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This trend of thought is not doing the black community in America ANY favors. For outsiders, it immediately creates TOWARD them. My African friends have noticed this, too, btw.
And it is a topic that is overwhelmingly black people from the United States discuss and harp about. It is rarely ever mentioned from English speaking black countries in this hemisphere or from Haiti or the Spanish speaking countries....just from the United States.
There are far more whites in the pc crowd than blacks, so what is it blacks have noticed? I've heard many times that blacks can't be racist, which I think is ridiculous. I've been the target of a black person's eyes looking at me with hatred so many times I surely think it's due to racism. It often happens in a grocery store when a black person is the checker. I was told long ago that such people are called militants.
I think it's a lost cause because blacks are unwilling for racism to disappear.
I've been shopping at grocery stores for decades, and never once has any black employee of any grocery store ever looked at me with hatred in their eyes. Are you sure about what you're seeing?
But I wonder how the atrocities against African American slaves compare with the atrocities committed by the Turks against the Armenians, or the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews. A lot of those victims, their descendants don't claim any reparations, because those descendants don't exist, because those victims don't have any descendants, because of how severe the atrocities were. Is it really fair to give reparations to those lucky enough to exist, while wiping clean the memory of those who were exterminated?
I think the most important thing is to recognize that the human race has a tendency to become violent and barbaric, and find ways to prevent such violence from happening in the future. Prevention of future slavery is one important step, but there are other equally important steps we need to take.
Indentured servitude, that's the white man's term for enslaving the low white classes into some very harrowing labor tasks, it was practiced all over Europe and continued in the American colonies. Unlike the situation most African slaves found themselves in, the white man's servant status had time limits, long, but not life long.
Humans have quite a history with slavery, and very few societies managed without it. America was one of those nations that allowed slavery into the 1800's and a modified form of it until the late forties into the early fifties. "Sharecropping, with the white landowner calling the shots was that form that kept black people, and poor white people, down on the farm for quite a few decades after the civil war.
I've been shopping at grocery stores for decades, and never once has any black employee of any grocery store ever looked at me with hatred in their eyes. Are you sure about what you're seeing?
But I wonder how the atrocities against African American slaves compare with the atrocities committed by the Turks against the Armenians, or the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews. A lot of those victims, their descendants don't claim any reparations, because those descendants don't exist, because those victims don't have any descendants, because of how severe the atrocities were. Is it really fair to give reparations to those lucky enough to exist, while wiping clean the memory of those who were exterminated?
I think the most important thing is to recognize that the human race has a tendency to become violent and barbaric, and find ways to prevent such violence from happening in the future. Prevention of future slavery is one important step, but there are other equally important steps we need to take.
I would not have said it had it not happened to me many times over the years.
Aside from talking about sex-related slavery, in the context of slavery in early north America, they're referring to the Irish, mainly. See the book, "How the Irish Became White". Irish slaves blended in to easily with the general population when they escaped. This gave rise to a demand for Black slaves, who would be easier to spot if they tried to run.
An excellent book which humanizes the evolution of labor in the young colonies which had brought with them the ideas of class and privilidge as practiced in Europe is this one.
The Irish were the first, as war booty and as a way to destroy their culture, but as there were plenty of English poor which were in excess, they were also seen as a means of supplying cheap labor while relieving the overpopulation of the 'useless' at the same time.
Then there is the 'servant' trade, which predated the importation of black africans to the colonies and served to fill the same purpose of cheap controlled labor. People who were poor and wished to escape were given a paper to 'put their mark' and they had agreed to an indenture. Others knew but life was so bad they took the chance. There were no limitations on the treatment of indentured labor, including beating them to death. The first shipment was a group of street children rounded up on the streets, all very young, who were shipped across to pick tabacco in Maryland, and had all died within the year, most much sooner. But as children were easy to gather and cheap to buy, and favored by tabacco farmers, many more came and died. Adults were often lied to about conditions, and the escape rate was high. After recapture, time was added to insure the labor was not going to leave. Whipping was the given punishment for nearly everything, to start. In the tropical areas where sugarcane was grown, both Irish prisoners and black purchases were used and housed together.
When the willing dried up, and the British prisons were massively overcrowded, those with sentences less than death could be shipped away as labor instead. There were time limits, but more died before the end than lived, and discipline for infractions tacked on more. And the convict trade was run by the same companies who ran the slave trade, on the same ships, with the same crews. But it was far more profitable since they were paid for taking the convicts and then could sell them upon arrival. After the revolution, as convicts were diverted to Australia as they also often brought prison borne disease.
My five x great grandfather and his brother were among the first offical shipment of convicts under this new system, and were sold to a planter in Maryland. They both left for the hills when they had finally fufilled their time. He lived to be a 91 year old man who's family history had covered the rise of East London, shipment in 1718 as involuntary labor, the shift away from convicts and others to Africans who replaced them in the system, the revolution and a farm of his own. But for those who survived to have such a history, a lot died before freedom.
The slow path to black slavery becoming the norm was paved by the use of unwanted europeans as expendable labor. That blacks had advantages does not take away from the reality that it did not begin with them, and the first blacks were purchased under the indenture system as well.
Whatever the person was, black or white or something else, the rules were the same unless one was a specialists in something, like Washington's tutor who was an indentured man who was educated, who had higher status. Labor was labor and laborors were worth what they could work.
Any system which developes has a multitude of steps along the way and ALL of them matter, as do the individuals who suffered, whatever color their skin. Those first children who died picking tabacco matter as do the poor foiled into purchaced labor as does the convict trade as does the blacks indentured before there was a system and those later straight out purchaced for in essense all of them were simply looked at as a comodity.
Last edited by nightbird47; 04-23-2016 at 07:35 PM..
I read the first of the articles. There was no discussion of white slavery among the Barbary Coast pirates. I see that Post #14 rectified that omission but there was little discussion of same.
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