Feynman is totally wrong there. The “East Indians”, never chose to come to the West Indies. They were brought there by the British/Colonizers as Indentured laborers, pretty much the same as slaves.
Anyways, I think this whole concept of “MODEL IMMIGRANT” and using Asians as example is just another type of racism. Its a copout for white people - and just pits asians against black.
And while we are at it, lets remember
Surely You’re a Creep, Mr. Feynman
I used to love his physics lectures as a highschool/college student, but not really anymore.
Even worse, perhaps, he pretended to be an undergraduate student to deceive younger women into sleeping with him.
Read the book. he mentions being back in university as a professor right after the war. He went to a frat house dance and since a lot of students were returning GI’s about his age, fit in; he got rebuffed a few times by girls. He eventually figured out the problem when one girl called him out -
“What did you do during the war?”
“I was in Alamogordo working on the atomic bomb”
“You’re such a liar!!”
The bomb was the big news that ended the war. This would be equivalent to claiming today to be a CIA agent and Navy Seal all in one. He then found it easier to just say he was in the army fighting through Italy. (I wonder what those girls though when they realized he was a young nuclear scientist on the faculty) But I suppose the same applies to him as would apply to Washington or Jefferson owning slaves, or Abraham Lincoln saying that black people were inferior. Balance how much good they did against what bad. (They all come out smelling better than Robert E Lee or Harvey Weinstein)
But I digress. I fail to see how his sexism and misogyny is relevant to his observations about slavery and race.
basically bears out Feynman’s observations. Unlike slaves, they actually had a choice - they weren’t rounded up randomly at gunpoint, presumably many chose indentured service because it offered a way out of the abject poverty back home, just as with Irish indentured labour. Generally, more specific rules were put in place; after a while wives were encouraged to migrate with their husbands, punishments for plantations with high death rates (over 7%), land grants to those whose indenture term had expired… some fairly decent rules when measured against full slavery and no rights. Plus, it bears out his observation that the total social fabric of the new immigrants was kept intact, not beaten out of them.
Indeed, Feynman’s observation is the antithesis of “model immigrant”. He suggests they weren’t successful because of their race or origin, but rather because they were treated far differently once in their new location than the slaves were, despite being imported to do the same work.
Sort of. On paper serfdom ended in the 19th century, but a variety of related practices survived until the Russian Civil War ensued. That is a complicated story I don’t totally understand, but basically many people were more or less still peasants and functionally tied to villages with their own legal obligations and limitations. Their ability and incentive to improve the land, or maybe even leave it for the cities, was somewhat limited. Of course, the Communist USSR didn’t necessarily change the real situation, either, since they instituted a controlled economy that did not allow for free movement.
I recall reading something about the late 1800’s attempt to “free the serfs” in Russia, that it created a somewhat violent backlash by serfs who did not want to be freed. They thought (probably not without justifiable reason) that then the local noble would be able to take the land assigned to them and give them the boot, or at least renegotiate the terms of tenancy.
Of course, that’s not the sort of thing nobles did in northern Britain, is it?
When the first non-Native people arrived on the shores of North America, slavery had been a common practice among the indigenous peoples for probably thousands of years, and it continued for a long time after European settlement and encroachment. When one tribe attacked a weaker tribe, slaves were routinely taken, including women who usually ended up as wives. So yeah, slavery has been a way of life for homo sapiens throughout history.
No, but it is good cause to not casually suggest slavery began as a result of New World colonization and the need to find labor in plantations there when the colonizers found that enslaving the local indigenous folk wasn’t viable.
My understanding, admittedly meager compared to some of the Dopers here, is that in many parts of the world slavery was different from the horrific slavery of the early US - mainly in that many of them were eventually freed and they lived in some measure as on-site workers. Some became parts of the families they worked for, and while not pleasantly occupied, were more or less able to pass their servitude with the knowledge that they were not doomed to stay there forever, weathering beatings, etc. Pretty general, I know, but the term, slavery, is pretty broad, too. Am I way off on this?
Slavery varied a lot everywhere it was practiced so it’s really hard to generalize. For most of human history though the majority of slaves lead lives (to crib a Hobbes quote on an unrelated matter) that was: nasty, brutish and short. There are many examples of slaves from history who earned or worked for their freedom and had influential post-enslavement lives, but they are like drops of water compared to the deluge of human misery that slavery involved for most of its history.
And that’s saying something because while most people led nasty, short, and brutish lives, slaves had it worse.
The customs and laws surrounding slavery varied just as much as the customs and laws surrounding other cultural norms varied. Things like adulthood, gender, marriage, land, trading, etc.