Thanks. I did briefly entertain the idea of adding an /s tag, especially after my recent experience on this board, but then thought that it would be impossible to miss.
That said, even the 1.4% is a meaningless number, something I tried to convey with my comment. While I doubt that a majority of white Americans benefited of black slavery (the rich and powerful never had a problem with keeping their peasants in bondage, either), there should be no doubt that about every white person and their descendants were better of than black persons.
Likewise the remark about black slaveholders, which is a remarkable example of double think. While white Americans should be considered blameless, because only a tiny number kept huge number of black slaves, black Americans should not bring up slavery because an even tinier number of black Americans kept an even tinier number of slaves.
I hope you mean that it’s meaningless because it’s not true. The “1.4%”-myth is a garbage facebook meme/white supremacist propaganda.
It was a slave society. A majority of white Americans of the time took benefit from black slavery. On paper, all property of the time was attributed to a minority of white male property owners, but no part of the economy was isolated from slave-work and the value stolen from it.
Now, I know you’re speaking half-sarcastically, but a lot of your messages are just repeating racist revisionism and tropes and you’re not being super-clear that they aren’t your own thoughts.
Anyone reading them for the first time would be hard-pressed to always see where you are making your arguments and where you are repeating what you think is a racist thought from someone else. Try quotation marks.
By getting cotton cheaper? By having to compete with slave labor?
There was a reason I framed it as “all white people suffered less and even poor whites had it far better”, because the same dynamics are in place today Place at least two disenfranchised parts of the population against each other, separate them economically and culturally, treat some of them better (slightly better would sound too casual and dismissive, as being denied of freedom and life and have the same standing as a thing outweighs everything else by orders of magnitude). And then let that 1.4% reap the most of their work.
Although only a minority of Whites owned slaves, slavery permeated the whole economy. It was common for less-wealthy White farmers to rent slaves periodically, or combine with their neighbours to purchase slaves collectively.
Even amongst the poorest Whites, the hierarchy was still constructed so as to purchase their racial solidarity via unjust privilege.
It’s a white supremacist trope, it’s not an actual statistic, and if you keep repeating it out of context, you make it seem like it means something.
A quarter of all American households held slaves, on paper, and that doesn’t include anyone who rented slaves from other slavers, and that doesn’t include people who enslaved people off the books, and it doesn’t include all of the economy that used slave workers for direct service to a majority of white Americans.
White people didn’t just passively “suffer less” by comparison. It was embedded in the economy. Framing it as a fringe activity is historical revisionism.
The worst thing I found about Tutu in my search was criticism that Tutu was insufficiently vocal in opposition to sexual abuse in the Anglican church when it was exposed (not that Tutu was involved, just that more could have been done to go after the church). It was not exactly a scorching critique, more of a feeling of disappointment. Of course that was next to an article where Tutu resigned Oxfam because of the sexual abuse that happened there (Tutu was not involved, it was a moral protest of the organization), so it looks like Tutu takes the problem plenty seriously.
I think that passage acknowledges the point I think @NativeSpeaker’s was trying to make - that racism is about pitting two underclasses against one another to keep them both down. Chris Rock said it: “White people and black people have more in common than either of them do with rich people.”
That said, to get out of this system white people have to see through it (Chris Rock again: “There’s no such thing as race relations. White people were crazy and now they are a little less crazy.”). White people who acknowledge that oligarchs are perpetuating racism to continue to oppress the poor often seem to frame that in terms of saying, “Forget race, we’re all in this together on economic issues.”
Here’s where I think white people need to recognize the ways they benefit from racism. If the white servants in that Howard Zinn passage had said, “No, you will not give us those benefits if you don’t give them to the slaves” then history would have come out differently. It’s not black people who were bribed into letting race divide the underclass, it’s white people. White people can’t dismiss the benefits they get from racism, we need to refuse them. We need to stop taking the bribe.
I think it’s necessary to simultaneously acknowledge that white people are directly benefiting from racism and that, for the majority of white people, it is a tool to oppress them. Both of those things can be true.
But there is plenty of evidence to suggest that racial categories were not just reinforced by the ruling class, but that working class whites also actively took a role in constructing a white racial identity.
That’s a big part of it, yes. But it was also about European immigrants integrating into society, as well as “defending” their (perceived) labor privileges - making sure that someone could not come in and undercut them.
Yes a system of racism harms all participants, in varying amounts. It would still encourage a grossly false equivalency to sum it up as “Well white people suffered too.” as if the experience of poor white people as a class was remotely comparable to enslaved black people, as a class.
And it’s not some exchange of anecdotes, either, where one white farmer dying from a dearth of property is held up as being the same as someone categorized as property.
In a word, yes. Cotton exports and other goods whose prices were kept low via slave labor formed the backbone of the Southern economy. Free labor was exploited like a natural resource.
Think of it this way: very few citizens of Saudi Arabia own oil wells, but all Saudi citizens benefit economically from the presence of plentiful oil.
The end of antebellum slavery didn’t usher in an amazing new era of economic prosperity for poor southern whites who no longer had to compete against free slave labor.
Yeah, this thread is really hitting the Bingo points for casually minimizing the horror of slavery.
Myths:
Slavery was just like being poor, right?
Slavers were just a few bad eggs in a sea of innocent white bystanders.
The US economy was free-floatingly independent of slavery; the only people who benefited from slavery were the Gone With The Wind plantation owners who had people fill their lemonade glasses while poor whites had zero help with their lemonades.
When a post starts with “But” and then goes onto to say something I am in complete agreement with, it tells me I didn’t express myself terribly well. But I think I’m just going to live with that for now.
Indeed. We all suffer under a the current economic system, but I wouldn’t have a lot of sympathy for a suburbanite reading a news story about a homeless person freezing to death under an overpass saying, “Sure, but I’m worried about how I’m going to pay for my kids college, it’s not that different.” It is that different.
