Racism: Why were Americans so racist prior to the 20th century?

[dannno]

Murder is as old as man himself.

Tyranny (government run slavery) is as old as man himself.

Anyway, the reason for black slavery is pretty simple when you think about it. There were white slaves early on in the "New World". They could easily blend in to the local free population when they escaped. Native Americans could blend into the forrest and hook back up with their tribes. Blacks couldn't blend in to the free population and swimming across the Atlantic is pretty difficult. So for this (and other reasons), blacks made better slaves. The racism that followed was the result of the condition and not the other way around. My 2 1/2 cents.

That's another really good explanation.

 

[FSU63]

The best post I've seen on the topic was by a poster named torchbearer who explained something along the lines of how a lot of people in the south didn't want slavery, but even the smaller farmers were essentially forced into the practice because they couldn't compete with the multinational corporations that had the big slavery plantations. And some British slave trading company was responsible for bringing over the vast majority of slaves. So it always seems to be these giant corporations that are given enormous state subsidies that cause all of these really bad things in society.

Are you seriously defending slave owners?

 

[jdmyprez_deo_vindice]

First, you have to realize that no race or culture held a monopoly on slave holding. The vast majority of African slaves that wound up here came from bulk purchases from African tribal leaders who captured them during periods of warfare. Those leaders who were friendly to European traders were all too happy to sell off the slaves they did not wish to keep for themselves because otherwise they would just be killed. So slavery as an American institution was born from an already existent African slave trade. Arabs, Jews, Europeans and even some Asian cultures were slave trading out of Africa mostly due to the fact that the supply of human labor there was both cheap and plentiful. Many African Chiefs would trade ships full of slaves for a couple barrels of iron bracelets. So while yes, the African as a whole was typically look upon by other cultures as being somewhat subhuman the basic reason is strictly due to economic reasons and economic reasons alone.

 

[acptulsa]

The laws were set up to allow slavery because people were making money on slave labor. Just the same way the laws are set up today to favor corporations over people--because stockholders are making money on the resulting semi-slave labor of people who can no longer legally be self-employed who have to compete for an ever-diminishing number of corporate jobs, and who can't feed their families for paying taxes.

If you want to get your panties in a knot over something, why not choose the current problem, rather than the problem that was solved nearly a hundred fifty years ago?

How can you say in 1776 the United States was founded upon the ideals of freedom and rugged individualism when people were classified as property? Slavery is the direct anti-thesis to freedom. I don't know, it just seems disgusting to me. How can you say 'All men are created equal' and then in the same breath, have people existing as slaves? I've read that European-Americans viewed the enslavement of African-Americans as being a part of a 'civilising mission'.

I can say that in 1776 the United States was founded upon the ideals of freedom because even though it didn't make everyone free, it made a hell of a lot larger percentage of its population free than any other nation at the time. In most other nations at the time, even the supposed non-slaves were serfs, there were debtors' prisons, not only could slaves not vote but citizens couldn't either, and you could be enslaved, robbed or killed if your religion didn't meet the state standard. And now, we have some of these things coming back, and right here in the U.S. We are on the verge of debtors' prisons (over child support and taxes) and indentured servitude (what else could you call student loan debt?). Any religion at all is liable to get you a little bit of official grief these days--and I think it's safe to say the majority of the population are being forced through taxation to buy things they consider immoral. We are becoming serfs to the corporations, which seem to enjoy all the constitutional protections of personhood without any of the responsibilities--can you put a corporation in jail when it breaks the law?

And people like you are in your current state of thought are the very problem. You've been taught to get your panties in a knot over slavery, and concern yourself only over racism, and pat yourself on the back over the fact that we no longer enslave people on the basis of race, and so you can't wake up to the fact that we are all being enslaved without regard to race. Is this a good thing because it gives us all equal opportunity to be enslaved?

Why are you here asking us this silly stuff? Because we approve of the Constitution. We do approve of the Constitution, to a greater or lesser degree. You don't even know it well enough to understand our position on it. We approve of the Constitution as amended. The Constitution as amended is not the same document as the Constitution unamended was. And we don't approve of every amendment. But I haven't seen anyone here in a long time who doesn't approve of the amendment that made slavery as illegal as it was immoral, and so we drove them all away pwning them because they were ugly and obnoxious. And we sure approve of the fact that the Constitution, as imperfect as it was, was a huge step forward at the time. Not because it failed to make everyone free, but because it was the first Constitution that made anyone but the nation's royals free. Indeed, it was one of the first that did away with royalty altogether.

Now that we have that cleared up, what are you going to do to help us reverse the trend back toward the very slavery that the Constitution did much--both in the beginning and when all slavery was made illegal--to end? Are you going to reject the beauty and righteousness of what the Constitution helped accomplish because it was more imperfect before it was amended? Or are you going to try to restore that spirit and that power of the Constitution that did much to curtail slavery over the years and make the modern world better than the world that spawned and inspired it?

You don't understand the past well enough to draw meaningful conclusions from it. You refuse to learn anything from history but what you're spoon fed, so you're doomed to repeat it. Lose the attitude, skip the lame attempts to play gotcha, and learn from us, and you might be worth something to liberty some day. Or not. That's entirely up to you.

