Do you really believe that, that this is an aberration?
Here’s a thread from 2011, and a couple of articles about the phenomenon and an individual story from CNN.
Another side to the story from the writer of her obituary.
I’m glad that I’m not the only person who felt anger reading the piece in the Atlantic.
Obviously Tizon was conflicted. It’s hard to accept that your own family is doing something wrong, even evil.
and another link. KUOW, the local NPR station interviewed Tizon’s widow. A seventeen minute audio link in the article.
You believe it’s not an aberration? Because by definition if it’s not, then it’s commonplace.
It’s obviously an aberration, so much so that not only is it illegal but it’s shocking to most anyone who lives in the US.
It may not be unique which itself is shameful but yes it is going to be a rare thing and can only occur when it’s carefully hidden from outsiders. To suggest otherwise would be delusional and/or believing in some wild, fictional version of the modern United States.
Enslavers and third parties don’t get to ask that question. The enslaved person is the only one who gets to decide what’s better.
It was common, in the nineteenth century, for Americans defenders of slavery to argue that blacks were better off as slaves in America than they would be as free people in Africa, or as free laborers in places like England or the free states of the United States. George Fitzhugh, in his book Sociology for the South, or, The Failure of Free Society (1854), wrote:
Another, James Henry Hammond, wrote an open letter to an English abolitionist in 1845, where he expressed similar sentiment:
Even after slavery ended, Americans who acknowledged its evils still argued that it had actually worked for the benefit of the slaves themselves. Richard Henry Pratt, who ran the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, used the experiences of African slaves in support of his plans for assimilating Native Americans into American society:
Do you believe that any of those arguments justifies or excuses, to even the tiniest extent, the institution of slavery?
It’s clear from the article that Eudocia Pulido would not have made the choice to come, that she didn’t want to be held in the United States, and that she wanted to go back. That’s all we need to know.
You see alot of similarities between this story and 19th century american slavery.
- Many slave holding families felt powerless in knowing what to do with them so they just went along with it.
Incidentally Sweet Briar college in Virginia, was founded on a former slave plantation and whats interesting is the founder gave jobs at the college to his former slaves. Now whats really interesting is about 25% of the workers at the college are descendants of those original slaves.
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Even after emancipation many slaves continued working for their former masters because basically, they didnt know what else to do.
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I find people in the US who’s families once owned slaves back in the day, dont really like to talk about it.
Nope.
Nope again.
Seriously, this is bullshit. Slave-owning families felt “powerless” and so just went along with slavery because they didn’t know what else to do with the slaves? Give me a fucking break.
People who had slaves, wanted slaves; and they wanted them because their social and economic standing in their society was based, to a massive extent, on their ownership and exploitation of enslaved people. The population of the slave states on the eve of the Civil War was about 12 million, and about one-third of those people were enslaved. They were held in bondage by a brutal, entrenched, violently defended, and ideologically and racially motivated system of bodily and economic exploitation.
Any effort to portray slave owners as confused or helpless victims of uncontrollable historical forces that they didn’t know how to deal with is, quite frankly, completely offensive.
And if you want to know why slaves continued to work for their former enslavers after the end of the Civil War, look no further than the very same entrenched ideology of white superiority and black inferiority, and at the deliberate efforts to maintain the region’s racial hierarchies. It wasn’t simply that blacks “didn’t know what else to do”; it’s that they were impeded in almost every effort they made to achieve any sort of rights or equality.
Look at the Black Codes enacted in southern states at the end of the war, many of which explicitly required blacks to labor for whites, and threatened them with arrest and jail for vagrancy if they didn’t. Look at the lack of effort made, even at the height of radical Reconstruction, to provide the freedmen with land and economic independence. Look at the concerted efforts of the “redeemers” and other Southern whites, after the Compromise of 1877 and the end of Reconstruction, to eliminate any opportunity for black political participation, economic independence, and social equality. Look at the ongoing violence of lynching, and the anti-black riots in places and times as varied as Memphis and New Orleans in 1866, and Wilmington NC in 1898, along with many others.
Your version of post-Civil War history would have fit right in with Southern ideology, and with many Northern interpretations, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Plenty of mainstream historians were willing to buy into the idea that enslavers were well-intentioned victims of circumstance, that blacks were simply not ready for freedom, and that Radical Reconstruction was misguided in its efforts to promote black civil rights. There’s even a name for that group of historians: the Dunning School. Their interpretation of history is now considered by all serious historians to be, at best, completely misguided, and, more likely, the product of a racialized ideology that opposed equality for African Americans.
No, I disagree and I’m basing this on writings of people like Booker T. Washington. Wahington even states in his writings that he feels some good did come out of slavery in that the slaves learned skills such as farming, blacksmithing, and taking care of animals which were very valuable skills. Also the fact that when given the chance many slaves did NOT run away. Also look at my above example of Sweet Brier college. Slavery was not the same everywhere.
Now I’m not saying slavery was good or that many former slaves were glad to torch their masters house and see them lynched even.
