Panther1015,
I’d really like to see some support for your arguments. I’ve never heard that before.
Anyway, here is an article by Thomas Sowell on the subject, since BB hasn’t chimed in.
[quote]rainjack wrote:
Professor X wrote:
A defense is needed? Most of the black population today in America is about as “purely African” as most whites are “purely German, Irish or Polish”. To make a claim that blacks today are better off is like saying that Jews should be thankful for the Holocaust because being Jewish is no longer a life threatening state of being and many are better off here than in early 20th century Europe. I don’t even understand what you are arguing…I also doubt that you even do.
Most of the posts prior to mine used insults and indignation to address the question. How dare he say something like that? Doesn’t he know that slavery is horribly wrong to discuss it is to prove your ignorance? I thought the question was valid. Evidently folks will waste 3 or 4 paragraphs to inform the thread that it isn’t worth their time to discuss.
No - you are wrong. Slaves weren’t mass murdered. Why would a farmer go out and blow a hole in his tractor? The assumptions you make about the viciousness of slave owners being as ruthless (and whites) as the Nazis is not even worthy of responding to. [/quote]
No, in can be seen as much worse in some cases. Why blow a hole in your tractor, when you can kill its self esteem, wipe away the desire for improvement and destroy its dignity? You’re right, the body wasn’t destroyed in favor of destruction of the soul. Wake the fuck up, please.
[quote]drag0n252pi wrote:
First off I am not from Texas. Far from it though my ancestors did have a plantation in Texas and owned slaves.[/quote]
Are you proud of this?
[quote]Professor X wrote:
No, in can be seen as much worse in some cases. Why blow a hole in your tractor, when you can kill its self esteem, wipe away the desire for improvement and destroy its dignity? You’re right, the body wasn’t destroyed in favor of destruction of the soul. Wake the fuck up, please.[/quote]
You’re the one that made the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews and slavery connection. I said it was a bad analogy. No one has said a word about the emotional torture placed on the slaves - until now.
I can’t look at your ass and read your mind.
I am not proud that my ancestors owned slaves but that was a way of life back then. This is now, my wife is black as our our two sons.
The United States government did something that was wrong?deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens. . . . clearly racist.
?President Clinton’s apology for the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment to the eight remaining survivors, May 16, 1997
Yep, those ex-slaves were treated with such dignity, weren’t they? So much so, that even the government itself targeted black populations and infected them with diseases intentionally. Mind you, this is all we know of meaning there could have been other cases.
For those who didn’t know.
Never implied that only stated a fact.
[quote]rainjack wrote:
Professor X wrote:
No, in can be seen as much worse in some cases. Why blow a hole in your tractor, when you can kill its self esteem, wipe away the desire for improvement and destroy its dignity? You’re right, the body wasn’t destroyed in favor of destruction of the soul. Wake the fuck up, please.
You’re the one that made the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews and slavery connection. I said it was a bad analogy. No one has said a word about the emotional torture placed on the slaves - until now.
I can’t look at your ass and read your mind.
[/quote]
You shouldn’t have to. Common sense alone should have informed you that while the Jews had their bodies tortured, slavery existed much because of mental torture of an entire race in this country. Blacks were afraid to learn to read or write, and if they did gain the skill, they kept it in secret. Is this because of their oh so loving slave owners who loved them and cared for them? If you honestly believe this bullshit, it is you living in darkness.
Are you willing to throw the black plantation owners who also owned their share of black slaves into the guilty pile as well? I mean they owned slaves too.
How about the tribal warfare that took place in Africa the resulted in the losers being sold off to slave traders by fellow africans? Is there any room for them in the guilty pile? What about the tribes that took other tribes as slaves for themselves? I don’t hear anyone running the evil Africans down for propegating the slave trade.
Everyone in the chain shares guilt. Don’t reserve it all for Southern White property owners. That might be considered racist.
I don’t know but perhaps it was there Brain trust, read Hamilton Naki, South African gardener-turned-heart surgeon, dead at 78
Sat Jun 11,11:05 PM ET
CAPE TOWN, South Africa (AP) - Hamilton Naki, a former gardener who was so skilled in complicated surgery he helped in the world’s first heart transplant - but had to keep his work secret in apartheid South Africa - has died.
He was 78.
Naki, a black man who left high school because his family couldn’t afford the fees, took his first job at the age of 14, cutting grass at the University of Cape Town. The university, where he worked until his retirement in 1991, announced his May 29 death on its website. No cause of death was listed.
In 1954 he was promoted to helping care for laboratory animals and progressed from cleaning cages to more advanced lab work after a professor at the university asked him to help anesthetize animals used to train students in surgery.
