On an episode of “CNN NewsNight with Abby Philip,” the topic being discussed was a serious one: the Trump administration’s current program to purge the Smithsonian, and other museums, of exhibits that painted white Americans in an unflattering light. In particular, this meant that exhibits about the horrors of slavery were going to be censored, and were going to misrepresent a significant chunk of our history.
CNN, a cable news network, in a news program, brought on a round table of about 5 people and the host, Abby Phillip, to discuss this issue. One of the participants, Jillian Michaels, came prepared with a long list of exhibits that, she claimed, had the theme of “white people bad” (that’s actually how she phrased it — I rather suspect that no professional museum exhibit said such a thing. I’d also like to know who gave her that list…the Heritage Foundation? The Ku Klux Klan?)
Michaels charged into the discussion, waved her list around, and declared that no, Trump was only trying to balance the presentation of slavery.
In a roundtable discussion about President Donald Trump’s latest plan, some on the panel accused him of attempting to whitewash history, including downplaying the horrors of slavery. But Michaels pushed back, arguing that some of exhibits in question unfairly target white people.
He’s not whitewashing slavery,she said.And you cannot tie imperialism and racism and slavery to just one race, which is pretty much what every single exhibit does.Michaels then went on to try to justify her argument by saying that slavery is thousands of years old and that only a small percentage of white Americans actually owned slaves, something host Abby Phillip did not seem to appreciate.
They were discussing the history of American slavery, which was pretty much a white-owned institution. Any museum exhibit is going to show white people benefiting from exploitation of an almost entirely black population. How can you hide that without grossly distorting the facts?
She also tried to claim that only 2% of American individuals owned slaves, a number you can get by including the more populous northern states, where it was outlawed, including the black population of the enslaved, discounting the fact that a whole family dependent on slavery only counted one person, the master, and yeah, let’s ignore the economic dependencies of the Southern states. More accurate and historically conscious analyses reveal a different number.
So, according to the Census of 1860, 30.8 percent of the free families in the confederacy owned slaves.
That means that every third white person in those states had a direct commitment to slavery.
OK, so who the heck is Jillian Michaels, and why was she brought into this serious discussion?
She was a reality TV star.
She was a coach brought on to a show called “The Biggest Loser” where she yelled at fat people to eat less and exercise more. She has zero expertise in history, museum curation, or treating people humanely. Her qualification for getting on the show were that she is extremely opinionated and conservative — that is, that she has a loud mouth and is stupid. She has no qualifications. She runs a blog and a podcast (because everyone has a podcast) where she peddles “supplements” and yammers about how much she hates DEI and immigrants and “wokism”.
What were the producers at CNN thinking? They definitely weren’t looking for informed, educated opinion on a complex issue. They just went with a pushy, random, white ignoramus who’d spout off controversial (and wrong) ideas.
And so the bad ideas continue to spread, thanks to media that doesn’t believe in informing, but only in keeping the paying public’s eyes glued to their ads.
This is true but completely irrelevant to the Smithsonian’s exhibits.
PZ already covered this.
The ancient Roman and other Middle Eastern societies were slave owning societies, among others. Slavery is all through the Old and New Testaments of the bible and never, ever condemned.
That has no relevance to American history.
The vast majority of slaves were Black and were owned by white people.
It’s not quite 100% though.
.1. Occasionally the European colonists would make the Native inhabitants whose lands they were taking into slaves.
These would be white slavers making the Native Indians into slaves.
This is rarely mentioned in any histories of the USA.
.2. A few of the assimilated Indian tribes copied the white Europeans and owned Black slaves.
This was a very minor part of the whole slave owner and slave population though.
None of this makes the white slavery of Blacks look any better.
The thing is, transatlantic slavery CREATED the racialised dynamic on display here, and the systemic racism it gave rise to is by far its greatest legacy. An honest museum display must acknowledge this.
Prior forms of slavery generally did not operate along racialised lines – Assyrian, Persian, Greek, Roman: mostly where ancient slavery was concerned it was those conquered in war who were enslaved, or those who sold themselves into slavery to pay off debts. Occasionally someone trying to moralise on slavery, like Aristotle, would theorise that there are races (non-Greeks in his eyes) who are naturally suited to slavery, but that never stopped Greeks taking other Greeks as slaves.
