quote:

ORIGINAL: RealityLicks
Hi MM,  interesting to hear more about your nanny story but you surprised me with your assertion about black employment in 60s London.  My Dad (and most of his friends) were skilled and semi-skilled workers back then although of course there was widespread discrimination in employment to contend with.  My parents owned their first London property at that time and my mother did not go out to work when I was a kid - not a silver spoon and not the experience of all my contemporaries but not that rare either.                                                                                                                                                         As for combatting racism, in my view, you can't spend centuries inculcating a set of ideas into a culture and then expect a few half-hearted lectures to reverse it all. As is already apparent on this thread and will likely become moreso, you can't teach anything to those who already "know" and as we've seen, the parents usually beat you to it.                                                                                                                                                                                             Godwin's Law be damned, it can best be likened to the scenario in Robert Harris' betseller Fatherland, which I'm sure you'll know is set in a dystopian  present where the Nazis won the war.  How do you eradicate antisemitism in that world?  Even if the majority says they think its the right thing to do? Gonna start by telling them not to feel guilty?                

quote:

ORIGINAL: khalya

The problem with forgetting the past, is that if you do it repeats itself. I personally am not upset or angry with anyone about slavery.

However, I am irritated with the residual effects that is still has. For example, every 50 years, Congress has to vote on whether or not black people can still have the right to vote. Just a few years ago there was a revote. Why does there have to be a vote on whether we can keep our voting rights?

Why is it that education systems with a high demographic of black students are the ones that are failing? Why are most of the people that are incarcerated people of color?

Why is it that no one has an issue with european immigration to America, but if you are black or latino there is a huge problem.

Why is "ebony" a fetish?

Why is the earning ratio disportionate?

There are a lot of issues that are still inherent in this society, and I don't feel like they should be swept under the rug. I personally don't like being followed around when I enter Lord and Taylor. Would you? I hate being asked,
"Would you like to open a line of credit?", when I walk into a jewelry store. I have money, I pay cash for everything, but the assumption is that I don't have any money.

It is especially irritating when people tell me that I am "so articulate", like that is an anomaly.

What is unfair is that I am still being judged by the color of my skin, when it was my ancestors that built up the wealth of this country. It was my ancestors that raised generations of white children, it was my ancestors that were raped and forced to breed, and it was my ancestors that fought and died in wars; for the paltry rights I sometimes am allowed to enjoy.

~Ashe

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aneirin

The Slavery issue, that abomination started in the UK by Sir John Hawkins, cousin of Sir Francis Drake and hero of the repelling of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and under licence from Queen Elisabeth the first I ask this question and am particularly interested in the POV from those of the ethnicity involved .

My question stems from a college lecture,  I would like to know and understand how ascendants from those once forcibly ripped from their homelands and sold into slavery across the seas actually feel now.

Do you in this present age feel anger still, 200 years since the abolition of slavery ?

To whom do you direct that anger, those of the past or other ?

Is it time that what was started in the sixteeenth century and finished some 200 years ago, past anyone's lifetime should be quietly set aside as one of those things in history that are better staying in history ?

My reason for asking, and this might well be down to myself being oversensitive, but one of the ethnicity in question displayed a degree of righteous anger and my perception was that that anger was levelled at the existing  representatives of that long passed age  and ethnicity of the slavers. Something, which I feel is unfair as this modern age is not that of the past.

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aneirin

True, why should I feel guilty for my ancestors actions, why do I feel under attack when the race issue is aired, good question, why did I feel it necessary to sponsor a Kenyan child and her family for education and healthcare, was that guilt. I grew up with the usual distrust of anything different as you did, but nowhere near what you underwent, my town was largely devoid of any other ethnicity aside from Jew, but they were not of a different colour, a small minded largely inbred Northern once industrial town, though my immediate family were Cornish, the Cornish having darker skinned people in their make up are largely not bothered about skin tone, Even half of my family are dark, not black, but of Asian and Far Eastern ethnology, they being my physically nearest relatives,the ones I see most often, there is no guilt there, so where is it coming from if not my geneaology studies.

quote:

ORIGINAL: UPSG

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aneirin

The Slavery issue, that abomination started in the UK by Sir John Hawkins, cousin of Sir Francis Drake and hero of the repelling of the Spanish Armada in 1588, and under licence from Queen Elisabeth the first I ask this question and am particularly interested in the POV from those of the ethnicity involved .

My question stems from a college lecture,  I would like to know and understand how ascendants from those once forcibly ripped from their homelands and sold into slavery across the seas actually feel now.

Do you in this present age feel anger still, 200 years since the abolition of slavery ?

To whom do you direct that anger, those of the past or other ?

Is it time that what was started in the sixteeenth century and finished some 200 years ago, past anyone's lifetime should be quietly set aside as one of those things in history that are better staying in history ?

My reason for asking, and this might well be down to myself being oversensitive, but one of the ethnicity in question displayed a degree of righteous anger and my perception was that that anger was levelled at the existing  representatives of that long passed age  and ethnicity of the slavers. Something, which I feel is unfair as this modern age is not that of the past.

Slavery did not begin then. Slavery is an ancient institution that was practiced throughout every corner of the world. Every powerful civilization of the past was built on slave labor from Egypt to Rome to China to the Aztec (Mexica) civilization to the United States. British, French, Spanish et cetera, colonies all used slave labor.

