Although I personally agree that slavery is inherently immoral I question your premise that at the time that people in the Colonial era thought that. You can point to individuals who might have had such a belief but if you’re talking about the population in general I’m not sure many gave it any thought, and some probably thought it an actual good thing.
I’m referring to the Enlightenment thinking of the time, which led to the foundations of liberty and democracy that eventually gained a foothold in the West in the late 17th and into the 18th Centuries. I certainly wouldn’t call it anything like the modern human rights movement, but it’s the beginning of the realization that ordinary people shouldn’t be enslaved (among other realizations).
That would be among the educated elite, not the general population.
There probably were a few kind-hearted souls among the regular folks, too, who though slavery was an evil but again that would be a minority.
Unfortunately, it won’t stop yankfan from starting 27 more debates about the same issue.
I was your typical middle-class, suburban white guy who was blissfully unaware of how bad things were. I grew up in an area were tensions were not all that evident and I was comfortable thinking overt racism was more a thing of the past, or at least of the southern U.S.
That was until Travon Martin and Eric Garner (the guy selling cigarettes on the sidewalk). I really connected with Travon’s father after watching the aftermath of the trial that acquitted scumbag Zimmerman, and in the case of Garner, I was like WTF a guy can lose his life over a petty crime? What’s going on here?
After that I learned a lot about how the system is set-up to make it more difficult for black people to live, much less succeed, in this country. I also learned how modern policing has been militarized by the introduction of high-powered weapons and siege techniques more suited for a war zone, not American streets.
So, yeah, I care about BLM and support what they are working toward - a country free of terror. It should not make any difference if I have any black friends or not: supporting equality and justice is not going to bring me down - it is going to bring others up. That makes my neighborhood, city, state, and country better.
I grew up in rural New England. We had a name for the black kids in my school system; we called him Dave.
So I didn’t see much racism directly growing up and, like you, I was blissfully unaware of how bad things were. But it was the sixties. I’d have had to be in a coma to not be aware that racism was an issue in this country.
When I hear some idiot like Mike Ditka saying “There has been no oppression in the last 100 years that I know of” I know he had to make a conscious effort to not hear about it.
Indeed; Ditka was born in 1939. He was an adult during the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, and he had many black teammates during his playing years, and black players during his coaching career.
FWIW, after making that statement, he later tried to clarify and walk it back, saying, “The characterization of the statement that I made does not reflect the context of the question that I was answering and certainly does not reflect my views throughout my lifetime. I have absolutely seen oppression in society in the last 100 years and I am completely intolerant of any discrimination.”
However, Ditka continues to be like a cranky old uncle who doesn’t really care if you like what he says.
A bigger issue is that some people argue against the validity of BLM protests. While saying that white people should be excused for not reacted to an issue they’re unaware of.
Making everyone aware of the issue is the reason the BLM movement exists. People shouldn’t say they have some right to be ignorant when their ignorance is killing people.
And a year after saying he was completely intolerant of any discrimination, he said “If you can’t respect our national anthem, get the hell out of the country. That’s the way I feel. Of course, I’m old fashioned. So, I’m only going to say what I feel. I think there’s a way you protest and there’s a way you don’t protest.”
Is there a reason we’re not ignoring Yankees_1996_Champs?
You don’t even “need” to care about Black Lives Matter. You’re white and you don’t care about it? Well…fine. But so many of these people can’t just leave it at that. They have to go out of their way to insult and demean the Black Lives Matter movement. They just can’t stop themselves from posting memes against them, calling them all sorts of degrading things, and generally blasting the message that they look down on the idea of black people trying to protest racism in ANY conceivable way. They really take it so personally, as if it’s all directed against them and everything they stand for. So actually yeah they DO seem to care about Black Lives Matter. They seem obsessed with it.
Future readers. The continued fight to support the Boards mission. Ennui.
I agree with both of these. I have to hand it to Yankees_1996_Champs, though: somehow an OP that was inarguable still got over 50 responses.
I’m still wondering what @Yankees_1996_Champs meant in the title by “a white man, let alone a white person”. Surely a Rutgers graduate in communications would understand the significance of that phrasing.
I think it’s pretty hard not to care about the black lives matter as a protest movement but smashing & looting infrastructure gets zero sympathies from me.
Interesting. Most white people I know are just the opposite…of course, ‘white people’ is a pretty broad category and a huge range of ethnic, cultural and socio-economic groups. Among my own friends, however, it’s pretty universal that they care about it and discuss it often. Among people I just know, it’s mainly hispanics and asians who don’t seem to care that much about it. I guess MMV and all that.
