osprey_archer | Sentimentalism etc.

I had a presentation today! About sentimentalism and how unfairly maligned it is, because it was in its time a radical doctrine: it's insistence, in the first place, that slaves had feelings, and furthermore that their feelings were as strong and deep as free white people's, and therefore it was not only possible but right and moral to sympathize with those feelings, and to be moved to action by that sympathy.

Of course this is in some ways a limiting doctrine. But at the time, when the foremost scientist in the US argued for separate lines of descent for the black and white races (arguing, essentially, that black people were literally not human), and when slavery apologists popularly argued that slaves didn't really have family feeling and therefore didn't suffer lastingly when their families were sold apart -

In that context, sentimentalist sympathy was a radical departure, and we should respect for that.

Also, my presentation was amazing. Everyone clapped!

We were out of time, afterward, for the last presentation, and the professor apologized to my classmate who was supposed to give it.

"That's fine," quoth the classmate. "I don't want to follow that."