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New Division posted:So can anyone advance an convincing argument that whites in the US would re-institute slavery if allowed to that is not based on paranoia? I have to repeat my question as to what the point of re-instituting slavery would be in an economy where unskilled labor is not particularly valued anymore. Slavery's initial practice and growth in the US was driven by shortages of manual laborers as much as anything else, and there's no real lack of those in the modern US. Slavery still persists today in the agricultural sector. Florida farmworker organizations allege that there's over a thousand literal slaves - minority workers in involuntary servitude, forced to work for masters who buy and sell them as if they were objects - working various fields in Florida today, and have enough escaped slaves and imprisoned slaveowners to prove they're not just making it all up. Aside from that, though, slavery as practiced two centuries ago is kind of an obsolete system from capital's perspective. The high cost of slaves made them an investment as well as a product, meaning that much money and productivity had to be lost in order to protect the long-term health of the slave. Wage slavery, where there's no upfront cost and thus no long-term stake in the health of the worker, extracts better overall productivity. Mukip posted:Slavery existed in the ancient world in Europe; but it took off in the colonial period when Europeans came into contact with African tribes selling slaves. I think it's perfectly reasonable to hypothesize that if it weren't for the slave trade in Africa already existing at that time, then there might not have been a transatlantic slave trade at all. While some white supremacists may seek to absolve the Europeans of any responsibility with similar arguments that is not my goal. My point was that racism was a symptom of slavery rather than a cause of it. Your second point is similar to what I said myself in that regard. Transatlantic slave trade or not, colonialists were perfectly happy to enslave the natives where convenient. If Americans hadn't been importing African slaves, they'd have just enslaved every Native American they could get their hands on instead.
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Jun 14, 2014 22:45
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OneEightHundred posted:IIRC, it's not so much labor laws as immigration laws. It's basically all off-the-books immigrant workers that their "employers" blackmail by threatening to report them to the authorities. Oh, there actually is literal "chain your employees to their workplace, then throw them into a locked trailer with armed guards at night" slavery occasionally, it's just a lot rarer than the type you're talking about because it's much harder to keep secret outside of rural nowhere and you have to spend a lot more money on chains, locks, and armed guards. MarksMan posted:Also, according to him and his friends (this is something he "shared"), white people did not end slavery -- for some reasoning I don't quite fully understand? It's not really wrong. Not really 100% right, either, but it's built on a foundation of truths, it's just using them to make some iffy inferences. It's true that the Emancipation Proclamation was partially justified as a form of economic warfare against the South, and that it only applied to Confederate states, exempting any slaveholding states that remained in the Union as well as some Confederate territory that was already under Union control. To say that this meant that Northern politicians didn't really want to end slavery is absurd, though - the Emancipation Proclamation, being an executive order issued in Lincoln's capacity as commander-in-chief, could only really cover what Lincoln could cook up a half-decent military justification for. He didn't have the authority to end slavery in the Northern states all by himself; that had to be done by legislative action, not just an executive order. Similarly, while it's true that slavery essentially continued in the South under things like sharecropping, the failure of Reconstruction is somewhat more complex and nuanced than "Northerners didn't really want to end slavery".
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Jun 15, 2014 01:39
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If you haven't completely run off in shame yet, OP, I'd like you to take a look at this article, because you're falling into the biggest trap for white people - when confronted with a conversation about racism that isn't sufficiently cushioned and tip-toey for your taste, you make it all about you, you, you and how dare they talk about a society-wide centuries-old legacy of racism without specifically making exceptions for you? Yes, "not all white people are like that", but if you're so self-centered and clueless that you have to butt into a conversation about racism to yell about how not-racist you personally are, you probably are "like that" even if you don't realize it. http://flowerhorne.com/2013/12/20/not-all-white-people-and-derailing-conversations/ quote:‘Not All White People’ and Derailing Conversations
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Jun 17, 2014 19:11
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A Buttery Pastry posted:I have a hard time finding the specific article*, but are you really sure about this? Not talking federal systems or institutions, but ones that cover much smaller geographic areas. Is the idea that the institutions of a solidly majority black city might mirror those of solidly majority white cities, except with black people on top, really so unfathomable? Yes. Systemic racism goes way beyond the local level - it's a society-wide ill, and even minority enclaves will be ultimately under the rule of a white elite, either directly or through systemic disenfranchisement of the minority community. A Buttery Pastry posted:This assumes they get their job by handing out resumes, not through connections made while in school. African-Americans are tremendously underrepresented at the top levels of the business world, so it looks like connections aren't very effective for black students either, at least not at schools like Yale or Harvard. Over 90 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are white males; blacks, Hispanics, Asians, and women combined make up less than 10 percent.
