They were White and They were Slaves

Everyone should read, "How Nations Fail," by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. And while the book itself is a bigger topic than this thread, the first chapters deal with the colonial nature of the Americas. You'll read about how colonists came to northern America expecting to use the same model for enslaving the locals as they did in Southern America, and how they failed. That failure led to a change in their model for colonization, which then led to indentured servitude in many forms, and the inability to control that slavery is what in the end led to our democratization. It puts it all in a very unique and clear perspective. In no way does this diminish what was done to Africans, only, you realize that our past was very dirty and we're just lucky that progressive values have led us to better ways and better days.

www.amazon.com...

reply to post by ThirdEyeofHorus

it seems the Democrats still think they own blacks, and minorities too. All one has to do is look at the what the Democrats and the media did to Herman Cain during the GOP primaries. Tea Partiers are not allowed to support a candidate with zero white ancestry without Democrats suggesting it's just for show.

Come on Herman Cain and West are dunces as to the entire 2012 line-up it got nothing to do with skin..Jon Huntsman, Jr. was the most sensible choice but you guys are so hard core to the right that you ran him off and kept the crazies.

As far as the Dems owning minorities yes they do so for now throw in Gays and women in that mix,they perceive the GOP as hostile to their interest..step back a take a really good look at the 2012 line-up and ask yourself did you really really want any of those folks running your country???.

I would like a third party option like the Greens or something the (Dems are almost as corrupt as the Reps) the Tea Party is just the militant arm of the GOP.

Very interesting vid Atlantic Jihad,didn't realized that slave raids from Africa went as far north as Iceland,mentioned also was Murat Ries a Christian Danish slave turned Turk or Muslim that became one of the most notorious Barbary pirates leading slave raid in Europe he was one of many who Turned Turk or Moor that did this sometimes out of work European sailors would find their way to Africa convert to Islam and spear head slave raids back in their former homeland ,his descendant from his Moroccan wife would include Humphrey Bogart and Jacquelyn Kennedy.

Note the use of the term Turk was just a catch all term used to described anyone from the eastern lands not that they were Turks in the ethnic sense, although much of those lands were under nominal control of the Ottoman Turks the Irony is that the people who were once Vikings were notorious slavers themselves in their pre Christian era.

The Viking Slave Trade:

The practice of slavery by vikings in Ireland can similarly be interpreted in two ways;it was a trade already well established in medieval Ireland and Britain in which Scandinavian entrepreneurs played no worse a role, or it can be argued that there was something strikingly abhorrent about the scale and nature of the vikings’ acquisition and sale of human cargo. We have a rich body of evidence for viking slavery in Ireland which can be brought into this debate.

Political alliances between vikings and Irish are recorded in annals from the 840s. In the tenth and eleventh centuries we
hear of Irish kings gathering captives as the booty of war, presumably, so that they too could profit from the burgeoning slave markets established in Ireland’s major ports

www.scribd.com...

We are all still slaves. ALL the slave owners have just teamed up, exited stage left, and the whole N.AM and S.AM are the plantation.

Slave:
fed
clothed
sheltered

Now:
we are paid money to then pay for these things to the descendants of the slave owners above, then, somehow it all trickles back to them.. and we are forced to work for them another day.. and again...and again.

Does this make you feel better about yourself OP?

Originally posted by OchoCinco
Does this make you feel better about yourself OP?

completely over your head.

the point is for other people to feel better, realizing they weren't the "only slaves".

shame ------> gone

feelings from this shame that can manifest into self destructive nature --------->gone

Originally posted by HanzHenry

Originally posted by OchoCinco
Does this make you feel better about yourself OP?

completely over your head.

the point is for other people to feel better, realizing they weren't the "only slaves".

shame ------> gone

feelings from this shame that can manifest into self destructive nature --------->gone

I don't think most slave descendants feel shame that their most recent ancestors were slaves,they/we for the most part embraced that part of our collective experience,for within that era are many stories of triumph over extreme adversity and survival techniques that would cause other folks to disappear.. however we are concerned that's what many folks believe is the extent of our entire story.

Another thing a lot folks of Euro-American decent had been led to believe that their ancestors could never have been slaves this gave rise to a certain amount of smugness viewing themselves as some type of Master Race not to be seen as having anything in common with so called dark slave races, when all it is was induced amnesia..by Mr Big Btw pre Communist Russia was one big slave plantation that gave rise to Communism as a reaction.
The O.P is on point bringing this issue to light it have the effect of making many here reexamine their own family history if not ethnic ones.

