George Orwell - Orwell on Truth (Book Review)

Edited by Adam Hochschild, this is a short collection of Orwell's comments on the subject of "truth," a subject near and dear to his heart.

We live in an amazing Orwellian Age. Orwell is just as relevant today as he was in the 30's and 40's as he wrote about the Spanish Civil War, Stalinism, Nazism, and World War War II. Nationalism was one of his topics.

"By Nationalism I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions of people can be confidently labeled 'good' or 'bad.' But secondly---and this is much more important---I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognizing no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not be confused with patriotism. Both words are normal used in so vague a way that any definition is likely to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different or even opposing ideas are involved.

By 'patriotism' I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force it on other people. Patriotism is by its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.

Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and prestige for himself and his nation or other until into which he has sunk his individuality."

r: "Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as "the truth" exists. ... The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, "It never happened" – well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five – well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs."

The general uncertainty as to what is really happening makes it easier to cling to lunatic beliefs.

"The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. One ought to recognize that the present political chaos is connected with the decay of language, and that one can probably bring about some improvement by starting from the verbal end. Political language---and with variations this is true of all political parties, from Conservatives to Anarchists---is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind."

"You are a slow learner, Winston," said O'Brien gently.
"How can I help it?" he blubbered. "How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four."
"Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."

". . . Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case perishes; only in the mind of the Party which is collective and eternal. Whatever the Party holds to be truth, IS truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. This is the fact that you have to re-learn, Winston. It needs an act of self-destruction, an effort of the will. You must humble yourself before you can become sane."

"Everything melted into mist. Sometimes indeed you could put your finger on a definite lie. It was not true, for example, as was claimed in the Party history books, that the party invented aeroplanes. He remembered aeroplanes since his childhood days. But you could prove nothing." 

We are moving forward in a new and horrifying Orwellian Agel

In the Name of Efficiency

Age should increase efficiency. We don't have the time and energy to waste anymore.
Put your pants on one leg at at a time very quickly. That Oral B electric is the way to go now. If the socks don't match no one cares anymore. Just keep on trucking. P.S. No one cares either if you look dorky. Remember to kidnap BEFORE you send the ransom note. If you forget the lyrics to the song no one will care if you hum or mumble along. The sticker on the wind shield is certainly a helpful reminder as to when to change your oil but only if you remember to look at the sticker.
Lastly, be all that you can be. The Army won't take you anymore, but there's still more to life than hanging around the pool hall all day.

Born Standing Up by Steve Martin

Martin chronicles his rise in comedy, becoming a wildly popular standup comedian in the 1970s. He was perhaps the biggest comedy star at the time. Martin reveals that it took him at least ten years of struggling and working on his material before his breakthrough.

From an early age, he was attracted to magic, which is incorporated into his act. He worked at a magic store as a youngster and also worked at Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm. As he began standup, there were many times that he flopped. However, as his popularity grew - from albums like Let's Get Small and A Wild and Crazy Guy to appearances on SNL - so did the size of his audiences. His act drew such large crowds that Martin felt he needed something to help the people in the back see him better. The result was his trademark three-piece white suit.

Martin details his famous gags, like Happy Feet and the arrow through the head.  He also talks about what it's like to tour as a comedian and his experiences as a guest on Johnny Carson and a writer for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.  Overall, his ridiculous brand of comedy was a reaction to the seriousness of the time, especially Vietnam.  He felt the country needed silliness to remind them to have fun.  Eventually, however, he felt his act was old and it had gone as far as it could.  It took him ten years to develop his material, and he didn't want to spend more years creating new material.  So, Martin quit standup comedy in 1981.

Since then, Martin has acted, written, and created music as an accomplished banjo player.

Alberto

Awaiting tropical storm Alberto expected to make landfall somewhere Pensacola and Panama City around noon today.

Wondering

You have to wonder about some people. Take criminologists who become blood splatter experts. Is this a calling? It would have to be a calling for me, and I didn't get the call.

