Using logic to guess at what happened in the past is justifiable when there's no evidence. When there IS evidence, you ignore it at your peril. There are literally millions of historical primary sources still in existence that provide direct evidence about what chattel slavery on this continent was like: slave narratives, letters, diaries, census surveys, shipping manifests, bills of sale, wills, advertisements, etc. It really isn't logical to overlook them.
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WEB SHOWS

It's correct that you can't for the point that YOU were making but don't confuse that with saying that there are no historical facts to support the opposite of your claims.

You're quite unfamiliar with this topic to the extent that you are unfamiliar with the different ways of saying the same thing. You're running around in circles basically.

Incorrect.

I have essentially already said this and that fits in line with the "low wage labor"/capitalism approach. Hence, my first comment in this thread.

In the end, our only point of contention is in your unfounded assertion that "the slaves weren't THAT abused." Everything else has already been covered.

That doesn't make slavery about "race" at the onset and in its earliest stages. I never said it wasn't about race at all, although some people in this thread may have. There are also academicians who believe it wasn't about race at all, hence the continuous debate (off of GC).

Perhaps people do not understand what it means when I say slavery wasn't about "race" but I have already explained it in previous posts but I'll try once more. To make something about "race" is more than saying "hey, there are Africans over here who would be great slaves in a foreign land where they don't speak the language and are easily identifiable as NOT European." Being about "race" requires more than the identifiability of someone whose skin is darker than yours and language is different. It also requires negative beliefs and stereotypes that fuel the use of those people for economic purposes. Not the other way around, which argues that the economic purposes were established first, the people (from and outside of Africa) were chosen, and then to reinforce this slavery institution there were negative beliefs of stereotypes such as "these people are immoral savages who NEED to be brought to this land...they aren't even human." So it became more and more about race as the negative beliefs and stereotypes grew but was not initially about this.

There is no hard evidence that places the causal ordering of the economic purposes and negative beliefs and stereotypes. Therefore, we are forced to interpret history and apply theory to understand why slavery and systemic oppression of racial groups, in general, was able to perpetuate. If it was just about "race" and prejudices, we could have knocked slavery, Jim Crow, and all inequalities out the box by educating people and eliminating bigotry. But I know that you don't have to be a "race bigot" in order to be a racist. You can love everyone and have minority friends but still refuse to hire a racial or ethnic minority because it hurts your company's profit when bigoted white people will no longer patron you. These types of racists would claim that they aren't doing it because of "race," they are doing it because of "economics"/profit. Whatever's whatever.

I know. You just started running around as a diversion tactic. ;)

So your assertion is unfounded even on a cost-benefit basis.

Right, and I do not argue that the initial impetus was not economics, but very early on, before the 1700s, it morphed into a institution that was in many ways circumscribed by race. Not to mention that the negative perceptions of Africans that fueled this transition had their roots in early Enlightenment thought, so even if the codification of these beliefs into law did not happen until later, these ideas were certainly a part of the popular European cultural imagination before colonization even begin in earnest (I think that Gould talks a bit about this in The Mismeasure of Man; and I am looking for other sources here). Indeed,the fact that the negative beliefs predate the institutionalization of slavery might have aided in the shift from the indentured servitude, "free labor" institution to the system of chattel slavery.

As I clarified earlier, economics were certainly a factor, but race was just as much of a factor from almost the beginning of the institution and to suggest otherwise is just wrong-headed to me. It seems to me that as race was such a defining characteristic for the majority of the time that the institution existed, we are justified in saying that it was in many ways about race. To cite the economic beginnings as a way of negating the racialized history of chattel slavery is problematic to me (not to say that you were doing that, but that this often happens.)

There were only 3 white people on this huge (school bus sized) tour bus. Me, and a couple from Holland. The surprised faces were on the blacks on the bus. This is all part of the "Black History Tour" that has Federal funding now in Charleston, b/c most of the slaves did enter from the Port of Charleston. I thought the Gullah tour was very interesting.

When we were stationed in Kansas, some of the buildings on Post were built with Indian slave labor.

