In places where Blacks are the majority but there is a white minority - like Jamaica or The Bahamas - are whites discriminated against the same way Blacks are in the US (or elsewhere where Blacks are the minority)? Can a white Bahamian expect to be randomly hassled by the cops? Have a hard time getting a job or a credit card or a place to rent? Could a white Jamaican expect frequent ass-kickings just because?
The differences between the oppressed and the oppressors are circumstance and opportunity.
Because of the way colonialism has worked in the past, I think most white minorities have been relatively privileged in Black majority countries.
There can certainly be resentment against a wealthy white minority (e.g. in Zimbabwe), but that’s not quite the same situation as you’re discussing.
In Zimbabwe things went a tad bit farther than resentment.
Right. And a lot of what the OP is describing is systemic racism, which takes a long time to bake into a society. Many (most?) black-majority countries have only become independent from white rule relatively recently.
So if white people do have trouble there, it’s not going to be the same as in the US, because they don’t have those systems in place. It may be fueled by resentment, but not by oppressive legacy systems.
My only experience is with Barbados. The few Bajan-born whites I have met seem to have it pretty good. I imagine they are the remains of the old plantation owners and didn’t start out disadvantaged by history.
I’ve spent a lot of months several times in South Africa. There’s some political realignment type of discrimination happening, but given that the Dutch and English still ran everything, no discrimination. Well, once a coworker asked me if I always asked him to repeat himself because he was black. His accent was thick, and that was because he was black, so I guess that’s why I needed repetition. Either he’s discriminating for asking, or I’m discriminating by not being used to his accent.
This made me think of Liberia about 200 years ago.
In the United States, there was a movement to settle free people of color, both free-born and formerly enslaved, in Africa. This was because they faced racial discrimination in the form of political disenfranchisement and the denial of civil, religious, and social rights.[17] Formed in 1816, the American Colonization Society (ACS) was made up mostly of Quakers and slaveholders. Quakers believed blacks would face better chances for freedom in Africa than in the U.S.[7][18] While slaveholders opposed freedom for enslaved people, they viewed “repatriation” of free people of color as a way to avoid slave rebellions.[7]
It wasn’t a big success, however.
The Americo-Liberian settlers did not relate well to the indigenous peoples they encountered, especially those in communities of the more isolated “bush”. The colonial settlements were raided by the Kru and Grebo, from their inland chiefdoms. Encounters with tribal Africans in the bush often became violent. Believing themselves different from and culturally and educationally superior to the indigenous peoples, the Americo-Liberians developed as an elite minority that created and held on to political power. In a conscious effort to emulate the American South, the Americo-Liberian settlers adopted clothing such as hoop skirts and tailcoats, and excluded natives from economic opportunities, including creating plantations on which natives were forced to work as slaves.[24] Indigenous tribesmen did not enjoy birthright citizenship in their own land until 1904.[10] Americo-Liberians encouraged religious organizations to set up missions and schools to educate the indigenous peoples.[24]
Sounds like the pigs/humans in Animal Farm.
And if we ever find a distant planet with sentient civilized life, the same thing will happen again.
For South Africa: No. Not at all. Not in the slightest. Quite the opposite.
There is official “discrimination” in affirmative action hiring/tendering, but the resultant effect on Whites is less than zero. They still own most everything and don’t suffer real social negative effects.
Mainly this. Whites in Africa or India, for example, were the privileged ones. They had the protection of the bigger, more powerful, and more oppressive European countries. They tended to have magical properties like money, the “correct” accent, and the ability to travel without visa restrictions, etc. etc. Part of the prejudice against black people in Europe and the Americas is as the descendants of slaves, they do not automatically have education, money, respect.
I can’t think of a society where any significant number of the white people are also country backwoods uneducated hillbillies, for example, except in a white-majority society - so whites in black-majority countries tend to have a head start as “elite-only”. As the upper class in any society will attest, you have to work hard to lose that status.
Indeed. For those unfamiliar, in 2000 Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe launched a systemic effort of both legal and extrajudicial action to drive white farmers off their land. Mugabe told the leadership of the ruling party that the people were at war with white landowners. Several landowners (as well as many black workers on the farms) were killed and many more beaten and disposed, while Mugabe and his cronies ended up in possession of some of the choicest expropriated land.
And please note that I’m just addressing the factual question here, not trying to draw an equivalency with the wholesale murder and subjugation of Africans during colonialism.
There is a white minority on Barbados and some other Caribbean islands. They are known as the Redlegs and many other names including Poor Whites. Which suggests they are not at the top of the social tree.
From Wikipedia:
“Redleg descendants are still present on Barbados today – some of them in absolute poverty – isolated, unassimilated and uneducated.”
A documentary on the Irish slaves of Barbados.
I was once called a “fucking white racist” by a young lady for querying her terrible parking over two parking spaces including the one the company I worked for had assigned to me. She did not spot the irony.
In every other respect, though, I have experienced white privilege.
From arrival in this country (South Africa, from Zimbabwe) as an illegal immigrant (on a holiday vs a work visa) when I simply walked into a bar and got hired without anyone asking for ID or references, mostly due to my race onwards.
I should probably feel some guilt about this, but I did not create the system and I can’t do much to fix it aside from charity.
Maybe it is enough that I recognise that I am a beneficiary of white priviledge and recognise that unfair advantage.
From the same source as your quote:
"I must stress that all of this is based mostly on rumour and on research done 20 years ago. "
Not having 51-minutes to devote to something that I already know will have to make either highly suspect but extraordinary claims, or incredibly mundane but perhaps misleading claims about alleged Irish slavery on sugar plantations, I’ll just put the question to you.
Were the children of these Irish “slaves” considered to be the property of their parents’ purported masters, and could these children be passed down in turn as property of the estate, and bought and sold as property? Is that a question this documentary answers, and if so what is the answer it gives?
Because lifetime penal servitude is one thing and indentured servitude is another, neither of which need amount to chattel slavery.
ETA: For full disclosure, I have been more than a little skeptical of claims of Irish slavery in the Americas due in no small part to exposure to articles and academic research like this:
as a side note, when you see all the White models coming from Brazil, you’d think it was a European rather than predominately Black country
The documentary is made for Irish TV and covers the origins of the Bajan Redlegs, a lesser known part of Irish history. There are several books written on the subject of the Redlegs. There were several reasons why they came to be in Barbados. Political prisoners, criminals, servants, indentured workers and some were slaves.
However, their presence in Barbados pre-dates the large scale importation of slave labour from Africa so I guess you could argue that it was not originally a black majority country until later and then with political authority only after independence. Nonetheless their social class is pretty much at the bottom of heap, with all the privations and disadvantages that go with that.
Colonies were often first used as a prison and general dumping ground for undesirables that the authorities in the colonising country was anxious to be rid of. England, at the time of the Civil War, had lots of political prisoners and this is where some of them ended up. The documentary explains this grim history and there are interviews with members of the communities that exist today.
How you vote is probably the biggest one. Who you donate to counts (including politicians). Do you go to city hall meetings and argue for better policies? If you are in a position to hire people do you give equal opportunity?
And so on. If everyone took the little steps to fix this that can add-up to some big steps in public policy. You do what you can, where and when you can.