Unforced Busing

Going down to the historic Birmimgham bus station this morning in a Paul Simon search for America. Gonna sit and look at the people. Then look at the people and sit. Listen to the loading announcements. "Memphis now loading in Zone Three." Is Burger King still there? This is where you find America. If only I could do it.

CBO

Congressional Budget Office finds higher deficits under Trump budget than administration projects

By 2028, the administration projects a $445 billion deficit if the White House budget were adopted, whereas the CBO says the deficit would top $1 trillion.

Beware the Criminal Deep State!

In morning tweets, the president referred to those investigating him as the “Criminal Deep State,” claiming they had been “caught in a major SPY scandal the likes of which this country may never have seen before!”

Oh, My! Now we have a mythological "criminal deep state." What's next? A Martian invasion attacking Trump within the FBI? President Obama and Hillary leading the "criminal deep state?" The man is completely unhinged and it is only going to get worse. His diversionary tactics are reaching new extremes.

Goodbye, Columbus

I guess Doris won't be reading "War and Peace" this summer. That's okay. I think she finally finished it. Good thing because she was always reading it. Goodbye, Columbus.

Never Seen Anything Like This

We have a POTUS who simply makes things up as he does along, desperately trying to distract from the ongoing investigations into his doings.  It's amazing to see.  The most amazing thing is his Congressional Republican enablers and his psycho electorate who defend everything he says and does.

Leaks

According to White House leaks, Trump hates White House leaks.
-Stephen Colbert

General Longstreet

We live in a time of great uncertainty & unpredictability, but nothing has changed regarding the advice of General "Pete" Longstreet: Never draw to an inside straight. Always cut the cards and never play with a man nicknamed "Doc" still works also.

We Are Regal

It is a tradition in The South that the women live longer than the men. The men die first after struggling, honorable lives, upholding family traditions, standing in the breech, and the women live on for another 50 or so years, complete with a second girlhood, new clothes, at least 35,000 hearty meals, and a long senesence. It's hardly fair, but it's the Southern Way of Life. It's been this way since Antebellum Days, especially after The War when Johnny didn't come marching home. Decoration Day was instituted to honor the men first. The Southern Man is, if nothing else, an honorable man, upholder of Southern Traditions, regal in the way that only a Southern Man can be regal.

On the School Shootings

One Republican blames Common Core for school shootings. Another one blames too many entrances in schools. Our POTUS blames video games. I wish they'd make up their minds.

Character

I have always said that character is destiny, or maybe I learned this from reading Thomas Hardy. Or Schopenhauer. I get so confused at times.

Nozick

How Robert Nozick put a purple prose bomb under analytical philosophy

Brad Baranowski

is a historian of modern American thought and politics as well as the director of the History Lab, a writing centre run by the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s history department. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

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Explosive joy. Photo courtesy Pexels

Libertarians are a quarrelsome lot. Debates about who is the better von, Hayek or Mises, rivalries between the Austrian and the Chicago schools of economics, and fights among Ayn Rand’s objectivists and Murray Rothbard’s Circle Bastiat – schisms that would make a Leftist blush – have rent libertarianism. So heads turned when one of their fold decided to throw in the towel on arguing.

Robert Nozick (1938-2002) was not averse to controversy. Five years after arriving at Harvard, he published Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974). A response to John Rawls, who had just published the monumental A Theory of Justice (1971), Nozick outlined the libertarian case for limited government. While plenty found A Theory of Justice unconvincing, critics found Anarchy, State, and Utopia to be unsavoury. One reviewer equated Nozick to ‘the average owner of a filling station’ whose only joy in life comes from ‘grousing about paying taxes’.

Such criticisms stung. ‘Is not the minimal state,’ Nozik’s book had asked, ‘an inspiring vision?’ A state stripped down to providing protection and enforcing contracts was simple and elegant. It was an art form, enchanting and efficient. Why didn’t others see this beauty? A sickness, answered Nozick, had descended upon Anglo-American thought. This illness had transformed intellectual life into a fit of assertion and counter-assertion. Nowhere was this impulse more malignant than in his own discipline, philosophy.

