249 thoughts on “Pixel Scroll 6/23/16 Where The Scrolls Have No Name”

1. The Roads Must Scroll
   Gonna Scroll the Bones

   I’m sure those have been seen already and I forgot.

   Current read is The Magicians, and yasss magical college give me all the details on classes and curriculum plz! *grabby hands* Also Lev Grossman turns a glorious phrase.

   (I am often vaguely disappointed by books and stories that make me think they are going to give me details about school or training and then tell a totally different story instead.)

2. @Bartimaeus: Thanks for the heads-up.

3. I had my ‘WTF, Texas?!?’ moment last year. I was in Austin on business and walked past the state capitol every morning the week I was there. On the lawn there’s a memorial to the Confederate War Dead inscribed:

   DIED FOR STATE RIGHTS GUARANTEED UNDER THE CONSTITUTION. THE PEOPLE OF THE SOUTH ANIMATED BY THE SPIRIT OF 1776, TO PRESERVE THEIR RIGHTS WITHDREW FROM THE FEDERAL COMPACT IN 1861. THE NORTH RESORTED TO COERCION. THE SOUTH AGAINST OVERWHELMING NUMBERS AND RESOURCES, FOUGHT UNTIL EXHAUSTED. DURING THE WAR THERE WERE TWENTY TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY SEVEN ENGAGEMENTS. IN EIGHTEEN HUNDRED AND EIGHTY TWO OF THESE, AT LEAST ONE REGIMENT TOOK PART. NUMBER OF MEN ENLISTED: CONFEDERATE ARMIES 800,000; FEDERAL ARMS 2,859.132. LOSSES FROM ALL CAUSES: CONFEDERATE 437,000; FEDERAL 485,216.

   I know it was built in the early 1900’s but to retain it on the grounds of the capitol today? It still astounds me.

4. @Stoic. I saw a Confederate memorial on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol last spring when I visited a friend living down in Little Rock. Yeah, I was gobsmacked.

5. I saw a Confederate memorial on the grounds of the Arkansas State Capitol last spring when I visited a friend living down in Little Rock. Yeah, I was gobsmacked.

   The US Civil War was about conflicting economic systems. The issue of slavery was involved, but not all of the impetus for the war. For this reason, assuming Civil War memorials and Confederate flags are always an expression of racism is simplistic.

6. The issue of slavery was involved, but not all of the impetus for the war.
   All the declarations of secession made it clear that it was because of slavery, frequently while using euphemisms for it.

7. Every secession resolution, every Confederate state constit union, the Confederate States of America constitution, all were quite direct and clear about the fact that secession was about slavery. And “conflicting economic systems” is just a euphemism for “it was about slavery.” Slavery was the economic system they were in conflict about.

8. @Lela E. Buis

   That’s disingenuous at best. The South had wedded it’s agrarian economy so strongly to slavery that any thought of losing slave labor had them crapping their pants. The whole controversy over Lincoln’s election was about what he might do about slavery and it’s impact to the South. You can argue economies but what was the driving factor if not slavery?

9. Hi gang! I’ve been distracted by other things for a while, so here are some book reports:

   “Company Town”, by Madeline Ashby, has many areas of overlap with Alex Rakunas’ “Windswept”, which I read a couple of weeks ago. Kickass heroine, working for a union, gets involved in high-stakes violence/crime/mystery involving a powerful corporation. Punches are thrown, mayhew involves movie physics more than real physics. And there’s a dubious, good-looking guy.

   Unfortunately for Ashby, her novel suffers from this comparison. The plot is too complicated toward the end, when a whole extra layer of machinations gets introduced and I lost track of character’s motivations. I admit, I was also dissatisfied with the ending because I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with a *lot* of books, because they have characters who’ve inherited wealth & position and are also exceptionally charismatic, intelligent, or talented. What is with this yearning for aristocracy? Any time you want to put in a “rightful king” who has inherited some kind of ability for leadership or command, I invite you to contemplate: Prince Charles.

   Anyway, I then went and bought “Like a Boss”, the second of Rakunas’ “Windswept” books, and enjoyed it just fine. It’s full of the atmosphere any good noir should have — though in this case it’s tropical noir, which means the food is much better. And it’s almost got me craving rum, which I don’t really like the taste of and which ends in a scalp-wrenching hangover.