Complicating things is the matter that no one can agree on exactly what constitutes slavery. Contrary to what is believed many slaves - especially throughout Luso and Hispanic America, paid slaves wages, albeit very tiny wages. This was one way a slave overtime could acquire his or her manumission. It's popular today to portray all Amerindians prior to the arrival of Columbus and other Europeans as nature loving, peaceful, egalitarians. The real history is much different from that and furthermore Amerindians were not one monolithic group. Some Amerindian civilizations had slaves prior to European arrival - in the North Americas of what is now the U.S. and Canada some tribes (as opposed to "civilizations" e.g. Mayan, English, Ottoman) were damn near pacifists while others were some of the most genocidal, savage fighters on earth. So, history is not always what's popular during a current era, such as ours today.

Perhaps the most free - or at least one of the most free - societies to ever exist on earth was that of the Thai people. Thailand means "Land of the free" and Thai means "free person." The Thai contrasted and denoted themselves to be different from their Khmer (Cambodians) neighbors who had legalized slavery.

The term "slave" itself is rooted from "Slav" because the Slavic peoples at onetime, became psynoymous with eunich slavery throughout the Arab Middle East. (many slaves in the Eastern worlds had either their penis or testicles cut off or worse yet both)



Black-American's history of disenfranchisment did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation (spelling?). This must be understood. Reconstruction era aside, when Jim Crow came into being, the U.S. South became one of the most brutal, thug ran, areas of the world, with this lasting into the 1960's. If I posted some of the things Whites were engaged in from the latter 1800's to the 1950's, it would shock the sensibilities of many Whites today and make them wonder if they were barley, culturally and psychologically, above the most sadistic Mexican drug cartle bandits of contemporary times. To make matters worse these often times were some rather poor, ignorant, Whites with low education (arguably IQ's among some of them) that I doubt many British middle-class Whites would like to be associated with. But such was the U.S. South and its Confederate Battle Flag that was so proudly waved during the era of the autombile.

From an economic stand point, slavery can be said to be ownership of a person as oppossed to ownership of another person(s) labor. The latter is what owners of the means of production own today through wage and salary laborers (rich in the United States earn financial wealth through selling their labor, as in example doctors and lawyers, but the very rich in the U.S. generally obtain their financial wealth through not working, in example inheritance [half the wealth in the United States is in the hands of an elite class of White women] and dividens).

This brings me to the point of different theories on how to create a "rightward shift" in an economy (economic growth). One theory is supply-side theory, or that is to say to increase the supply of goods and services by decreasing the cost of resources. Reasources in economic terms are land, labor, and capital.

The United States aquired cheap labor firstly by mass exploitation of Black labor through slavery. Eventually they switiched that toward advertising in Europe (not Africa, Asia, or Latin America) for "ethnic" Europeans to come over. Today in the United States the Mexicans are no more than what the Irish used to be. The U.S. economy utilizes them (via the collusion of the U.S. Government and American industries) to create a rightward shift in the economy by using them as cheap labor (one of the decreased elements of reasources I spoke of). The Mexicans have been fundamental to U.S. economic growth over the last few decades via cheap services and cheap cost in goods.

This style of economic growth (which is anti-union and opposed to demand-side theory [increased wages for labor to stimulate economy by using disposable income] has been popularly coined "Reaganomics." (spelling?)

Why do I bring all this up? Well, existing the U.S. Marine Corps, serving over in war in the Middle East, and owning a high school diploma, I came back to the civilian world to find that many buisnesses visibly demonstrated a preference for Mexican labor. In fact I've helped some of the Mexicans out filling applications (because I look Puerto Rican to many people) when they have asked me speaking in Spanish (I don't speak Spanish but I understood the point of help they were trying to get at). Now, according to traditional U.S. polemics, the U.S. economy favors, at the entry level positions, persons that have not only acquired a high school diploma but that has recieved a basic enough U.S. education to speak and be literate in English. Would not a Black, former U.S. Marine, owning a high school diploma qualify as such? Would not many Black-Americans literate and able to speak English qualify as such?

With the number of Mexicans absorbed in the U.S. labor market - undocumented no less - it does not seem tenable to me that one could propose it is either accidental or just coincidental.

Essentially, the owners of the means of production have stated this in action towards contemporary Black-Americans: We no longer need your cheap labor. Hence, in terms of labor (not privileages of citizenship), Mexico is today one giant 51st state of the Union (United States of America). Arguably the U.S. acts as a giant state for Mexico too, given how much money Mexican immigrants float back over the boarder to family and relatives.

Now, jusat with that little slice you might be able to glimpse into the anger of a poetic, musical, artist like Tupac: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly9rlLmY-Vw

quote:

ORIGINAL: MichiganHeadmast

Just a fine technical point, but slavery predated the UK by a few millennia.  It also survives the outlawing of slavery by same UK by several centuries, in places like Somalia.  But again, just a fine technical point.  

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aneirin

The Slavery issue, that abomination started in the UK...in 1588...

quote:

ORIGINAL: Aneirin
My question stems from a college lecture,  I would like to know and understand how ascendants from those once forcibly ripped from their homelands and sold into slavery across the seas actually feel now.