"But slavery was so long ago"

You are not Spartacus, are you?

Actual text of the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, emphasis mine…

Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.

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Highlight what you want to quote in the main post, then click the “quote” button that pops up. Discourse will (mostly) take care of the rest for you. It works better on desktop than on mobile.

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i am, and have been since i was in my single digits, a close observer of the currents of my times. i am an 8th generation native of texas of anglo ancestry whose ancestors have been being born in texas long enough that if sam houston had lost the revolution i’d be mexican. my school district, a small town in north central texas, desegregated in 1970 while i was in the 3rd and 4th grades. we did so by consolidating the white district with two different jim crow districts, one small and one large. the result was a demographic mix that was unusual for the rural south and stayed so for around two decades afterwards. there was a small amount of variation from grade to grade but overall the district was 45-48% white, 45-48% black, and 5% +/- hispanic with a few filipinos and pacific islanders to add to the confusion.

i am extremely happy this was the district i spent the next 8 years in because we taught ourselves to get along with each other along the way. we were steeped in each other’s cultures to the extent that even the most redneck c&w shitkickers in the class would pay attention when lou rawls and al green came on the radio. it wasn’t a post-racial utopia but it was an immersion in the practical aspects of getting along with each other and understanding something about each other. in the process of rebelling against the authority figures that tried to tamp us down many of us came to understand racism in the brute fact that offenses which would get a white kid a talking to would get a black kid swats while offenses that would get a black kid suspended or brought before the juvenile justice system would get a white kid swats-- over and over again to the point that only the willfully ignorant wouldn’t see it. even now that we are all in our mid-50s we are collectively more woke than most other people i meet in our age group. and even though the demographics are closer to texas averages now than they were 20-30 years ago there are still many more multiracial neighborhoods there than in any other town i’ve experienced.

i don’t think anyone in my class would say that segregation ended in 1954 or 1964 or even 1970. that it might have ended for us over time in one small town sometime in the late 70s or early 80s but that it still existed just down the road and still does even now.

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Well it ought not to be Green either.

Symbolically, ideologically, green signifies “Go” or “Begin”, as in an end to “Stop”. The stop light sequence is Yellow, Red, Green, and what they’ve done in the graphic is confusing. The goal is to suggest Not Free - Red, More Free - Yellow, and following that pattern suggests Green means Free.

I’m not saying the status is Not Free, but I’m saying the status is flawed enough that a Green Light is misleading.

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1954 is when desegregation began, which is outlined in the post.

But even that’s not really the beginning. The Armed Forces were desegregated in 1948.

Brown was a landmark, but its largest effect in reality was “white flight.” By several measures, American schools are more segregated now than they were in 1954.

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What @Purplecat said :slight_smile:

If you quote people’s posts, they’ll get notified, just as when you hit reply, unless they have notification disabled.

And welcome to BB!

No, I’M Spartacus!

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I’m Spartacus and so’s my wife

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Yes they are.

However, both situations are still slavery. Not all slavery is chattel slavery.

image

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Miscegenation wasn’t made legal at the Federal level until a 1967 Supreme Court decision.

The dates are a little inaccurate. Slavery in the United States of America could not have predated the founding of the country. You cannot blame the USA for British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, or French practices that occurred before independence. If we are talking about America as in the North and South American continents, then chattel slavery in the Americas began millennia ago, and ended in 1888 (Brazil).
I am not arguing with the main point of the post, but the data is a little ambiguous.

Um… that word.

Maybe not the best choice for describing interracial marriage and/or sexual relationships.

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At which point most Americans also stopped using the term “miscegenation.” I know it’s a concise and technically/historically accurate term, but a little outmoded when we discuss interracial families and relationships in a discussion in 2018, long after the SCOTUS decision.

It’s mainly a matter of phrasing. You could say “miscegenation was a crime at the Federal level until a 1967 Supreme Court decision” or you could say “interracial relationships weren’t made legal at the Federal level until a 1967 Supreme Court decision” and I doubt anyone would take issue with either statement (perhaps the former, but you’d be citing the crime by its name at the time).

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I was just using it in its sense as a legal term. It seems appropriate for a thread on the persistent vestiges in law of slavery.

The best choice for “describing interracial marriage and/or sexual relationships” is just “marriage and/or sexual relationships”.

I’m fortunate to live somewhere where relationships between people of different backgrounds has never been constrained either by law or by culture, but I’m also old enough to remember these despicable laws being active in my lifetime.

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I don’t disagree.

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Like I said, coerced labor is an important injustice. But coerced labor is not chattel slavery, and attempts to paint it as such are a false equivalence which hides the particularly depraved evil of the latter.

Ok. I am down with this. I am just wary of making them equivalent.

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That’s up for debate in one instance. Nothing more.

Add in killings by cops, discrimination by businesses, and unequal treatment by courts of law, and the problem persists to the present.

Miscegenation is when a Republican mates with a Democrat.