   I’m not quite sure I bought the overall plot, really. I guess Rakunas ran into another thing that’s been bugging me in general: too many plots that involve The Bad Guy being motivated by essentially personal issues. Especially Revenge. I am so *sick* of Revenge as a motivator, whether for Bad Guys or “Good Guys” (moral protip: revenge is never a Good motive).

   One thing about the Windswept books that is never explained: it seems as though most of the characters, include many (most?) of the ones who beat people up professionally, are women. This bugged Mr Dr because it’s never explained. I didn’t notice until he pointed it out to me, and I suspect Rakunas is doing it as a kind of meta joke: to flip the kind of sff stories (we’ve all read *so* many of them) where almost all the characters “just happen” to be men.

   Meanwhile, Mr Dr Science just finished “Dark Run” by Mike Brooks. It’s basically Firefly fanfic, except he reports that the captain is supposed to be nuanced and morally ambiguous, is actually an asshole. Why characters are talking in fake-Western accents is never clear, either. I’m not reading it, I’ve got too much Hugo reading to do.

10. An excellent book brought to mind by the discussion:

    Raising Holy Hell by Bruce Olds –

    https://www.amazon.com/Raising-Holy-Hell-Bruce-Olds/dp/0312420935/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1466824028&sr=8-1

    A biographical novel about John Brown (of Harper’s Ferry fame). It uses a lot of experimental techniques and shifts between multiple point of views, poetry, newspaper articles, essay, etc. In some ways it never fully pulls off what I think it’s trying for but is still a worthwhile read despite the flaws. Brown himself was a fascinating but flawed man so in some ways the failings of the book mirror its subject. Highly recommended.

11. @Mike Glyer:

    The characters and their developing relationships were one of the pluses of The Fifth Season to me. If there’s any hope, though, the author is holding it back for a later volume…

    … or the Disney adaptation… I hear they are pretty good at portraying characters who can harness elemental powers to freeze large regions of land in a sympathetic light.

12. @Tasha Turner:

    The Fifth Season was a difficult read for me. Jemisin is a brilliant writer but her books are brutal

    In addition to the relentless grimness of the book, I found the writing quite difficult to get into. It took me a while to sort out the connections between the various narrative threads (one of them in second person narrative, although that ends up making some sense), and in combination with the downbeat mood, it took a while for me to enjoy the reading.

13. Ah, the old canard that the “War of Northern Aggression” (I have had students who call it that) wasn’t really about slavery.

    Of course, a cursory look at the primary documents shoots that racist bullshit out of the sky:

    Primary Documents: The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States
    Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia).

    The word ‘slavery’ appears 38 times.

    We just saw _The Free State of Jones_ tonight (were surprised to see it in our local theatre), so I have to point to the second paragraph of Mississippi’s declaration:

    Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery– the greatest material interest of the world. Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of commerce of the earth. These products are peculiar to the climate verging on the tropical regions, and by an imperious law of nature, none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun. These products have become necessities of the world, and a blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization. That blow has been long aimed at the institution, and was at the point of reaching its consummation. There was no choice left us but submission to the mandates of abolition, or a dissolution of the Union, whose principles had been subverted to work out our ruin. That we do not overstate the dangers to our institution, a reference to a few facts will sufficiently prove.

    ETA: Just got this book after reading this review: White Rage.

14. As someone who’s lived in the south for most of my life, there’s nothing that makes me want to start slamming my head into a wall more than the states’ rights argument. Unless it’s Stage II of the argument, which is when the neo-Confederate starts in about how northerners were bigots, too, so it wasn’t really about slavery, so there. And we get this same damned argument every time someone wants to remove one more insult to our less-than-lily-white fellow citizens. Every single time. The thing I hate most about this election year is that it has galvinized all those morons into crawling out from under their rocks. Brexit has just been one more enormous encouragement to them. Leaving to find another wall to bang my head against…

15. Thanks to everyone for their feedback on the Jemisin. I think I’ll try reading it instead of listening. Less time to be immersed in grimness and brutality.

16. robinareid: Great quotes about the secession — thanks for them.

17. @microtherion: I found that there was one moment reading The Fifth Season where the connections between narratives became clear in a moment of blinding revelation. I’m pretty sure that’s what Jemisin intended, and thought it was a pretty cool effect.