I should add poverty mixed with generations of inequality concentrated in ghettos that feeds off itself is the cause of self destructive behavior among poorer AAs, that behavior is not reflected in middle and upper class AAs the Black poor is concentrated not spread out as in the case of Whites.

reply to post by UnifiedSerenity


IRead the book 'White Gold' that is about English villages being taken away into slavery for a long time. SLabvery was never about only race. I feel for any people who have suffered slavery, but I do find it odd how in America so many people go crazy about the plantations ans African slaves etc when really pretty much all people through history have suffered slavery, from Romans, to Egyptions, to Chinese. Britains, Slovaks, I could just list every nation/people who have existed really!

It's more about rich and poor, or conquerers vs the conquered. I never got why people feircely go crazy about the American slave trade as if it hadn't happened to anyone else before.

reply to post by HanzHenry


I agree with you to a certain extent in principle, but I think you are trivialising the suffering of people who had to experience real slavery. Having their famlies murdered in front of them, to then be taken away to be sold into forced prostitution or to labour until you dead from exhaustion and malniutrition. Please don't pretend that is the same as the luxury lifestyle we enjoy today despite all the freedoms we still are fighting for.

Originally posted by Jadette
Everyone should read, "How Nations Fail," by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson. And while the book itself is a bigger topic than this thread, the first chapters deal with the colonial nature of the Americas. You'll read about how colonists came to northern America expecting to use the same model for enslaving the locals as they did in Southern America, and how they failed. That failure led to a change in their model for colonization, which then led to indentured servitude in many forms, and the inability to control that slavery is what in the end led to our democratization. It puts it all in a very unique and clear perspective. In no way does this diminish what was done to Africans, only, you realize that our past was very dirty and we're just lucky that progressive values have led us to better ways and better days.

www.amazon.com...

Amazing book,would definitely suggest reading it.

Originally posted by clintdelicious
reply to post by UnifiedSerenity

 

IRead the book 'White Gold' that is about English villages being taken away into slavery for a long time. SLabvery was never about only race. I feel for any people who have suffered slavery, but I do find it odd how in America so many people go crazy about the plantations ans African slaves etc when really pretty much all people through history have suffered slavery, from Romans, to Egyptions, to Chinese. Britains, Slovaks, I could just list every nation/people who have existed really!

It's more about rich and poor, or conquerers vs the conquered. I never got why people feircely go crazy about the American slave trade as if it hadn't happened to anyone else before.

Two things 1st the scale was massive this was among the greatest migration of Black folks in history second only to the great Bantu migration in Africa and certainly the greatest forced migration in history,the result.. in places like Brazil they have the most African descendant folks outside Africa,the Caribbean both north and south American main land is peopled with such folks.although modified by European and Native American genetic contributions..2nd it was the latest of such slavery in the case of Brazil ending about 1888,like I had mentioned before I know people who had met persons born in slavery,so the memory is relatively fresh.

originally posted by: MrPlow

Originally posted by kimish
reply to post by MrPlow

 

I think it's disgusting that Africans selling their own to the Europeans is left out of the history books. Is that not telling a half truth? yes or no.

And no one mentions the Arabs play in all of this. They were buying, selling, and trading black slaves before the first European stepped foot on the Continent.

They weren't "selling their own" - there was no Africa. They were selling prisoners from other kingdoms.

Regardless, this whole discussion is like a child saying "well, he did it too!" and the only goal is to deflect attention away from the fact that white people did this to blacks in THIS country.

You can keep skirting around it and deflecting all you want. The ONLY way we can ever move away from this admit it and do what we can to ostracize the racists that are left in our society. Period.

At all corners, anyone who implicitly or explicitly seeks to belittle another only because of their race, should be shunned, publically embarrassed and shut up as quickly as possible and without excuse.

And really...this thread REEKS of said implicit supremacy.

I don't get the sense at all that the op was trying to justify Black slavery nor are people trying to glorify Whites. The point being made is that it seems in recent years the complete picture is left out. I am a liberal, and an ally, and work in social justice. But to hear some people and most books tell it, racism, slavery, bigotry, imperialism, etc, are inherently European or White things. The problem is that this ignores history such as the fact that people conquered, subjected, genocided, etc, other peoples, from the Assyrian Empire to various ones in India. Africans tribes have committed genocide on others, such as in Sudan and Rwanda. To find a solution, we need to understand the roots. To say these are white things only and not practiced by other people essentializes whites versus others, and actually is racist because it posits whites as having inherently having negative traits that others are not able to have. So, for example, when someone says that "reverse racism isn't real," what they are actually making is a racist statement, because they are saying that Whites are fundamentally capable of racism but others are not. Moreover, to truly resolve racism going forward, we need to see it as form of ignorance, in-group out group bias, and power differential yes. However, until every race and person knows they are capable of it, we will see it happen again and again, especially if Europe and North America and whites lose power in those areas.

originally posted by: Quetzalcoatl14 But to hear some people and most books tell it, racism, slavery, bigotry, imperialism, etc, are inherently European or White things. The problem is that this ignores history such as the fact that people conquered, subjected, genocided, etc, other peoples, from the Assyrian Empire to various ones in India. Africans tribes have committed genocide on others, such as in Sudan and Rwanda. To find a solution, we need to understand the roots.

