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From: tdn@cmu-cs-spice.ARPA (Thomas Newton)
Newsgroups: net.abortion
Subject: Re: The Status of the Fetus and Its Rights
Message-ID: <447@cmu-cs-spice.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 5-Sep-85 14:27:08 EDT
Article-I.D.: cmu-cs-s.447
Posted: Thu Sep  5 14:27:08 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 8-Sep-85 04:47:27 EDT
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 39

I have no desire to engage in extended name-calling sessions with Rich Rosen,
so I will simply reply to the following argument:

>> With slavery, the stake was 'as soon as we recognize blacks as human, a
>> lot more people are going to be against slavery and slavery may become
>> illegal'.

> Blacks were not recognized as not-human, the law simply made it legal to
> own humans as slaves.  That's why the law mentioned nothing about race when
> slavery was abolished.  It also stated that no person should be discriminated
> against due to race.  It is clear that in neither case had it been assumed
> that blacks were not human, at least not in the eyes of the law.

       "  An equally durable myth is that Negroes, in contrast to
        peoples of other races, possess certain racial traits which
        uniquely fitted them for bondage, and which created in the South
        a lasting "race problem."  As other defenses of slavery became
	increasingly untenable, ninteenth-century Southerners gave special
	emphasis to this racist argument.  Doctors, scientists, and pseudo-
	scientists--phrenologists had a substantial following -- found a
	physiological basis for alleged temperamental and intellectual
	differences.  Dr Samuel W. Cartrwright, of Louisiana, argued that
	'the visible difference in skin pigmentation also extended to "the
        membranes, the muscles, the tendons, and . . . [to] all the fluids
	and secretions.  Even the negro's brain and nerves, the chyle and
	all the humors, are tinctured with a shade of the pervading darkness."
	Dr. Josiah C. Nott, of Mobile, was the leader of a small group who
	carried racism to the extreme position of denying that Negros and
	whites belonged to the same species."
	
                The Peculiar Institution -- Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South
        	Kenneth M. Stampp, 1956

The (bogus) claim that blacks were somehow inferior to whites was more and
more important to slaveowners as time went on, and other arguments in favor
of slavery lost ground.

                                        -- Thomas Newton
                                           Thomas.Newton@cmu-cs-spice