Racism

[bonnie]

Racism in the area I was born is alive and well. The younger ones not so much but the older ones can keep it alive nicely. They dwell on and dream of the wonderful unspoiled land they inhabited before the white man.Peace and tranquility until the white man came. It is an illusion but serves their purpose quite well.

In the fifties and sixties many towns were basically native american with a few white people in the mix. It was not a healthy place to be found after dark.

Many DNR employees disappeared mysteriously in the woods.

The same is true for many african americans,not a racist bone in their body or they would have you believe. Whites by virture of being white are racist and responsible for the problems and lifestyles of many african americans.

Whites are racist. But they were not the first racists nor did they invent racism.

I think no matter who is racist it is wrong,but it gets tiresome to hear the litany of wrongs committed by one race and the excuses given for failures of another race is because of white racism

[Liz]

I hear where you are coming from. My dh is in graduate school, he just got finished with a class that taught exactly what you just stated. Whites were racist simply because they were white. The professor actually wanted the white students to go into a predominantly (Sp?) black church and apologize (sp?) for all the wrongs "we" caused. This was written down in the literature for this particular class. I don't know how many of his classmates did this, but I know my dh passed on this assaignment (sp?).

P.S. sorry for all the mispellings, my dyslexia is really acting up today, and nothing looks right.

[Woody]

We will forgive you Liz ... if you stand before the church and confess. And BTW ... you can confess before either a white or black church.

[Liz]

Thank you Uncle Red, I knew I could count on you. ((((Biggie Hugs))))

[Dr. Shane]

I kind of like stock car races myself.

[bonnie]

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I hear where you are coming from. My dh is in graduate school, he just got finished with a class that taught exactly what you just stated. Whites were racist simply because they were white. The professor actually wanted the white students to go into a predominantly (Sp?) black church and apologize (sp?) for all the wrongs "we" caused. This was written down in the literature for this particular class. I don't know how many of his classmates did this, but I know my dh passed on this assaignment (sp?).

The only acceptable viewpoint to many is the "white man" on his knees asking for forgiveness for what "white men" did.

We cannot do that and have it mean anything. Those alive today did not do it.

Is there still racism? Of course and it is alive and well on both sides of the aisle.

Is there a difference between the black man that sold other black men and those that purchased the slaves? Not one whit.

Did africans sell other africans? Routinely.

Did they own slaves themselves? Yes,some did.

The distinction being made is that one tribe selling another tribe is not selling their countrymen.

That is no different than the Native Americans.

The Ojibwe stole the land from the Lakota, men died. One tribe would take captive members of other tribes. Ojibwe were stronger or better warriors. This is part of the peaceful land the whites took over.

There is nothing right about the way whites treated the Indians. But it was no different than they treated each other.

This was the way of the world at that time. The stronger defeated the weaker and took what they wanted.

It does get tiresome however when the only "racists" are white and everything in dealing with another race is defined in that way. We as a race did not invent it. We as a race cannot stop it. We can only be responsible for what each does personally.

We can't do anything about the racism that is present in many African americans or Native Americans.

[bonnie]

Is it all racism that many SDA's are against? Or is there a selective racism that meets with the approval of SDA's.

Several topics on C/A seems to have more racism involved in denouncing or ridiculing opinions that don't fall into the "Forgive me please,I am white and a racist" than the "white racist.

To me it is racist against the citizens of Israel to say "They aren't real Jews anyway"

Who cares what their nationality is. 100% Jewish,50% Jewish,10% Jewish? They bleed and die as did the Jewish of centuries past.

Are we to oppose them because Evangelicals support them and have a different biblical understanding than we?

fccool doesn't seem to be bothered by suicide bombers,they are only desperate people blowing themselves and many innocent to bits. They are not blowing true Jews to bits so doesn't seem to be a problem. If this was not part of the rational it would not have a reason to be brought up

SDA's are just so special aren't we?

Tom Wetmore used a phrase often used in a not to complementary fashion "They all look alike" and attributed that thought to me.

Completely different than what I said or my intent. I believe he knew that to be true. But let's not be bothered by little details.It is the effect we are after

Lazarus seemed to think "I am nuts".

He has certainly shown a few racial thoughts of his own. Or what to me is racial overtones.

He seems to disagree that africans sold their countrymen. My saying that gave him the idea I was nuts.

He is entitiled to his opinion as I am to mine and I believe he has racist issues

I see no difference in one African tribe selling another tribe for slavery. Coming from african tribes on the continent of Africa I do believe them to be countrymen. Not necessary to be same tribe,same country.

But I do see a little racism peeking out in the explaination

"Africans didn't sell their countrymen,they came from other tribes" It sounds like it is only a problem and wrong if you sold those of your tribe. Very convenient.

