Katrina and Prejudice

Jazz directs us to a commentary by Leonard Pitts in the Miami Herald on prejudice in the United States and the reactions to looting in New Orleans. Like Jazz, I'm not going to copy and paste, you should read the entire thing.(login: horsey@og.com password: horsey1) We here much about our treatment of slavery and blacks here in the United States but we were not alone of course. I have been reading James Michener's Caribbean recently. If you have not read it this would be a good time. As the horror in New Orleans was unfolding I was reading the section on the English sugar plantation owners of Jamaica and there battles over slavery and equal rights. One of the chief allies of the plantation owners was Scottish essayist and historian Thomas Carlyle. So what kind of man was Carlyle? This single line from Wikipedia says it all:

Carlyle's distaste for democracy and his belief in charismatic leadership was unsurprisingly appealing to Adolf Hitler, who was reading Carlyle's biography of Frederick during his last days in 1945.

Perhaps his most shocking essay is the Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question.

Later writings were generally short essays, often indicating the hardening of Carlyle's political position. His notoriously racist essay "An Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question" suggested that slavery should never have been abolished. It had kept order, and forced work from people who would otherwise have been lazy and feckless. This – and Carlyle's support for the repressive measures of Governor Eyre in Jamaica – further alienated him from his old liberal allies. Eyre had been accused of brutal lynchings while suppressing a rebellion. Carlyle set up a committee to defend Eyre, while Mill organised for his prosecution.