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Between films like “Gone with the Wind” and “Alabama Sweet Home”, and Pre-war themed weddingProviding holiday and weekend lunches for the rich and famous, the idyllic plantation life concept is still deeply ingrained in the American imagination, especially for white Americans. There are more than 300 plantations in the United States intact, and dozens of them have been set up as museums.
They help remind Americans of the era when Americans obtained obscene personal wealth from mankind, which is an absolute power over mankind that is unparalleled in history. Even in this era, for so many people, the awe of accumulating so much money and power far exceeds the horror of enslaving generation after generation.
There is no doubt that the first American dream was plantation slavery, or American wealth. It includes taking the land and lives of Native Americans, kidnapping and enslaving Africans, weaving the wombs of African women into property, and growing tobacco, cotton, indigo, and sugar cane as cash crops.
It contains all the elements of racism, misogyny, classism, and narcissism, which are related to American dream. Plantation slavery is a system that regulates the body and movement of blacks, rape and torture for profit and improper pleasure. Between white vigilance, law enforcement, and unbridled capitalism, the violence of the first American dream is deeply rooted in everything in the United States in 2021.
Americans deliberately forget that before, during, and after America became a nation-state, millions of white people were lustfully chasing the first American dream. As the new United States launched an offensive on more land, these people repeated the model of developing cash crop plantation life into the engine of the American economy. First in Kentucky and Tennessee, then after the purchase of land in Louisiana and the War of 1812, in Alabama and Mississippi.
Soon after, in Missouri and Florida, in the U.S. Army and Aboriginal killer Just like Andrew Jackson, the ultimate seventh president of the United States. Then, it annexed Texas, and eventually seized all of the southwestern United States from Mexico. By the 1850s, plantation slavery existed in Kansas and threatened New Mexico and Arizona.
Plantation slavery is indeed the ideal of the United States, not just the ideal of the South. There is land and capital produced by slaves. Add to this the wealth and power generated by land speculation and human trade from Delaware, Maryland, and Virginia to Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. Coupled with the many accounts held by bankers in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston, these assets enabled more whites to obtain loans to buy more land and more enslaved blacks.
Coupled with the venture capital required to establish a textile factory in New England, it is used for shipping companies that sell and trade tobacco, rice and cotton to factory owners in the United Kingdom.As the historian Edward B Baptist wrote in an article Vox interview In 2019, the 19th century is “when you see the United States transform from a colonial economy dominated by agriculture to the second largest industrial power in the world.”
Many American historians take President Thomas Jefferson’s ideals of agricultural democracy as a negative narrative. Jefferson wrote in his Virginia notes in 1785: “Those who work on the ground are God’s chosen people. If God ever had chosen people, their breasts were specially stored by him in substance and true virtue.” According to history According to the scientist Lisi Krall, “[h]Historians generally believe that [Jefferson] Provides a vision of a nation of independent farmers who will provide the foundation for our…sound democracy. “
But if Jefferson had a democratic vision, it would be pure fantasy, similar to Paul McCartney and Steve Wanda’s 1982 hit film “Ebony and Ivory”, where he lives in an unequal hierarchy. People will live together in “perfect harmony”. At best, Jefferson’s vision is a garden of Eden full of small family farms and plantations, where white people can play the role of democracy, freedom and prosperity. In the worst case, it is to maintain the socio-economic status of the minority whites who own all the arable land, as well as the socio-economic status of those who kidnapped, raped, and forced more enslaved people to cultivate the land for free.
Jefferson was a plantation owner in Virginia, and his hypocrisy was endless. During his lifetime, he claimed that more than 600 people were property. He owns Monticello, a 5,000 acre (2025 hectare) plantation, now the University of Virginia. Jefferson also gave birth to all six children of Sally Hemings, one of his slaves and the half-sister of Jefferson’s white wife Martha. Martha died in 1782 when Jefferson was 39 years old.
From 1787 to 1789, he made Hemmings his “concubine” during his tenure as the U.S. Minister of Foreign Affairs to France in Paris. He was between 44 and 46 years old at that time. Hemings was between 14 and 16, 30 years younger than Jefferson.
“White men… exercised excessive power over black women during slavery. Rape and its threat destroyed the lives of countless enslaved women,” historian and Hemings family chronicler Annette Gordon-Lee De (Annette Gordon-Reed) wrote. The prospect of romantic love Between Jefferson and Hemings. Gordon Reid added: “Being a man’s wife is not the same as being a man’s slave, even though the relationship between Sally and Thomas started under unusual circumstances.”
Those “unusual situations” are rape, legal and legal rape, because Jefferson owns Hemmings and her baby. As Tina Turner once sang, “What does love have to do with it”, especially if Jefferson said that farmers have the best “substantial and true virtues” in America, then rape and What does enslavement for generations mean. Rape and the whip are ways in which slavery can be reproduced, and the beloved founding fathers like Jefferson are very active in this contradictory world.
As WEB Du Bois wrote in his book “Black Reconstruction”: “Under the law, the fact that a person can become the real master of human body and mind… tends to exaggerate the self of most growers beyond all rationality; They became arrogant, arrogant, and aggressive little kings; they gave orders; they made laws; they called their orders; they expected respect and low self-esteem; they had bile and were easily humiliated.”
“As the world has long known, nothing can destroy humanity more than absolute power over humans,” Du Bois concluded.The desire for this kind of power is why even white people living in poverty always Find fun In the suffering of black.
The first dream is often difficult to die. The Civil War destroyed the climax fantasy of white people becoming cowardly tyrants through the American dream of plantation slavery. But this version of the American Dream has changed and continues to exist in the law, the mind, and the minds of millions of American men.
This dream explains the popularity of wealthy white men in the United States. White evangelist Like Joel Austin and Kenneth Copeland, robber tycoons like JD Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, emerging billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, and Donald Trump and Liars and pedophiles like Jeffrey Epstein.
The lack of this status has increased the anti-black and misogynistic hatred and resentment for white men’s sense of rights and fear of consequences, because they will always have a group of supporters to pursue this poisonous American dream. They will continue to turn this country and the world into a nightmare for all of us.
The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.
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