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Prismattic comments on What truths are actually taboo? - Less Wrong
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Granting that I haven't done a detailed study of the literature on this, but I think you're taking an exceptionally narrow view of what was bad about slavery in the antebellum US. After reconstruction, for example, black sharecroppers could not have their spouses and children arbitrarily seized and sent elsewhere.
How sure are you of that? Sharecroppers were often kept indebted as a method of control, and the US had debtors' prison just like England did.
As I said, this is not within my area of expertise. However, given that the family-destroying aspect of slavery is much commented upon, and various other evils of Jim Crow are much commented-upon, the fact that I have never encountered complaints about the family-destroying aspect of Jim Crow is sufficient for me to feel moderately confident that the situation was not equivalent on this dimension.
"Jim Crow" is a pretty small part of the story here. "Criminalization of black life" is a better description.
It wasn't designed to be a erudite summation of what slavery was like, but rather a succinct illustration of how slavery was not at that time an obviously worse outcome than the consequences of abolition. It's obvious to me at least that the abolition of slavery has proved a Good Thing, but it would not have been obvious in 1890.