I will admit that I have not looked at this issue in depth; however, I think that my claims have some validity. The US economy during the 1600's until the 1900's (roughly) was based on exports from plantations. Those plantations depended on the work of slaves to run efficiently. The Wiki on US Slavery does not offer any exact details, but it does note:



Additionally, I found this website that says this:





Knowing nothing of British history (well, I know a little of what lead to the foundation of the US), I have not made the claim that Britian's economic prowess is due to its role in the slave trade.



I am not sure what you're getting at with this comment. The reason we went to war was precisely because the Southern states wanted to keep slavery. They lost, but that doesn't mean that the US wholly embraced the abolitionist movement. The existence of "separate but equal" and Jim Crow laws sort of proves that the US didn't fully accept their black counterparts as worthy of equal consideration.



Again, I never made that assertion with any country but the US. But I think youre completely wrong to say that slavery was never that great an income; if that was the case, then a good majority of the US economy would not have depended so much on slaves. Neither would we have engaged in the slave trade to the extent that we had. Why waste money and resources on something that wasn't a "great income"?




In a manner, I agree. However, in another, I don't. I don't support the exploitation of any worker; however, certain US programs, such as the Bracero program were fundamentally different than simple low-wage labor. We promised a great number of things to Mexican migrants in return for their labor, and did not follow up on it. Additionally, the reason I bring up things like the Bracero program (or the railroads) is because you challenged my assertion that the US was founded on racism. The existence of these racist programs, as well as racist immigration laws, help support my claim. Unlike many white settlers who came to the US, without being coerced or forcibly removed from their homelands, many Asians, Africans and Hispanics reside in the US for entirely different reasons.




I suppose we'll have to agree to disagree on this point.




I didn't say that Native Americans were slave, only that their history with the US is testament to the idea that the US was founded on racism. We decimated the Native American population simply because we thought the US should only be for white people (and their darker skinned slaves).

However, it is important to note that we did try to enslave Native Americans; they just made bad slaves. Since they knew the terrain far better than the European settlers, they were able to escape more successfully than African slaves. Seeing that they had no economic benefits, European settlers decided it would be easier to kill them, relegate them to some hostile lands [reservations], and break treaties with them, because the Europeans did not think that Native Americans were "civilized."




And this excuses injustice...how?




Im not sure why you would expect McIntosh to deal with anything other than what she was writing about: white privilege. She makes no excuses, and what she's discussing has little to do with slavery.

However, to address your point, I fail to see how African slaves are responsible for their inferior status. It's not as if they willingly agreed to be sold as slaves (as far as I know); thus, the idea that descendants of slaves are somehow responsible for their slave status doesn't make sense to me.



They're ignored because they somewhat irrelevant. It looks like it's just another way to blame blacks on their sorry status in American society.



I don't think that slavery is purely racial. I am aware that slavery exists today, and that's its not a purely black and white issue. But when discussing American race relations, slavery is racial. The US only had white "slaves" for an extremely small period of its history, and even then, as CR pointed out, they were indentured servants and regained their freedom after a specified number of time (7 years, generally).

Additionally, for the white slaves in US, they do not suffer the same long lasting consequences that blacks continue to do. If any of my ancestors were slaves, I am not feeling the repercussions of their slavery, because most people generally assume I am white (well, sort of...but that's a different topic). On the other hand, a black person, who may not even be a descendant of a slave, continues to experience the repercussions of slavery simply because he is black and we have it so ingrained in our minds that dark skin=totally alien.

Well, first of all, the USA was founded in 1776 so there was no US economy in the 1600's, and slavery was ended with the civil war which came to its conclusion in 1865. During that period, the USA gradually took over the cotton industry from India, because...Link.
1840 seems to the tipping point where the US cotton industry takes over from the Indian cotton industry. 1840 to 1865 gives 25 years of southern US dominance based on the slave trade.

I suspect you are allowing yorself to be persuaded by political anti racists, such as this historian James Oliver Horton to whom you have linked. Horton makes the point that by 1840, cotton is more valuable than everything else the United States exports put together, so the value of slaves is tremendous. Yes, the value of slaves in 1840 is 'tremendous', and yet a mere 25 years later slavery has been abolished by the sacrifice of hundreds of thousands of lives. Obviously slaves were not so tremendously valuable if a nation would sacrifice hundreds of thousands of its own soldiers to liberate them.

I suspect that, as was the case with the British, the 'tremendous' value of slaves was only actually valuable to those individuals who owned slaves, and the profits slavery generated did not translate into any sort of multi-generational national advantage. Had it done so then I very much doubt the union forces would have been able to defeat the confederation.
As it happens, the industrial power of the north (machines being both more ethical to own than slaves and capable of working non stop) was far more viable and far more lucrative for the USA than the slave driven cotton trade. Not least since Great Britain, the worlds largest consumer of raw cotton, went to Egypt to buy cotton rather than side with the confederation.

In other words, the actual contribution of slavery to the USA economy was probably negligible, and certainly not great enough to avoid being scrapped in favour of a 'human rights' movement made possible by the introuction of industrial machines.
Any one can bandy about figures pertaining to the total value of slaves in 1840, but the bottom line is, slaves are only valuable if any one is willing to buy them, and by 1840 the international slave trade was well and truly dead having long since been shut down by Great Britain's Royal Navy.

That means in actuality, America's slaves were worthless to every one except the owners who were profitting from their labour, and remember these owners are the same people who lost just about everything in the war with the North. Any sizable reserves of money slavery might have built up were depleted in a mere five years of warfare, and the slave owners were a spent force after the American civil war, their cotton based economy was easily replaced by the industrial economy of their opponents.

The USA today is the direct inheritor of that industrial economy. The legacy of slavery as given white Americans an advantage is largely a myth.