Well…I don’t really do the whole god thingy, personally, so I’ll just say as a human being people should care about how people of all ethnic and cultural backgrounds are treated, especially in their own country. They are, after all, fellow citizens. If for no other reason than the old saying from Nazi Germany (to paraphrase): First they came for the Jews and I did nothing. Then they came for the Gypsies, and I did nothing. Then they came for…then they came for…then they came for…and then they came for me. So, for selfish reasons if nothing else, people should care about others treatment in their society, less eventually they become targets themselves. Even ‘white’ people.
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But it was the elite who believed in slavery and owned slaves. It’s doubtful that bourgeoisie, serfs, and indentured servants would have supported or believed in slavery as an institution to aspire to; it was simply a place in the hierarchy.
What I’m explaining is that forced labor generally fell out of favor with societies in which liberal democratic ideas were flourishing. Europe established colonies in the New World, bringing over their European economic and political systems with them. The moral dilemma that confronted them was finding a way to reconcile their economic motives for maximizing returns on their investments (profits) with their growing political/ideological/philosophical realization that slavery was immoral. They developed “race” as a means of justifying the ownership of other people who came from radically different cultures and had physical features they deemed ‘exotic.’ There are various applications of race and racism, which range from extermination of indigenous tribes and enslavement of African slaves in the Americas to total political exploitation and subjugation of colonies in the Americas, Africa, and Asia in exchange for economic resources.
I digress…we’re probably moving away from the topic.
Why should any of this matter to whites? Why should whites care about black lives? Beyond the “First they came for my father” cliches, I go back to something I’ve pointed out before, which is that race has been exploited time and time again to thwart things like collective bargaining. In fact several of the more notorious race riots (see Thibodeaux massacre 1887-8? East St. Louis, Ill riots of 1917, and the Arkansas river delta massacres in the 1920s) all involved attacks on rising labor movements, with white capitalists fomenting racial tensions through propaganda and suppressing them with outright violence. In some cases, the racial tensions were caused incidentally when industrialists used migrating black “scab” workers to break strikes with white labor unions, infuriating whites who then attacked blacks in their neighborhoods (this is more or less what happened in East St. Louis in 1917).
In the end, the ultimate result was that union movements were broken. Labor rights never advanced. Wages stagnated. Workers died on the job. The rich got richer, the poor either got poorer or stayed mired in their current state of misery. When people of all colors and backgrounds can collectively confront capitalists in unison, things can change for the better. This is also why it’s important to protect the minority vote. The capitalists use racial or ethnic divisions as a way to break up democratic mobilization against them. This is why they support people like Trump even if they don’t necessarily think of themselves as racist.
Expanding on this a little, let’s go beyond the cliche. Why did the Nazis first come for the Jews? Because they could, because they were an easy target. Let’s not forget: Nazi Germany sprung out of a democracy. Before it was a totalitarian regime, it was a democratically-elected force in politics. The Nazis used the Jews to legitimate violence against a group that was systematically targeted for expulsion from the human race - and everyone else in Germany who wasn’t Jewish signed off on that idea. You could argue that some didn’t really, that they were uncomfortable and just didn’t want to stick their necks out, but doing nothing is itself a choice, and a political act.
The Nazi pogroms were successful in getting Germans to consent to acts of barbarity, and they forced the German population to accept, in their names, outrageous behavior as routine…which is what Americans are doing when they accept migrant children being thrown into detention to suffer human rights abuses, or when they accept the creation of a security state with extra-constitutional wiretapping powers. We’re walking down the very same path. It’s a question of whether we realize it now, or later when it’s too late to thwart the very worst abuses without risking life, injury, or indefinite detention.
Well of course, vandalism doesn’t get much sympathy from anyone much. But what I read from the rabid right is that all those millions of protestors of all colors are ALL VANDALS. They equate all protests with vandalism, except if those protests are for white and right wing causes. Those are righteous, no matter what gets broken or who gets hurt or killed. I have read this over and over.
When in Reality Land, an extraordinarily small number of people involved in BLM protest engage in vandalism and looting. And it seems a goodly percentage of those are either agents provocateur looking to start a race war (whatever they imagine that to be), or simply opportunistic criminals. They aren’t the protesters themselves, by and large, and yet in the right wing mind, it is the very reverse of the truth.