18. On rec.arts.sf.written about five years back, the bit about states’ rights and “principles” came up, and Kip W. got off a good one:

    Okay, it wasn’t “only” about slavery. It was about the right of states to have slaves, and the right of the citizens to have slaves, and of the right to oblige other states to honor their right to have slaves, and other important principles about slaves.

19. David Goldfarb: I found that there was one moment reading The Fifth Season where the connections between narratives became clear in a moment of blinding revelation. I’m pretty sure that’s what Jemisin intended, and thought it was a pretty cool effect.

    I got there on my own about halfway through the book. I don’t know, I liked the novel well enough, but whatever everyone else is raving about just didn’t do that for me. 😐

20. @lela
    Even if I bought “The Civil War wasn’t about slavery” argument (and I *don’t*, it was totally about keeping slavery), the concept that you would have a memorial to the soldiers who participated in a failed attempt at rebellion and secession…yeah, I felt in seeing that that this Yankee was definitely in Terra Incognita.

21. David Goldfarb
    Great research chops, there.

    Cathy and I lived in Georgia for a couple of years. Then we lived in Texas a couple years. Then Virginia for twenty years. When we went house-hunting in Massachusetts, we got to the town where her job was. As we passed through the town square, I couldn’t help pointing out: “Look, honey! It’s a statue of a Civil War soldier. FROM THE NORTH!”

22. @microtherion
    Enjoying Jemisin’s books is beyond me. Admire how she writes? Yes. Think about the large number of issues she’s brought up? Oh yes. See the brilliance in how she makes me feel and care and hurt while reading? You bet. Needs lots of self care during and afterwards? Yep, tons. But enjoying books with slavery, rape, torture, murder, suicide, incest, with little good seen in people? No, that is way beyond me even when I know they have a point or point back to real slavery and colonialism.

    @robinareid Of course, a cursory look at the primary documents shoots that racist bullshit out of the sky: Primary Documents: The Declaration of Causes of Seceding States: Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia).
    The word ‘slavery’ appears 38 times.

    Thanks for the link. If only we’d done a better job after the civil war of truly freeing black people. #EqualityForEveryone

    @David Goldfarb
    Kip W does have a way with words. Thanks for digging up his old quote.

23. @Another Laura: Unless it’s Stage II of the argument, which is when the neo-Confederate starts in about how northerners were bigots, too, so it wasn’t really about slavery, so there.

    And THEN, there’s the “slaves were treated better than northern faculty workers” stage III argument which comes, followed quickly by the “and a black woman took care of our house when I was a kid and we thought of her just like family.”

    As a northerner (but not technically a Yankee since Idaho wasn’t exactly a state at the time) teaching in Texas, and teaching the multicultural courses, I was VERY careful to emphasize how racism (different structures and practices) existed in the northern states (because “we freed the slaves we can’t be racist” is also bullshit), but yeah, I’ve heard all the arguments.

    And have had three students CHOOSE to tell me (albeit in office hours not in class) that they were or their family members were in the present tense members of the KKK.

    There are still small towns around Commerce (which is all of 7800 people, so by small Imean 500-1000) which are de facto sundown towns to this day.

24. @Tasha: While I adore Jemison’s work, I have the same sort of feelings you do about Jemison, only about Charnas’ work–I now have to think about why I have the different responses. (And I can only read Tiptree sometimes).

    But I admire the way you are able to distinguish between the quality of the works and your personal responses/reactions!

25. >That’s disingenuous at best. The South had wedded it’s agrarian economy so strongly to slavery that any thought of losing slave labor had them crapping their pants. The whole controversy over Lincoln’s election was about what he might do about slavery and it’s impact to the South. You can argue economies but what was the driving factor if not slavery?

    You’ve located the heart of the issue here, which is how to make farming profitable. Because of the longer growing season, money crops like cotton, sugar cane and tobacco were established in the South, while the North relied more on an industrial economy. But farming is always a “perfect competition” which means the more you farm, the less money you make. The way to make it generate wealth, or actually to make it sustainable in any way, is to reduce the labor costs. Slavery was one way to do that. Mechanization is another way. Undocumented workers is another.

    When Northern politicians tried to push emancipation and a new wage-based economy on the Southern states, it was clearly set to destroy the established social and economic system. When the change was forced by way of the war, then it did destroy the Southern farming industry, which really never did recover. Note that most US farming now takes place in the mid-West, in California and Florida, and that it relies heavily on automation or on migrant workers. Like most wars, this one was about wealth and capital.