Transatlantic slavery was an integral factor in the rise of modern anti-black racism, and introduced the ideas, the systems, the relationships that define it. You can’t bring up other forms of slavery that didn’t have these dynamics and say it balances out the peculiarly American version that did – if anything that goes to show just how noisome and awful this particular form of slavery was.
There is a lot about the enslavement of Indians by white Americans but it is scattered all over the internet.
This was until recently an obscure topic.
I’d never heard it before until I looked it up.
Here is on article on one example of a common phenomenon.
An oh yeah, for any MAGAts reading this, enslaving the Native Americans doesn’t make the US look any better. If anything, it makes our history look worse.
Slavery in America was opposed by many people who fought slavery. By the time of the Civil War, many Northern states had pretty much abolished slavery. Most of the white Americans. This rhetoric that honest histories of Amrican slavery paint white Americans as bad erases those whites who successfully opposed slavery from American history. Yes, those white Americans who championed cruel chattel slavery were bad people. But not all white Americans were bad pro-slavery people. The efforts of good white people to oppose slavery cannot be tossed down the Orwellian memory hole to please the MAGA morons who want to teach our school children chattel slavery was good and America’s slaves were happy slaves. I am down here in Texas. When Texas seceded from the USA, Texas politicians wrote up a document A Declaration Of Causes which impelled succession. It not only supports slavery, it also is explicitly white supremacy supporting and that on religious grounds. This is a bad document filled with bad ideas written by bad people.
https://www.tsl.texas.gov/ref/abouttx/secession/2feb1861.html
raven: You’re right about American Indian slavery. There are accounts of Indians in Florida being terror stricken by the prospect of being captured by White slavers. So terror stricken in fact that some tribes went to sea and took refuge in the Bahamas. Modern DNA analysis shows that many African Americans have a large dollop of Indian DNA. This was the result of intermixing on plantations. Another interesting DNA finding is that most Black men in the U.S. have European y-chromosomes, particularly from the UK. The old Massahs were busy noodling their Black slave women. There were contemporary accounts of how so many of the slave boys resembled Massah. Slavery, as practiced in America, was a brutal, dehumanizing institution. When Northerners travelled to the South, they were horrified by the conditions they saw on the large cotton plantations — they were basically slave labor camps, not farms. Nearly every contemporary Southerner has slave owning ancestors. I’ll fess up, I do too. As soon as my English ancestors landed in Virginia, they busily bought slaves to work the tobacco fields. It was said that the British colonists were unable to work the fields in the Southern heat, so Africans were needed to take their places.
She is nobody important who has anything worthwhile to say.
CNN probably had her one because they needed someone to defend slavery for their Bothsidesism. And the only people they could get all had Nazi tattoos and long prison records.
Except Jillian Michaels and I’m not at all claiming that she doesn’t have a few Nazi tattoos, just that they aren’t obviously visible on TV.
The problem with traditional media outlets these days is that pretty much all of them are owned by a few billionaires who are all pro-Trump and push their TV channels and newspapers to run stories in a pro-Trump manner. CNN got a very obvious pro-Trump slant a few years back when the Discovery Network bought out Warner.
One of the museums being looked into by the Trump administration is the National Museum of Natural History. I do wonder what they’re going to find objectionable there. Evolution?
The ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ were considered civilized in large part because they adopted slavery. This is more of an indictment on the white setter culture since they were the ones calling the American institution of slavery ‘civilized’. In the end, even adopting white culture did not spare the Native Americans. They were still forced to endure the Trail of Tears (one of many expulsions).
A lesson: Complying with American Fascism will not save you.
One factor in the fall of the western Roman Empire was their enslavement of the peoples they conquered. The population of Germanic slaves was larger than the free population of Rome. The enslaved opened the gates, the populace surrendered the Emperor, and Rome got sacked, though the “Barbarians” really should have razed that city to dust and killed the pope for good measure.
Chattel slavery of non-white people and the subsequent world-wide colonization was wholly instituted BY said popes and the evil Catholic Church.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dum_Diversas
Jillian Michaels is racist and ignorant, in addition to providing a classic example of a Karen. Skinny white women being the public face of fascist white man cults has always been a thing, from Virgin Mary to Ghislaine. Her lip fillers look terrible and she has ozempic face.
Tethys@10 her face has looked like that since before Ozempic hit the market. Any similarity is coincidence, or the fault of her plastic surgeon.