And if one wishes to continue with the history class here:
The term "Cow-Boy" may have as one of its bases as a way to differentiate house-boys and cow-boys.
Over 1/3 of the Cow-Boys in the West were Black.
Something else not covered in most Western or History books.

Around the 1830s or 1840s some residents of Louisiana around and in NOLA realized that slaves were not 'free labor'. They were expensive to feed, keep healthy, etc. They were valuable assets. New Irish immigrants were actually cheaper to employ than slaves to maintain. So much of dangerous or difficult physical work, such as digging canals, was transfered to the Irish.

More food for thought.

Left the previous country I had been in for a bit of a vacation in the sun.

Yall (theres no apostraphe on the keyboard all it shows is à), are ridiculous.

SECdomination, others. Dont argue with racists. Anyone focused on race/culture to a degree where every thread becomes an issue of race, is a racist (DSTChaos, etc). Its the most obvious form of collectivism and is the reason the Democratic/Green and other parties are so rife with it. Look at some of the most absurdly racist countries in the world...Spain, Germany, Poland. Their past with statism/socialism is appalling.

and SWTXBelle is correct. It was an offhand remark that was mocking the comments making fun of macallen in dubbing him a White AngloSaxon Protestant and old money. Relax.

Racism = prejudice + power. The end.

No one here has called anyone else racist(well, with the exception of you); we are all engaging in debate that is both healthy and enlightening. If any of us learn something new from engaging in this debate, then it has been fruitful. If you do not want to learn anything, then peace out.

It seems like this may be a semantics issue on what we're calling "race"? Europeans certainly saw the African as other from the beginnings of the slave trade, but that view's development into modern ideas of race was a process that took a few centuries.

We are saying the same thing.

ETA: See my response to DSTRen13 on the "slight" differences.

Exactly. "Race" is more of a North American construct.

But the concept of "cultural and ethnic differentialism" increased throughout the institution of slavery.

It isn't "the end."

I am one of many who do not believe that racism requires prejudice.

But I agree with you that prejudice without power isn't racism. :)

You really are an idiot with barely a toddler level of reading comprehension and understanding.

We should probably specify that for the most part this discussion has centered on slavery in the Americas. Slavery, alas, has been around far longer (and continues today, for that matter).
I have always been intrigued by the enslavement of those who look like the enslavers. Surely it is easier to justify slavery if the slaves are "different". If you can think of the slaves as sub-human, or only in economic terms, it would be easier (I think) to live with your actions. But when the enslaved look like you - talk like you - and you don't have the "different" defense, your justifications would have to be more intellectual in nature a la the defense of slavery in ancient Greece and Rome.
I did Living History work, and one character I portrayed was an occupant of New Orleans under Union occupation. Doing the research was interesting - I haven't done any statistical comparisons, but I think I can make an educated statement and say that the attitude of southern women towards slavery and slaves was different than the male. It is remarkable how many primary sources show women who felt a certain similarity existed betweeen their role and that of their slaves - totally at the whim of men in terms of their lives, financially dependent, etc. (And NO - I'm not saying slavery = role of women. There is no doubt that is was much better to be a white woman than a slave. I am saying that women had a different take on it, and some of them were far more sympathetic than most men to the plight of their slaves).
Of course, if the slaves lived in marble palaces, wore silk clothes and ate bon bons all day it wouldn't matter - the problem with concentrating too much on how the slaves were treated is that it seems to imply that if they weren't being abused, then it was okay, or that it is wrong because people were abused when it was wrong because IT DENIED THE BASIC HUMANITY of the slaves in denying them the freedom that is a basic right for all men. And women, too!

Can I just say I love GreekChat? We start off with a discussion about chapters of the same fraternity, but different campuses, visiting each other and end up discussing the history of slavery/racism.

Does this thread win the award for going off in the most random direction? Or, has there been another thread that so clearly exited its original concept?

I understand where you were going with this, SWTX, and without in any way (hopefully) taking the thunder out of the slavery discussion, here's some info (pulled from the 'equal rights' thread the other day) that might help connect the dots as to why some women may have had much different attitudes about slavery than men. In 1848, Elizabeth Cady Stanton drafted a "Declaration of Sentiments":

"In this Declaration of Sentiments, Stanton carefully enumerated areas of life where women were treated unjustly. Eighteen was precisely the number of grievances America's revolutionary forefathers had listed in their Declaration of Independence from England.