    Some sort of phased change might have worked, but the the idea of declaring the plantation owners’ investment in their business capital (slaves) suddenly illegal without providing any other way to make the businesses profitable amounted pretty much to dictatorship. The Southern states responded with succession in order to protect their economic interests.

    So, slavery was at the heart of the war, but the issue was mainly labor costs, and not whether some people had a right to enslave others. If there had been an alternative labor source, then Southerners would likely have been as willing as Northerners to give up their slaves; however, there wasn’t. This same battle continues on other fronts, such as the current opposition to use of undocumented migrants as farm workers. When the damage became clear, the government instituted price controls to artificially support farming. Tobacco was supported until about 2000, when it pretty much moved to Africa and Asia.

    The underlying question no one is looking at is whether we want to continue with large-scale farming in the US. It’s generally considered to be in a country’s economic interest to have sustainable food production within its own borders, but on the other hand, being dependent on other countries (say Mexico) to produce food for you can make you a better neighbor.

26. There are still small towns around Commerce (which is all of 7800 people, so by small I mean 500-1000) which are de facto sundown towns to this day.

    The town in the part of west Texas where I lived has about 25000, maybe a little more. Many of the black families live in a named area just outside the city limits. It isn’t listed as a ‘sundown town’, but all the clues are there.

27. It isn’t listed as a ‘sundown town’, but all the clues are there.

    South Side, Chicago? Black Bottom, Detroit?

28. @Lela E. Buis: See, the thing is, to say that the war was “about wealth and capital,” you are, intentionally or not, smuggling in the dehumanization of the people the white Southern holders of power regarded as “capital” – the people the white Southern holders of power did not regard as ends in themselves. When you refer to the white Southern holders of power as “the South,” you are passing along, intentionally or not, an insistence that we regard a whole myriad of people who lived in the South – people who were enslaved there – as not properly constituents of the collective “the South” at all. And when you speak of the North attempting to impose a “wage economy” – meaning – pay people for their labor rather than extract it from them via the lash – you are once again, intentionally or not, casting things in a way to draw our gaze away from the human calamity.

    I can’t say why you’re doing this, but I can see what you’re doing perfectly well. It is no longer remotely as effective as it was even a generation ago.

29. @Lela E. Buis

    Except Lincoln was no firebrand abolitionist. Except the South fired the first shot when otherwise there was every chance of a negotiated separation. And allow me to direct you to the Cornerstone speech of the Confederate Vice President. You can find it in whole easily enough. Just a snippet:

    Our new government is founded upon exactly [this] idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. This, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.

30. Well it’s true northerners were bigots too. We weren’t actually freeing the slaves to give black men equal rights with white men. Not like they got the right to vote or loads of protection under the law when Lincoln freed them.

    Slavery is bad. How it was practiced in the USA was horrific. Slavery needed to be ended. It should never have been allowed. But we had no plan set up for integrating freedmen into society. We had no plans for how farming in slave states should survive the loss of their workers. Plans needed by both newly freed as well as plantations or whomever was going to take over farming. Initially Lincoln only freed slaves in the confederate states Not in the USA which has always left a bad taste in my mouth.

    But we still have a long way to go to make up for the way we’ve continued to allow various forms of unofficial slavery to continue since the Civil War ended. The way we’ve allowed chain gangs and forced prison labor and why we send proportionately more black men to jail. Why education, housing, loans, laws, etc. aren’t equally available or applied.

    So yes slavery was and is evil. The Civil War was about economics and slavery. But northerners weren’t all about equal rights, treatment, and protections for blacks in the eyes of this Yankee whose family fought in the Revolution. I wish the Civil War had been.

31. @Steve Simmons

    I agree with everything you say about Seveneves!

    Re slavery, the argument that I always heard as a kid was that it wasn’t as bad as portrayed in dramas. That since slaves were an investment, they were treated as well as dogs and horses. (As a child we didn’t know about the rape part). Well, even as a kid (think 12 not 7) I knew that was a false argument. Our dog was really spoiled but we decided when he would eat, what he would eat and how much. We decided when he was left alone to sleep. We decided what, if any, medical care he received and we had the legal right to have him humanely euthanized at any time for any reason. And, if our neighbors killed him, they were only responsible for replacing his monetary value. Tell me again how that’s not so bad?