Racism in post civil war America however is something else entirely.


You haven't, but you have made comparable claims with regards to the USA and I don't think you can simply divorce the USA from the rest of the world to suit your own political bias (what ever that may be). The fact is, the UK was a driving force behind the American slave economy for as long as it lasted since the UK was the prime buyer of all that cotton. Any profit the US was receiving was coming from the UK and the UK in its turn was making a profit from having access to cheap (and superior quality) cotton.

Despite this, the UK and the USA still did away with slavery.


Certainly, racism persisted. Slavery however, did not.


Well, you might ask yourself that about any number of contemporary American industries. The answer is simple enough. Rich people are politically more powerful than poor people and they go to great lengths to stay rich.

So it was with slave holders in the American south. They understood their power was threatened because it did not benefit any one but themselves. They subsequently went to any lenghs, including secession and ultimately war to maintain that power. They failed, largely because their power was based on other people doing all the work for them and because slaves and a slave economy could never compete with machine power and an industrial economy.


I understand your point, and I think its got a lot to say for itself, but I am being pedantic. I don't see that the USA was founded with exploitation in mind. I think the USA was founded despite exploitation, in a deliberate attempt to put an end to exploitation.

That reality conflicted with aspiration ought not surprise, our lives are built on lies and broken promises. I believe however that the fouding of the USA was, is still, an ongoing attempt to put an end to inequality.


If you insist, but I must point out that so far, you've not demonstrated the validity of your claim. In fairness I'll admit I've actually shifted my argument from regarding manual labour to machine based industry so I'm not being very honest. I don't know what the Bracero program was.


I can't argue against any of this, as its all true. I concede this point to a certain degree. I draw a distinction in that the people who founded the USA in 1776 were not the same people who subsequently took it upon themselves to ethnically cleansing the aboriginal population on the basis of race.

The history of racism as an institutional, ideological and political belief stems largely from the mid 1800's, a full century after the signing of the deleration of American indpendence. Still this is almost a bagatel in the face of the atrocities which toook place. There can be no credible justification for racism as I am sure wh can swiftly agree on.


It doesn't. It merely puts 'white guilt' into perspective.


I would expect any person writing on any subject to be balanced, and to consider all the factors before committing such a list for public consideration. The fact that a person chooses to confine themselves to only one aspect of a social situation, for what ever reason invalidates anything they might say.

This topic mirrors the American civil rights debate because it is specifically about 'white guilt'. The assumption of guilt rests on white people who, it is commonly accepted, have all benefited greatly from racism, even if they are not racists.

At no point are blacks expected to feel any form of guilt, for it is commonly accepted that blacks are not responsible for racism.

Being born white in America, regardless of personal merit is therefore to be branded the recipient of these benefits. No matter how strenuous your poverty stricken family might have been, no matter how many family members died due to adverse conditions, you are always judged to bear guilt for crimes you yourself had no part in.

By comparison, African Americans are not expected to answer for the situation they find themselves in. No matter how poorly they choose to live, no matter how many drugs they take, or what sort of degenerate criminal sub culture they choose to cultivate or how many fatherless babies they sire, they are absolved by the concept of white guilt of any responsibility for their situation.

Likewise any African American born of a wealthy family, who perserveres due to wisdom and astute personal decisions, is still able to claim at a moments notice, that white racism is a factor in any injurious situation that befalls him.

The trouble with the concept of white guilt as I see it from my perspective, is that there is no opposing visible concept of black guilt by which to put white guilt into perspective. As it is now, whites are always guilty. Blacks are always victims.


I'm not talking about the slaves. I'm talking about African Americans today. If white people are expected to feel any sort of guilt for crimes they had no part in, then equally black people should be expected to feel guilt for the crimes of black peopel they had no part in.

Obviously either situation isn't fair, and no people should be expected to feel guilty for something they had no part in. The fact that some people do (specifically white people who may be voting for Barack Obama because they feel guilt) tells me there is an imbalance in perspective.


I do not believe you can honestly divorce blacks from sharing the responsibility for their sorry status in American society.

Nor do I believe that the details in question are ignored because they are 'somewhat irrelevant'. No consideration which casts a different light onto a subject under scrutiny can be considered irrelevant. I believe black on white racism is ignored because it upsets the accepted wisdom regarding racism that seeks to define racism as a white on black crime.


My experience of slavery is limited to internal family relationships. At no point until this debate did my grandfathers fate at the hands of the Third Reich spill into the public arena. I have never discussed it before as I have never had reason to do so.

My grandfathers slavery does not effect me in relationship to the society about me. It is utterly an internal situation where by my relationship to my father is tainted by his relationship to his father. The knock on effect is neither visible to nor effected by outsiders.

My point being that slavery, and racism, and any other form of institutional cruelty (for example the bullying we see recorded by teenagers on their mobile phones these days) leaves long lasting emotional scars which cannot be easily identified. In other words, it doesn't matter that other peolpe can't see your scars, they exist nonetheless.

Black people in America bear an identity in the colour of their skin, but they do this because being black is seen to be adverse. In other words, the perception of racism exists even when the crime doesn't... even when there is nothing to feel guilty about.

I'm not saying racism doesn't exist, or that African American's have only themselves to blame. I'm saying that for as long as African Americans are seen to be victims, and 'Euro Americans' are seen to be guilty, then they will both remain so.



I'm too tired to re read for spelling errors so please forgive any you find.

Splitting hairs a bit, neh?

It's true but has no bearing on her actual argument.

Proto-US economy is likely more accurate :shrug:


Dominance of the global market isn't the issue. Its the importance of cotton to the economy of the United States, right?

Sure market share can affect that, but you can't say that cotton became important only after 1840, even before it was the 800-lb gorilla it was still one heck of a beast.