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Postwar American philosophy departments were not famous for providing insights about living the good life. Dominated by philosophical analysis – a movement preoccupied with logic – professional philosophers neglected or even condescended to issues of broader interest such as ethics. In The Rise of Scientific Philosophy (1951), Hans Reichenbach, a prominent defender of analysis, asserted: ‘Those philosophers who are willing to derive moral directives from their philosophies can only offer you a sham proof.’ Proof, in this rigorous, new philosophy, was everything.

Nozick had studied philosophy as a graduate student at Princeton University during the early 1960s, writing his dissertation about logical notation and decision theory. Few other topics were appropriate. Analytical philosophers made up the bulk of the faculty, and they sniffed at ethics and aesthetics. ‘There was a purity about the air,’ recalled one graduate student. Professors believed that there ‘were philosophical wars to be fought, with good guys and bad guys’. The latter, those who talked about the good and the bad, were easy targets. As W V O Quine, the philosopher whose work launched many dissertations, declared in 1953, ‘philosophy of science is philosophy enough’. All other approaches should be purged.

By the 1980s, Nozick had had enough of this mode of philosophical enquiry. ‘The language of analytic philosophy,’ he complained, ‘“forces” the reader to a conclusion through a knock-down argument.’ Discussion thus became a zero-sum game. If the loser of an argument did not accept his opponent’s conclusion ‘he dies’, a victim of his own mental weaknesses. Among the collateral damages of this aggression was an appreciation of intellectual diversity. Nozick aspired to pacify philosophy.

He was not alone. At nearly the same time, three highly regarded analytical philosophers began an intellectual guerrilla war within the discipline, breaking down the conceptual barricades against the value-talk that the previous generation had erected.

In 1979, Douglas Hofstadter battled the widely held perception that formal logic was impenetrable, showing in Gödel, Escher, Bach how cognition ran around a ‘strange loop’ of self-reference. The same year, Richard Rorty staged a coup against academic epistemology, calling it a ‘self-deceptive effort’ in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Following these engagements, Alasdair MacIntyre launched a frontal assault on contemporary meta-ethics in After Virtue (1981), decrying how the ahistorical assumptions of contemporary moral thought had created a new dark age.

‘I want to speak of the purity and dignity of an apple, the explosive joy and sexuality of a strawberry’

In Philosophical Explanations (1981), Nozick opened a new line of attack. Philosophers, he posited, would be better off if they stopped trying to prove things like scientists, an impulse he believed led thinkers to overlook how philosophy might stimulate the ‘mind’s excitement and sensuality’. Rather, they ought to limit themselves to explaining how a system of thought is possible. This would allow a ‘basketful’ of approaches to exist within philosophy, transforming it into an art form, one that sculpted ‘ideas, value, and meaning into new constellations, reverberative with mythic power’. Such an attitude would also recognise philosophers for what they were: ‘valuable and precious’, free to mould and express their lives as artists do theirs.

This big change in conceptualising philosophy liberated Nozick. He now discussed topics ranging from explorations of modern poetry and Hindu theology, to considerations of parenthood, emotions, and personal enlightenment. Gone, too, were the formal equations of his dissertation, replaced with the considerably looser prose in his next book, The Examined Life (1989), a series of informal reflections on life, death, and fruit. ‘I want to speak of the purity and dignity of an apple,’ he waxed in a representative passage, ‘the explosive joy and sexuality of a strawberry.’ Remarking on the shift in style himself, he admitted that he would have found this second line ‘ridiculously overblown once’. Some of his readers still did. As the British philosopher Bernard Williams observed, reading Nozick’s later work was like watching ‘a commercial for breakfast food’.

Purple prose aside, Nozick largely won praise from his colleagues. He had appeared, as one reviewer wrote, like a ‘knight in shining armour’, rescuing his peers from doing obscurantist philosophy. Thanks to his willingness to quit arguing and start explaining, philosophy had rediscovered its obligation to provide the public with lessons about living the good life. The Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking thought it nothing less than the ‘rebirth of philosophy’. Lost in this ballyhoo was the irony that a man who, in the previous decade, had argued for the moral benefits of privatisation, now spearheaded philosophy’s concern with the intellectual commons.