Carol explained it as they didn't have any loyalty to other tribes.

I guess I will stay in my nutty world,one where I could not care less about the color of your skin.

I don't care what your nationality/race is. Not until that is used to excuse your own racist behavior.

[lazarus]

He has certainly shown a few racial thoughts of his own.

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Or what to me is racial overtones.

Bonnie, you should really stop making false accusations. Post the quotes. Let see what you are talking about.

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He seems to disagree that africans sold their countrymen.

Again let's see the quotes.

[bonnie]

Originally Posted By: bonnie

He has certainly shown a few racial thoughts of his own.

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Or what to me is racial overtones.

Bonnie, you should really stop making false accusations. Post the quotes. Let see what you are talking about.

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He seems to disagree that africans sold their countrymen.

Again let's see the quotes.

[bonnie]

Those that owned and sold slaves do all look alike.

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In the same way that Nelson Mandela looks like Robert Mugabe.

Or Hosni Mubarak looks like Ellen Sirleaf (Liberian President)

Of even Idi Amin looked like Jomo Kenyata.

Are you nuts?

This is an interesting one. Did Nelson Mandela have slaves or involve himself in the slave trade for profit?

Did the others you mention engage in the behavior of Idi Amin?

If not this does not apply.

If you sell me a slave for me to own and use in any manner I choose what is the difference between us. Regardless of our outward demeanor we are both the same on the inside.

For that you asked or suggested I was nuts. So be it. In my house those involved in slave trades,makes possible abuse of another,or simply profits financially or materially in some way is the same. You make a distinction between one race and the mentality of those that made it possible,I don't

[bonnie]

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The slaves were usually men and women captured in war whose labor led to surplus production and whose numbers amplified the armies of imperial expansion. In most parts, slaves born within the master's household were better treated than war captives or trade slaves--often as members of the family. Slaves could occasionally rise to positions of importance or buy their own freedom. Nonetheless, a master had ultimate power over his slave. If a master chose to kill a slave, he could do so without question. The disgrace which cloaks the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade is the inhumanity of treatment the slaves received. The ultimate degradation and dehumanization of slaves singularly characteristic of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade was the reduction of human beings to mere commodities and labor units. The minimum amount of food, clothing, and shelter was given to those slaves who survived the Middle Passage, and the maximum amount of work was expected of them.

Who made the above possible for the slavers? Who provided a continuing supply of human beings to be treated in this way?

Those who used the whip and chains or those that provided the opportunity for materialistic gain or revenge are no different.Use the same racial yardstick for both. Judge all by the mindset and culture of the day or all by 21st century standards

[bonnie]

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Since when is 28% of free black slaveholders in a single city a mathematically accurate comparison to 1.4% of the white population of the ENTIRE United States?

Obviously slavery in smaller numbers is okay and not to be considered. The entire US was made possible by those that supplied the slaves for the slave trade.

It again is the white man that carries the whole burden of this practise

[bonnie]

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If you don't want to accept the nature, scale and scope of the Transatlantic slave trade, that's OK. If you don't want to accept the nature, scale and scope of what happened to Native Americans that's fine too. There are people who deny the Holocaust.

I have never denied this and I am quite aware of the scope thru history.The Transatlantic slave trade was made possible by aficans that provided the "cargo" when the slavers came.

I have not denied what happened to the Native American. I also know from history what the peace loving Native Americans did to one another before the white man came. Both dealing with the mindset and culture of their day. If not both must be judged by the same yardstick.

Even today there is a bit of strained relations between the Lakota and the Ojibwe in MN,unless of course they join together in berating the white man for the same they did to one another.

Do I understand it?? Not a clue how one person,regardless of color could treat another in this way.

Nor is one more guilty because of numbers than the other.

If my side kills 10 and your side kills a 100 are you more guilty of murder than I??

[bonnie]

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Originally Posted By: there buster

More often than not, and contrary to a century and a half of bullwhips-on-tortured-backs propaganda, black and white masters worked and ate alongside their charges; be it in house, field or workshop.

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This is bogus, revisionist trash. Read some slave narratives:

http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/wpa/index.html

What does not fit with your view of history is trash. Why is that? Is it because someone white probably wrote the above.

Maybe because I am white,I don't know but I would suspect rather than trash there is truth on both sides. Unless of course in your non-racist viewpoint only a black writer or one sympathetic to blacks is capable of telling the truth

[bonnie]

This to me is a racist mentality. Not taking the time to look up the more obvious. When the freedoms of the US constitution were being discussed it didn't take long for the reminder of the lack of freedoms for some. It is a blight on our history,it is a blight on any person that can't get beyond race. Most are painfully aware that freedom was not always equal and probably isn't to this day. It has more than one cause and one group.