We could point out that the US didn't even become a world power for a long time after the war, but it wouldn't change the fact that slave labor laid the foundation.

As opposed to the reasonable historians who aren't anti-racists? What's the alternative?

Now if your saying his agenda has twisted the facts that's another thing, though it requires some evidence.


The purpose of the Civil war was not to liberate the slaves, but the put down an insurrection in the Southern states. Slavery may have been why the south seceded, but it wasn't the reason the North fought.

They weighed the values of slavery versus the existed of the US as a single nation and even then it took years of hand-wringing and war before deciding to go through with emancipation.

That only backs kimpossible's argument of slavery's importance, nearly being on par with the very existance of the US.


Ah, the problem with that argument is that it was the material wealth of agriculture that allowed the US to embark upon the industrial revolution to begin with.

Furthermore, it was Union embargo that kept the South from benefiting from it's cotton wealth during the war.

Link

Not at all. You cannot argue that the USA had an economy when the USA did not exist. Prior to 1776, the slaves were not owned by Americans, they were owned by European colonists and any official funds slavery generated was sent to European coffers.


I didn't say that. I pointed out that 1840 seems to the tipping point where the US cotton industry takes over from the Indian cotton industry. Certainly America was selling cotton prior to 1840, but not in the same quantites.


That is exactly what I just pointed out. The fact is, the slaves James Oliver Horton claims were Americans greatest economic asset were nothing of the sort. They were, from a national economic perspective, so practically worthless that 25 years down the line they were swept out of existance by the war with the Union.


So who is splitting hairs now then?

The individual reasons for the war were many. Paramount among them however was the Southern land owners attempt to retain their slaves. Had slavery not been so central to the economy of the southern states, there would never have been any need for a war. Slavery would have been abolished by a simple act of politics as it was in so many other country's.

The underlying point I was making however, is that the slave economy was destroyed by the war. It left no lasting legacy of economic advantage to white Americans. That came about from the machine economy just as it did every where else.


I don't see how and I can't see how you've shown how either. A few years of hand wringing is normal when it comes to emancipation. It took Europe a century of hand wringing before it finally decided in favour of banning slavery and we're still hand wringing over free trade. Not all moral certainty's are so certain when you live in a world where commerce dictates the value of life.


If that were so then the UK would never have become the engine for the industrial revolution. In case it has escaped your notice, the UK never had a slave economy, and yet it managed to feed its fast growing industrial population quite easily. As did France and Germany too. Having colonies made all the difference.

Now, you might argue that colonies are evil also and you may have a point, it would be interesting to ponder the qustion as to whether or not it is possible to kick start an industrial revolution without exploiting some one, some how... but the point remains that the USA did not actually become a fully industrial power until after it had abolished slavery. As you just so rightly pointed out, the USA did not become a global power for almost a hundred years until after the civil war.


I think you will find, should you care to look deeper in to the matter that what actually broke the Souths cotton trade was Great Britain switching its custom to Egypt in order to avoid taking sides. The Anaconda plan worked largely because the South lost its major customer (the UK which also happened to be, easily the foremost naval power on Earth and was certainly capable of breaking a Union blokade had it so chosen) once hostilities broke out.

The South even pinned hopes on the UK joining the war on their side in order to liberate the cotton trade but were sorely mistaken in that regard (as they were in so many others). They over estimated the value of their cotton thinking it was more important to other peope than it was to themselves.

There seems to be a lot of that going round....

Oh no, not this thread again!

The problem is that its not evident wealth matter in comparision to other factors, particularly a willing labor supply. Japan started its industrial revolution as one of the poorest countries in the world. While money was obviously needed, the critical elements of the restoration was the large source of cheap labor, and the intense pursuit of technical training from European countries. Much of the Japanese industrial revolution was governmental, bypassing the need for private wealth fundamentally.

There was a controversal idea named the "william's thesis," where American slavery somehow contributed towards the British industrial revolution. I forget the exact details, and its difficult to find information about it on the web, but I remember even that wasn't a capital argument.

Edit: Unsure history bugging me

Turnea addresses much of the historical issues you bring up (thanks Turnea!). So, I see no need to repeat what he's already written.



I am hardly "divorcing" the US from the rest of world. I refer to the US specifically, because I am more familiar with US History than any other. You seem to trying to confuse my argument by adding in several other factors, which I've never made any claims to.



Well, this particular debate is about racial tensions, not about slavery. Slavery clearly plays a large role in modern day tensions, but as we're speaking about racism through time, it seems silly to ignore the fact that racism persisted. Simply because the US did away with slavery, a step in the right direction obviously, does not mean that minorities' lives were great and they could all equally participate in the "American Dream." In fact, once slavery ended, whites made sure to implement laws that would bar blacks from gaining equal status.



Again, we'll have to agree to disagree. Simply because something is not codified in law means nothing. European settlers saw a way to exploit the land. I will agree that maybe the Pilgrims did not have the intent to do that, but Jamestown surely did.

Spanish settlers did the same farther south.



Wiki: Bracero Program



While I think much of the writings that popularize American racism are from the mid 19th century, I disagree that the history of racism only started to take hold during this time period. Jefferson wrote extensively about his thoughts on slaves, and he was around for the signing of declaration.



Fine. But I am not arguing that anyone should feel at all guilty.



Well, white people have benefited greatly from racism, even if they aren't racists. However, simply because that is true, does not mean that one also needs to feel guilty for it.



And this is the rub, the reason why it is so difficult for most people to accept this idea. Who likes to be told that all their reasons for success can be reduced to the color of their skin? No one, I am certain. However, I think the notion of white privilege is actually much subtler than that. I don't think it's denying that whites do not work hard, or that all their achievements are based on race. Rather, it merely posits that because one is white, their hard work is viewed as better, as more worthy; and that to a certain extent, their struggles are alleviated because they are white.

