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The Culture of Slavery: Outcomes

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Book cover Race and Morality

Part of the book series: Clinical Sociology ((CSRP))

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Abstract

How can it be? How can a pattern established hundreds of years ago, under conditions that would be barely recognizable today, have the power to bind people to a cheerless style of life? Are not those in its grip smart enough to see what is happening and just change? These are questions my students ask all the time. Utterly uninterested in history, they can scarcely imagine what sorts of mechanism might keep the past alive. Indeed, most doubt that it happens. But they are wrong. The past does operate in the present, and it does so with a vengeance. They have nevertheless stumbled upon a legitimate problem. If the S-C-S model is valid, there remains the question of how transitions from one time period to another are effected. How do particular social structures become frozen into distinct sets of cultural features that manage to persist over decades or centuries? More than this, having succeeded in enduring, how are these characteristics converted back into structural elements? Just as geologists had difficulty accepting the theory of continental drift before plate tectonics provided a reasonable mechanism for rafting the continents apart, so a culture of slavery theory requires a plausible method of getting from then to now.

Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, or inclinations, or the dictates of our passions, they cannot alter the state offacts and evidence. John Adams, Defense ofBritish Soldiers in the Boston Massacre Trial

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The Culture of Slavery: Outcomes

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  1. Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia

    Melvyn L. Fein

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Fein, M.L. (2001). The Culture of Slavery: Outcomes. In: Race and Morality. Clinical Sociology. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-1281-3_6

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