It still does not diminish the intent of the US Constitution.

If you are to judge one group in history by the standards of today,judge them all by the same yardstick.

If you can only judge the actions of one side you have a bit of a racial problem.

If you want to judge the actions of whites towards native American by our standards of today,judge those like the Ojibwe and what they did to the Lakota's in "stealing their lands by today's standards.

If you are going to judge the white man and his racism,judge the black man,his part in it and his racism. One side cannot fix the problem

[bonnie]

I think we all have a degree of racism.

I could not care less about the color of someone's skin,whether neighbor,co-worker,or as a mate for one of my family.

When someone is willing to use their race as a weapon,a cause I can easily dislike someone of another race. Not their color or nationality but what they do with it.

[bonnie]

Concerning Native Americans.

We were foster parents to several little native americans.

We helped them with history of their tribes and culture.

There was extreme pride already instilled in these little boys concerning battles in history where they were victorious over other tribes. Until it came to the "white man" being victorious over them.

Somehow the same actions and intent delivered by the white hand made a great deal of difference

[lazarus]

Racism: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.

I can't see how any of you posts show that I am in anyway racist.

[bonnie]

Racism: a belief that race is the primary determinant of human traits and capacities and that racial differences produce an inherent superiority of a particular race.

I can't see how any of you posts show that I am in anyway racist.

We will continue to disagree then. I believe you would like to attribute qualities and actions to the white race that you cannot accept that was/is present in african americans.

As well as Native Americans. They don't seem to you to be as responsible for their own actions against each other as you do the actions of the white race against Native Americans.

[bonnie]

Put it on a personal level.Humor a woman you think might be a bit nutty

You capture and hold 10 african for me to buy. I already own 100.

You take them from home,family,everything they hold dear and sell them to me and I do same.I find a buyer and make a profit on my purchase from you.

How in your opinion is the ten you capture and sell somehow not the sin my purchase of the same ten from you is? Just because I have more?

[Dr. Shane]

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Since when is 28% of free black slaveholders in a single city a mathematically accurate comparison to 1.4% of the white population of the ENTIRE United States?

I am not sure where that quote comes from but slavery has never been legal in the ENTIRE United States. It was only legal in selected states. It has banned in many states from the very beginning of the country.

[bonnie]

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Since when is 28% of free black slaveholders in a single city a mathematically accurate comparison to 1.4% of the white population of the ENTIRE United States?

I am not sure where that quote comes from but slavery has never been legal in the ENTIRE United States. It was only legal in selected states. It has banned in many states from the very beginning of the country.

I believe that is a statement was made by lazerus.

[Amelia]

*gp

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Slavery in the United States

From Wikipedia

Slavery in the United States began soon after English colonists first settled in Virginia in 1607 and lasted as a legal institution until the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865.

Before the widespread establishment of chattel slavery, much labor was organized under a system of bonded labor known as indentured servitude. This typically lasted for several years for white and black alike, and it was a means of using labor to pay the costs of transporting people to the colonies.[1] By the 18th century, court rulings established the racial basis of the American incarnation of slavery to apply chiefly to Black Africans and people of African descent, and occasionally to Native Americans. A 1705 Virginia law stated slavery would apply to those peoples from nations that were not Christian.[2] In part because of the success of tobacco as a cash crop in the Southern colonies, its labor-intensive character caused planters to import more slaves for labor by the end of the 17th century than did the northern colonies. The South had a significantly higher number and proportion of slaves in the population.[1] Religious differences contributed to this geographic disparity as well.[citation needed]

From 1654 until 1865, slavery for life was legal within the boundaries of much of the present United States.[3] Most slaves were black and were held by whites, although some Native Americans and free blacks also held slaves; there were a small number of white slaves as well. The majority of slaveholding was in the southern United States where most slaves were engaged in an efficient machine-like gang system of agriculture, with farms of fifteen or more slaves featuring a higher factor of productivity compared to those farms without slaves. According to the 1860 U.S. census, nearly four million slaves were held in a total population of just over 12 million in the 15 states in which slavery was legal.[4] Of all 8,289,782 free persons in the 15 slave states, 393,967 people (4.8%) held slaves, with the average number of slaves held by any single owner being 10.[4][5] The majority of slaves were held by planters, defined by historians as those who held 20 or more slaves.[6] Ninety-five percent of black people lived in the South, comprising one-third of the population there, as opposed to 2% of the population of the North.[7] Despite being an efficient economic system, slavery did not spread northward due to the nature of the soil in the region and the types of crops typically produced there. At the time, principal importers of slaves were sugar and cotton growing regions. Both of these crops were more suitably farmed on plantations and in the soil of the southern regions. Thus, when land more suitable for these crops was discovered towards the west, slavery spread westward and not to the north. The wealth of the United States in the first half of the 19th century was greatly enhanced by the labor of African Americans.[8][9]