People often discount the idea of white privilege because it undermines their idea of themselves. Most people see themselves as fair, hard working individuals; to say otherwise means that their lives would lack meaning, that their accomplishments mean nothing. Additionally, we have a cognitive bias, called the fundamental attribution error, that prefers to see humans in this way, i.e. we place more emphasis on personality, and generally ignore environmental influences, even when they are pretty obvious (such as with white privilege, imo).



This is simply not true.

I get what you're saying, but I don't think anyone is saying it's OK that blacks make poor life choices; however, again, there are more factors than one person making poor decisions. And many of those factors are a result of racist US policies; of course, I would also argue that this cycle is self-perpetuating, thus even as our racist policies are being examined, simply banning a certain policy or law does not mean that society is OK now, i.e. simply because slavery is now illegal, blacks now have the same opportunities as whites.

Fundamental attribution error strikes again! It is easier to blame blacks for making poor choices, or for not fitting in, or whatever than to look at the broader situational elements that influence why blacks make poor choices. This does not mean its OK for blacks to take part in any morally corrupt behavior, rather that things are really not so simple as "black people are never held responsible for their actions."



That may be how you see it. Again, I've never said anyone should feel guilty. Rather, I'd like to see people acknowledge their part, and try to find real solutions. The US has clearly made progress, but as long as conversations about race turn into a blame game ("whites did this" "well, blacks did this!" "oh yeah? Mexicans did this!") we're not going to get anywhere.



Again, I've never said anyone should feel guilty. I don't expect white people to feel guilt for crimes they had no part in. However, to deny that they haven't benefited from these crimes is intellectually dishonest.

I can't control if other people feel guilty.



Untrue. I have yet to meet anyone who thinks that racism is only perpetuated by whites. It may sound that way in some respects, but I think that's mostly because these debates tend to focus on blacks and whites; it being the most prominent and obvious case.

However, that black slave traders sold black slaves is not an issue of racism. That's why it is largely irrelevant. Additionally, Africans today have not benefited from the slave trade at all, and most certainly not the way the US has.



However, there is a world of difference in bearing psychological scars that affect a family internally, and having your scars judged by society (as is the case with blacks today, imo). It is awful that anyone suffers from these events at all, clearly. I think what makes racism so awful, especially in regards to blacks and slavery, is that not only do they bear those internal scars that affect relationships, but that in turn, broader society can "see" those scars, in a sense. Because racial minorities are easily identifiable, they take risks simply by going outside, by talking to people. No one would ever know about your particular story, unless you choose to tell it. However, when a black person walks down the street, he can't hide the fact that he's black.



This is common rhetoric, and I think it largely misunderstands the argument, at least the argument I am trying to make (and others with similar views). I don't see blacks as victims and I don't see whites as guilty. I don't think most people think that way (except for those mysterious white people who feel white guilt, although none have been identified in this debate). I would rather see a shift in perspective, but it would really challenge the way everyone thinks. Instead of looking to things like personal choice, we really need to look at broader issues and their influences. Because, regardless of what most think, those elements are rarely examined (or not examined enough) and they play a bigger role than anyone would like to admit.

Oh, and should I believe they spilled their blood to free hundreds of thousands of Black people? Not hardly. Ending slavery was never one of the major motivations for The Civil War.

The 1974 book, Time on the Cross: The Economics of American Negro Slavery by Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman counters your assertion that slavery was not a profitable endeavor .

1. Slavery was not a system irrationally kept in existence by owners who failed to perceive or were indifferent to their best economic interests. The purchase of a slave was generally a highly profitable investment which yielded rates of return that compared favorably with the most outstanding investment opportunities in manufacturing.

2. The slave system was not economically moribund on the eve of the Civil War. There is no evidence that economic forces alone would have soon brought slavery to an end without the necessity of a war or other form of political intervention. Quite the contrary; as the Civil War approached, slavery as an economic system was never stronger and the trend was toward even further entrenchment.

3. Slaveowners were not becoming pessimistic about the future of their system during the decade that preceded the Civil War. The rise of the secessionist movement coincided with a wave of optimism. On the eve of the Civil War, slaveholders anticipated an era of unprecedented prosperity.

4. Slave agriculture was not inefficient compared with free agriculture. Economies of large-scale operation, effective management, and intensive utilization of labor and capital made southern slave agriculture 35 percent more efficient than the northern system of family farming.

5. The typical slave field hand was not lazy, inept, and unproductive. On average he was harder-working and more efficient than his white counterpart.

6. The course of slavery in the cities does not prove that slavery was incompatible with an industrial system or that slaves were unable to cope with an industrial regimen. Slaves employed in industry compared favorably with free workers in diligence and efficiency. Far from declining, the demand for slaves was actually increasing more rapidly in urban areas than in the countryside. link

It is also worth mentioning neither The Civil War nor Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation eliminated slavery in The South. Instead of slavery ending, it simply mutated into a new form of neoslavery and the effects of this practice which has been largely hidden from history is only recently begun to come to light.

On March 30, 1908, Green Cottenham was arrested by the sheriff of Shelby County, Alabama, and charged with 'vagrancy." Cottenham had committed no true crime. Vagrancy, the offense of a person not being able to prove at a given moment that he or she is employed, was a new and flimsy concoction dredged up from legal obscurity at the end of the nineteenth century by the state legislatures of Alabama and other southern states. It was capriciously enforced by local sheriffs and constables, adjudicated by mayors and notaries public, recorded haphazardly or not at all in court records, and, most tellingly in a time of massive unemployment among all southern men, was reserved almost exclusively for black men. Cottenham's offense was blackness.

