Make the Confederacy's Defeat a National Holiday

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43. In the American South? No.

You're not going to like that answer, but genocide is the systematic destruction of all or a significant part of a racial, ethnic , religious or national group.

African-American slaves were a resource to the white landowners of the south. Systematically destroying the African-American population would have destroyed the southern economy. So while slavery was morally indefensible and incredibly cruel -- and without drawing any relative moral judgments with regard to slavery v. genocide -- the fact remains that genocide is not slavery (and slavery is not genocide) and that African-Americans were not the subject of genocide in the American south.

3.1 percent of the population of the Upper South states and 1.1 percent of the population of the lower south states were freed blacks in 1860. The fact that there were freed blacks in the slave states also doesn't square with attempts to blur the distinction between genocide and slavery.