Thank you, that was interesting. I have no idea whether infoplease is a site to be believed, but I assume in this article they are just reporting stats compiled by the US census and such. I did note that California wasn’t one of the states where blacks are the largest minority, but that Los Angeles has over one million. This may be why my idea of black poverty is different than what is actually the norm.
Shrug. So, instead of exploring an idea that conflicts with yours you just leave blacks to their problems? I suppose it is a good thing that you are not president. I don’t know anything much about Obama, but maybe he will be able to help - hopefully without making more trouble.
Your assumption, (and the underlying flaws in logic you have displayed throughout this thread), is in error.
DSeid made no claim that only one person from Ireland was mistreated, he used an exaggerated analogy to indicate a flaw in your reasoning.
To place his point in context:
Whatever form of “slavery” your ancestor and similar Irish immigrants endured, their experience does not compare in magnitude to what the African-descended slaves endured.
He was not forbidden to learn to read and write.
He was not subject to being picked up on the street and re-enslaved if he could not produce papers of manumission.
His “slavery” clearly had a finite period after which it ended.
He was never threatened with having his family sold away from him (or he being sold away from them).
Had he escaped from his slavery, he could not have been returned to his owner, as no law in the U.S. recognized whites owning other whites.
Once he was free, there were no laws passed for the express purpose of denying him the right to vote or get an education. (In fact, if he moved to a city populated predominantly by other Irish immigrants, he could actually join the party that ruled the city’s politics.)
Anything that could have been inflicted on him could also have been inflicted on a black person, but the black person also had to deal with a number of further restrictions and insults such as I have outlined, above.
My post contained a typo, which would be obvious to anyone even vaguely familiar with American history. You wrote “Up until 1807, all Africans entering the U.S. were brought as slaves. From 1897 to 1861, quite a few more Africans were brought into the U.S. illegally as slaves” which on first read left a ninety year gap. Now I see that you meant to say that from 1807 to 1861 etc.
As to my education, yup it sucked like I said before. I am a product of the public school system, which even 30-40 years ago wasn’t always worth sending one’s children to in the poorer areas. It certainly didn’t include much if anything about European owned Africa from 1861 until the early 1960s, which is why I was unaware that African immigration is a relatively new thing. Doesn’t mean that my observations of the problems in the black community here are all completely wrong and worthy of all of this knee jerk dismissal. If you think that my opinion that blacks need to let go of the slavery from over a century ago and quit trying to be compensated for it is messed up, it would be interesting to hear why.
Why? Pretend that I am completely clueless about everything, since that is what you seem to want to do, and explain to me why it is different to be a black slave than an Irish slave?
How do you know all of this? Where is it written down as fact that the Irish people that were forced to work the mines had none of these things done to them? From my own personal knowledge (well, what I was told), there was no street that my great grandfather could have been walking down anyway, there was noone to teach him to read and write tho I have no idea if it was forbidden, he died still owned by the company, he had already been sold from his birth family and his wife and daughter were booted from their community after his death in his early to mid 20’s. As for the laws, there may never have been any laws covering any of this, but then you said there was still black slavery after that had been made illegal, so is it hard to believe that there were also illegal white slaves?
Which, of course, is all completely immaterial to the thing I said originally - as long as any blacks hold onto a slave identity from over a century ago, I cannot see how they can move forward. This whole black vs Irish slave is a smokescreen - why do you think the black people should continue to identify with the slavery in their past?
curlcoat,
It cannot be said any more clearly: the conditions that defined Irish immigration into this country, which was often harsh and occasionally may have functionally been slavery even if not supported by legal institutions here, was in no way comparable to the conditions that defined how most Blacks came into this country. At this point further failure on your part to understand the difference cannot be attributed to your merely being clueless.
You are comparing a family story of unknown accuracy to the well documented institutionalized enslavement of an entire class of humans and the legal enshrinement of them as less than fully human. It has been explained to you, very clearly, why such is an offensive thing to do. Your response was to dig in deeper and make broad generalizations about a segment of society.