After three days behind bars, twenty-two-year-old Cottenham was found guilty in a swift appearance before the county judge and immediately sentenced to a thirty-day term of hard labor. Unable to pay the array of fees assessed on every prisoner--fees to the sheriff, the deputy, the court clerk, the witnesses--Cottenham's sentence was extended to nearly a year of hard labor.

The next day, Cottenham, the youngest of nine children born to former slaves in an adjoining county, was sold. Under a standing arrangement between the county and a vast subsidiary of the industrial titan of the North---U.S. Steel Corporation---the sheriff turned the young man over to the company for the duration of his sentence. In return, the subsidiary, Tennessee Coal, Iron & Railroad Company, gave the county $12 a month to pay off Cottenham's fine and fees. What the company's managers did with Cottenham, and thousands of other black men they purchased from sheriffs across Alabama, was entirely up to them.

A few hours later, the company plunged Cottenham into the darkness of a mine called Slope No. 12--one shaft in a vast subterranean labyrinth on the edge of Birmingham known as the Pratt Mines. There, he was chained inside a long wooden barrack at night and required to spend nearly every waking hour digging and loading coal. His required daily "task' was to remove eight tons of coal from the mine. Cottenham was subject to the whip for failure to dig the requisite amount, at risk of physical torture for disobedience, and vulnerable to the sexual predations of other miners--many of whom already had passed years or decades in their own chthonian confinement. The lightless catacombs of black rock, packed with hundreds of desperate men slick with sweat and coated in pulverized coal, must have exceeded any vision of hell a boy born in the countryside of Alabama--even a child of slaves--could have ever imagined.

Steel's production of iron. Forty-five years after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation freeing American slaves, Green Cottenham and more than a thousand other black men toiled under the lash at Slope 12.

Imprisoned in what was then the most advanced city of the South, guarded by whipping bosses employed by the most iconic example of the modern corporation emerging in the gilded North, they were slaves in all but name. link



Revisionist and reactionary crap, moif. Professor McIntosh's theory is "White privilege" not "Black slavery." It has as much to do with slavery as it does with the theory of relativity.

But to address your point, yes, there were Africans that sold other Africans into slavery and also held slaves of their own. However, for there to be something to sell there must be someone willing to buy.

You oversimplify the matter by saying 'Africans were sold into slavery by their own people," but totally gloss over the motivations behind the selling:

Europeans usually bought slaves who were captured in tribal wars between African kingdoms and chiefdoms, or from Africans who had made a business out of capturing other Africans and selling them. Europeans provided a large new market for an already-existing trade, and while an African held in slavery in his own region of Africa might escape or be traded back to his own people, a person shipped away was sure never to return. People living around the Niger River were transported from these markets to the coast and sold at European trading ports in exchange for muskets and manufactured goods such as cloth or alcohol.

Europeans rarely entered the interior of Africa, due to fear of disease and moreover fierce African resistance. The slaves would be brought to coastal outposts where they would be traded for goods. Enslavement became a major by-product of war in Africa as nation states expanded through military conflicts in many cases through deliberate sponsorship of benefiting Western European nations. During such periods of rapid state formation or expansion (Asante or Dahomey being good examples), slavery formed an important element of political life which the Europeans exploited: As Queen Sara's plea to the Portuguese courts revealed, the system became "sell to the Europeans or be sold to the Europeans". In Africa, convicted criminals could be punished by enslavement and with European demands for slaves, this punishment became more prevalent. Since most of these nations did not have a prison system, convicts were often sold or used in the scattered local domestic slave market. link

Without digging deeper you have tried to make it seem as if Africans sold other Africans to Europeans just to get rid of them. As with most things in the world, something is sold in order to exchange for goods or in some cases to resolve a problem (trade you my criminals for your dry goods). It doesn't exactly cover in glory those who sold their own people into slavery, but there was a method to the madness far more deliberate than you made it out to be.



Slavery as practiced by the Nazis against non-Aryans isn't even remotely comparable to the American system of slavery as practiced by Whites against non-Whites. You know full well that there isn't a single Black slave or White slaveowner alive in America in 2008. This particular African-American has never said slavery was purely a racial issue, but neither are all incidents of slavery equally comparable in measure or degree.

Certainly people have always been racists, but is the decleration of American independence a racist document? Thats what you seem to be saying.


Do mean like nepotism?

I can agree with that. I see it all the time in Danish society. I'm not sure if it exists along racial lines, but I think it certainly exists in one form or another. Its often refered to as 'the old boys network' I think, but in truth it doesn't run along gender lines either. Rather there are relationships between family's that know of each other through long term friendships and business relationships and these tend to favour each others children above better qualified strangers.

If white privilege is something akin to this, then it makes much more sense but only up to a point. I can't see anything to convince me that these relationships only extend to white people. People will always seek to help their friends and lots of white people will extend help to black friends in the same way that they would a white friend.

Given that a lot of African Americans live in 'ghetto's' then I can imagine they don't have any friends capable of helping them out to the same advatange that people who don't live in ghettos can. To them it might seem as if they are living in a world defined by their race, and they probably are, but that situation is as likely to be due to their living in a ghetto than to being black.

Turnea once countered this point (in a previous debate) that African Americans only live in ghetto's because they are forced there by a lack of opportunities. I can accept that up to a point. I can accept that fear of the outside keeps African Americans in their ghetto's, but I don't believe that they have zero other options. There is always an alternative.

One thing is for certain though. No one is going to improve their lives by living in a ghetto. They are just going to languish in a self perpetuated prison of the mind, irregardless of their skin colour or ethnic identity.


