Response to St. Clare

This post is a continuation of the comment I left on the St. Clare's Racism post. There, I corrected the misattributed piece of narration on page 189-- while saying that cooking is "an indigenous talent of the African race" IS a faulty generalization, the character St. Clare did not say it.
The post then cites on page 195, St. Clare's response to Miss Ophelia's trepidation that the house's slaves may not be honest in their work, recquireing tighter discipline and management. St. Clare's reply, "Of course they're not!" is taken entirely out of context.
From 194-195, St. Clare actually makes a very sober social justice argument: the logical consequence of the socialization provided by slavery is the demoralization and dehumanization of the enslaved.
In full, what St. Clare throws back somewhat venomously at his cousin reads much like George's polemic to Mr. Wilson:
"...Why should they be? What upon earth is to make them so?...from the mother's breast the colored child feels and sees that there are none but underhand way open to it...As to honesty a slave is kept in that dependent, semi-childish state, that there is no making him realize the rights of property, or feel that his mater's goods are not his own, if he can get them."
The premise being addressed here, one that I can't help but agree with, is that there can be no morality without meaningful choice-- agency. There can be no respect for others without respect for self, of which the slave, by virtue of birth and skin color, is set against impossible odds to reclaim. Miss Ophelia's philosophy-- her version of Christian morality as rigor and order alone-- does nothing more then rearrange deck chairs on a sinking Titanic. It blames the victim for a systemic issue.

St. Clare even draws connections to a classic model of class conflict: "Look at the high and the low, all the world over, and it's the same story,-- the lower class used up, body, soul, and spirit, for the good of the upper. It is so in England; it is so everywhere; and yet all Christenom stands aghast, with virtuous indignation, because we do the thing in a little different shape from what they do it."