Stanton's version read, "The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world." Then it went into specifics:

• Married women were legally dead in the eyes of the law
• Women were not allowed to vote
• Women had to submit to laws when they had no voice in their formation
• Married women had no property rights
• Husbands had legal power over and responsibility for their wives to the extent that they could imprison or beat them with impunity
• Divorce and child custody laws favored men, giving no rights to women
• Women had to pay property taxes although they had no representation in the levying of these taxes
• Most occupations were closed to women and when women did work they were paid only a fraction of what men earned
• Women were not allowed to enter professions such as medicine or law
• Women had no means to gain an education since no college or university would accept women students
• With only a few exceptions, women were not allowed to participate in the affairs of the church
• Women were robbed of their self-confidence and self-respect, and were made totally dependent on men

Strong words... Large grievances... And remember: This was just seventy years after the Revolutionary War. Doesn't it seem surprising to you that this unfair treatment of women was the norm in this new, very idealistic democracy? But this Declaration of Sentiments spelled out what was the status quo for European-American women in 1848 America, while it was even worse for enslaved Black women."

Wait - you mean Greeks actually get an EDUCATION??? They aren't just partying and frying their brain cells, but actually engage in meaningful discussions about a variety of topics? lol

And I have to admit, many times the digression ends up being more interesting/fun than the original topic. That said, I'm glad the chapter visits have worked out well.

That was made clear from the beginning.

Hmmm . . .as I'm reading the beginning of the digression it seems to center more on a discussion of Europe. Hence my desire to clarify. If I'm being repetitive, so be it. If I'm being repetitive, so be it.

I guess so, because what you and Chaos are calling race seems to tied to negative perception of those differences, whereas I tend to think of race in the DuBoisian sense, as one of the ways that a group people define themselves against another group, which does not necessarily imply negative associations. Though I would argues that the negative associations attached to those perceived differences did emerge earlier rather than later.

That's not how we're defining race. I define race the same way that DuBois did, as a N. American construct.

But that conceptualization aside, you already said that slavery was initially about economics (the physical and cultural differences were used for a reason, not because Europeans hated a "race" of people and targeted them as a hobby). And that race became an emphasis a little later on as the N. American construct of "race" developed and advanced. We're saying the same thing. :)

OK, that last post made it a bit more clear. We are, mostly, saying the same thing.

Damnit my internet broke at the wrong time last night. Just an aside to my previous discussion with SEC before this thread whipped around to slavery.

I'm not asking the USA or other developed nations to produce less food. I'm asking for international trade laws to be changed so that trade is, well, fair, for everyone. That could actually help with poverty levels too, increasing a country's gross product.

And dude...wanting not to believe something happened doesn't mean it didn't. I would like to believe that the nazis didn't murder 6 million people but they did, and there are people alive today who can attest to that fact. Shit we're back to jews again. Sorry ya'll.

:(

I'm sure the Spaniards who throw bananas onto the pitch and make monkey noises directed at black players at Nou Camp and elsewhere would love to hear that one.

I'd like an explanation.

Believe it or not, at the moment I've been having alot of racism directed towards me. In the country I live in (which 3/4ths of my ancestors came from) right now, I'm frequently being insulted because they think I'm one race (which is hated in this country) because I get darker in the sun then they do (the other 1/4th is seen as an even lighter skinned nation). They don't know any better. All that being said, I'm not sure how you can term it a "N. American construct."

She means that the structure of racialized thinking as we know it today developed in North America. Some elements of that thought have been exported elsewhere. This is true. At the same time, there are many other places where racial relations have developed differently than in North America. Any study of Latin American slavery and racism would demonstrate this fact. To illustrate this you can read the sections comparing racism in the US and racism in Brazil on Wikipedia (which, incidentally, is not written by liberal academics):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_%2..._constructions

No one claimed racism did not exist outside North American. It certainly does. What is being argued is that there is more cultural/national variation to racism than you are admitting, and that the racism we know in the US was first developed in the North America in the 17th and 18th centuries. European people in the medieval period certainly did/said things that we would perceive as "racist" today, but it's not clear that they even had a concept of "race."