Of course, it had become easy to overlook such political incongruities. Nozick certainly did. If his libertarianism had gained a joie de vivre, it had done so by diluting its original raison d’être. Students should read Max Weber or Karl Marx, he contended in Philosophical Explanations, not because these authors provided insights into how society functioned. On the contrary, these political theorists were notable because their books are part of the ‘long list of human accomplishment, striving, and excellence’. Capital(1867-94) was a model of what hard work could achieve, not a book about how hard work is.

The same standard applied to Nozick’s own work. ‘The libertarian position I once propounded now seems to me seriously inadequate,’ he announced in The Examined Life. From here on out, he would apply his libertarianism inwardly, focusing on the cultivation of his self rather than the destruction of the state. While this admission shocked admirers of Anarchy, State, and Utopia, it was a logical outgrowth of the author’s intellectual development. After all, this was the man who had declared that attempting to convince others of your views – the modus operandi of politics – was a ‘philosophically pointless task’. For Nozick, libertarianism had ceased to be an ideology. It had become a lifestyle, one that was not better or worse than any other – at least, not arguably so.

Where?

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? Our nation turns its lonely eyes to you. What's that you say, Mrs. Robinson? Joltin' Joe has left and gone away.  
Truth is, I'd settle for Yogi Berra. Joe's bride Marilyn would be even bette

I Have Never Care Much for British Royalty Anyway

Watch the royal wedding? No thanks. I'm still mad about the Stamp Act.

This GOP candidate touts a 'deportation bus'

Republican politicians always find new and creative ways to display their racism.

Checking my Faculties

Just checked my mental faculties. I can still pat the top of my head and rub my tummy at the same time. So far, so good. Walk and chew bubble gum at the same time. Still remember where I live and who is the President (unfortunately). So far, so good. As part of my ER venture Sunday morning, I had a brain scan. The doctor said I should be the first to know if I'm losing. it. So good, so far. I ain't gaining, but I ain't losing either. So farly, so goody.

Leakers are Traitors; Leakers Do Not Exist

by Jonathan Chait

People were already invoking the Republican Party’s rejection of “the reality-based community” and its “epistemic closure” long before Donald Trump took it over. But it has taken Trump to elevate the Republican Party’s reality-altering habits to a level that is literally Orwellian. The latest visit to the mind-bending frontier of pseudo-reality comes via this presidential tweet:

Here we learn that the anonymous quotes coming out of the White House are invented “so-called leaks” by the hostile reporters of the “Fake News Media.” At the same time, Trump denounces the leakers as “cowards” and “traitors.”

“Doublethink,” as George Orwell wrote, “means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.” Even Big Brother had enough respect for his audience to insist that they had always been at war with East Asia, or whoever they were at war with at the moment. You didn’t see Big Brother calling East Asia his great ally and enemy in consecutive sentences.

Will There Be a Blue Wave in November?

I'll believe it when I see it.  The only solution for the mass of us is at the ballot box.

Good Day

Going down to the Shelby County landfill today to conclude our spring cleaning. Going down to the strawberry place in Verbena while I'm down that way. Gonna listen to some Johnny Cash and Dylan in the car. Gonna stop in Clanton somewhere and dance a jig, just thankful to be alive. It's spring time in Dixie. Lawsy mercy it's gonna be a good day!

The Skilled Helper

Giuliani might help Trump with an insanity defense. That could be Trump's best chance.

Being Retired

Being retired means that I do not have to douse my naked body with water and soap every morning. Sure saves on the old water bill and with the price these days of razor blades, there's another big savings not having to scrape my face every morning. And I do not have to go out and deal with people everyday. That's a psychological savings that's worth it all.

It Won't be Okay

Chauncey Dega

The lie that "economic anxiety" motivated Trump's white voters is a zombie idea. .@salon I highlight new research which puts another stake in the head of that claim. It was a fear of losing white privilege and white dominance that drove Trump's voters.