Your historical scope is incredibly narrow and ill-informed.
I’ve read Washington’s Up From Slavery literally a dozen times, at least. I’ve taught it to hundreds of undergraduate university students. I’m a great admirer of Booker T. Washington, but even in his own time, many African Americans, including important black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois, criticized him for what they saw as excessive pandering to white prejudices and racial ideologies.
I don’t blame Washington for this; he was doing his best to create opportunity for black southerners in an environment of virulent racism and persistent legal discrimination and extralegal violence. But it’s precisely that context in which we need to understand his arguments, and it’s also this context that you seem ignorant about. I’m well aware of what his arguments were , and i’m well aware that “slavery was not the same everywhere,” but none of that changes a single word of what i wrote above.
Your argument here demonstrates that one the the greatest strengths of history is also, in the public sphere, one of its biggest vulnerabilities. Historical writing and knowledge is available to everyone; anyone can get hold of historical essays and books and read about history. Even the most academic and specialized historical texts can generally be understood by an intelligent non-specialist reader. This makes the most sophisticated historical work accessible to non-historians in a way that’s not quite true of some other specialist knowledge, like particle physics. This is, in my opinion, a good thing; i want history to be accessible and interesting to non-specialist audiences.
The problem is that this often leads to a situation where anyone who has read one or two things thinks that they’re immediately qualified to make big-picture historical evaluations. So, someone like you gets a few disparate and disconnected pieces of historical information, and suddenly thinks he’s an expert on the nature and consequences of slavery. Because history is accessible, plenty of people who are just casual readers and consumers of history come to the ill-founded conclusion that their historical interpretations are just as rigorous and just as valid as people who actually spend much of their lives reading and studying and writing history.
Have you, for example, read the works of Eugene Genovese, Leon Litwack, Nell Irvin Painter, Eric Foner, Drew Gilpin Faust, Walter Johnson, Thavolia Glymph, and Edward Baptist? They’re just the first books i can see on my shelf or in my ebook collection from where i’m sitting right now. And slavery isn’t even my own area of specialization. My main areas of interest are in twentieth-century American history. Yet, despite the fact that slavery isn’t my particular field, i’ve read more books about slavery than, conservatively, 99 percent of the American population, because that’s part of my job.
I don’t say all of this to boast, or to claim that i have a particularly outstanding intellect. I’m not claiming to be smarter than you. I’m simply suggesting that, because this stuff is my actual job, and i spend much of my working life thinking about these sorts of issues, i know more about it than you can possibly get from a quick scan of Booker T. Washington and a willingness to repeat a few out-of-context historical factoids.
My mechanic probably isn’t smarter than me, but he knows infinitely more about fixing cars than i do because he’s spent years studying and learning about and working on cars. Because of that, i defer to his expertise in questions related to my car. I’m not saying he’s never wrong, or that he’s the best mechanic in America; similarly, i’m not saying that i’m never wrong, or that i’m the best historian in America. But, just like he can tell pretty quickly that i don’t know a connecting rod from a crankshaft, i can see from your previous post that your historical understanding of slavery is, at best, superficial.
Ok, you have me there. Slavery isnt my specialty either and I’ve only read a few books on the subject. Your right, reading only 1 or 2 authors can give you the wrong perceptions and lead to incorrect assumptions. I only recently have read more insightful books about one of my favorite subjects, Helen Keller.
But thats the problem with much of the study of history in that people and issues are so broad it can take alot of time to cover even a single issue and ones personal biases also come in.
Bumping because of three new stories from survivors of human trafficking in the US in The Atlantic:
All three were kept in bondage through extreme manipulation for domestic labor. It’s infuriating that people can treat others this way. One of the common threads that’s almost unbelievable is how their “employers” (slavers, really) ration their food to the point of routine hunger. Food is so damn cheap in the US… it doesn’t even make sense financially, considering how cheap food is. Well-fed workers doing physical labor will be a lot more effective and efficient than hungry workers.
While the living conditions in those stories are definitely horrible, I’m not understanding the word “trafficking” in those contexts. One women was even able to return to the Philippines and then voluntarily went back to the same conditions. How is that “human trafficking”?
I think because they were manipulated through intimidation and false promises, along with the conditions they were forced (through manipulation and intimidation) to live and work under, and those doing the false promising and forcing were doing so for profit (whether paid by others to “recruit” domestic servants, or in forced labor of those trafficked).
I’m watching Trevor Noah episode. Shocking!
A Texas school asks students for the “pros and cons” of slavery. A Georgia school uses slaves and beatings in arithmetic word problems. A Bronx school taught students about slavery by standing on the backs of black pupils.
I’ve linked this story before. It’s about a “Christian” organization that claims it is providing the drug and alcohol abusers that courts send them with rehabilitation therapy but is really renting them to chicken processing plants while pocketing their pay. One of the people who benefit from this arrangement is Rachael Ray. It’s right out in the open.