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Jun 20, 2014 16:36
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Gantolandon posted:He presents racism as the insidious enemy that's everywhere - and if you don't see it, it's only because it makes you blind to its presence. This makes dismissing anyone who criticizes the article in any way incredibly easy. If you disagree with any of his claims, you automatically are proven wrong - because it only means you're too racist to perceive how bad your society is. He's right, though. This part is literally one hundred percent correct. It's not just a tactic for dismissing arguments, it's verifiably accurate, and you deserve to be dismissed when you come at them with "well, as a white person I've never noticed any of this stuff, therefore you're wrong about racism". Kristov posted:You may have stumbled into a good point here. In some ways the goalposts have shifted to the point where you have to belittle imaginary minorites (rather than, y'know, real ones like black people or jewish people) in order to stroke that hate boner. I don't even see anything wrong with "voluntary" minorities complaining about oppression. While it's not on the same level as the more widespread minorities, they do face actual hatred as a result of their totally harmless beliefs or physical condition. The only real difference is that hating people for something they weren't born with is still considered socially acceptable. Do I support their cause? Not necessarily, but an otherkin who gets fired from his job because he told his boss about how he thinks he was Goku in a past life has the right to complain about how society doesn't accept him or his beliefs, even if they're stupid ridiculous beliefs. Is discrimination based on mental illness even illegal?
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Jun 27, 2014 18:03
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twodot posted:"racism as the insidious enemy that's everywhere" is certainly true. "if you don't see it, it's only because it makes you blind to its presence" is possibly true, but a pretty bad assumption. Racism is a real thing that has real bad effects on our society. This is convenient, because it means when people doubt it is real, we can directly provide evidence that it exists. Telling people who don't think racism exists that they are ignorant dirtbags is true, and possibly fun, but you can't claim that it's an effective argument for the existence of racism. The problem here is the contrast between "verifiably accurate" and "we should dismiss people who disagree". If you are dismissing disagreement, you are not verifying the accuracy, this is an ok strategy as far as I'm concerned, but putting those things next to each other is weird. We do have evidence that it exists. People who disagree are being dismissed because they're intentionally ignoring or dismissing that evidence in favor of their own personal, anecdotal observations or convictions. It's no different from climate change deniers - they're ignoring or dismissing the overwhelming evidence that climate change exists because they don't want to believe that it exists, they don't want to believe they're complicit in it, or they believe in an ideology which requires it to be false. And when they're inevitably shrugged off as cranks unwilling to engage in good science, they similarly claim that the scientific community is just promoting dogma and dismissing disagreement. In either case, it's not just "dismissing disagreement", it's dismissing people who go against overwhelming evidence solely because that evidence contradicts their raw ideology or gut feelings, because it's impossible to meaningfully engage with those people.
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Jun 27, 2014 22:12
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Gantolandon posted:Show me this "overwhelming evidence" Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's article supposedly contained. He presented statistics how many whites believe in racism and claimed they actually are wrong and can't spot racism anyway. Plenty of the overwhelming evidence has been posted in this thread. Was all of it included in that one specific article? Probably not, but if you insist on ignoring every article that says racism exists without repeating the widely-available and easily findable evidence that racism exists, I daresay you're exactly the kind of person Kareem was calling out. People debate people who are willing to debate, but you're clearly arguing in bad faith so why bother putting forth any real effort in telling off a guy who's concerned about how we just aren't open enough to the opinions of racists? Gantolandon posted:You can't falsify the notion that claiming something is not racist is actually racist in itself - a belief that shows up in KAJ's article and is frequently expressed in racism threads in this forums. This is the bit I found hard to stomach, not the one stating that racism is prevalent in America. Of course you can. The notion that "starting fires with matches instead of flint" is not racist can't reasonably be portrayed as racist. However, claiming that it's not racist to cross the street when you see a black teen heading your way is assuredly racist - it's defending blatantly racist behavior under the cloak of "well, I don't see why that's racist".
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Jun 28, 2014 04:19
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