@5 John Watts
False. Black American men are mostly descended from their male African ancestors, though the percentage of European Y haplogroups in modern populations is significant at approximately 35 to 40%.
Speaking of networks claiming to show the news. Does anybody have a link to an Amicus brief that Fox filed a while back. Maybe a decade or two even.
This was a case where a newscaster at a Fox affiliate in Florida flat out lied. And was sued by a viewer. Fox corp filed an Amicus brief stating that Fox was an entertainment company, and truth had nothing to do with entertainment.
I thought I had a link to it but I can’t find it.
There were a handful of free Black Americans who owned slaves, which does not counter PZ’s argument in the slightest, but what about Jim Crow laws? Those were racist as fuck.
I find myself wondering if the superstitious belief in maternal impression was used to explain this away.
(Of course the master would never stoop to such a thing as you imply! He is just so very impressive! )
@13 JimB
Fox usually tries to claim their lies are simply opinions, not “entertainment”.
Unless Florida has stricter laws than the USA does, I can’t think of any law or implied contract where a viewer gets to sue a newscaster for lying, unless it was a claim of slander. Even in that case, I don’t think you can get off the hook by essentially claiming he was just joking, unless the plaintiff qualifies as a public figure.
@13 JimB
Fox News website’s terms of use agreement says this:
It has been brought up in many lawsuits involving Tucker Carlson, Sidney Powell, and/or Dominion (as plaintiff). Most of them are referring to this but AFAIK the judges are not buying it (for now).
I’ve always known that Native Americans were enslaved. Perhaps that was because my maternal great-grandparents were Cherokees who escaped from the Trail of Tears at the Mississippi, made their way upriver, and found work in Illinois.
Their son even married a farm owner’s daughter, my grandmother. The farmer’s family was from a Scottish clan. My grandmother’s maiden name was Minerva Marie MacWilliams.
Our family was well aware of the hardships that the Native Americans endured.
This sounded familiar to me as well, but I couldn’t remember where I’d seen it. Checking WikiP found nothing of relevance, even on the page for “Fox News controversies”.
It looks like this may be an urban legend. Searching snopes finds debunkings of this sort of claim:
[about a 2013 fictitious article] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-news-entertainment-switch/
[about a 2004 case in FL that might have started the UL] https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/fox-skews/
I can find nothing verifiable that supports such claims.
A related misbelief is that Fox News is banned in Canada, supposedly because its content doesn’t obey Canadian laws in one way or another.. Not the case at all. You can get Fox News on most cable providers. Murdoch did try to start a Fox News Canada in the early 2000s with what was Canwest/Global at the time, but eventually gave up because of media ownership requirements.
@20: Yep.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/canadian-fox/
The U.S. has such ownership laws as well. WikiP:Rupert_Murdoch:
I suspect that he would have preferred to gain Canadian citizenship while retaining US citizenship, but there are probably reasons that made that too onerous or even impossible. And as noted, Fox (News and Broadcasting) are accessible on Canadian cable+satellite channels.
‘Sun TV’ tried to position itself as a Canadian version of Fox. (If you’re familiar with the Toronto Sun newspaper, you know what it would have been like.) It eventually collapsed as well, though not because of media ownership requirements (because it actually was mostly locally owned) and not because of ‘news stations must actually tell the truth in Canada’ as some folks have claimed… mostly it was because none of the big cable providers would put it on the basic cable package so they never got much penetration into the lower-paying markets. And their attempts to use the CRTC to force cable providers to put them there didn’t pan out because the CRTC’s attitude was ‘there are already two Canadian 24-hour news networks on basic cable, what do you have that’s so different that you need to be there too?’ Sun TV tried to claim that it was anti-conservative bias, of course (and we can’t say for certain that there wasn’t some of that behind the scenes, but there was no actual public indication of it), but eventually they shut down because running a TV network is expensive and they couldn’t make a profit without being on basic cable and thus pushed out to almost everybody.
So they shut it down and formed ‘Rebel Media’ instead, because there wasn’t as much regulation over the Internet. If you’re not Canadian and you’ve heard of Rebel Media, it may be because one of their ‘star reporters’ was rather openly siding with the neo-Nazis at Charlottesville… (The same star reporter tried running for Mayor of Toronto later, and got a couple percent of the vote at the most, basically the lowest of anybody with significant name recognition.)
