clearing up some historical facts about slavery - Beloved (1998) Discussion

[–] 17 years ago

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[–] Iheartthewire 17 years ago

Joe frog I'm just really curious to know where you're getting your "facts" from,and I use the term "facts" loosely!?

How much longer are you going to go on blaming your dreams on for own weaknesses?

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[–] joe_frog 17 years ago

Which fact are you speaking about? I would be happy to refer you to specific sources. There are many statistical records to draw from. Would you like to know anything more specific?(details?).

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[–] paradise_287 17 years ago

That's very interesting Joe Frog but you know what? Slavery is not about color. Every type of people have been held as slaves at some point in time in history. We shouldn't try to make people feel bad about it, cause honestly that's not gonna help anything. We as people, knowing the horrors of the past, should try to do whatever possible to not let it happen again. Numbers don't matter. who got sent where, how many got sent there, it doesn't matter if we let it happen again.

"I'm starvin'... let's get some *beep* french toast."

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[–] joe_frog 17 years ago

Didn't you read my post? That is EXACTLY what I said.

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[–] Iheartthewire 17 years ago

That there were more european slaves than African slaves?

How much longer are you going to go on blaming your dreams on for own weaknesses?

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[–] DisturbedPixie 16 years ago

My great grandmother was a slave from Sweden to the USA.
And then my Polish/Czech family were persecuted by the Nazis.
No one color suffers, and to think so is ignorant and racist in itself.
And to think a Mexican coworker said I was so white I was Hitler's daughter, just proves the ignorance(& cruelty) of the common person.
I actually liked how the ex-slaves in the story didn't let their past dictate their everyday. My Great Grandmother moved to nice Swedish neighborhood and found a good Swedish boy to marry.

If you are Anti-American: Admit you are doing it just to be cool. Does it feel good to hate?

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[–] madeinjalisco 15 years ago

You cannot compare indentured servitude to slavery. Whites were not hunted down, torn from their families, and shipped to another continent to work in fields the way Africans were. White women weren't SYSTEMATICALLY raped to produce more slaves the way African women were. And, based on your own great grandmother's experiences, white women had the FREEDOM to leave their servitude after their debts were paid. Africans were enslaved with no hope of buying their own freedom for generations.

You have to be incredibly ignorant- or incredibly self centered- to think that the two experiences are even remotely similar.

And, a comment from ONE person, does not "prove" anything about an entire group of people. If it did, I would have "proof" that all white people are retards based on YOUR comments.

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[–] lkgpiano 15 years ago

You don't see any similarities between the Holocaust and slavery? Whites WERE hunted down, they WERE torn from their families, and they WERE shipped to concentration camps. They WERE systematically murdered, through gas chambers, gunshots, fatigue, disease and the like. The people in those camps were there to be annihilated - that was the Nazis' "Final Solution." While there is life, there is hope, and not much hope was felt by either slaves or concentration camp victims. If a person looked different, they were treated differently, whether it be race, religion or gender. Sadly, it's still done. Please, let's not add to it.

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[–] madeinjalisco 15 years ago

Where/when did I write ANYTHING about the Holocaust?!?!?

Indentured servitude.
In-den-tured ser-vi-tude.

This was a practice made common in the U.S. a hundered years before the holocaust... and it mostly involving poor Irish and English immigrants who participated willingly....

What the hell does that have to do with jews dying in the holocaust? Perhaps you need to visit the Schindler's List board.

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[–] lkgpiano 15 years ago

When did DisturbedPixie try to compare indentured servitude to slavery? She mentioned her great grandmother, yes, but she also mentioned family being persecuted by the Nazis. I really don't think she was comparing her great grandmother to the plight of slaves here in the 1800s, though it may have been interpreted that way. You focused on the great grandmother; I focused on the family in Europe.

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[–] krypton333 15 years ago

I see one glaring similarity! Crazed europeans hunting, killing, raping, and committing atrocities that makes the average sane man ask himself, "Why?"...As far as the jewish holocaust goes, you may as well include it with the African holocaust. What was a major reason why nazis wanted jews exterminated? Because they were impure. Impure meaning, not fully aryan/white. And what do you think those impurites were? You got it, the blood of Africa. But if it's a means to an end, people will make up anything to get what they want.