They weren't all so racist prior to the twentieth century. We aren't all racist now. Many people of all races were racist prior to the twentieth century. Many people are racist now. Racism was institutionalized then because corporations made money on slave labor. Racism is used to distract people today from the fact that corporations are today making money on semi-slave labor. You can be distracted--you can have your head up your ass--you can believe the people who try to make you afraid of the people who are fighting slavery today--or you can be part of the solution. Choose.

 

[CPUd]

Oh geez. Now you're just mixing up your fonts? And that's the best user name you could come up with for a multiple account? NewUser? Really? NEWUSER? Holy friggin' crap.

Tell you what New Loser; let's take it from the top. Take off a week and come back. Start easy. You know, with a good user name. Something like Liberty Fuckin A! Or ObamatheDictator. Shit like that.

And don't come back and tell everybody you're a student on Christmas break. Too clichéd.

He seems to be leveraging current events; this thread would have not happened if this tweet had never happened:

 

[NorthCarolinaLiberty]

He seems to be leveraging current events...

I think he's actually leveraging himself on the couch.

 

[FSU63]

 

[dannno]

Are you seriously defending slave owners?

I don't think so? I'm against slavery.

My point was that because the large European based corporate plantations existed with slaves which brought down the price of goods, it was nearly impossible to operate and be economically viable without having slaves. As a result, you are going to have more farmers with slaves, because generally the ones without slaves would go out of business. Even if they personally abhor the practice, many farmers had slaves. I'm not rationalizing and saying it is 'ok' to have slaves, I'm just informing people of why they existed. It isn't that much different from welfare, you get people dependent on welfare and it becomes very difficult to just get rid of it. Of course they should have and that in itself was definitely a good thing when it happened.

The other interesting thing is that slaves were attached to debt, so you couldn't 'free' slaves without defaulting on debt to the banks. So the banks had a vested interest in continuing the practice. It also meant that if you inherited a slave, you inherited their debt. So you could either sell the slave to a big corporate plantation where they would definitely be treated very poorly, default on the debt or you could have them work to pay off their debt and treat them as humanely as possible. I imagine a lot of people inherited slaves since it went on for hundreds of years. What would you do if you inherited a slave with a $80k debt attached? Many individuals in the south would attempt to treat their slaves as well as they could, but they had to make sure that the slave earned enough to help continue to pay off the debt. It was in fact the big corporate plantations that had the very nasty reputations of treating their slaves very poorly. I'm not saying none of the smaller plantations treated their slaves poorly, or that it was a good thing that they had slaves, just that they were treated much better in general, and that the slave owners themselves in many cases may have never actually purchased a slave...

 

[NewUser]

The best post I've seen on the topic was by a poster named torchbearer who explained something along the lines of how a lot of people in the south didn't want slavery, but even the smaller farmers were essentially forced into the practice because they couldn't compete with the multinational corporations that had the big slavery plantations. And some British slave trading company was responsible for bringing over the vast majority of slaves. So it always seems to be these giant corporations that are given enormous state subsidies that cause all of these really bad things in society.

Multi-national corporations from the 18/19th centuries??? Like what?

 

[acptulsa]

Multi-national corporations from the 18/19th centuries??? Like what?

Like the Hudson Bay Company, ignorant child. Like the Rothschild Bank. Like the royal family of England, Prussia and Russia (note I said 'family', not 'families').

Your school is brainwashing you. You want actual education. Find it.

 

[heavenlyboy34]

The best post I've seen on the topic was by a poster named torchbearer who explained something along the lines of how a lot of people in the south didn't want slavery, but even the smaller farmers were essentially forced into the practice because they couldn't compete with the multinational corporations that had the big slavery plantations. And some British slave trading company was responsible for bringing over the vast majority of slaves. So it always seems to be these giant corporations that are given enormous state subsidies that cause all of these really bad things in society.

I miss Torch so much. :'(

 

[ghengis86]

I miss Torch so much. :'(

Is he gone?

 

[fr33]

We are barely rational apes that are prone to tribalism and other superstitions.

 

[ObiRandKenobi]

Genghis Khan was anti-racism.

 

[Origanalist]

Is he gone?

He was here today.

 

[Origanalist]

We are barely rational apes that are prone to tribalism and other superstitions.

Don't you think that's going a bit too far? We make a lot of dumb mistakes, but "barely rational"? It seems to me there are two sides to our coin.

 

[fr33]

Don't you think that's going a bit too far? We make a lot of dumb mistakes, but "barely rational"? It seems to me there are two sides to our coin.

There's so much that we don't yet know, but there are many things we do know but get ignored in favor of tribalism. Even today, it's not uncommon to speak with people that think certain races have a lesser brain than another race. The whole concept of races is ridiculous. But we haven't gotten past that particular superstition.

 

[CPUd]

Even today, it's not uncommon to speak with people that think certain races have a lesser brain than another race. .

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?434599-London-Mayor-16-of-the-population-are-idiots

 

[fr33]

http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthread.php?434599-London-Mayor-16-of-the-population-are-idiots

That statement did not discriminate against ethnicity.

 

[RickyJ]

The only sensible conclusion is that European Americans didn't view African-Americans as being completely human.

There are many who didn't think they were fully human and those that pushed this theory for personal gain. However not all states were for slavery at the beginning of this nation, and some wanted it outlawed at the start of this nation in the Constitution. Unfortunately these states looked for the greater good of being a part of the union for defensive purposes and didn't push the matter of slaves. If you look into the history of black slaves in America you will see that it was not Christians responsible for starting it or pushing propaganda trying to dehumanize black people.