    Most civil war memorials were built when there were still lots of people left around who had lived through the war and Reconstruction. One of my history professers told me that Lincoln’s murder guaranteed that the Congress would have no checks in its desire to punish the South. Lincoln apparently planned a much more pragmatic policy. There’s not a state where history is taught without political interference but I suspect it’s worse in the south. It’s one of the things that excites me about replacing textbooks with tablet computers. Texas can have their textbooks without evolution, climate change and ‘our glorious cause’ without all the other kids having to suffer for it.

32. Re fighting in the Civil War, my mother told me that her grandmother, when angry at grandfather, would bring up how her father had fought in the war but his father had paid someone to fight for him.

33. Because of the longer growing season, money crops like cotton, sugar cane and tobacco were established in the South, while the North relied more on an industrial economy.

    We think of the South as an agricultural powerhouse, but that is more because that is all it had rather than because it was outperforming the Northern states in that area. In 1860, the Northern states produced half of the nation’s corn, four-fifths of its wheat, and seven-eighths of its oats. In almost every area other than sugar, cotton, and tobacco, Northern farms outproduced their Southern counterparts. During the Civil War itself, the Union exported corn and wheat, because it had a surplus of agricultural production.

34. I can’t say why you’re doing this, but I can see what you’re doing perfectly well. It is no longer remotely as effective as it was even a generation ago.

    It’s an economic analysis, not sociological. Economics isn’t called the “dismal” science for nothing. It analyzes events and opportunities objectively based on supply, demand, resources and the flow of wealth.

    The economic advantages and disadvantages of slavery are fairly clear, and it clearly has strong attractions for a lot of people. You’ll notice that declaring it illegal hasn’t really stopped it. Typically unprotected immigrants are now targeted.

    Racism and the position of African Americans in US society has to take the legacy of slavery into account, but it’s a mistake to think this is somehow the only cause of the social and economic problems in the black community. It’s also a mistake to assume that symbols of Southern regionalism are all meant as demonstrations of racism. The conditions in Chicago and Detroit are more likely the results of structural racism and more worthy of your concern. African Americans in Southern states are noticeably better off, and the trend is for middle-class African Americans to migrate in that direction.

35. >But we had no plan set up for integrating freedmen into society. We had no plans for how farming in slave states should survive the loss of their workers.

    This is the worst legacy of slavery and caused the most of the damage. There’s still no good plan for either of these. Affirmative Action was an attempt in this direction, but it has yet to make a huge difference for African Americans.

    >But we still have a long way to go to make up for the way we’ve continued to allow various forms of unofficial slavery to continue since the Civil War ended. The way we’ve allowed chain gangs and forced prison labor and why we send proportionately more black men to jail.

    Hah. I’d missed this. My sister just pointed out the fact that the new local jail is already being expanded to take on more federal prisoners. Her observation is that the prisoners are free labor for the county that comes with a federal subsidy.

    I’m in the South and I’m not seeing a lot of black prisoners, but Hispanics are in the same boat as African Americans as far as prison sentences go. This is definitely a growth industry.

36. @Lela E. Boys

    Monuments designed to ennoble a cause fought for slavery are inherently racist. That a government would sponsor a monument to a cause dedicated to the brutal enslavement of some of its current citizens is unfathomable. It speaks to a mindset. While there is certainly much work to be done in reforming our society’s treatment of minorities, if you can’t acknowledge the wrongness of such monuments then your protests read as deflection.

37. >Monuments designed to ennoble a cause fought for slavery are inherently racist.

    But what does racism actually have to do with slavery? Historically, I’m just not seeing the connection. The Romans and Greeks had a slave economy that used white war captives. There were forms of forced servitude for whites in the early colonies. Native Americans kept white slaves. We’ve just pointed out that the most common forms of slavery these days are aimed at unprotected immigrants (often trafficed women and children) and prisoners who are used for unpaid/underpaid labor. Slavery is more about wealth and power than racism.

    I personally think it’s a waste of time to dwell on a social institution that ended over a hundred and fifty years ago, and try blame everything (including racism) on that legacy. The focus for social/political improvement should be on making better plans to reduce the structural problems for all low income people, for example, access to transportation and good jobs.

38. That since slaves were an investment, they were treated as well as dogs and horses. (As a child we didn’t know about the rape part).

