Is structural racism responsible for the rise of the white middle class?

Great Debates
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I’m trying to recall the polite response to the bolded section.

Oh, yeah! Bullshit!

Slavery, in several forms, was well known to and practiced by Europeans throughout history. What changed in the late 15th and early 16th centuries was the idea that if one took a person who looked nothiong like a European and made him or her a slave, that person could not run away without being recognized as a slave.

From there, different social and economic pressures resulted in the development of chattel slavery based on ethnic appearance. Africans had nothing to do with that development.

Now, once that occurred, the blacks of sub-Sahara Africa very definitely joined in, looking for profits. However, they practiced neither chattel slavery nor “race based” slavery before it was introduced to their societies by whites (Arab and European).

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[QUOTE=Sumisu_919]
Is structural racism responsible for the rise of the white middle class and the rise of the black under class?

From this site:

http://www.prrac.org/full_text.php?text_id=1098&item_id=10191&newsletter_id=90&header=Symposium:%20Structural%20Racism

If the above is true, .ites where given an advantage a sort of “Affirmative Action” if you will.
[/QUOTE]

If says it all ,a pretty big if by the looks of it.

So how exactly were black people "funneled "into lower paid and lower skilled jobs?
Did they have no choice of refusal for the jobs they were offered?
Quite frankly if I was a white garage owner for example and I saw a skilled black motor mechanic being forced to work for another firm at below a white mans rate due to racism,Id take him on at a higher rate to work for me .
My experience is that a good tradesman can name his price so that he can pick and choose to work where HE wants to work.

My impression of American business was of “can do”,any racist bigot who tried to undermine my profits by telling me I cant employ an Afro American ,even post ww2,would be told to mind his own business and go fuck himself .
Or am I wrong ?

These cites bear as much relation to the real world as the fairy tales of Hans Anderson.

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[QUOTE=Lust4Life]
If says it all ,a pretty big if by the looks of it.

So how exactly were black people "funneled "into lower paid and lower skilled jobs?
Did they have no choice of refusal for the jobs they were offered?
Quite frankly if I was a white garage owner for example and I saw a skilled black motor mechanic being forced to work for another firm at below a white mans rate due to racism,Id take him on at a higher rate to work for me .
My experience is that a good tradesman can name his price so that he can pick and choose to work where HE wants to work.

My impression of American business was of “can do”,any racist bigot who tried to undermine my profits by telling me I cant employ an Afro American ,even post ww2,would be told to mind his own business and go fuck himself .
Or am I wrong ?

These cites bear as much relation to the real world as the fairy tales of Hans Anderson.
[/QUOTE]
Actually, I am afraid that you are the one not in touch with the American reality, particularly 40, 60, 80, and more years ago.

Based on beliefs prevalent throughout society, few garage owners would have even considered the possibility that a black man was an outstanding mechanic, (and how would they know if he was never given a job, to begin with?). And if a garage owner did hire a black mechanic, he might suffer a loss of business from customers who were afraid the black mechanic might mess up their cars. An individual black mechanic might actually get a good reputation and be given a raise to a “white” wage, but the average black mechanic would have to settle for the prevailing, lower “black” wage. In very large industrial cities where labor was a commodity, there was even less opportunity to sell one’s labor to the highest bidder, since there was an accepted limit on what any employer would “bid.” I suppose that it does seem counterintuitive, but it was the reality. (A similar situation existed between men and women with it being just a societally accepted standard that no employer offered women a wage as high as that of men.)