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[–] Nglas 14 years ago

madeinjalisco, I think your statement comes across as extremely ignorant, as you clearly have not done any research to back up those opinions of yours. And yes, I said opinions because that is exatly what they are.

Did black slaves have it bad? Of course they did... they were slaves! But to sit here and say that black slaves had it the worst is so ridiculous... it's like trying to win a competition for whose life sucked more. Let us compare some FACTS, shall we?

Slaves from Africa were SOLD to Europeans and Americans by leaders of Africa. Yes, some were kidnapped, but don't think for one second that the government that existed at the time in Africa didn't benefit from the misery of their own people because it is the truth. In a starving, poor country where the population was getting so high that work and food was not as available, the leaders probably thought they were doing the right thing by getting rid of some of the people. (and making some profit themselves)

Jews were slaves to the Romans for years. They were treated just as badly, if not worse, than the Africans were. The OP was right. Almost every race has been a slave at some point in history. They were all torn from their families, beaten until their spirits were broken, and many more horrors.

Let us not forget WW2 and the holocaust because you are aware that the Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, communists, and mentally ill were considered slaves too, right? They were also taken from their homes, forced to perform labor for their captors, and treated as property rather than human beings. The big difference between these people and African American slaves is that they were killed if they couldn't be of use to their captors based on what they were. Did slaves from Africa die at the hands of their owners? Sure, but not to the extent of 5 million being slaughtered.

In the future, please recognize that you will NEVER be able to prove that one group of slaves had it worse than another, based only on their skin color. That is just a sad, pathetic argument to try and make. Any kind of slavery is evil and awful. A white slave and a black slave are equal in the tragedy of being a slave. One didn't have it worse than the other.

"I don't do scared." -Yvonne Atkins

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[–] wunderful_digby 17 years ago

Jaibailey: Joe frog I'm just really curious to know where you're getting your "facts" from,and I use the term "facts" loosely!?

They are not facts, it is disinformation from web sites hosted by fascist networks like stormfront looking at what he's posted on other threads.

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[–] sayhellokitty 17 years ago

The one out of four stat is correct. Most slaveholders had only one or two slaves. And Sweet Home, in the novel "Beloved" has only six slaves. However, a Southerner who had only one or two slaves was regarded much more highly than his counterparts with no slaves since slave owners controlled policy-making of the South. White slavery or indentured servitude did not work. All too often the slave or servant would run away and change his or her name and escape slavery altogether. Indian slaves did not fit in well to the types of agrarian societies the American colonies (and later states) were seeking to achieve. They also proved susceptible to disease. African slaves could be bred and kept for their entire lives and by appearance, could not easily escape slavery without detection. However, all of America profited from the slave trade and slave economy, whether or not they participated in the slave owning lifestyle. American slavery proved extremely destructive to the African culture of the slaves once they were established in America. In South America and the West Indies, African music, language, and culture that was imported via slavery still exists. Not so in America, where the barest traces of African culture survive. It is easy to try to diminish the impact of American slavery by pointing around the globe to where slavery has existed, but American slavery was unfortunately one of the crueler systems of slavery that has been devised. It tortured people, ripped families apart, turned women into breeders, perverted religion, and denied millions of human beings almost everything they could be denied--right down to an identity because it was profitable to do so. And it was so pervasive it was that thousands of young men who had never owned slaves and could never afford to do so walked onto battlefields and died, defending the right to keep human beings against their will.

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[–] joe_frog 17 years ago

I think you missed the point of my post. I did not say african slavery was not inhumane,destructive,etc. It is a fact that millions of white people were enslaved during the history of the US,as well as millions of africans,native americans and mixed-race people as well.Your point on slavery in South America is rather misguided if you examine the state of places like Brazil,the center of the South American slave trade. Did you know that the ancestor of a black slave in Brazil is 5 times more likely to live in poverty than his US counterpart? If you want to talk about brutality, no American plantation would compare to those operating in Jamaica,Haiti or Cuba.Haiti is now one of the poorest countries in the world,thanks to a system far inferior to that of the US. True, slavery in America was a despicable insititution but certainly not an institution which targeted black people exclusively, as most liberal revisionist historians would have you believe.