I agree that nothing is ever so simple that you generalize an entire ethnic minority in to one set of actions, but there are so amny instances where it is okay for blacks to take part in morally corrupt behavior that it becomes very difficult to not make generalizations based on a 'percpetion of black culture'. Barack Obama's former priest friend is a perfect example of what I mean. No sane person would sit about listening to such vile hate mongering, and yet Barack Obama seems to have been perfectly happy to attend this maniac's sermons for years. Why, unless at some level he accept what the priest was saying as being 'okay'?


Agreed.


It does. That is exactly the impression I get when I listen to or watch American media. Off the top of my head I can't remember a single instance where any one talked about black on white racism, where as I frequently see African Americans defending the most spurious actions by other African Americans as being due to white racism.

The Muslims do the same thing in Europe. People call it playing the victim card.


Well, I'm still not seeing anyone post any evidence that the USA actually benefitted in any great way from the slave trade. Everything I have read indicates that slavery was only lucrative to those people who owned slaves.


Agreed.


I'm not sure what your getting at when you say broader issues and their influences. Which broader issues?






Thats amazing as I never made any claim that slavery was not a profitable endeavor.

Once again nighttimer swings into action against arguments I never made.


I said that it was not so profitable as people were making out. Certainly it generated funds, lots of funds. Enough funds for the South to wage war for five years. Just not enough funds to justify any claim that white Americans today benefitted from slavery.

In the end, the South was defeated and its slave based economy depleted. The benefits of slavery were spent. Nothing in your list of six points contradicts that.


So who is being revisionist and reactionary now?

There is no such thing as 'neo slavery'. Slavery is slavery regardless of when it takes place. If people were made slaves through dubious court actions, then I think you'll find that those courts were breaking the law. As I said earlier, slavery ended, but racism didn't.


I am told repeatedly that American racism against black people is grounded firmly in the fact that African Americans were brought to America as slaves. You have made this point yourself many times in the past.

Now, when I address this the tables are turned and suddenly slavery is irrellvent?


Thank you for telling me what I really meant nighttimer.

Except, I'm afraid that (once again) your barking up the wrong tree. I have not glossed over European involvement in the buying of slaves. In point of fact I have made mention of it several times in my last few posts.

The point I am making, that point which you have utterly disregarded in your eagerness to act offended, is that African Americans are not called upon to answer for the actions of their African ancestors. Europeans (by which I include Americans of European descent) are, frequently.

Reading the debate surrounding American racism against black people and the slavery from whence it came, one might be forgiven for thinking Africans played no part in slavery at all, that Africa was not the apex of all slavery, that Europeans were never slaves and that many slaves themselves had not also sold other Africans into slavery themselves. One might be forgiven for thinking that slavery was a European invention, carried out solely by white people against black people and only ended by the efforts of a few abolitionist activists.

I have no problem admitting to the fact that Europeans, including Britons and Danes, bought, sold, kept and abused slaves.

I have a problem pretending Europeans were not taken slaves for hundreds of years by Africans, specifically Muslim Africans and that the slave trade was not equally an internal African trade where by Africans bought and sold each other, and still do.


My grandfather wasn't a non Aryan. He was as blonde and blue eyed as they come, but of course, he wasn't black, so I suspect that in your mind, nothing he suffered, or any other slave of the Third Reich suffered, compares in measure or degree to the plight of 'your people'.

So it must have been another guy named moif who said, 'Slavery was never that great an income for any state and most states easily accepted the loss of income when they did away with slavery."

If not, then as Fogel and Engerman countered slavery was a great source of income for the South and slaveowners were bullish on their chances for greater prosperity. I think that adequately counterpoints your contention.



You are still being revisionist and reactionary, moif. Why is there no such thing as 'neoslavery?' Because you say so? History begs to differ. Douglas A. Blackmon's book, Slavery by Another Name: The Re-enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II makes a far more convincing case than your obtuse refusal to accept reality.

As I began the research for this book, I discovered that while historians concurred that the South's practice of leasing convicts was an abhorrent abuse of African Americans, it was also viewed by many as an aside in the larger sweep of events in the racial evolution of the South. The brutality of the punishments received by African Americans was unjust, but not shocking in light of the waves of petty crime ostensibly committed by freed slaves and their descendants. According to many conventional histories, slaves were unable to handle the emotional complexities of freedom and had been conditioned by generations of bondage to become thieves. This thinking held that the system of leasing prisoners contributed to the intimidation of blacks in the era but was not central to it. Sympathy for the victims, however brutally they had been abused, was tempered because, after all, they were criminals. Moreover, most historians concluded that the details of what really happened couldn't be determined. Official accounts couldn't be rigorously challenged, because so few of the original records of the arrests and contracts under which black men were imprisoned and sold had survived.

Yet as I moved from one county courthouse to the next in Alabama, Georgia, and Florida, I concluded that such assumptions were fundamentally flawed. That was a version of history reliant on a narrow range of official summaries and gubernatorial archives created and archived by the most dubious sources—southern whites who engineered and most directly profited from the system. It overlooked many of the most significant dimensions of the new forced labor, including the centrality of its role in the web of restrictions put in place to suppress black citizenship, its concomitant relationship to debt peonage and the worst forms of sharecropping, and an exponentially larger number of African Americans compelled into servitude through the most informal—and tainted—local courts. The laws passed to intimidate black men away from political participation were enforced by sending dissidents into slave mines or forced labor camps. The judges and sheriffs who sold convicts to giant corporate prison mines also leased even larger numbers of African Americans to local farmers, and allowed their neighbors and political supporters to acquire still more black laborers directly from their courtrooms. And because most scholarly studies dissected these events into separate narratives limited to each southern state, they minimized the collective effect of the decisions by hundreds of state and local county governments during at least a part of this period to sell blacks to commercial interests.