That sort of “funneling” was purpotedly stopped in the 1960s (depending on where one lived and whether the Feds bothered to check out the situation in one’s city). A different sort of funneling continues, today. The effort to get into a college from high school is a significant one. It is not beyond the scope of any reasonably intelligent person to handle, but the bureaucracy that surrounds it is extremely daunting to persons who are not used to dealing with that level of paperwork. (The efforts required to secure funds to go to college are significantly more difficult–to the point that many parents who are “in the know” actually pay professionals to help them find loans and grants and to navigate the horrendous maze to secure them.) It has remained true up to the present that many school guidance couselors, (the people who are supposed to provide assistance in helping students take the correct class load and fill out the appropriate paperwotk to enter some career path), have chosen to follow paths of least resistance. Thus many black kids with high gradesare still encouraged to follow technical class schedules rather than college prep schedules and often kids who are not deemed “college material” are not even provided basic information about the requirements to enter college. Since the student is not aware of the process, if the parent (also unaware of the process) does not go into the school and demand better assistance, the student is liable to wind up with a high school diploma having taken no steps to enter college. Now, black kids are not the only kids subjected to such ineffective “counseling,” many white kids whose parents are working class suffer the same fate. However, such lacksadaisical “counseling” has been found to be disproportionately directed to black kids at higher rates.

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[QUOTE=tomndebb]

Slavery, in several forms, was well known to and practiced by Europeans throughout history. What changed in the late 15th and early 16th centuries was the idea that if one took a person who looked nothiong like a European and made him or her a slave, that person could not run away without being recognized as a slave.

From there, different social and economic pressures resulted in the development of chattel slavery based on ethnic appearance. Africans had nothing to do with that development.

Now, once that occurred, the blacks of sub-Sahara Africa very definitely joined in, looking for profits. However, they practiced neither chattel slavery nor “race based” slavery before it was introduced to their societies by whites (Arab and European).
[/QUOTE]

I was careful to make the point “to Europeans of that time”,yes europeans were aware of slavery as a historical event just as they were aware of “Droit de Seignur” as a historical event but both practices had died out by this time.

The Africans did NOT jump on the slavery bandwagon it was and is even today in some parts of eastern and west africa a traditional practice.
Arab traders took advantage of the market and then europeans .
The market being eagerly promoted and supplied by Africans .

The fact that at this time only Africans were enslaved has nothing whatsoever to do with being able to recognise a slave by his/her ethnicity (though to slave owners it was no doubt a useful bonus, in previous eras slaves have been made identifiable by the even more barbaric practice of branding slaves visibly ),only Africans were enslaved because only Africans were prepared to capture and sell other Africans .

Europeans at that time were not prepared to round up other europeans to enslave and it is doubtful if they had tried to whether a sufficient number of their victims would have co operated so readily even with coercion by physical brutality.
However much you try to demonise the whites and write off the responsibility of the Africans the fact is in not too recent history Europeans adopted an African practice for a while until conscience set in on a public level and the practice was voluntarily abandoned (speaking on national levels)despite the economic losses incurred by the slave owners (which puts paid to the smear that the west is driven entirely by greed then and now)

Something that the Africans have NOT done themselves.

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[QUOTE=tomndebb]
However, you are addressing a different point than that made in this thread. No one has claimed that every black person who suffers, today, is suffering the injustices of 1946. (In fact, nothing in your post appears to relevant to this thread; you seem to have simply taken this opportunity to get quite different topics off your chest.)

This had a double effect that while Chinese, (for example), could build from a smaller population, conserving their wealth, blacks repeatedly found themselves reduced to poverty in successive generations of larger populations so that when individual blacks were successful, they were a smaller percentage of the population and their success did not translate to community success.

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[/QUOTE]

I suggest you reread the quote in the o.p.a little more carefully .
The point was made that many Blacks dipped out because many of them did not serve in WW2 and so did not qualify under the G.I. bill.
As that was a quote in the o.p. I would consider it a relevant point to address,it may not be a point some people with differing views to my own would like me to address as its so much easier if people can slip in a few invalid points under the radar uncontested.
I’ll bet its SO annoying when little gems like that get noticed.

I’ll agree with you that there are significant amounts of Bullshit in this and other threads like this but its me and people like me who are carrying the shovels not the ones who are spreading it about .

Try taking the clip off of your nose and you may well discover one of the sources more quickly then you think.