“He has skills I don’t have,” Dr. Christiaan Barnard told The Associated Press in 1993.
“If Hamilton had had the opportunity to perform, he would have probably become a brilliant surgeon.”
Barnard asked Naki to be on the backup team in what became the world’s first successful heart transplant, in December 1967. It was in violation of the country’s laws on racial segregation, which dictated blacks should not be given medical training, nor have contact with white patients.
Naki was especially known for teaching medical students to perform intricate liver transplants on pigs, a procedure said to be more complicated than human heart transplants.
Doctors who observed Naki’s work used to describe how he managed to join minute blood vessels together with amazing delicacy and accuracy and quietly finish operations the medical students had started.
Ralph Kirsch, head of the Liver Research Centre, described him as “one of those remarkable men who really come around once in a long time.”
By the time he retired in 1991, he had only made it to the level of laboratory assistant. But he had to be content with the meagre pension of a gardener, since his more-skilled work had never been made public.
Naki once told an interviewer: “Those days you had to accept what they said as there was no other way you could go because it was the law of the land.”
It was only after the demise of apartheid in 1994 that Naki’s contributions became known. In 2002, South African President Thabo Mbeki gave him the country’s highest order for his years of public service.
Naki said he hoped to set an example to young people to benefit from opportunities in the new multiracial, democratic South Africa that he was denied.
“I would like it a lot if the young generation could find inspiration in my work. Our country needs more doctors, especially from the disadvantaged community,” he once said.
“Look at me; it can happen!”
VERY stupid post Pretzel. I hope you were drunk as I was when I got back and posted at a similar time last night. One of the MAIN reasons that Africa is in so much trouble know is the slave trade and centuries of exploitations. And their problems have only been compounded by industrialized nations and the effect that a globalized economy has had on them.
[quote]rainjack wrote:
Professor X wrote:
No, in can be seen as much worse in some cases. Why blow a hole in your tractor, when you can kill its self esteem, wipe away the desire for improvement and destroy its dignity? You’re right, the body wasn’t destroyed in favor of destruction of the soul. Wake the fuck up, please.
You’re the one that made the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews and slavery connection. I said it was a bad analogy. No one has said a word about the emotional torture placed on the slaves - until now.
I can’t look at your ass and read your mind.
[/quote]
Your reasoning is so selective, would not the question of bieng better off include mental illness from abuse of slavery,Analogy: often children who are abuse also abuse… It can take several generations for a family to get rid of that craps repetitive nature.
Proving agricultural (and other) expertise - NOT MINDLESS PHYSICAL LABOR - was one of the primary reasons for slave imports in America:
[i]By all measures of productivity and competitiveness, China, India, Southeast Asia, and West Asia were far ahead of Europe. Could support far higher rate of population growth: 0.6 percent vs. 0.3 percent a year (compared to 1 percent annually after 1750). West Africa was largely on a par with Europe in 1500. Iron and gold producting expertise Building expertise. Achievements in mathematics, astronomy and medicine Extensive commercial networks. Economic and population growth rates, exports, domestic output
In mining, metallurgy, civil engineering, textile manufacture, glassmaking, ceramics, irrigation and drainage, transportation, chemicals Europe, the Americas, and Africa were comparable. . Similar rates of life expectancy. Biggest differences: application of machines to work, use of non human power, use of power driven devices, bulk transportation of goods by sea;[/i]
[url]http://discovery.coe.uh.edu/history/hisd/lecture_notes/lecture2.htm[/url]
From early on there was a close relationship between African slavery and rice cultivation. Planters buying slaves showed some preference for West Africans from the Gold Coast. In An Account on Life in the Carolinas in 1750, Johann Martin Bolzius claimed, “The best Negroes come from the Gold Coast in Africa, namely Gambia and Angolo.” In the 1730s, roughly 12 percent of South Carolina’s slaves were from the centers of rice-production (the Upper Guinea Coast, Senegambia, and the Windward Coast),
[url]http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/hs_es_rice.htm[/url]
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries enslaved African Americans in the Upper South mostly raised tobacco. In coastal South Carolina and Georgia, they harvested indigo for dye and grew rice, using agricultural expertise brought with them from Africa.
[url]http://www.cr.nps.gov/delta/underground/slave.htm[/url]
This destroys your argument of selective breeding by slave ownders for physically superior “stock”:
The slave-master relationship was intense and unstable. Slaves strove mightily to improve their conditions, sometimes by running away or striking back at hated individuals but more often by focusing on their families, friends, and churches. Although slaves were able to secure a measure of social autonomy in their quarters, that autonomy was severely limited by the masters’ pervasive interference in their lives. Owners held Bible readings, nursed the sick, provided material conditions that were relatively high by international standards, and prided themselves on caring for their “people.” But they (and their overseers) subjected the slaves to countless arbitrary regulations, resorted frequently to the lash, took sexual liberties with slave women, separated family members more often than they admitted, and strove to keep their human property in a state of complete dependence.