People are giving up on conversing with you not because you are presenting ideas that conflict with theirs. I’ll stop there as this is not a Pit thread.
Is this some kind of joke? Do you really think this thread is going to do** anything ** to solve the problems that plague that 24% of black America? You really have quite the inflated opinion of this board. Look, curlcoat, I have no problems with a disagreement as long as it has basis in fact. I will talk to someone who disagrees with me as long as the thread has legs. I’m not going to waste my time trying to explain basic historical facts to a person who refuses to listen. This is like talking to someone who insists that Canada has been much worse off since it was colonized by China, and denies that it didn’t happen.
Oh, and you don’t need to wonder about the source of Dseid’s cite, because I provided you with the link to the government page itself in the post right below his.
It appears more to me that you all have decided I must be some kind of racist (or joking) and therefore you have no interest in helping me to understand why it is that slavery over 100 years ago is still such a big issue today.
I didn’t say this board, I said exploring the problem. Apparently if one does anything other than agree that blacks should still be compensated for slavery, one is an idiot or something. I’m sorry that you must jump to such a negative conclusion but I am glad that I am not black if this is what happens when one tries to get beyond bad things that happened to one’s ancestors.
I do note that during all of this assumption that I am joking, a racist or an idiot, this was ignored -
Well before that question can be explored a few assumptions must be questioned and some clarity must be provided as to what you mean to say and to ask.
Are you of the belief that most Black Americans “hold on to a slave identity”? Or that they in large numbers “identify with the slavery in their past”? What do those terms mean to you? And on what basis, other than generalizing from a few personal experiences you’ve had, do have for making those generalizations? Do you indeed perceive that most Blacks and that most discussions about Black History are focused on how Whites need to make things up to Blacks?
I can only gather from your posts that what you mean is that you have met some individual Blacks who you feel are unfairly taking advantage of affirmative action programs and that you resent that. To some extent, if we strip away what comes off as offensive over-generalizations and broad brush stroke statements, you are merely agreeing with the op: we put more importance on racial classification than we should in this country.
I think we can agree to that much. I’d like to confirm that much before we progress to where we disagree.
I just read thru this whole thread and I haven’t seen anyone say that blacks should be compensted for slavery.
I think you need to educate yourself about the black experience in America as you seem to a have a skewed perspective on things. I don’t know any black people who can’t move forward because they are holding onto a slave identity (and I live in southern California too).
You also seem to think that racism towards blacks is now completely gone and is simply a relic of the past that they are fixated on. You might want to read up on how black men experience the criminal justice system today as compared to say Irish women. Very different experiences indeed.
Anecdotal, but might be enlightening: My mom often describes a time when my oldest brother was 12 in 1970 and brought a friend home from school after they started ‘busing’. My brother came in and told my mom that his friend was on the front porch and wouldn’t come in until he cleared it with mom. Mom said 'Of course he can come in" but brother came back and reported that his friend would not come in until my mom invited him in. So my mom went to the front porch and saw an African American boy standing there(this was a neighborhood with very few blacks). He explained that his mother told him he was NEVER to go into a non-black home without being explicity invited by the parents.
I have often imagined how painful it must have been for this kid’s mother to have to explain this to him and what a negative impact this must have had on this child’s psyche. Granted we’ve come a long way since the 1970s but I can’t imagine there is an Irish-American alive today who’s experienced anything like this.
Having traveled through Europe recently and listened to people talk about immigration from Muslim countries (esp. Turkey), I’m not so sure that’s an accurate portrayal of other countries attitudes towards race.
I was going to make a similar point. I think race is a huge issue in America because there are a lot of people of different races here all living together. When my sister lived in Germany the Turks were pretty much segregated from the German nationals.
And when my husband and I traveled thru Turkey, several Turkish Customs officers (who learned we were American by our passports) expressed outright disgust that “American women” were involved with “niggers”. They found that absolutely appalling and had no problem saying it right out loud. I think racism or tribalism is universal and not just an AMerican phenomenum.