That would be terribly difficult to prove. Thought isn't "exported." There is a root within the peoples which accept the theories so that once they are exposed to the theories, they expose the root. There is nothing new under the sun (as the Bible claimed and I think is true).

I know plenty about the race classifications in Brazil, I did an in-depth study on it for one of my classes. Fairly intresting, but it really doesn't prove anything we were talking about.

SEC (and others that are interested): Please read: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1206...iews_days_only -- and be sure to watch the slideshow

and: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1206...2:r1:c0.328393

I don't know what you mean by the part in bold so I guess our conversation is at an end. If you mean that people are naturally sinners - I certainly agree with you there. At the same time I also think that evidence shows our thinking about race has changed over time and varies by place. Maybe "exported" isn't the best word for the move of ideas - perhaps "exchange" would be better. But if you don't agree that new ideas appear and are exchanged among peoples, again, we have nothing more to discuss really.

I love Ecclesiastes. Let's not even start on how to do a sound reading of that amazing spiritual book.

For an interesting discussion of holding servants against their will, you could check out James Brooks's Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. He's mainly looking at a form of non-chattel slavery that existed in the American SW (mainly New Mexico) throughout the 19th century. The enslaved people or "servants" or "captives" were American Indians. He argues that the master/slave relationship was justified as a kinship or familial relationship, although masters also held the power of violence over their slaves and that slave raids among Native American communities were ongoing. He has a lot of concrete evidence to support his argument.

Pull one out your ass.

A very typical, yet childish response. Very ladylike. Troll at another board instead of bothering us.

What I'm trying to say (and it's a hard point to get across I think) is that N. America didn't just suddenly create the current racism. It's been there all along.

An important thing worth noting:
If N. America did indeed "create" the current style of racism as has been claimed, this only stems from the fact that for the first time ever people of different racial backgrounds on a large scale. Perhaps there are countries and periods which can contradict but I can't think of any off the top of my head. Europe has always (and still is mostly) homogenous. The countries with the greatest amount of overt racism (in my opinion, Italy and Spain) are also the countries with some of the highest African immigrant populations.

And as a sad side note, I was traveling in the Northeastern part of the city today and found a shack with four Confederate flags on it. The racists here use the Confederate flag to overtly show racism. It's sad that a beautiful tradition is mangled in this way.

Perhaps it's semantics, but I agree that "beliefs" are exchanged and exported through literary and through force, not ideas.

The way you state this, you act as if we are blaming current North Americans for creating the model we're discussing. Actually, we're not--we just have to deal with it. I suppose we might say that the model was created by Europeans and Euroamericas based on experiences and encounters in North America. That might be more accurate than saying "created in North America." I don't know. You're fairly wrong about people not encountering racial or ethnic others until the age of exploration. For example, the Roman Empire was an incredibly ethnically and racially diverse nation which had a considerable amount of tolerance for these differences. To take two examples, think of Paul (a Jew) who was also a Roman citizen. Also think of the numerous military commanders in the late Empire from Gaul & Western Europe (a true cultural backwater of the Roman Empire) whose ethnic groups were mocked in contemporary literature and yet rose through military ranks to leadership and sometimes even Imperial office... The point being that they didn't create "race." 17th & 18th century Europeans had a tremendous desire to understand the world by categorizing and classifying people, idea, and things. I can point you to literally hundreds of sources about this. Thus they began categorizing people on various points including race. The system of slavery was a phenomenon that helped to ensure that Africans were categorized as "inferior." Yet the same system and ideas that took hold in these areas did not take hold everywhere, even places that had slavery. (As indicated by the Brazilian counterexample I brought up and you dismissed.)

As a scholar of Europe, I actually disagree with you on Italy and Spain being the most racist. I would argue that France is probably more so. I study France...

OK... I'm glad you recognize how racists use this symbol.