University of Michigan political scientist Diana Mutz destroys that dominant media narrative in her new research in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Pocketbook voting is uncommon. Trump's voters make more than the national average.

With so much evidence against the mainstream news media's love for the "white economic anxiety" lie re: Trump why do they cling to it? Against all the evidence, there is a deep need to presume the inherent goodness of white voters and the benign nature of whiteness.

Trump won all groups of white voters. The consistent variable was white anxiety about losing group power. This leaves a question that I and others have tried to highlight.

The white racial frame helped to a elect a white supremacist political cult leader Donald Trump. The chickens have truly come home to roost. But folks, too many in the mainstream news media, keep hoping things will somehow be okay. They won't be.

Meeting a Lottery Winner

They say that the 17th Century French mathematician, theologian, and all-around swell guy Blaise Pascal was terrified of the vast emptiness of space. Unlike Pascal I am terrified of the donut shop not being open on Saturday mornings.
Not to worry today about Donut Joe's in Pelham.  
Chatted with an interesting stranger, sitting there in front of the store as I left with my donut haul, a man in shorts and t-shirt looking slightly older than me, a regular looking man. Anyone looking about my age I always say is a little older than me.
"Working hard, I see," I say and from there he tells me that not really; he's been retired since he was 42.
"You must have money," I say boldly.
He proceeds to tell me that he won 8 million dollars in the Massachusetts lottery at 42 and has been retired since as a former Massachusetts state trooper.
"Why are you in Alabama?"
"It's a retirement mecca. The state doesn't tax social security or traditional retirement funds, and low property taxes."
Okay, good to hear I tell him. Some people do win the lottery and I meet my first and probably only lottery winner outside the donut shop in Pelham.
Happy Saturday everyone!

Defending Slavery

Opinion

The Historian Behind Slavery Apologists Like Kanye West

By Blain Roberts and Ethan J. Kytle

Dr. Roberts and Dr. Kytle are the authors of “Denmark Vesey’s Garden: Slavery and Memory in the Cradle of the Confederacy.”

May 3, 2018

Image

An 1863 photograph that became known as “The Scourged Back”’ shows the whipping scars on Gordon, a former slave in Louisiana who escaped to Union lines.CreditMcPherson & Oliver, collection of the Illinois State Historical Library

A video of the rapper Kanye West discussing slavery is a sad reminder of America’s historical amnesia about the brutal realities of that institution. “When you hear about slavery for 400 years,” he said in the clip, which was widely circulated on Twitter, “that sounds like a choice.”

Mr. West seemed to suggest that enslaved African-Americans were so content that they did not actively resist their bondage, and, as a result, they bear some responsibility for centuries of persecution.

He’s not alone in his thinking. In 2016, the former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly asserted that slaves were “well fed and had decent lodgings.” Last September, the Alabama senatorial candidate Roy Moore deemed the antebellum era the last great period in American history. “I think it was great at the time when families were united,” he declared. “Even though we had slavery, they cared for one another.”

Modern scholarship has debunked such whitewashing, accurately depicting slavery as an inhumane institution rooted in greed and the violent subjugation of millions of African-Americans.

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Yet countless Americans have not learned these lessons. They cling, instead, to a romanticized interpretation of slavery, one indebted to a book published 100 years ago.

In the spring of 1918, the historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips published his seminal study, “American Negro Slavery,” which framed the institution as a benevolent labor agreement between indulgent masters and happy slaves. No other book, no monument, no movie — save, perhaps, for “Gone With the Wind,” itself beholden to Phillips’s work — has been more influential in shaping how many Americans have viewed slavery.

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An enslaved man tied to a whipping post, circa 1865.CreditSamuel N. Fox/George Eastman House, via Getty Images

Born in 1877 into a Georgia family with planter roots, Phillips developed an abiding sympathy for the Old South. He studied history at the University of Georgia and then as a graduate student at Columbia University under the tutelage of William A. Dunning, a scholar with a pro-Southern bent.