Exactly. This tendency for slavery is not based in a racial propensity, but a HUMAN one. The fundamental behavioral drive is about hierarchy. We are social animals, all jostling for a higher place in the pecking order. Just about the most direct way to gain that higher place is by establishing dominance. In human beings this can be extremely subtle or particularly brutal. One of the other ways that we establish dominance is through wealth. The two get mixed up and "owning" other human beings conveniently fills two very important expressions of dominance--wealth and ultimate authority.

Slavery is just a complex manifestation of some serious monkey-brain-chest-thumping behavior. All of the justifications about race are a convenient excuse that the Dominant At That Time people will (almost) inevitably use to help them sleep at night, with maybe a little bit of primal Fear of The Other thrown in. None of it is actual thought, just biological imperatives. It's horrible and it's wrong but one race is not more brutal than any other, any more than one race is more submissive, stupid, or prone to bondage than any other.

a reply to: Ameilia

Wow, posted 5 million dollar bail.

Wow.

originally posted by: redhorse

originally posted by: Quetzalcoatl14 But to hear some people and most books tell it, racism, slavery, bigotry, imperialism, etc, are inherently European or White things. The problem is that this ignores history such as the fact that people conquered, subjected, genocided, etc, other peoples, from the Assyrian Empire to various ones in India. Africans tribes have committed genocide on others, such as in Sudan and Rwanda. To find a solution, we need to understand the roots.

Exactly. This tendency for slavery is not based in a racial propensity, but a HUMAN one. The fundamental behavioral drive is about hierarchy. We are social animals, all jostling for a higher place in the pecking order. Just about the most direct way to gain that higher place is by establishing dominance. In human beings this can be extremely subtle or particularly brutal. One of the other ways that we establish dominance is through wealth. The two get mixed up and "owning" other human beings conveniently fills two very important expressions of dominance--wealth and ultimate authority.

Slavery is just a complex manifestation of some serious monkey-brain-chest-thumping behavior. All of the justifications about race are a convenient excuse that the Dominant At That Time people will (almost) inevitably use to help them sleep at night, with maybe a little bit of primal Fear of The Other thrown in. None of it is actual thought, just biological imperatives. It's horrible and it's wrong but one race is not more brutal than any other, any more than one race is more submissive, stupid, or prone to bondage than any other.

I'm with you 100%. Psychology shows that all people have the entire range of potentials, biases, psychological issues, etc.

We have to look at the universal human roots of all of this.

I tend to go towards the Guns, Germs, and Steel hypothesis combined with the fact that bigotry and in-group out-group bias are in all cultures to explain one, how European and North American's have been dominant for several hundred years, and two, thereby projected negative force on to a number of people's.

Guns, Germs, and Steel explains why Europeans and North Americans industrialized first and pulled out ahead technologically, merely enabling the ability for them to dominate others.

A perfect example of how much of this history is not based on inherent differences in racism or brutality but instead technology and power is Cortez conquering the Aztecs. Before the Spanish came, the Aztecs were brutal imperialists towards other tribes, conquering them and often sacrificing some of them. So much so that some tribes joined Cortez in fighting the Aztecs.

What was the difference between the Spanish and Aztecs? Technology..

originally posted by: noissucnoc16
Blacks who where only 3/5 of a man but u skunk was a whole skunk couldn't even walk on a white mans shadow or he was killed on spot in those times your thread is irrelevant

The 3/5 personage was for representation in the Congress. It was the racists Northerners who made that deal so they would not be out numbered in congress.

a reply to: UnifiedSerenity

The (white) Ukrainians are also decedents of slaves
And that is modern slavery like the African slaves not ancient times

originally posted by: HanzHenry
We are all still slaves. ALL the slave owners have just teamed up, exited stage left, and the whole N.AM and S.AM are the plantation.

Slave:
fed
clothed
sheltered

Now:
we are paid money to then pay for these things to the descendants of the slave owners above, then, somehow it all trickles back to them.. and we are forced to work for them another day.. and again...and again.

So may I ask what makes a person not a slave by your view?

I would much rather be a slave to money than basic survival. I love my paltry 40 hour week over spending 112 hours a week to survive... how about you?

To get back on track...

When did slavery ever go away? Below is 2013 slavery chart. There is a 500 millon people in slavery today, hell there is 40 millions in India alone...lol How many TOTAL black slaves were in America for the entire period of slavery here?



When we look at black slavery one must also understand there were even less undesirables back then. I believe I read that the Chinese built the railroad because it was so dangerous that a slave was too valuable to use...

a reply to: Xtrozero

Yes exactly, slavery today is much worse than its EVER been.
But we dont hear much complaining about that, do we?

Slavery is now underground, but its very much still there.