I agree that slavery (and the genocide of the natives) were worse but no one claimed slavery or Indian genocide were for the good of the blacks or natives.
lmao y’all need to learn your history for real.
African chattel slavery (and Native American slavery in Latin America) was justified throughout on the basis that these populations were lower beings who *needed* to be civilized, christianized, or protected by white masters. White slaveowners frequently saw their role as fundamentally paternalistic, as providing moral guidance and structure to people whom they viewed as children otherwise incapable to self-directed activity.
Native American populations were treated similarly- as a lazy people prone to idleness who needed to be corrected for their own good in order to become productive members of society. Even into the 20th century, the residential schools and forced rehousing of indigenous children was seen as a way of disabusing them of their layabout, drunken regressive culture and instilling instead good Christian values.
It is no accident, of course, that these same stereotypes exist for black people as well. From the trope of eating watermelon (black people laying about in the sun eating watermelon and not working), to welfare queens and drug use, to frivolous ostentatious purchasing practices today, they are all residual affereffects of the original Southern myth: that black people constitute a lesser, childlike species who, absent the good stewardship and guidance of a benevolent, paternal white master, will soon revert to their slothful, impulsive/indulgent ways (and so constitute proof positive that emancipation was a mistake).
Finally it cannot be ignored that both genocide and slavery, and indeed much of the American ideological drive today is founded on a premise of a land’s right to “good stewardship.” Native populations, perceived as idle and unproductive, were consequently seen as abusing the land by failing to effectively martial its productive forces. This has long been the argument that justified Indian removal and massacre, from the conquest of the Aztecs and Inca, to the Indian Removal Act and Tecumseh’s war, to Standing Rock, the open conflict against the Wet’suwet’en people, and the destruction and removal of Indigenous people from the lands around the Amazon today. The myth goes that Native Americans do not make effective use of the lands, and it is for the collective good of humanity that they be removed from their homes, and their lands be given over to the stewardship of those who can make better use of the resources at their disposal.
And this is all of course inherently tied into liberal and capitalist ideology: that productive activity and full utilization of all available resources is a good in-itself, that history progresses linearly upwards and consequently anybody standing in the way of this progress is damaging humanity overall, that the accumulation of wealth irrespective of sustainability or equitable distribution is an inherent good, and ultimately that it is a moral imperative for the weak and “unproductive” so-defined, to give way to the strong and more-profitable who are thereby rendered by-definition more deserving of the space.