[url]http://college.hmco.com/history/readerscomp/rcah/html/ah_079301_itheinstitut.htm[/url]
Now, YOU show ME proof that slective breeding was done to make “better” slaves?
[quote]rainjack wrote:
No - you are wrong. Slaves weren’t mass murdered. Why would a farmer go out and blow a hole in his tractor? The assumptions you make about the viciousness of slave owners being as ruthless (and whites) as the Nazis is not even worthy of responding to. [/quote]
Wake up. Guess what-plantation owners had a shitload of money, and a new ‘tractor’ was realtively cheap. No, slaves were not mass murdered. But if one was causing ‘problems’, don’t think that they weren’t junked and a new one purchased. History proves you wrong. There were plenty of slaves that were killed. Not to mention the mistreatment they received while in slavery.
Who cares if it’s not on the mass scale of the Holocaust? Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, and doesn’t mean it wasn’t wrong. This doesn’t speak to whether the DESCENEDENTS are better off today. But that has already been addressed. African immigrants could have come here, and we don’t know what kind of place Africa would be today without the slave trade and European and American exploitation and interference.
[quote]rainjack wrote:
Are you willing to throw the black plantation owners who also owned their share of black slaves into the guilty pile as well? I mean they owned slaves too.
How about the tribal warfare that took place in Africa the resulted in the losers being sold off to slave traders by fellow africans? Is there any room for them in the guilty pile? What about the tribes that took other tribes as slaves for themselves? I don’t hear anyone running the evil Africans down for propegating the slave trade.
Everyone in the chain shares guilt. Don’t reserve it all for Southern White property owners. That might be considered racist. [/quote]
Well, you should listen up. Yes-there is room for them in the guilty pile. Multiple wrongs don’t make a right. The atrocities in Africa don’t excuse what happened here at the same time in a ‘so-called’ advanced and civilized country.
Come on where do you get that athletic bias from? Read the book the Race Myth if it isnt above your comic book mentality. Secondly, most all african americans today descendent from slaves have white blood in them because the owners enjoyed the pleasure of increasing the number of slaves. The fairer the skin the better price they fetched.
[quote]rainjack wrote:
Panther1015 wrote:
That should say they were NOT brought here just because they’re cheap “tracktors”.
Slaves were bred like stock animals to produce the biggest, strongest, and most efficient farm labor possible. If it makes you feel better to think that blacks were enslaved for their cerebral capacity, go right ahead. But youare believing a crock of shit.
[/quote]
Well, you are right. That is the reason why the slave trade began and why they were ‘bred’. BUT a supposed inferior cerebral capacity and a lower rung on the evolutionary ladder was used to JUSTIFY slavery for hundreds of years.
rainjack, if you were keeping up with this post you would have seen that I already mentioned the tribal warfare and selling their own to the slave traders.
[quote]drag0n252pi wrote:
rainjack, if you were keeping up with this post you would have seen that I already mentioned the tribal warfare and selling their own to the slave traders.[/quote]
A fact which his perverted logic seems to think justifies validating slavery in this country or anywhere for that matter.
[quote]rancho wrote:
Your reasoning is so selective, would not the question of bieng better off include mental illness from abuse of slavery,Analogy: often children who are abuse also abuse… It can take several generations for a family to get rid of that craps repetitive nature.[/quote]
You’ve totally missed what I was saying. The original question on this thread was are blacks better off here because of slavery, or in Africa having never been captured and sold by their fellow countrymen? I am paraphrasing, but that is the question as I understood it.
The questiopn was never asddressed. It was met with charges of racism and other disparaging remarks. Regardless of the intent of the original poster, I thought it was at the very least a question worthy of discussion.
ProfX compared the treatment of slaves to that of the Holocaust, and I disagreed. Slaves weren’t brought over here to be killed. They were brought over because they were cheap LABOR.
Then he comes back and says that I need to wake up because I didn’t connect the dots from racial extermination and emotional abuse.
You guys are under the horrible misunderstanding that I agree that blacks are better off now. Show me where I said that. Show me where I have ever supported slavery. You can’t. But that’s not what this debate was about.
As for the tangent that began because I said that slaves were tractors - it serves no purpose.
I think it is very sad that all of you are heaping all the blame for the plight of the black man on SOuthern white folk when blacks themselves had as much to do with the slave trade as white southerners.