Offense

[DavidEBernstein at aol.com]

Like Eugene, I'm not sure I get this.  The 13th Amendment doesn't prohibit 
the enslavement of African Americans.  It prohibits the enslavement of anyone.  
To my knowledge, to the extent 13th Amendment prosecution come up nowadays, 
they almost always involve immigrants, who are almost always either Asian or 
Hispanic.  In fact, just the other day I was reading about a case of a Saudi 
Arabian family somewhere in the Western United States that was enslaving their 
maid, who was from an Asian country, maybe Indonesia.  Even in past days, around 
the turn of the century, many of the peonage prosecutions under the authority 
of the 13th Amendment involved Italian immigrants.  Given that the 13th 
Amendment is in no way race-specific, that it has not been applied in a 
race-specific way, and that slavery has existed throughout human history and has not been 
confined to persons of African descent, I don't see how it can be "racist" to 
analogize the status of animals to the status of slaves.  Dehumanizing and 
degrading to humans of all races, yes, but racist, no--unless of course, there 
Mark had a racist intent, which I presume is not the case, and there is 
certainly no evidence of that.  Yvette says that it's subliminally easier to make 
Mark's argument because of the historical association of blacks with slavery, but 
that's pure conjecture--someone with the name of Stein might just as easily 
"subiminally" associate slavery with his ancestors in Egypt.

In a message dated 8/8/2006 6:04:47 PM Eastern Standard Time, 
7barksda at jmls.edu writes:
I do want to say that I was not trying to shut Mark up. If he had not posted, 
then the issue would never have been raised - I think that it was good that  
the issue was raised so that we could have a discussion about it. My objection 
was not so much to his throwing out the argument, as it was to the argument 
itself - which as I keep saying, I think is racist.  

yb
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.ucla.edu/pipermail/conlawprof/attachments/20060808/d531e98c/attachment.htm