Imagine you lived as a Southerner in mid-1800s America. Would you be opposed to slavery or would you support it?

@Newandimproved: This reply has religious and race bigotry all over it.

@Noahkahol: it isn't supposed to - it's looking at the idea in terms of what people were influenced by at the time

bigotry? it's asking a question about the social millieu of the time dude

@Noahkahol: He's not factually wrong about any points he made

@Newandimproved: Few at the time had the money for a clean shirt much less a wagon and buckboard or any means to sojourn severl miles every Sunday with their large families in tow to listen to some 2 bit preacheer.

Hollywood planted that social milleiu at the time horse shit in people's heads.

@HalfCactus: and trying to look at what a person in 19th century southern USA would have been exposed to.

think about it. they were in a mostly rural area with the nearest neihbors miles away. not everyone was a landowner with 100s of people in legal captivity.

shoot even the founding fathers 100 year previous had problems dealing with the inconsistency between freedom and slavery.

It's not meant to be a bigoted response -

and here's another thought - what ugliness will people of this generation be thought guilty of 100 years from now?

@Noahkahol: okay, looks like we can't discuss anything....believe what you wish and think about me as you will

@Newandimproved: and yet even in the South there was a strong movement for abolition. By your logic, no new ideas could ever arise

@firefall: I'm not saying it would be impossible - I havent even taken a freakin position - I'm talking about the difficulty in getting an idean in circulation in that particular part of the world in that time and place in history

geez people climb off my back

@Newandimproved: Look at the Civil Rights movement, Jim Crow law and lynchings. You and I are only about a generation away from [b]that[/b] being "just the way things were".

@bijouxbroussard: The point he's making is that beliefs like those in the Jim Crow era tend to reinforce the positions people already had regarding segregation. It's not setting them in stone, but providing axioms for people to avoid critical thinking

@bijouxbroussard: scary isn't it?
you go to school and you get the briefest of history lessons about slavery and the civil rights movments in the, what 40s? is that the beginnings up through the 50s and 60s - reading about the things that happened in Mississippi even in the 50s to try quiet the movement shocked me. and it was done with governmental backing.

@Newandimproved: Yes, exactly.