Interesting & Civil discussion re: slavery from Greek Life is HERE

[breathesgelatin]

Originally Posted by Elephant Walk

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.

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.

[breathesgelatin]

Originally Posted by SECdomination

The second article was interesting. It had many more useful facts than the first. But I don't understand how you could hold servants against their will. Did officials look the other way because this was taking place in the south?

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.

[DSTCHAOS]

Originally Posted by Elephant Walk

I'd like an explanation.

Pull one out your ass.

[Elephant Walk]

Originally Posted by DSTCHAOS

Pull one out your ass.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

[breathesgelatin]

Originally Posted by Elephant Walk

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.

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...

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.

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

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

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.

[alum]

Originally Posted by breathesgelatin

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...

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.

[nittanyalum]

Originally Posted by SECdomination

From the first link:
"Under laws enacted specifically to intimidate blacks, tens of thousands were arbitrarily detained, hit with high fines and charged with the costs of their arrests. With no means to pay such debts, prisoners were sold into coal mines, lumber camps, brickyards, railroad construction crews and plantations. Others were simply seized by southern landowners and pressed into years of involuntary servitude"

There is no further description of these laws in the excerpt. It just brings to light the mistreatment of prisoners after slavery was abolished. The Wall Street Journal is much more credible than most publications, but all the article talks about is the mistreatment and not the laws that put them in jail in the first place.
The slideshow didn't look that bad. Have you seen the movie "Cool Hand Luke"?

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."

Originally Posted by SECdomination:
The second article was interesting. It had many more useful facts than the first. But I don't understand how you could hold servants against their will. Did officials look the other way because this was taking place in the south?

They weren't "servants", it was "debt slavery". From the article:

...the peonage system -- which allowed farmers to use bogus debts and the threat of violence to keep workers on their land indefinitely -- hung over millions of African-Americans. ... Although the antebellum version of slavery had been unconstitutional for decades, there still existed no federal statute that made holding slaves a punishable crime.

Then came Pearl Harbor and suddenly everyone panicked that the (known) mistreatment of black Americans could be exploited against the U.S.:

President Franklin D. Roosevelt expressed to advisors his worry that the mistreatment of blacks would be used in propaganda by Japan and Germany to undercut support for the war by African-Americans.

Attorney General Francis Biddle shared the president's concerns with his top assistants. Mr. Biddle was informed that federal policy had long been to cede virtually all allegations of slavery to local jurisdiction -- effectively guaranteeing they would never be prosecuted.

Mr. Biddle said that in an all-out war, in which millions of African-Americans would be called upon to serve, the U.S. government needed to take a stand: Those who continued to practice any form of slavery, in violation of 1865's Thirteenth Amendment, had to be prosecuted as criminals.
Five days after the Japanese attack, on Dec. 12, 1941, Mr. Biddle issued a directive -- Circular No. 3591 -- to all federal prosecutors acknowledging the history of unwritten federal policy to ignore most reports of involuntary servitude.

In August 1942, a letter from a 16-year-old black boy arrived at the Department of Justice alleging that Charles Bledsoe -- the Alabama man who had received a $100 fine for peonage -- still was holding members of the teen's family against their will. Despite Mr. Biddle's strong directive, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover initially saw no need to pursue the matter. The U.S. attorney in Mobile, Ala., Francis H. Inge, was similarly uninterested.
"No active investigation will be instituted," Mr. Hoover wrote to Assistant Attorney General Wendell Berge.
But seven months into World War II, with the nation anxious to mobilize every possible soldier and counter every thrust of Japan's and Germany's propaganda machines, Mr. Berge directed Mr. Hoover to look further. ... "Enemy propagandists have used similar episodes in international broadcasts to the colored race, saying that the democracies are insincere and that the enemy is their friend," Mr. Berge continued.

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.

[breathesgelatin]

Originally Posted by alum

My H 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.

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.

[breathesgelatin]

Originally Posted by nittanyalum

They weren't "servants", it was "debt slavery".

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.

[moe.ron]

Please come back to the original discussion.

[SWTXBelle]

So - can we have an agreed on definition for slavery? I'm interested in what y'all have to say as far as how to define it.

[breathesgelatin]

Originally Posted by moe.ron

Please come back to the original discussion.

Why? We're having a surprisingly civil and interesting discussion of these subjects.

[SWTXBelle]

Originally Posted by moe.ron

Please come back to the original discussion.

There's really nothing to add to that - the vistors came, it all went well, and there was an additional bunch of brothers who seem to have come and visited with no problems.

Did you have something to add?

[moe.ron]

Originally Posted by breathesgelatin

Why? We're having a surprisingly civil and interesting discussion of these subjects.

Yeah, but the slavery issue and other stuff should be confined to the news politic forum.

The original discussion was about visiting other chapters.

Thank you.

[SWTXBelle]

In before the lock.