After earning his doctorate in 1902, Phillips set out to correct the slanted picture of the Southern past that he believed prevailed at the time. “The history of the United States has been written by Boston and largely been written wrong,” he lamented. “It must be written anew before it reaches its final form of truth, and for that work, the South must do its part.”

Phillips certainly did his. During his 30-year career, he published nine books and close to 60 articles, earning a series of prestigious professorships that culminated in a “very flossy job,” as he put it, at Yale University. This 1930 appointment reflected his stature as the country’s leading historian of slavery and the South, as well as the influence of his most important book, “American Negro Slavery.”

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He was a prodigious, albeit selective researcher. Phillips found evidence in plantation records and Southern travelogues that bolstered the book’s benign interpretation of slavery, while downplaying evidence that did not. In his hands, plantations became idyllic sites where white families had modeled the habits of civilized life for their childlike black charges. “The plantations,” Phillips wrote, “were the best schools yet invented for the mass training of that sort of inert and backward people which the bulk of the American negroes represented.”

According to Phillips, slaveholders provided the enslaved with comfortable living quarters and plentiful rations and eschewed physical discipline. They rarely sold slaves, especially if it meant breaking up families. Slave owners’ rule “was benevolent in intent” and “beneficial in effect.”

Phillips’s use of the passive voice — “in March the corn fields were commonly planted” — further distanced the reader from slaves’ coerced labor. Enslaved African-Americans, in turn, displayed gratitude and loyalty to their masters. Phillips concluded that, while slavery may have been economically inefficient, “the relations on both sides were felt to be based on pleasurable responsibility.”

“American Negro Slavery” won widespread acclaim in the North and the South. Reviewers praised Phillips for his thorough research, charming style and lack of bias. In the words of the historian John David Smith, an expert on Phillips, the book served as “the definitive account of the peculiar institution” from World War I into the 1950s.

The book set the tone for the treatment of slavery in classrooms and textbooks across the country. “There was much to be said for slavery as a transition status between barbarism and civilization,” maintained a 1930 best seller, echoing Phillips almost verbatim. “The majority of slaves were … apparently happy.”

From the beginning, however, Phillips had his critics, who insisted on telling a more truthful, unvarnished history of slavery. W.E.B. Du Bois wrote a scathing review of “American Negro Slavery,” observing, “It is a defense of American slavery, a defense of an institution which was at best a mistake and at worst a crime.” Drawing on interviews with ex-slaves, sources Phillips rejected, the historian Frederic Bancroft published a 1931 book that exploded Phillips’s misrepresentations of the domestic slave trade.

Phillips’s critics grew more vocal in the 1950s and 1960s, as a new generation of scholars challenged his benign reading of slavery and the racism that stained almost every page of “American Negro Slavery.”

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Yet while Phillips’s most egregious claims fell out of favor, the legacy of “American Negro Slavery” has proved tenacious.

According to a new Southern Poverty Law Center report on how slavery is taught in public schools, current pedagogy continues to focus on slavery from the perspective of whites, not the enslaved, while failing to connect the institution to the white supremacist beliefs that supported it. Textbooks often ignore slaveholders’ desire to make money and too easily slip into grammatical constructions — Africans “were brought” to America — that absolve enslavers of their actions.

Last year, a Charlotte, N.C., teacher asked her middle-school students to list “four reasons why Africans made good slaves.” An eighth-grade teacher in San Antonio recently sent students home with a work sheet titled “The Life of Slaves: A Balanced View.” It prompted students to list the “positive” aspects of slavery along with the “negative.”

We must confront mischaracterizations of the nature of slavery, whether nurtured in the classroom or broadcast on Twitter. After all, historical accuracy on this topic is not just about getting the past right; it is also about understanding the challenges of the present.

The persistence of racial inequality in America — from police brutality and school segregation to mass incarceration and wealth disparities — reflects, to some degree, the persistence of the Phillipsian take on slavery. If the institution were little more than a finishing school for African-Americans, then why acknowledge or address its pernicious legacies today?