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[–] sayhellokitty 17 years ago

I would imagine that most people in Brazil live more poorly than their US counterparts. That's a result of the opportunities each country can give its inhabitants and how available those opportunities are. Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica are not democracies and many people are mistreated there, slaves or not. The United States, unlike virtually any other place that has operated a system of chattel slavery, ran that system while also standing upon a Bill of Rights that guaranteed basic rights to its citizens. The country's own philosophy and constitution should have made slavery illegal, but it did not. In order to operate, the country had to officially and legally declare its slaves non-citizens and furthermore, property. In that sense, black people were pretty much exclusively targeted, at least in the United States.

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[–] joe_frog 17 years ago

Nice try,Kitty but your info is incorrect. Both Brazil and Jamica are democracies.In Brazil,moreso than in the US, black people are very much at the bottem of the totem pole. The US Constitution did not come out until 1788. Less than 20 years from that time slavery impoertation was declared illegal. 80% of all white citizens had no ownership or connection with black slavery in the US.You also failed to mention that the uS has the greatest proportion of black middle class citizens of any former slave holding nation.The civil rights legislation of the US is also superior to any given worldwide. 0 citiezens

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[–] sayhellokitty 17 years ago

Cuba, Jamaica and Brazil allowed slavery at a time they didn't resemble anything that looked like a democracy. Cuba still is not a democracy. Even today, it depends on how you stretch the word democracy. In Jamaica, there is no system of checks and balances and the electorate is responsible for most of the voting. It's hard to apply a constant term to Brazil as it has swung back and forth between being a dictatorship and being a federal republic with very broad powers given to the president. So is it an unstable republic or unstable dictatorship? (Although Brazil has sometimes been called a racial government for its almost total lack of diversity--which of course doesn't seem very democratic, I have read that there is very little racial tension in Brazil. Black Americans living in Salvador report that they feel better living in Brazil than they do in America, where they can feel overt racial tension.)

I really don't see what the illegality of slave importation has to do with the injustice and cruelty of American slavery and its hypocritical contradiction with its own governmental and social values. Slavery was upheld and practiced until the ratification of the thirteenth amendment in 1865. The current civil rights legislation, no matter how generous, does not reduce the cruelty to those who suffered under slavery. (Incidentally, Texas did not ratify the thirteenth amendment until 1870, Delaware not until 1901, Kentucky not until 1976, and Mississippi until 1995.) And doesn't it seem a little absurd, granting civil rights to people who should have had them just for living in the country? But I think your original point was something about all ethnicities being subject to slavery, yet you keep pointing out the contemporary situation about black people--how poor they are, how uneducated, etc. And those are remnants of slavery. The black population in the US may be doing better than other countries, but still, the remnants of slavery are still somewhat present. But I'm more interested in the slaves of all these other races (White, Indian, Hispanic, etc.) that you say got revised out of history. If that's so, we should see the remnants of slavery in those people too, just as we see them in the black populations of Brazil and the United States. So tell me about them and their civil rights movement and where they stand in the middle class and everything.

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[–] 17 years ago

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[–] Drewy 12 years ago

The total number of white slaves imported from europe exceeded their african and native american counterparts by a large margin during the history of slavery in the U.S.

This thread (more than 5 years old now) has been hijacked and has gone way off the original topic.

joe_frog, back then, offered to back up his "historical facts". The one I find most difficult to believe is the one I have quoted above. That is, that there were more white slaves than black in the United States during the history of slavery in that country. As an historian *not* specialising in US history, I want to know!

I note that, unlike some other posters in this thread, joe_frog appears not to be trying to downplay the impact of slavery, or making some point about the US treating slaves better or worse than other societies etc. Nor do I. I merely wish to check this "fact" that, if true, surprises the heck out of me. More white slaves than black. I never saw THAT in Django Unchained! :-)

I suspect the "fact" is incorrect, but would be happily corrected if someone was able to point me to some reliable sources to back it up.

Thank you.

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[–] hardwood53 11 years ago

I notice no one mentioned the millions of Chinese that were forced to build the railroads. I do not know if they were actual slaves or just indentured servants. I do know that there were routine killings of those who did not work well within the system where they were held. That includes whites who worked the coal mines too.
I would further muddy the water with more recent events. The various land grabs has made many Americans renters, working there whole lives for bare survival. These poor also fill the largest prison system in the World, most of these prisoners are black. Wage slavery offers no real hope, that was true decades ago and is even truer in todays economy.

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