    Currently there’s a lot of energy expended in complaining about the plight of black women in the early colonies and states, but not as much concern about the position of women in general. Women were considered the property of their husbands or fathers, and got the vote well after African American men. White women captives were also used to populate the early colonies. When not enough women volunteered, they were taken out of prisons and kidnapped off the streets and forced into passage to the Americas, basically for use as farm labor and breeding stock.

39. But what does racism actually have to do with slavery?

    Read robin’s quote from the Mississippi secession resolution again.
    And remember that historically, slaves in North America are not white; most of them were black. (Not all slave owners were white, either: the Choctaw had slaves right up to the Civil War.)

40. Lela E Buis I personally think it’s a waste of time to dwell on a social institution that ended over a hundred and fifty years ago, and try blame everything (including racism) on that legacy.

    Since we’ve been building on the legacy of slavery and it is what helped to build many of the systems we have today including the prison system to keep blacks down it’s safe to say it’s a good part of why we haven’t been able to shake our racist attitudes in the US. It’s easy for those not directly affected to not dwell on slavery, what it did, what it continues to do, it’s a good way to keep your bias in place rather than to face unconscious biases which affect the way you think, talk, and behave when it comes to PoC.

    Yes we need to move forward to fix structural problems today. But one can’t figure out which steps to make if one ignores all the programs over the years starting with official slavery moving through all the unofficial slavery and industrial systems set up to keep blacks from being equal members in all ways of our society. One won’t know all the places to look for where they’ve been locked out if one ignores history and the transitions which led to today.

41. >Read robin’s quote from the Mississippi secession resolution again.

    This is an expression of the philosophy of colonialism, which was that all indigenous peoples were sub-human and that white Europeans were therefore entitled to treat them like animals. It led to the virtual extermination of numerous tribes of people in the Americas, in Africa and in Australia. This is likely one basis of racism, but slavery was one of the less destructive results. Widespread genocide was much more of a sociological problem.

    Again, the underlying motivation for this philosophy was about wealth and power.

42. Oh, excellent – I usually have to wait for AH.com to get my Confederate apologias…. Where to start? I see that the Filers, truly being one of the smartest comment sections on all of the Internet, have already tossed up a real Who’s Who of Southern elites, secession declarations, and other documents that lend to the idea that it was about slavery, because they said it was, repeatedly. I would only add that the Cornerstone Speech is too often only excerpted: it wasn’t just about slavery, it was also about the right of the elite to make decisions for the great mass of the people being another true and right form of government, in contrast to letting the rabble make a choice.

    Because the antebellum South was not a democracy in any sense of the word, even in the sense of the limited suffrage North. It was a aristocracy, where a group of large land holders put themselves and their place-men in positions of authority, where law enforcement, access to courts, and the ability to hold property happened at their say so. Turning into some Paul-ite alt-right libertarian utopia does a disservice to the actual history of the period.

    The monuments to various Confederates are monuments to traitors to the United States. End of sentence. They rose up against the government, in the name of slavery and in the name of an aristocratic system, and they were slapped down. This remains true no matter how much people will hide the ball, saying first it was economics… then colonialism… than the black community is author of enough of their own problems… ad infinitum.

43. >One won’t know all the places to look for where they’ve been locked out if one ignores history and the transitions which led to today.

    I agree that looking at history helps in analyzing the problem, but people aren’t doing that–they’re just pointing to slavery as the basis for all the resulting social/political/economic problems and not moving forward to propose solutions to the problems.

    One of the main efforts for integration of freedmen in the South after the Civil War was to take the plantations from whites and break them up into 40 acre plots that were awarded to the newly freed slaves. However, poor understanding of the economics meant these farmers were left in the same position as white farmers, working on a subsistence level with no way to expand using paid labor. The result was that blacks quickly gave up farming and flowed into Northern cities looking for paid work.

    This move meant they traded capitalist plantation owners for capitalist factory owners. Unions improved this for a while, but Northern city planning in the early 20th century exacerbated the problems for workers in low income neighborhoods, leaving people without transportation and access to jobs. This means that African Americans in large Northern cities tend to be concentrated into violent neighborhoods without opportunity. This isn’t caused by slavery, and maybe not even by racism. It’s caused by poor planning. The city planners were more interested in serving developers in the suburbs than in maintaining inner city neighborhoods.