The modern media isn’t informing — it’s platforming. That is, it’s outsourcing the hardest work of marketing (building initial interest) by choosing only spokesbacteria who already have a publicitly platform, however unrelated to the topic. Examples from a few years back: Sarah Ferguson and her children’s books; Hulk Hogan and the governorship of PZ’s state; lurking behind… Mr Chesterfield himself, Ronald Reagan. More directly within media, consider why Bill Maher might be considered appropriate as the host of a current-events-oriented show, or, well, any Kardashian…
Of course, none of this is helped at all by using the same metrics to measure success in “informational media” as are used in “entertainment media.”
Fuck CNN. I am never looking at anything CNN, not even with adblockers. There are extensions to add websites to your blocked list so they do not show even if you click on link by mistake or open them habitually. Just add CNN to that list. It’s an absolutely garbage supposed news network.
@2. cartomancer : ..Aristotle, would theorise that there are races (non-Greeks in his eyes) who are naturally suited to slavery, >
Yuk. Some respect for Aristotle lost. Didn’t know that or think the ancient Greeks had much of an idea or care about race as a notion before now really. Thanks I guess.
.***
I very much doubt that’s what ANY of those exhibits actually did let alone all of them.
I wonder if many or any of those contestants were People Of Colour and how she treated them versus the white ones? Could be intresting if I suspect horrible to find out – maybe more privately than publicly?
Funny to think the reichwingers like to rnatand rave about history supposedly being rewritten to be politically correct although so very typical of their hypocrisy and projection “Every accusation etc..” Sigh. Shades of Stalin’s historical revisionism really.. another thing they used to condemn with horror but are ofc doing themselves in essence now.
I guess folks have probably already heard too but :
Source : https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62wjjpxdq0o
It isnt only relatively ancient history they are trying to erase and it isn’t only slavery and African-American and Coloured people they are trying to erase and vanish from the records, education and memory. / Capn Obvs.
Netflix is currently running a documentary series all about what happened behind the scenes of the “reality” show “The Biggest Loser”. Haven’t watched any of it yet, but I believe that “personal trainer” Jillian Michaels (one & the same) is pretty well raked over the coals by former contestants and others. So she probably already had her swastika panties in a bunch.
makarman, I tried watching it, but it was basically like the show itself. I gave up halfway and a bit through the first episode; they introduce past contestants and each one goes through their story and their motivation and whatnot. I’m not USAnian, can’t cope with the same thing repeated over and over as content, after being told what the supposed content is gonna be. Bah.
By the time I gave up on it (with due zotting), I was no more informed about the show than in the first five minutes. Bait and switch docco, for mine.
Zero stars — a time waste.
@^
The previous comment is a random idiot with no relevant expertise of any kind commenting on a show he explicitly says he didn’t watch.
Zero stars, total time waste
X-D
I particularly enjoy how – in a comment on racism – the resident troll blithely and unwittingly boasts of the virtues of being “not USAnian”.
X-D
@ ^ Silentbob : USAian is NOT a “race” and John Morales is not a troll.
You really cannot just leave him alone can you?
Naomi Klein’s book Doppleganger (excellent! wide ranging! thought provoking!) may be relevant. In it, she talks about how her Doppleganger, Naomi Wolf, took an arch right turn after being publicly humiliated (on the BBC no less) for getting her research wrong. She felt rejected by the left/center and found a new home and income stream among the antivaxxers / RFK loons.
Jillian Michaels’ trajectory may be similar, but worse. Unlike Wolf’s early work, hers had little redeeming value. There’s currently a Netflix documentary out discussing how bad her fitness methods were and the harm she caused to The Biggest Loser contestants. I wouldn’t be surprised if she’s doing this in a bid to both deflect detention from that documentary and also to carve out a new path for herself. Her MAGA face, full of fillers, would be another clue.
Back on topic and FWIW a googel search just found this :
Plus :
Source : https://www.msn.com/en-us/entertainment/news/jillian-michaels-breaks-silence-after-biggest-loser-docuseries/ar-AA1L1xHV
Also :
Source : https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a65675285/jillian-michaels-now/
In addition to thatreality show generally being disgusting :
Source : https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/tv/jillian-michaels-slams-new-biggest-loser-docuseries-some-folks-still-lie-like-its-1985/news-story/8013d0f5830e6346c0b931865bb5d6c7
SteveR @25
Mark Chrisler of The Constant: A History of Getting Things Wrong podcast always refers to him as “Fucking Aristotle” because he was wrong about just about everything and his bad ideas contaminated European thought for centuries. I don’t understand the reverence for the ancient Greek philosophers. Nearly all of them were moral dumbasses who couldn’t figure out why owning human beings as property was wrong even though Epicurus and a few others had pointed this out. To me, this worship of ancient Greece is the same longing for a a “Golden Age” that is a core part of Fascism.