So there are never any new ideas, only new beliefs? This doesn't make any sense to me, unless you're just going to randomly categorize anything that's new as a "belief" and anything you perceive to be persistent throughout time as an "idea." Then it makes it easy to claim ideas never change. Besides, for any idea to affect society, at least someone must believe it. Ideas which are universally dismissed are usually not discussed, written about, or exchanged.

I still haven't seen you state evidence to support your claim that the "idea" of race has never changed throughout time or across space. Certainly people have treated each other poorly, oppressed one another, held slaves, committed atrocities, etc. throughout time. I agree with you there. I also agree that people doing this based on ethnic, cultural, and religious differences has been fairly persistent across time. But race specifically is an idea and construct that really did not exist before the advent of North American chattel slavery. Did medieval Europeans who happened to encounter sub-Saharan Africans consider them as other? Yes. But not because they perceived them to be a member of a particular "race" that was inherently different. In fact, there's evidence that they judged them many times on a religious basis. They feared many of the rituals of African religion and compared them to their own ideas about witchcraft in Europe. Early on in the institution of Portuguese slavery, there was an idea that if a slave converted to Christianity he was freed. This didn't last for long of course because the masters quickly realized that the slaves could convert (or claim to convert) to get their freedom. (Although many African converts continued to practice African religious rituals alongside Christian ones.) Early explorers like Vasco da Gama were constantly looking for rumored Christian peoples in East Africa and India, hoping that they would help Europeans in crusades against Islam. They took quite a while to find the Ethiopian Christians, but they did manage to find some of the native Indian Christian population.... Vasco da Gama was constantly killing Muslims and less frequently Hindus - he was not a very nice guy. But yet he had the idea that if he met other Christians, even if not of his skin color, they would be his allies. This idea was pretty much defunct by the 18th century - although obviously new religious movements of the 18th century (Methodist, Moravianism, etc.) began to revive the idea of the equality of believers in some sense and became active in the early abolitionist movement.

GEN Alum had to deal with French nationals as fellow students at KSG and on a State level at NATO, at the UN, etc. He felt they were the most difficult people and government with whom to negotiate.

It "just brings to light the mistreatment of prisoners after slavery was abolished"???? Did you read the same article? Do you not get that what it's documenting is that even decades after slavery was abolished, the state and private enterprise continued to find and force ways to enslave african americans? The point was that since "slavery" was illegal, they would simply arrest them so they could call them "prisoners" and then justify the continued used of them as slave labor. And are you REALLY comparing the reality of this to the Hollywood depiction in a Paul Newman film???? Did you see the picture of the man tied around the pick-axe in the slide show? That was real.

You must have just skimmed the article, so let me pull some highlights for you: "were arbitrarily detained" ; "Others were simply seized by southern landowners and pressed into years of involuntary servitude."
"At the turn of the 20th century, at least 3,464 African-American men and 130 women lived in forced labor camps in Georgia"
"vivid accounts of the system's brutalities" ; "Wraithlike men infected with tuberculosis were left to die on the floor of a storage shed" ; "Laborers who attempted escape from the Muscogee Brick Co. were welded into ankle shackles with three-inch-long spikes turned inward -- to make it impossibly painful to run again. Guards everywhere were routinely drunk and physically abusive."
"hellish conditions at Chattahoochee Brick and other operations owned by Mr. English, a luminary of the Atlanta elite" ; "But by 1908, Mr. English -- despite having never owned antebellum slaves -- was a man whose great wealth was inextricably tied to the enslavement of thousands of men."
"The base of his wealth, Chattahoochee Brick, relied on forced labor from its inception"
"Once dried, the bricks were carried at a double-time pace by two dozen laborers running back and forth -- under almost continual lashing by Mr. English's overseer, Capt. James T. Casey. Witnesses testified that guards holding long horse whips struck any worker who slowed to a walk or paused"
"A string of witnesses told the legislative committee that prisoners at the plant were fed rotting and rancid food, housed in barracks rife with insects, driven with whips into the hottest and most-intolerable areas of the plant, and continually required to work at a constant run in the heat of the ovens."
"On Sundays, white men came to the Chattahoochee brickyard to buy, sell and trade black men as they had livestock and, a generation earlier, slaves on the block."
"after a black prisoner named Peter Harris said he couldn't work because of a grossly infected hand, the camp doctor carved off the affected skin tissue with a surgeon's knife and then ordered him back to work. Instead, Mr. Harris, his hand mangled and bleeding, collapsed after the procedure. The camp boss ordered him dragged into the brickyard and whipped 25 times. "If you ain't dead, I will make you dead if you don't go to work," shouted a guard. Mr. Harris was carried to a cotton field. He died lying between the rows of cotton."
"Guards there had recently adopted for punishment of the workers the "water cure," in which water was poured into the nostrils and lungs of prisoners. (The technique, preferred because it allowed miners to "go to work right away" after punishment, became infamous in the 21st century as "waterboarding.")"
"a 16-year-old boy at a lumber camp owned by Mr. Hurt and operated by his son George Hurt ... The teenager was serving three months of hard labor for an unspecified misdemeanor... "one of the bosses, up in a pine tree and he had his gun and shot at the little negro and shot this side of his face off"... The teenager ran into the woods and died. Days later, a dog appeared in the camp dragging the boy's arm in its mouth, Mr. Gaither said. The homicide was never investigated. Called to testify before the commission, Mr. Hurt lounged in the witness chair, relaxed and unapologetic for any aspect of the sprawling businesses."

