bit of pride in not being too proud to all drink out of the same tin cup, whatever that means.
Why should I and other plebs take these people and their indignation seriously again?
Ultimately, it doesn’t do people having emotional meltdowns any good (or the rest of us any good) to pretend they’re being reasonable and give them what they want. The authors of this decision are, with scant doubt, among the world’s hollow people.
An overlooked point is that slaves were expensive to buy and to maintain. If memory serves, a strong young male cost about $800 to $1200 in 1860 dollars. Those slaves were major capital investments, and a plantation owner would have been very ill-advised to have treated his investment badly. So most slaves were assets, not liabilities to be abused.
And after the War Between the States, the now-free slaves were rootless, devoid of leadership, physical and financial assets, and purpose, so along came tenant farming.
Oh, we’ve talked about slavery in this country for a long time. 600,000 died and hundreds of thousands were maimed for life. We’ve talked and fueded over slavery ever since Lee surrendered. We’ve passed needed legislation to make a more level playing field for the descendants of slaves. Then we chained millions of those descendants to the stake of the soft slavery of low expectations and welfare dependency and fatherless children.
Slavery, is a democract party institution, both the cruel slavery and the soft slavery. They just won’t let go. But perhaps that is passing away as more and more blacks are ‘woke’.
Social media again. The center of our outrage age. –neo
One finds social media at the center of so many “crime scenes” these days. Cause or accelerant or bystander?
I’m not on Twitter or Facebook and I don’t see material from them beyond occasional links. It seems like America has been pretty crazy since 9-11. How much of it is social media?
I wonder how one might design studies to test the effect.
@Cicero:An overlooked point is that slaves were expensive to buy and to maintain. If memory serves, a strong young male cost about $800 to $1200 in 1860 dollars. Those slaves were major capital investments, and a plantation owner would have been very ill-advised to have treated his investment badly. So most slaves were assets, not liabilities to be abused.
People do themselves and others great wrong and harm even when it is not in their interest to do so. Southern slaveowners tried this argument out on Charles Dickens, who replied:
“Is it the interest of any man to steal, to game, to waste his health and mental faculties by drunkenness, to lie, forswear himself, indulge hatred, seek desperate revenge, or do murder? No. All these are roads to ruin. And why, then, do men tread them? Because such inclinations are among the vicious qualities of mankind. Blot out, ye friends of slavery, from the catalogue of human passions, brutal lust, cruelty, and the abuse of irresponsible power (of all earthly temptations the most difficult to be resisted), and when ye have done so, and not before, we will inquire whether it be the interest of a master to lash and maim the slaves, over whose lives and limbs he has an absolute control!
Apparently slaves cooked food too. Should we ban cooked food? I bet they washed clothes too, should we ban washing clothes as “racists”?
It’s possible this is what caused the problem among some at that Arlington school — from this past February: “Parents outraged after 5th graders in South Carolina pick cotton, sing songs on field trip”:
I wish I were in the land of cotton/
Old times there are not forgotten/
Look away, look away, look away, Dixieland.
Yeah, we’ll get that rotten cotton plant! Next up: down with grits ‘n’ gravy! Save your Confederate money, boys. The South will rise again!
* * *
Good idea, except that the Media never lets a story die if it harms the Right, and never lets it live if it harms the Left.
* * *
Mac on May 20, 2019 at 5:53 pm at 5:53 pm said:
…
It’s weird how slavery is at once The Thing Of Which We Must Not Speak and The Thing Of Which We Must Always Speak.
* * *
It’s called “having a national conversation about race,” except it is more of a shouted monologue from one side of the aisle.
“it seemed to make a “game” out of an experience deeply rooted in the painful history of slavery and Jim Crow in the South.”
Or you could interpret it as an attempt to demonstrate what a hard, miserable, humiliating task it was.
BTW, just because kids are doing something does not make it a game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pick_a_Bale_of_Cotton
This work song was in a family songbook that my family had in the fifties, and all we thought about it was that it had a catchy tune.
(Quite a few of those would be excised if a new edition were made today.)
BTW, if we are going to start shunning people, like Kate Smith, who once sang “racist” songs, the Wikipedia list in that link means we are going to have to include a LOT of people who are in the wrong demographic box, but that is probably one of the topics Mac was thinking of.
More along the lines of Mac’s observation that Democrats always want Republicans to abide by two mutually contradictory mandates:
https://amgreatness.com/2019/05/20/president-trump-can-win-on-race/
And also worth noting that mechanisation (the cotton gin) does not destroy jobs.
This is all rather like a 1950s sci-fi story isn’t it? In some distant highly urbanised future a teacher grows a plant in a pot which causes confusion, fear, and finally rage.
Mac, humans easily lose their minds to fear, and then anger, aggression, stupidity, recklessness, and then self righteous self rationalization of their crimes against humanity and Divine.
I like to keep my head as others lose theirs.
The media are obeying their orders. Blaming them is about as pointless as blaming Germans because they obeyed their national leaders.
Humans Obey Authority. They are too weak to do anything else.
Can Ralph Northam shuffle dance ?
SHAME ON YOU AARON NEVILLE!!!
Can’t believe nobody beat me to that one.
Admin folk in gov’t schools need to get more opt-out protection from parents & outsiders’ rage.
Let those who want to opt-out, tell their parents, and opt-out.
There should always be some history / science book available to read about the “truth of history”, rather than a field trip / hands on experience.
But the hecklers / micro-outraged veto needs to be fought against.
I was a “plebe” at the Naval Academy, with lots of hazing, as well as tough physical stuff, including multi-mile marches. There was usually singing on the march. In “Snow White”, there is singing while she works, both at the castle and in the dwarf’s house. Throughout history, singing together, when working together, for most folk, makes the work more tolerable.
