The issue I have with this graph is that it illustrates primarily the relative duration of slavery vs- non-Slavery rather than the fact it wasn’t that long ago.
Also, 1865 kinda is a while ago, especially considering how people are starting to think even of National Socialism as ancient history these days. This is troubling in many ways, but illustrates how the hive mind of the majorits deals with unpleasant truths about their ancestors.
The Emancipation Proclamation was in 1863. And Massachusetts, for example, outlawed slavery in 1783.
1865 was when emancipation ended, because there was no one left to emancipate. (At least legally.)
ETA: so there was no slavery (at least legal slavery) in the US after 1865, but there was still plenty of legal segregation after 1954.
Actually he is USian. Being a natural born citizen is prerequisite to becoming US president. He’s their fault not yours. Don’t blame yourself or the Scots.
Btw the original “orangemen” are the dutch.
Hate to sound like some deranged commie lefty, but I dunno that freedom is yet a fully appropriate term. Free with qualification isn’t actually free.
Now if the shirt instead said “free-is”, that would be something else.
Darkies became legally human
During the course of our parents life
And the freedoms we have only occurred
'Cause our ancestors spilled their blood to the earth
They changed that much? Are you so sure?
The world’s darker people still the most poor?
So it’s our task to put an end to this
Even those like me with our heritage mixed
If a knife is in your back 9 inches
And it’s only been pulled out six
When the wound starts healing
And we stop bleeding and bleaching
Can it begin to fix?
That’s a fairly pedantic distinction since the topic of discussion is clearly about how long slavery was practiced in the culture and location that eventually became the United States.
Nobody takes issue when we refer to New York City as an “American City” or Harvard as an “American University” even though they were both founded in the early 17th Century. By the same token, chattel slavery was an American institution dating back to around the same time.
We are convinced that freedom without Socialism is privilege and injustice, and that Socialism without freedom is slavery and brutality.
Mikhail Bakunin
Any time you try to distill a complicated subject into a simple slogan or statement, there is some ambiguity introduced. especially when the term “America” can mean several things.
But my intention is not to derail the discussion, or minimize the issue of slavery. It is a subject hard to be dispassionate about. And a good part of the discussion today is about whether it is right to assign blame for the institution of slavery on people living today. If that is the discussion we are having, then we need to be fairly specific about the details.
But anyway, I did read the reasoning statement by the designer of the graphic, and they offer a fairly concise explanation of how they chose the dates for the graphic.
I admit that “Slavery of Africans by English-speaking persons in North America” would be awkward on a shirt, and even worse on a tattoo.
I would not propose an in-depth discussion of the issue through the medium of T-shirt slogans, but I think such a discussion might be acceptable here.
It’s hard to see that as anything other than a derail since no one has suggested that people living today are responsible for the actions of 17th-Century colonists.
The topic at hand is about how the centuries-long institution of chattel slavery and the generations of legalized segregation and bigotry that followed created a profound legacy that continues to have a tremendous impact on the lives of African Americans in the modern-day United States.
Nor did Pre-Columbian slavery practises in the Americas have anything to do with the subject at hand, namely: black people kidnapped from Africa and brought to the Americas by Europeans to work as slaves before they were granted the “privilege” of second-hand citizenship after the Civil War. And yet it’s inevitably brought up in an effort to further derail the toxic industry portrayed in the graphic.
If we didn’t pick nits and split hairs, we wouldn’t be Boing Boing.
Coerced labor is something else. Prison labor is forced labor, as in forced labor camp. Freedom is revoked, prisoners are shackled (AKA jailed) and their lives are dictated by the state remanded through prisons to corporations, making them de facto capital property of the prison-industrial complex. This is a form of slavery, legally per the Constitution, logically per the definition of slavery, and historically as slave has been used used to literally describe a vast range of conditions under which humans have been and continued to be deprived of their freedom, many better than the American prison system and some worse. No one mentioned chattel slavery specifically until you brought it up. Nor were laws governing slavery identical across all American slave states.
So although I do understand your point that what slaveholders could legally do to their slaves included in some states things American prisons cannot do with their slave laborers, it really is beside the point of meeting the definition of slavery.
Moreover, the authors of the Thirteenth Amendment understood this perfectly, and encapsulated it far more succinctly than I (which is why I merely quoted you the text in my previous reply), and they recognized that legally forced prison labor would be on shaky legal ground if they didn’t include the exception, hence why they did.
the last segment should be labeled War on “Drugs”
I took it as @pbasch saying that people who haven’t suffered from the negative effects of slavery shouldn’t tell people who have to “get over it”.
Ah, I somehow missed that bit crucial bit. In that case, yeah, one’s oppressor certainly does not get to arbitrarily decide when it’s time for you to “move on.” How one moves on from hundreds of years of murder, slavery, systemic racism, demonization, marginalization, and god knows what else is beyond me, especially when the people who did all that oppressing look at you and say things like, “ugh, you’re still upset about that time that I treated you and anybody who looks like you worse than livestock for 400 years.”
Or fifty. At least.
I think from one frame of reference, we’re already there, and another, there’s quite a ways to go. But I don’t think it needs to necessarily be more literal, to be bad – we are for the most part all slaves to capitalism, to the ultra-rich, to the military-industrial complex, to environmentally imbalanced practices, etc. etc.
I actually think one of the primary ways the control mechanism works, is by “tricking” us into looking for the literal accouterments of “slavery” as the signposts that it’s upon us, versus paying attention to the myriad ways it already is…
I say that from the white side of the blue line.
There was this time I was down in VA for something, and I learned how they do lines at checkout counters. It’s not the same in New England, there is no line 15 feet from the register you’re expected to wait behind until called or you won’t be served. Ever seen that?
found the Highlander.
Well I’m from New England (Western MA) originally, and the sensibilities are verrrry deeply rooted in me. I’ve been in Baltimore, AKA Charm City, for about 22 years, and I’m still getting used to the more in general congenial way people can be, down here.