They weren't "servants", it was "debt slavery". From the article:
Then came Pearl Harbor and suddenly everyone panicked that the (known) mistreatment of black Americans could be exploited against the U.S.:
So, ultimately, the federal government was forced to finally put teeth behind the 13th Amendment to the Constitution and protect black americans from any form of indentured servitude because of fear of bad P.R. during World War II. Oh, and because they needed them to fight for the U.S. in the armed forces, too.

Yeah... I'm a Francophile for sure. I love French history and culture and food and pop music and so many things. I love being in France. But they have a bureaucracy that is out of control... It's really inhibiting their economy at the moment. It's difficult to impossible for young people (even with college degrees in many cases) to find employment, and getting anything done that requires the government is nearly impossible. One example would be on the French historians listserv I'm on, there was a recent discussion of an elevator in one of the Parisian archives, can't remember which one, and how the elevator had broken and there was apparently no effort and a total level of disconcern from all sources about getting it fixed... It was supposed to be weeks rather than hours... wow. Also when I was in Lyon last summer if there was a computer problem at the municipal archives they'd just shut down immediately in the AM and go home claiming it couldn't be fixed until the next day (the computer network is used to recall the documents). Uh... OK. It's a different mentality. In one way the laid-back thing is beneficial and fun--eg cafe culture. In other ways it really inhibits getting things accomplished efficiently... There was a New Yorker article about this last May during the election season. I'll see if I can dredge it up...

Not to mention the MASSIVE racial and ethnic prejudice and disenfranchisement of North Africans and others (sans-papiers from former French colonies, for example)... they just haven't dealt with a lot of their societal problems. Modern French society has a multitude of problems to confront. I guess this goes along with my basic political position, which is anti-authoritarianism/anti-government power.

The point being that slavery after 1865 was usually called by names other than "slavery" (for obvious reasons). In fact it was often called "servitude" or "captivity" or "emprisonment." Or they would even claim their slaves as family members and use that to justify the enslavement and the slaves' inability to leave. James Brooks's work makes this very clear, although he's working on very different forms of slavery in the southwest and not on the material you've brought up.

I'm willing to recognize that there is a semantic issue here, right? So the people who were enslaving in this period didn't call what they were doing slavery for a variety of reasons, but we can recognize that it was, in fact, slavery. We do this today pretty frequently. For example, we call child soldiers in Africa slaves even though their masters don't speak of them that way. I do think it's important, however, to recognize the difference in words and think about how differences in words affected the reality of people's lives... I do think language matters even if we want to constantly speak truth to power. Even if we all decided ultimately to call it "captivity" and not "slavery" (which James Brooks uses semi-interchangeably in his book), we can all recognize that it was a pretty great evil... I hope.

Please come back to the original discussion.