The Black Lives Matter movement

Tangential to the current conversation and not directly related to the thread, but as good a place as any.

“Slavery, not all bad.”

#NotAllSlaveowners

I wonder if the textbook also says, “Jim Crow laws were bad, sure, but they were the laws. Some police officers were nice! Probably. Some black citizens were unhappy, as the Civil Rights movement attests, but many were content to change the legislature slowly, over generations.”

I don’t think it’d be controversial to state that no, not all slave owners were terrible and sadistic.

For one thing, if a slave is an asset, like a workhorse, you’d tend to want to take care of it.

It’s not even at odds with believing and maintaining that slavery as an institution is wrong.

And I daresay there were plenty of blacks complicit in the system. The Samuel L Jackson character in Django was pretty common.

I mean, devils advocate (don’t reply) but one could, if one wished to, make the case that labour in return for food, shelter, clothing and security wasn’t that bad a deal, especially considering the economic conditions post civil war, and the ensuing Jim crow laws, mass ghettoisation etc.

I mean most of us are wage slaves in the modern economy anyway.

From the outside looking in, America needs to have a serious sit down discussion about racism (naive I know.)

Let’s just be Roman about it.

You could make the argument that slavery wasn’t that bad if it was consensual, which it wasn’t, and if you were also okay with owning other humans like property. It’s not right, full stop, regardless of what the laws of the day were, or whether it was “better” by some metric that doesn’t involve basic humanity.

Well it was alright for thousands of years…

Anyway I’m not supporting slavery or racism. Quite the opposite.

I was pointing out that saying that some slave owners were quite humane doesn’t make the institution correct or acceptable.

On that, we agree. But some people, that textbook included, argue your devil’s advocate position sincerely and earnestly. And I think any time it is sincerely argued, it should be shot down mercilessly.

Our understanding of morality evolves.

Oh I don’t doubt that there are people who use that line of reasoning as an attack vector/lead in to argue some horrible stuff as being ok.

And for that we should remain vigilant.

I mean, I’m sure most of the guards at concentration camps were perfectly ordinary humans, and alot of the work done in the camps was done by Jewish prisoners themselves (the final scene in the film “The boy in the striped pyjamas” shows this perfectly well) but on no account should that be used to argue that the camps were in any way good or acceptable.

There’s a book (am on phone, won’t Google right now) that discusses the collective guilt of the German people concerning the Holocaust, the enablers (passive or not) who let it happen.

The sheer banality of how it happened is disturbing.

What’s even more disturbing is that if we’re being honest with ourselves, we would have done precisely the same things in the same circumstances.

Going back to the book quoted, I’m pretty sure that the history of slavery is taught in quite a binary, black and white manner (it is in the UK. It’s not taught at all that I recall in Kenya.) And that’s not good either.

But saying we should look at all sides of the story isn’t, or shouldn’t be, a lead in for whitewashing anything.

The problem with having it in a textbook for a young mind is that it plants the seed that slavery “was kinda ok for some people” when the absolute reality, full stop, is that slavery is NOT OK AT ALL.

You want to have a conversation about racism. You can’t start that conversation with everyone thinking that somehow being a slave might have been a great life!

Good point.

What should children be taught, and by whom (discuss in another thread maybe?)

What should children be taught wasn’t really a question until you had textbook makers that want to inject their religious beliefs and politics into curriculum. I have to say that the more I’ve seen on Qt3 of the education system in other places, PA is WAY more progressive than much of the country when it comes to what’s being used in schools. That’s what happens when you have a large legislature like we do, I guess? Some good things actually come from it, like education standards that are decent.

We all know that history is written by the winners, not the losers. That said, I think great history books can intimate the other side’s ideas without making them acceptable, especially in the case of slavery. Slavery = Bullshit is a pretty simple concept. This is why Trump’s Charlottesville comments were so broadly criticized and torn down, because there is no good side to Nazi rallying. None. Zip. Zilch. Nada. There is no equivocation. There is no place for that shit in a civilized world.

I’d need more information before I passed judgement on that book.

We’re seeing one incomplete paragraph in a longer section. The paragraph before it seems to be detailing the horrific conditions, and even the shown paragraph seems to be concluding by saying that the vast majority of slaves were unhappy and would rebel if given the chance.

I don’t have any problem with a history book saying that American chattel slavery was not the non-stop whippings and rape that are typically shown in modern media, because it wasn’t. I also don’t mind it for suggesting that certain slaves were not miserable; that’s non-verifiable but almost certainly true. Neither of those statements, if included in a detailed exploration of the subject, takes away from how fundamentally wrong the institution was in American history. Hell, even the new African-American History museum makes that point.

The biggest question for me is what is the age-group that’s being taught out of this text? If it’s second-graders, then that level of ambiguity is probably not appropriate and they should stick to “Slavery was terrible” and “Americans were the good guys in WWII”. If it’s intended for middle school or certainly high school, then the students really ought to be exploring the details of the subject.

It’s like saying, “hey, some people took awesome care of their property and their property didn’t mind at all”. Wonder how old that textbook is…

That’s a great statement. I think they need to make their employees go through those “implicit bias” tests where they time how quickly one picks out the “good” words* (happy, fun, joy vs. sad, boring, depression etc.) when you see a non-white face vs a white one, and maybe it would wake them up.

The “peculiar institution” differed from all other known slave-holding societies because it was founded on a novel construction of racial difference. If you look at the history of laws in Virigina regarding African-Americans, you can see it being constructed; it was not pre-existing. All relationships between the races were determined by the physical violence that whites were legally-entitled or de facto enabled to inflict on blacks; they could beat, murder or rape them with impunity. Any textbook that soft-pedals this is misleading, and clearly this textbook is misleading with a political agenda.

I think that lets the company off of its responsibility.

Let’s imagine what they could have done differently:

  • Have a recruitment process which weeds out racists
  • Train their staff that two guys sitting in a coffee shop isn’t a reason to call the police.
  • Have a rule book in place that allows calling the police on innocent customers is gross misconduct and is grounds for instant dismissal.

That may as useful as training their staff to sell more of their weak ass excuse for coffee.

But, as someone above hinted at, it does seem weird this happens in a major inner city (any major inner city) rather than at some suburban mall location.

I’d like to correct this assumption. This happens all the time; it just doesn’t make the news.

https://www.cnn.com/2018/04/16/opinions/philadelphia-starbucks-why-i-tweeted-the-video-depino-opnion/index.html

Things like this happen to black and brown people in this country every single day, and they talk about it, tweet about it, and write about it, but for more reasons than I can discuss intelligently in this small space, people who look like me – white people – often don’t see, hear or believe their stories. And what’s even worse is that it often takes a black or brown person experiencing this type of painful situation – and having it exposed it to the world – for many of us to even get involved, which in and of itself is part of the larger problem.

So many people don’t listen. It’s not comfortable to listen. It’s not easy to believe because it destroys this easy idea that indifference to racism, indifference to sexism and indifference to bigotry is somehow neutral when what it actually is is a support of the status quo which allows for and often encourages, racism, sexism and bigotry.

YMMV obviously but I don’t think I’ve ever heard of this happening in a UK Starbucks.