By 1900, the South's judicial system had been wholly reconfigured to make one of its primary purposes the coercion of African Americans to comply with the social customs and labor demands of whites. It was not coincidental that 1901 also marked the final full disenfranchisement of nearly all blacks throughout the South. Sentences were handed down by provincial judges, local mayors, and justices of the peace--often men in the employ of the white business owners who relied on the forced labor produced by the judgments. Dockets and trial records were inconsistently maintained. Attorneys were rarely involved on the side of blacks. Revenues from the neo-slavery poured the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars into the treasuries of Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Georgia, Florida, Texas, North Carolina, and South Carolina—where more than 75 percent of the black population in the United States then lived. link

The law means nothing when those that make and enforce the law twist it serve their own ends. You're going to have to bring something to the party a bit more substantial than what you think to debunk Blackmon's research.





When you attempt to draw a spurious and disingenous comparison between Professor McIntosh's "White Privilege" theory and slavery, you've made it irrelevant.





Not a problem. Glad to help.



Funny, I though acting offending was your schtick. I did not say you had glossed over European participation in the slave trade. Nor did I gloss over African participation in the slave trade. I simply added some much needed context which you had not. You are trying to make a quid pro quo argument where it can not be applied.



It's not in dispute the Africans held (and still do) enslave their own people and those of other cultures. But you're trying to make it appear that all things are equal here and there is no difference between European, American and African slavery. In your own words, "slavery is slavery." The thing is though, that's not true. There is a difference between forced labor and indentured servitude. There is a difference between sexual slavery and sweatshop labor by children. All forms of slavery are repellent and inhumane, but some forms are far worse than others and African slavery is not the same thing as American slavery.



I am sure what your grandfather endured was no day at the beach, but he wasn't taken from his homeland, shipped to a strange world like cargo, stripped of his name, family, religion and history and sold to another race to serve as chattel.

In the overall scheme of things, no--I don't think it compares.

Yes. I wrote that. I don't see how it actually contradicts anything I have subsequently written. As I posted earlier in the thread, the UK's total income from the slave economy (buying, selling, farming) was 5% of their total economy. Thats a lot of money but its no where near the other 95%.

The notion I am contesting is that slavery managed to grant the European nations, and their former colony America, some form of lasting advantage for the white population.


It would, if that wasn't the exact same as I wrote earlier.


I'm sorry nighttimer, but history is not determined by Douglas A. Blackmon, nor does making up a word to describe a form of slavery make that form of slavery some how different from another form of slavery.

That is what I mean when I say slavery is slavery. It doesn't matter why you are a slave, or how you became a slave. A man dragged from Africa to work until his death is no more of a slave than a woman imported from Eastern Asia against her wishes to serve the sexual wishes of strangers, or a Dane taken to Germany in a cattle truck to work in a steel mill as a slave labourer for the Third Reich. Trying to make some kind of distinction based on who suffered more is pointless and I suspect, biased by your own ethnic identity.

As for my 'obtuse refusal to accept reality', I have not denied the suffering of any one, nor argued that slaves were not what they were. The suffering of these human beings is not effected by the politics which surround them, they suffer regardless.

Its also kind of funny to be told that I am refusing to accept reality when I have read the four points on the list you didn't include in your previous post... more on those in a minute...


What for? I'm not interested in defending a bunch of crminals who subverted the law to their own ends and I don't have anything against Blackmon's research either, only your notion that 'neoslavery' is some how different to any other kind of slavery.


I didn't make that comparison, its been around all my life and I've heard it said a thousand times (also by you). I merely responded to an accepted wisdom by saying: I would expect any person writing on any subject to be balanced, and to consider all the factors before committing such a list for public consideration. The fact that a person chooses to confine themselves to only one aspect of a social situation, for what ever reason invalidates anything they might say.


I feel so much better


Really? So you didn't just write Without digging deeper you have tried to make it seem as if Africans sold other Africans to Europeans just to get rid of them.? That certainly seems like an accusation of 'glossing over to me'.

Be that as it may, yes. I admit I get indignant when people suggest I am some how guilty of something I didn't commit, or that by being a white person I am some how the recipient of unjust privilige. Yes, I know I am not an American, but the fact is these accustaions are spread about the western world quite liberally and being a Dane has never insulated me from countless accusations or pointed figers telling me I ought to feel some kind of guilt because of my 'heritage'. I get very indignant. So indignant in fact that I post my indigantion on internet fora.

I hope you don't expect me to apologize for that, because I won't.


Yes, I disagree entirely. You seem to want to make out that the American slave experience was the apex of some kind of metaphysical pyramid of suffering but nothing I've ever read indicates that African slaves in America suffered greater than any other form of slaves. Certainly many individuals were treated horribly, but I've read accounts of Chinese slaves that were just as bad and I've read of Europeans who were dragged off in their thousands to Africa to suffer endless atrocities at the hands of Arabs. I see no monopoly of suffering for the American slaves, and if your own link is to be believed, Robert William Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman don't see that either.

The four points you failed to add to your previous list:
Link.
Nr 8 and nr 9 are particularly interesting.


He was taken from his homeland, actually he was sent to Germany by collaborators in the Danish arbejdsformidling, in a rail way cattle truck, stripped of his name and identity and issued with a number (though not tattooed as he wasn't Jewish) and for five years he worked as a slave for German industry. He was paid nothing what so ever and had no rights. Had he stood up to his masters he would have been 'sent east' as others were.

No he never saw the inside of a slave ship and his slavery only last a few years so by comparison to an African American slave he 'had it lucky'. He returned to Denmark the same year my father was born and lived the rest of his days, a bitter, broken man, always at odds with his family and never able to recover. By the time I knew him he was a wreck of a human being who would sit chain smoking with trembling fingers and who refused to hear any talk about the war.
Thats how lucky he was. He survived the war but never recovered from it.