    I agree that the colonial philosophy about race set in pretty heavily in parts of the US, and it still exists. However, I don’t see this as based in slavery, but in the wider philosophy about who’s superior and who’s inferior and who’s going to have all the wealth and power. The whole issue is actually about a set of power relations and not so much about the color of someone’s skin.

44. >The monuments to various Confederates are monuments to traitors to the United States. End of sentence. They rose up against the government, in the name of slavery and in the name of an aristocratic system, and they were slapped down.

    But from another point of view, these were successionists and patriots for the policy of states’ rights and for a traditional system that had been well-accepted in the colonial era. It is, of course, another case of people being blind-sided by a new paradigm. In this case they fought hard to maintain their way of life, but they lost. Social change marches on.

    We have been pointing out that emancipation could have been better managed. The government could have redeemed the slaves and had a plan for integrating them into society. They could have had a plan to deal with the loss of labor for Southern plantations. Instead, the heavy-handed efforts resulted in destruction of the social and economic system of the South that quickly spread to Northern cities.

    The government is still trying to shuffle the problem away without real plans. The current trend to gentrification clearly played out after the hurricane damage in New Orleans, for example, where city planners managed to deport poor black residents and raze hardly damaged low-income housing to replace it with upscale developments. All this was supported on the federal level.

45. @Lela E Buis The whole issue is actually about a set of power relations and not so much about the color of someone’s skin.

    Umm, wow. Done.

46. >The whole issue is actually about a set of power relations and not so much about the color of someone’s skin.

    Umm, wow. Done.

    Hey, money talks. If you’re not one of the 1%, then don’t expect the government to really care about your concerns.

47. I need to get a few other things done today, but before I leave I want to point out that getting stuck on the issue of racism tends to keep people from looking at the larger picture, which is the constant flow of wealth to that top 1%.

    This has increased exponentially in the last few decades, and it affects people regardless of race. It’s pretty alarming when you look at the effects. It’s damaging the middle class and pushing a lot more people into low income categories where they’re on the verge of falling into homelessness. It’s resulting in legislation that puts more of the disadvantaged in prison over petty infringements, or allows police to execute them immediately on any small pretext. There are some other alarming trends, too, but I’ll just leave it at that.

48. Lela, Massachusetts passed a law, before 1690, making slavery an inherited state. They weren’t talking about whites. Nor was it about the rich: you didn’t have to be wealthy to own one slave.

49. >Lela, Massachusetts passed a law, before 1690, making slavery an inherited state. They weren’t talking about whites. Nor was it about the rich: you didn’t have to be wealthy to own one slave.

    This is right in the heart of the colonial era, so of course the laws reflected the government policy of using African people as economic assets. It wasn’t until industrialization took over that the practice came into serious question. As the colonies expanded, white men got more rights while women, blacks, Asians and Native American’s didn’t. That’s about holding on to power.

50. The first time I saw an argument for how it’s all really about class,not race, i found it strongly persuasive. After all, there are poor people of all stripes…

    I’ve done some reading since, about gentrification, about who could get mortgages for which neighbourhoods, about cities NOT rebuilding black neighbourhoods when they got burned down, about systematic bias against certain names on identical resumes. I’ve watched the not-white people get tried in the office, or the customer service counter, where I worked for a bakery, then get given up on and quietly shuttled back to the factory because … well, it wasn’t becuase of their skill level. In the office, it was so there’d be plausible deniability, I think, but in the retail store, it was because customers and one worker explicitly complained about working with a black woman. I’ve read about migrant workers being misused, about Residential schools and systematic poverty in Reservations, about what the supposedly huge amounts of money poured in to First Nations communities are expected to pay for that are paid for by the government in other towns,(schools, community centres,) and what the hidden price tag is, about how my own city basically cut a reservation off from easy access to the rest of the country to build our city’s water supply, and left them on a 17-YEAR boil water advisory before finally, now, doing something about it.

    That’s not about class. None of that is, and many other things along the same lines are not. Class is important, but so is race, and most arguments about how it’;s really ALL about class, when you scratch them hard, translate to “Stop making me uncomfortable about racism.”

    There IS in fact a word for a philosophy that looks at the effects of classism without pretending racism isn’t also a thing – it’s intersectionalism. People who say it’s about classism want to erase intersectionalism.

Comments are closed.