To me, this worship of ancient Greece is the same longing for a “Golden Age” that is a core part of Fascism.
And a few libertarians — America’s version of fascism — do indeed show a bit of nostalgia for ancient Greece, which they seem to imagine as THE birthplace of Pure Reason, science, philosophy, Western Civilization, and all the things that White people seem to think make us uniquely enlightened and rational beings. Whenever libertarians try to pretend they’re “the Real Liberals,” they usually hark back to either Ancient Greek philosophers or Anglo-French (mostly Anglo) Enlightenment scientific progress. Anyone here remember a blog called “Classical Values” by Eric Shiehe et al?
The north also benefitted hugely from southern slavery. The fabric mills run by whites processed cotton picked by black slaves. In some places coal was dug by an underclass of whites (Irish, Ukrainians, Polish) and in others it was slave labor. Northern capitalists bet big on southern sugar plantations that used slave labor, and traded it internationally. The entire US economy depended on an extremely distorted “buy low, sell high” based on free labor, and evolved to depend on it – the cause of intense labor warfare as slavery officially ended. For example, Jack Daniels whisky co’s founder was taught distilling by an enslaved man who basically set him up in business for “free” though he was uncredited. George Washington was known for setting up a distillery, but the work and construction was entirely done by slaves he owned. Even when buildings were built for white businesses in the north, the buildings were often built by slaves who were transported up for a job.
Slavery was fractally evil and continues to corrupt US society and politics. I’m guessing under Turnip the Smithsonian won’t talk about the “southern strategy” or voter suppression but they are some of the clearest legacies of our addiction to slavery.
Raging Bee @ 34
The Greeks were very much part of the cultural melting pot of western asia/northern africa, although with the rise of political power they got arrogant about the “barbarians”.
Coins was an invention of the Phrygians. The greek alphabet was a modified version of the Phoenician one with wovels added. Chemistry came from Egypt, the name can be translated as the egyptian art/craft. Non-local traders would have had to learn many languages, like Herodotos did.
Where greeks stood out is that the phalanx soldier militias led to the displacement of oligarchs, and the creation of a literate middle class with political clout. The city states of phoenicians and their Carthagian colonies did not take that step.
The geography with microstates spread along islands and valleys separated by mountains had a lot to do with greek polities being small enough that free men / soldiers could gather at a place and make collective decisions.
Later the same thing happened in the valleys that formed the kernel of Switzerland.
On the flat plains of Europe, it was easier for kings and other feudal riffraff to maintain control over vast domains, as was the case in Egypt, Mesopotamia, India and China.
And if you look on a map of the expansion of Rome, the halt of the most interesting hellenistic intellectual accomplishments coincide with Rome conquering the whole region.
The intellectual explosion was possible when neither secular nor religious forces could hold an iron grip of the people.
The intellectual awakening in the last centuries of the middle ages is a very complex story (where the arabs played a big role) and I cannot get into that here.
Another center of creativity was in what is today Sri Lanka/Ceylon, but I cannot claim any expertise on that topic.
This rhetoric that honest histories of Amrican slavery paint white Americans as bad erases those whites who successfully opposed slavery from American history.
No history class I had in high school or college “erased” White opposition to slavery — they may not have said a whole lot about it, but they did explicitly mention the Abolitionist movement, and how it at least grew (with White support) big enough to make slaveowning states scream about secession and bitter civil war in response.
“No history class I had in high school or college “erased” White opposition to slavery”
It’s a work in progress.
The alphabet also came from Egypt. The Phoenicians just adapted Egyptian hieroglyphs for their own purpose.
Walter, Egypt practiced slavery. As did the Phoenicians. As did the Greeks.
“In particular, this meant that exhibits about the horrors of slavery were going to be censored, and were going to misrepresent a significant chunk of our history.” is the lede.
(It seems that the topic is a bit fraught, so that changing the subject feels less uncomfortable)