Ah, I see. Appreciated.
This will not end well
Possibly… I’m always hopeful, though, and I’d like to think it’s an opportunity for practice and improvement 
4 Likes
Hey, somebody’s gotta be the optimist.
7 Likes
The vast majority of households (78.9% in 2007) in the US haven’t inherited anything. It isn’t until you hit the upper income brackets that you see a large % of inheritances (39% in 2007 for households earning >$250K).
There is a certainly a huge difference of Whites vs. Blacks receiving inheritance (25.6% vs. 9.1% in 2007), but intergenerational wealth transfer isn’t as common as one would think.
I don’t have any number from before 1963 when 17% of households had received some sort of wealth transfer, but considering the average family size was twice as large a century ago than it is today, I can’t imagine inheritance was very common.
3 Likes
The two of you should argue this out.
I can understand that various forms of slavery can differ. But that was true in the South as well. We knew that when Uncle Tom was sold down the river. It’s all still slavery.
Debt slavery and wage slavery aren’t real slavery. That doesn’t mean these are good things. Those terms have their uses in hyperbole, but they’re not actual slavery. (It’s funny how the same people who use these terms went nuts when Sarah Palin said the expanding federal debt was a form of slavery.)
Slavery wasn’t a “historical crime.” It was simply part of a more savage culture that we were (and are) still growing out of. The problem I see here is how many like to imagine that the U.S. (which didn’t even exist in 1725) is morally culpable for such barbarism when the rest of the world can be excused for much worse – especially when it still goes on.
4 Likes
You make a good point. Let’s see what the original poster has to say.
1 Like
Thank you for expanding on your point. Makes all the difference!
4 Likes
I hate to wade into this, but I think you are expressing a political opinion, rather than relating accurate history. Even when you narrow the argument to ancient Greece, since the laws varied greatly from state to state. A slave’s lot in Laconia meant that he or she could be worked to death, ritually sacrificed, or killed by a citizen without retribution. In most Greek states, it was illegal to kill someone else’s slave. But slavery was not limited to Greek city-states. How about Rome? Or the Islamic World? Eunuchs were in very high demand in the ancient Islamic world, and with the medical knowledge of the day, up to 90% of slaves captured for that purpose did not survive the complications of the procedure. So, if a sultan (Sultan Alauddin Khilji) had 50,000 eunuchs, the populations raided for slaves were grim places indeed.
But none of this is intended to minimize the horrors of slavery in the new world. I just don’t understand the need to make it worse than other historic incidents of slavery. I would imagine that being worked to death in a cotton field in Georgia is not a measurably worse life than being worked to death in a silver mine in Laurium.
It’s not just what you inherit when your parents die, it’s also about the opportunities they can afford to give you while they are still alive. For example, I grew up in a stable middle-class neighborhood where I never had to worry about having enough to eat or encountering gang violence on my way home or going to a school that didn’t have adequate funding. I had college-educated parents who could help me with my homework and paid for most of my living expenses when I went to college myself.
My parents were able to provide me all these advantages in part because their parents gave them similar advantages, and in turn I hope to provide my own children with the same.
Privilege has multi-generational impact even without inherited wealth.
14 Likes
You’re right, for sure most of us struggle in many ways. Thanks for providing those numbers. Obviously inheritance is just one part of the picture of how so much inequality can persist to this day.
ETA–@Brainspore says it better, just above.
1 Like
I guess it is for you, since you’re the one who’s moving them.
4 Likes
Depends what you mean by “wealth.” As @Brainspore basically said/illustrated, money isn’t the only form of intergenerationally transferable wealth.
11 Likes
Thank you for your post and I’m baffled that what you said still has to be explained to people.
cuz…bootstraps.
12 Likes
Sure, you grew up in a middle-class home, but I’m betting your grandfather or great-grandfather didn’t. After all, the modern middle class was created after WW2 and the Great Depression before that wiped out the majority of household’s wealth in the US.
Don’t get me wrong, wealth helps the next generation get ahead, but it wasn’t that long before the Civil Rights Act that half of all Americans were living below subsistence levels.
Of course the GI Bill wasn’t applied evenly which gave white America a larger step up than black America, so we aren’t talking about even ground, but even so, I think it would be a mistake to assume that it requires many generations to break out of poverty.
Nor did they have the gross disadvantages they would have if they’d been poor black southerners living under racist Jim Crow laws.
My ancestors lived on family-owned farms instead of working for poverty wages as sharecroppers. They served in the military when people of color were limited to low-skilled positions like kitchen duty. They traveled the country looking for new opportunities when a dark-skinned person could be arrested or lynched for showing up in the wrong town.
14 Likes
Not when the KKK still exists. Not with Dylann Roof and his ilk. Not if white supremacists exist.
6 Likes
Let’s say that we want to put a stone over it and get over it and forget that it ever existed. We’d love to. And so, with Fascism and the Holocaust, and Imperialism and Colonialism. Most of those involved are dead by now. Problem is… what about present day discrimination, xenophobia, prejudice and racism? Have we ended them forever? Or do the abominable beliefs that spawned them live on? What about the present violence? What about Dylann Roof, the KKK, white supremacists, Aryan nations, neonazi and xenophobic groups, Anders Breivik, etc… they are alive, now! What about politicians who get votes and even win elections after they slander people over their skin color/place of birth/religion/sexual orientation? Sorry, the horrors of irrationality and hateful ideologies can’t be forgotten because some people insist on being ASSHOLES and in keeping them alive. Then they take umbrage at the reminder. That’s no better than being a hard-line communist and insisting that we should get over Stalin, Mao and Castro!
1 Like
Today I am here to welcome back the community to series 2 of the much anticipated…
**
Conversations with a sociopath - Series 2**
- Staring @Ion and the BBs community
3 Likes
I have one word for you:
(Consider me surprised that this hasn’t been brought up in this discussion yet.)
6 Likes
@TailOfTruth can you chill with the giant fonts? It’s as bad as posting in all caps, yelling for no reason.
It is very true that the consequences of slavery cast a very long, very dark shadow – and it is closer than we tend to think. My favorite example is Loving v. Virginia which was decided in 1967, that’s just three years before I was born.
I recently read Underground Airlines which is an alternate history where slavery wasn’t abolished, and persisted (in a few holdout states) until today.
It was terrifying to read about “modern” slavery, the consequences of industrial scale legal slavery practiced for a hundred years and refined to a shining corporate polish. It made me feel a little sick, like I hadn’t fully thought through all the long term moral consequences of deciding that yes, other human beings can be property – the indelible stain that leaves on your soul as a human being, and the inevitable corrosion of society that results.
You think “oh yes of course slavery was bad” but it’s bad like … holocaust … bad.
Great, great book. But in case it wasn’t abundantly clear: extremely dark.
9 Likes
Yes.
Which is why I view the Confederacy as a close moral equivalent of Nazi Germany. And hold a very dim view of those who try to venerate its history.
14 Likes