It was said upthread that “African American means a person who is the descendants of blacks brought to the United States as slaves”, so it would appear that those blacks that identify as AA are identifying with the slavery in their past. Whether or not most blacks identify as AA I don’t know. I do know that quite a few of the ones that I worked with tended to be militant about the fact that since they had ancestors that were slaves, and since after that time things weren’t a heck of a lot better, us whities had better start digging in our pockets, or at the very least let them mess around at work without recourse.
Indentifying with slavery? Helplessness, an expectation that someone else will take care of them, resentment that they feel this way.
A few personal experiences? I was not born anti-black, nor did my parents teach me to be but as an adult I now tend to have an internal negative reaction to most black people - instead of assuming that any random young black person will be nice I tend to assume that they won’t until proven different. This is due to decades of bad experiences with young black people, which unfortunately has been most of my experience - I know very few black people of my age.
I don’t understand Black History Month at all - why do we have it in the absence of any other history month? Why do we have the NAACP? Why were there quotas for universities and employers and all the other affirmative action programs, when (as far as I can tell) there isn’t anything like that for any other race/religion/whatever in this country? This is some of what I am referring to the separate but equal idea - that all these things are available to just the black people which separates them from the rest of the population, yet they say they want to be equal to everyone.
No, not resent, just tired of it. And not just some blacks - if it were just a few I’d just shrug it off as their problem. It is slowly getting better in that I do meet far fewer of those sort these days, but that may also be because I am no longer working.
Since I don’t think there should be any importance placed on racial classification ( or gender, or religion, or sexual orientation), yes I agree that we put too much emphasis on it. And I see calling oneself anything other than just plain old American as putting too much emphasis on something that should have become unimportant decades ago. Will it ever become unimportant if folks keep calling themselves AA?
And why is this, which I do believe to be true? Is it because everyone is against the black lawbreaker, or is it because there are more black lawbreakers or because they have an attitude? I have no idea, but the simple statistics of black in prison do not show the whole story.
This poor American born girl of Irish decent (I refuse to call myself Irish American) was not allowed in the homes of many of my grade school friends because I was “dirty” and “not of their kind”. It didn’t have anything to do with my being Irish but because we were very poor - tho not dirty. And the pathetic thing was, my friends’ families weren’t all that much better off. These things happen to all people, not just to blacks.
Okay curlcoat, here we immediately come up against some odd and twisted thought processes.
You take a statement which, quite clearly, responded to your comment about most African Americans you know having been born in the United Sates, with essentially a “Duh. The group came over as slaves.” and twist that over several steps into that Blacks have a helplessness and an expectation that people will take of them.
You are an instructive person, but not in the way you would think.
Oh I won’t argue that you have had some bad experiences. You have demonstrated an amazingly ability to perceive that which is not there and to hear what has not been said in this thread alone, and that ability will undoubtedly result in many bad experiences. Each one that you perceive (maybe even a few based in reality) confirms to you the truth of your stereotype. The more you confirm your stereotype the more you restrict your experiences to that which confirms it. And so it goes. Until we develop the person we see before us, an individual who filters the world in such a distorted way that reality and her vision don’t even intersect.
No, I don’t believe that you are joking, or trolling, or merely an idiot. You represent a large number of people in this country today, who feel completely justified in their “negative reaction to most black people” and that is sad.
http://www.aapf.org/focus/episodes/oct30.php
The greatest beneficiaries of affirmative action have been college educated white women. This is due to one of the weird ironies of affirmative action. The least disadvantaged members of any disadvantaged group benefit the most. Out of the groups which qualify for AA, college educated white women were the least disadvantaged.
In So Cal, the groups which qualify for affirmative action have been white women, Latinos, blacks, Pacific Islanders, and Native Americans. White women and Latinos were and are the largest groups, Pacific Islanders and Native Americans the smallest. Black people fall somewhere in the middle.
Since AA has largely been banned in California, curlcoat’s complaints about it are fairly meaningless. In California, affirmative action has never been a “black” program. The number of Latinos and white women who benefited have always dwarfed the number of blacks. That’s why Latino leaders led the fight against the California affirmative action ban.