High Court Finds Indentured Servitude and Sweat Shops To Be Equivalent To Slavery; Congress OKs Reparations To Every Conceivable Ethnic Group
One minimizes a terrible wrong and insults the memory of those who underwent it by falsely equating it with lesser degrees of injustice.
Making false comparisons out of pique or regional pride does not excuse the insult.
We won’t talk about the compromise that got slavery into the Constitution. But you are right - after all, the armed services weren’t integrated until 1948.
This sounds like it could be a good GD thread. I won’t mention the obvious reasons why slavery is worse (right to life, right to marry, etc.) but ask you this. If sweat shops and poverty are as bad as your are saying here, do we have a constitutional and moral obligation to eliminate them, just as we had an obligation to eliminate slavery? I’m not sure if you are still a Libertarian, but that seems to be not a very Libertarian thing to imply.
Not to speak for Liberal - I wouldn’t dare! - but his definition of libertarianism relies heavily on coercion, which even I can easily apply to sweatshops. He will, I hope, correct me if I’m misinterpreting his belief.
That said, he seems to recognize no degrees of coercion; any, from real estate covenants to slavery, is equally bad.
Why coercion? In the sweatshops of the early 20th century, all employees were free to quit at any time. (Except in the middle of a shift, and I assume even libertarians are in favor of fire codes.) In the libertarian paradise, no employee would work for a sweatshop, and they’d be forced, by the free market, to improve. If they couldn’t find another job, it’s their fault and they should work harder.
Slave labor camps, bad. Sweatshops - just a contract between employer and employee.
Coercion can be force or fraud. Northern bigots took advantage of blacks by lies and misrepresentation about employment, housing, and even political offices. More details are in one or more of the links already provided.
And once again, we have the “All wrongs are equivalent” claptrap.
Next up - forced vaccination: bad as the Holocaust.
Only in some libertarianoid post-Reconstruction fantasy world.
You are just absolutely incapable of being even remotely honest, aren’t you? I never remotely implied that racism was limited to “a very few parts of the South”. Do you do this because you’re actually too stupid to read and understand what others say? Do you just think it’s easier to argue without actually listening to what the other side has said?
Christ, you never fail to fall below even the lowest of expectations, Liberal.
Seeing as no one has said that . . .
I should probably have waited until I read the whole thread before replying.
Liberal, are your pants literally on fire?
Do you have any evidence that racially-restrictive covenants were more common in the North? They happened everywhere, to my knowledge, and I’m not personally aware of any difference in their distribution by region. (In fact, no small number of properties STILL have them, as due to the peculiarities of land use law, it’s extremely difficult to get a covenant removed, even though they’re of course no longer enforceable. This actually came up during William Rehnquist’s confirmation hearings - he lived in a house that had such a covenant.) Racially-restrictive covenants always targeted blacks, but in many cases Asians and Catholics as well; they weren’t even ruled legally unenforceable until 1948.
He invented the proposition we’re debating, and assigned it to me, because Liberal likes fighting easy strawmen and he places absolutely zero value on honesty.
I’m posting again because I’m just absolutely astonished that you seem to feel absolutely no shame about lying about what I said, over and over and over and over. I’m well aware that you’re a good deal dumber than you and some of your consistent supporters like to imagine. I was already fairly convinced that you are a deeply intellectually dishonest man. But I’m just amazed to see how easily and gladly you make up ridiculous lies - you obviously feel absolutely no compunction to declare that I hold a (ridiculous and bigoted) viewpoint and repeat it again and again and again. I knew you were intellectually dishonest - you like fighting easy fights; it obviously makes you feel intelligent to easily win easy arguments. But when you’re explicitly assigning me a viewpoint that I clearly do not hold, that moves beyond the realm of being a dishonest debater and simply being a dishonest man, one who isn’t reluctant in the slightest to bear false witness and thereby slander another specific person. It’s one thing to argue dishonestly, but it’s another thing to make up ugly lies about a particular person like the ones you’ve been spewing about me all through this thread. I suppose I have no excuse for being amazed at the depths you’re willing to descend to, but I can’t recall you ever lying about me in such a blatant fashion in the past, and it’s really driven home what sort of ugly person you are on the inside, Liberal.
Oops. Nothing to see here, folks.
I understand your point and agree that there have been times that the South has been more racist than the North. There have also been times when the Northern states (simply by being more populated while dealing in slave trading) have been more racist. Also, a greater portion of the history of Northern states has been spent in slavery.
I don’t think it’s the Southerners here who are likely to be in denial. We are fairly well documented in the history books. If someone refers to “the slave states” people often assume that she is referring to the South. But that’s really not a safe assumption, is it?
Someone mentioned the white civil rights workers from the North who rode the buses into the South in the early 1960s. Is there documentation on where the Freedom Riders were from? I know that people kept joining them along the way. Most were under the age of thirty and there was about an equal number of Blacks and Whites.
It really bothers me when there is an assumption that there were no men of conscience in the South in those days. The only people that I knew personally on the Freedom Rides were Southerners and one of them was white. And my father was, in my eyes, much like Atticus Finch – though not an attorney.
Some people have a view of Southerner white males that is as biased and ugly as the black male characatures os the 1930s.
According to the Freedom Riders Foundation:
I’m not so certain that source is entirely accurate.
According to another source that I read, most Northern states did enact laws against segregation after the Civil War. But as “the Great Migration” began, more and more communities began to ignore the law.
And the Black community was very divided over it keeping the schools segregated:
Source: Interview with Davison M. Douglas, author and Professor of Law, a legal historian with an expertise on the interplay of race and law in American history
According to Douglas:
Isn’t that a fine how-do-you-do? Of course, the same is true for Southern urban schools too. Maybe we haven’t come so far afterall.
I saw nothing to disagree with in your post. As far as urban schools being more racially separated today, I would guess that has to do the great middle-class Diaspora of the late sixties and early seventies. The schools are not segregated, in NYC, any student of any background can get into the better High Schools.
The problem is the poor neighborhoods are probably less integrated today then when my parents were growing up. The poor Irish, Jewish and Italians lived right next to the poor Blacks and the few Hispanics of the day and went to the same high schools at least. The elementary schools in the poor neighborhoods are usually no where near as good as the elementary schools in the better neighborhoods and so it is harder for the poor to qualify for the schools like Bronx Science. This leads to more poor blacks staying in their local overwhelmingly Black and Hispanic High Schools.
I think we are looking at more of a class divide than a racial divide these days. Suburban middle-class schools are usually very well integrated, at least in NY & NJ. I cannot speak to other states with any knowledge or experience. Any black family that lives in lower Manhattan or a better neighborhood in the other boroughs is likely to be a minority in a mostly white school.
Jim
No one here has made the assumption you refer to.
It just took awhile for those “men of conscience” to get the upper hand - with the assistance of the U.S. Supreme Court, several Presidential administrations (one run by a southerner, Lyndon Johnson), federal troops and outraged national opinion outside the South.
Thankfully, attempts to rewrite Civil War history have largely died out on this board. This thread has been a reminder that wishful thinking about the history of racism is still alive.
I don’t know that that’s entirely true, if you control for the ages of the states. Obviously, states that were settled earlier will have a longer history of slavery than states that were settled later (and a longer history of much else).