How did Mary Poppins put it (spoonful of sugar, better than remembered!):
“In every job that must be done,
There is an element, of fun.
You find the fun, and snap.
The job’s a game.”
The PC-Klan do NOT allow games, or fun, or any pleasure, except outrage against others.
Without allowing any fun in their work, it’s no wonder they’re outraged all the time.
Among woken crafters, only linen and hemp are acceptable. Never mind the technique must also conform to your dna heritage, those fibers give me welts. So I’m in seriously trouble if the textile totalitarians take control. Luckily, I hate knitting.
Was the offending plant “made comfortable” prior to its termination ?
I can’t cite a source for this, but:
1. the northern blockade of southern cotton led to increased cotton production in other places, including Egypt, which led to:
2. A boom in Egypt’s economy, which led to:
3. Increased spending by Egypt’s government, which led to:
4. An economic crisis when US cotton production resumed, which led to:
5. Egypt borrowing large sums of money from various European nations, including Britain, which led to:
6. European nations, especially Britain, taking over the management of Egyptian government, which led to:
7. Britain encouraging the Egyptian government to suppress the slave trade in the Sudan, which led to:
8. The Mahdist revolt in the Sudan in the 1880s, which led to:
9. The fall of Khartoum and the establishment of an Islamic state, which led to:
10. The British punitive expedition in the 1890s, which was a major milestone in the careers of Lord Kitchener… and Winston Churchill.
I’m not sure that I understand Dicken’s rather histrionic argument. Unless he is granting that it is indeed against the interest of masters to beat slaves on the investment assumption, but that they are prone by human nature as Dickens reads human nature, to do so anyway.
Or, I suppose, Dickens might be construed as inadvertently arguing against himself, to the effect that it is in fact in the interest of slave masters to indulge their passions and – at least in the short term – to physically coerce and degrade slaves; and that therefore the investment restraint argument taken as normative in the Southern States, doesn’t work: because vicious behavior and short term gain and never learning from mistakes is the human norm. But that is obviously not true across the board.
Certainly in places such as Brazil, where the importation of slaves was such that in comparison the number imported into the United States was almost insignificant, working a slave to death represented a much smaller economic cost.
The scarce and valuable resource argument is valid in terms of the rational and economically motivated man.
However irrational men and women do often enough accrue or find at their legal disposal resources and powers which they wantonly squander and destroy, for it to be socially noticeable. Drunks beat horses, dogs, and women and children. Children leave bicycles out in the rain for months. People abandon pets to freeze or starve. Idiots leave their tools in the weather.
Lottery winners are a pretty notorious example of what happens to some of the stupid and emotionally incontinent types when a fortune falls into their lap.
But none of that categorically undermines the economic argument.based on the motives of a rational actor.
If machine planted, cultivated, harvested, retted, and whatever else, flax were produced in such economical quantities making it possible for some portion of the human population to say “We will go with linen, wool, and synthetics. So eff off now, we are done with you, keep your precious XYZ and shove it where the sun don’t shine” to cotton hysterics seeking to harangue consumers to death, the hysterics would then start raving about that. Have something to do with them, and you are “guilty”. Have nothing to do with them, and you are “guilty”. The claims never let up when a mentally unbalanced person is determined to find leverage. They will always find something: coffee beans, cotton, rare earths, wood pulp … something, anything, to fasten onto.
If you could draw energy in usable quantities from the atmosphere or E.M. fields through a proprietary technology, people would go ballistic about that. If you could find a way to transmit information without using limited bandwidth technologies subject to regulation for the greater good, people would go insane over that: at the mere idea that you might be gaining something they might very well have no interest in, or use for.
This is all about applying and leveraging GUILT. So, if religion won’t serve to produce enough guilt, and they can’t make people feel enough guilt about sex, then we have to dig into history. The one thing most feared by tyrants is truly innocent men and women.
Esther’s remarks set me off down my own memory lane as I recalled both my first encounter with P.C. Cotton entanglements, and my own perfunctory research into linen.
There were still, a few years, 6 or 7 maybe, back, a couple of Irish companies making button down shirts (of the Brooks Brothers “polo shirt” style) in linen and having occasional sales. I never bought any and had them shipped over, even though they were not too exorbitant.
What finally occurred to me was that when I was a young kid of 5 or 6 and my mother was dressing us I had worn a short sleeved version of them regularly during the summer. They were the shirts with the bunched up threads here and there and that were really really wrinkled unless ironed.
And that reminds me of the puffy or mini waffle-iron surfaced type material shirts for hot weather too …
I could probably look up the name of it if I searched. I don’t think it’s called poplin. I don’t really even know what poplin is. I think they made men’s casual summer suits out of it, or something similar, too.
Religion can be rather exclusive. Don’t fuck your mother. Don’t fuck your sister. Don’t fuck your father. Don’t fuck in large numbers. It’s socially disruptive. Don’t sodomize your male companion. It’s dysfunctional. They should have included your female companion, too. Don’t corrupt young girls and boys, too. Don’t abort for social progress and profit. Don’t indulge diversity (i.e. color judgments).
DNW,
Is it seersucker you’re thinking of? See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seersucker
Roy’s at it again.
The display of black slavery and Jim Crow paraphernalia gaining outsized importance and severity is a reflection of American black people’s increased political power and higher social status.
They get to decide which things are offensive and which ones aren’t, and — surprise! — the capital offenses are exactly those formerly mild offenses that prick their ego and allow them to climb the ladder of competitive victimhood even further.
I completely understand: many peoples, including me and mine, hold historical grudges, for centuries or even millennia. Not sure why we ought to accommodate each and every one of those, though (other than as a practical demonstration of the group’s political power and social standing).