Washington & slavery

[Paul Mackin]

jbor wrote:

>
>
> "There are, however, in the vast record of his correspondence no explicit
> statements by Washington that blacks were innately inferior to whites."

Is this a statement that can be accepted as true? (not sure who said it, but no
matter)

In other words he was calling his black household staff lazy and shiftless because
they happened to BE  lazy and shiftless, not because of their race.

I remember giving a quote a while back to the effect that GW considered working
people in general to be worthless and shiftless.

Theories of racial superiority and inferiority were developed in the nineteenth
rather than the eighteenth century. So if GW was a full-blown  racist he was ahead
of his time. He might only have been an incipient racist or a protoracist.

None of this has anything much to do with Pynchon's GW that I can see.

P.