Slavery was the major issue of the American Civil War in which the Union emerged victorious, after which the slave-labor system was abolished in the South.[10] This contributed to the decline of the postbellum Southern economy, but it was most affected by the continuing decline in the price of cotton through the end of the century.[11] That made it difficult for the region to recover from the war, as did its comparative lack of infrastructure, which kept products from markets. The South faced significant new competition from foreign cotton producers such as India and Egypt. Northern industry, which had expanded rapidly before and during the war, surged even further ahead of the South's agricultural economy. Industrialists from northeastern states came to dominate many aspects of the nation's life, including social and some aspects of political affairs. The planter class of the South lost power temporarily. The rapid economic development following the Civil War accelerated the development of the modern U.S. industrial economy.

Twelve million Africans were shipped to the Americas from the 16th to the 19th centuries.[12][13] Of these, an estimated 645,000 were brought to what is now the United States. The largest number were shipped to Brazil (see slavery in Brazil).[14] The slave population in the United States had grown to four million by the 1860 Census.[15]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_United_States

[Amelia]

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The Slave Trade

The American slave trade was an international business. It began in Western Africa, where prisoners were taken for sale to European and American slave traders, and continued in permanent and impromptu slave markets in the United States, ultimately concentrated in the South. Not only were some half a million Africans ripped from their lives and families to be imported to the New World, but the enslaved were bred for sale on American soil and transported, often under brutal conditions, throughout the slave states.

http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/scripts/sia/gallery.cgi

[Amelia]

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Captive Passage:

The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making of the Americas.

Between 1441 and 1888, Europeans and their descendants in the Americas enslaved many millions of Africans. Torn from their homeland, men, women, and children were shipped to the Americas and forced into slavery.

The transatlantic slave trade was a highly profitable maritime business. Without African slaves, the potential economic value of the Americas could never have been realized. Slaves made possible the taming of the wilderness, construction of cities, excavation of mines, and the establishment of powerful plantation economies.

This exhibition examines the transatlantic slave trade and seeks to increase understanding of this maritime epic and its legacies in the modern world.

The transatlantic slave trade was the second leg of a triangular economic route between Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Traders left European ports headed for Africa's west coast. There they exchanged trade goods for humans and loaded their human cargo into ships. The transatlantic voyage itself-the infamous "Middle Passage" -usually took six to eight weeks.

Once in the Americas, sailors off-loaded those Africans who had survived the journey and sold them in the markets in the Americas where the captives began their life of labor as slaves. The ships then returned to Europe with goods produced by the subsequent slave labor. With this triangular trade, European capital, African labor, and American land and resources combined to supply an emerging global economy.

Historians do not agree on the exact number of Africans who were forcibly transported across the Atlantic, although it is generally accepted that the number exceeds ten million.

Slave traders actively encouraged wars in Africa, resulting in the death or enslavement of millions more Africans on that continent than ended up in the Americas. Scholars of African history believe the total number of Africans killed or abducted in Africa and the Americas could be between 50 and 100 million. Whatever the figure, the slave trade brought death and dislocation on an unimaginable scale. Its full impact will never be fully known.

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The institution of slavery in any culture at almost any time in recorded history has had at its foundation the tacit understanding of the slave as "other." By classifying the slave as being fundamentally different, and thus somehow inferior to the master, slave owners could justify their treatment of the enslaved. Slaves could be used brutally, made to do unreasonable or dangerous tasks, and dehumanized because they were somehow "different." Throughout history, slaves have differed from the masters in a variety of ways: they could be prisoners of war, debtors, people of another faith, or simply foreign. Skin color, however, did not come into this equation until the 15th century.

White Europeans and black Africans had commingled through trade associations since antiquity. The eighth century spread of Islam and the conversion of much of northern Africa added a divisive element in that many blacks were now of an opposing religion that threatened much of Christian Europe. White Christians, however, still held out hope of finding the fabled Christian kingdom of Prester John, hidden somewhere in Africa. The failure to find Prester John during successive explorations of Africa in the early 1400s, along with the desire to circumvent the nations of Islam in obtaining or producing trade goods, led to the increasing perception of the black African as "other." The reconquista movement in Spain, which culminated in the expulsion of both the Moors and the Jews in 1492, fed on religious fervor directed at the "other" as well. This religious impulse, coupled with the increasing need for slave labor in the New World colonies ultimately, led to the institution of black slavery.

http://www.mariner.org/captivepassage/introduction/index.html