The effect of what his father went through shaped my father who grew up in poverty in the immediete aftermath of the war with a father who took to beating his children regularly. Its not hard for me to understand why my father is the way he is, since I took my share of beatings at his hand. Like his own father, my father doesn't like to talk about what his father did in the war.

I have no such reservations. I won't be the third generation to carry the shame of those five years and I won't be beating my children because I am unable to emotionally connect with them.

The reason why I am telling you all this is because I want to make clear why I protest the notion that I am the recipient of unjust privilige. I won't deny that African Americans still bear the stigma of slavery, or that America is a racist society, or even that Denmark owes some kind of repertion to the descendents of those slaves who were once upon a time traded by Danes. Ia m all in favour of free trade for example and would love to see equality in the world.

I refuse howver to accept that as a 'white person', and for that reason alone, I am some how guilty of receiving 'unjust privilige', which to me sounds like I am being charged with reciving stolen goods. Any privilige I receive is only due to my nationality and not my skin colour. Further more, like a great many other 'white people', my family has paid in full any 'balance of misery'. We too have been slaves, been sent to the gas chambers, been shot down in flames, blown up and subjected to decades of psychological trauma. Any advantage being white might have conferred upon me along the way has for ever been countered by the scars and burdens of being white in the twentieth century.

I know you don't care about any of that, but I'm not asking you to care. Only to understand because nothing you say or write is going to make me, or any one else suddenly decide to put the misery of angry strangers before the misery of 'my people'.

Moif, I disgree with part of your post, and take more seriously this latter half quoted above.

Firstly. Slavery is not all slavery. It's wrong for you to equate and compare sex slavery to chattel slavery; that's not to trivialize sex slavery, or to glorify chattel slavery, just to say that they are historically very different processes. What the third reich incurred upon the danish people was brief, war-time suffering; it was brutal, but it left europe with her historical memory in tact. It upset individual families, a hundredfold; but it did not dramatically change the nature and composition of the european family. Sex slavery targets the individual; it alienates the individual from the society. Chattel slavery covered the entire society.

We can play who suffered most if you want, but there's a place to play those childish games: CNN.

But i take seriously your contention that you don't want to feel like you've inherited 'stolen goods.' That I take quite seriously. To characterize european (and european-american) history as such is to demean and dismiss the hard work of generations of europeans and european emigrants who fought back any number of diseases, and taxing living conditions to better their lot. But to pretend that our great-grandparents merely toiled away quietly in their ramshackle workshops until their suffering was over is to neglect the many ways they were helped by government intervention (homesteading, vaccination programs) and, yes, by an economy that occasionally reaped the benefits of free slave labor. There's a reason that European-immigrant-filled New York City resisted the civil war to the point of draft riots; new york's economy partially was a cotton economy, too.

My point is simply that this is a ridiculously knotty web to entangle and if one comes at it with an agenda, intent on absolving one's great-grandparents of historical guilt, then you'll never undo it.

Really?

I think that would only be true at a rate of 100% taxation. I mean King George was rough, but jeez!

They were British subjects but their material wealth became American, our argument holds.


Yes, but you must distinguish between the Southern motive for succession and the Union motive for committing troops.

The South did secede to protect slavery (or autonomy as they saw it) but the Union didn't fight to end slavery, they fought to keep the South.

Those soldiers didn't die to win freedom for slaves, that notion is just historically inaccurate.


It certainly gave them a substantial comparative advantage over blacks. Not to mention it's hardly the case that the profits of slavery were entirely destroyed, the plantation class still ruled from their slave labor built position for decades. First in the South during reconstruction and back into national prominence as soon as it ended.

I'd keep picking away but it's a bit of a waste of time.

The US benefited enourmously from slavery. It was only when it became a political liability that it ended.


Of course I'm still speaking of a minority. Only a quarter or so of African-Americans are beneath the poverty line, but that's still a lot more than whites as a direct result of the white supremacist nature of the country's history.

Can I object to the question of this poll?

Are whites responsible for the current economic conditions of blacks in america?

Like, which whites? Which Blacks?

Take me, for example. I'm neither a police officer patrolling poor neighborhoods in this disastrous war on drugs, nor am I an activist fighting to end that war; I am not sub-prime mortgage lender, or a city planner trying to ensure good public housing for the needy.

So, like most folks, I mostly fall somewhere between the "not hurting" and "not helping" points on the spectrum.

I'm sure, as a former tutor, I may have said comments that, without me noticing, deflated the confidence of students (black and white), or perhaps I slept on kids who had potential untapped... but that hardly means that there is a pure racial component to it. Many black teachers do the same thing to students of all races. At the same time, I'm sure I've helped a few black students realize their potential in the same way that many of my black teachers helped me realize mine.

So my culpability for african american poverty is decidedly mixed. And, gawd, if we start dragging my ancestors to court -- a bunch that ranges from Stonewall Jackson to czechoslovakian coal miners -- then I'm not sure I am ever going to be able answer this poll. And that's just my family. There's a kajillion other white nuclear families to sort through after them.

And that's not even approaching the question of 'which black people.'

My point it that race is a spaghetti mound of knotty, complex interactions and the favored response 'partially' doesn't begin to address the vagaries of our American past.

Why the heck are we asking this question? If you answered 'no,' you're wrong. Everybody knows that our white ancestors contributed to the conditions of African-American poverty, and that said stranglehold was only lifted 40 years ago, hardly enough time to turn to government cheese into sparkling wine. If you answered 'yes,' you're keeping things a little too simple for my tastes. If you answered 'partially,' you might be like me, searching for a sane answer in one of the least constructive, most divisive polls I could possibly imagine.