Read more >> ... including the author's well-documented response to know-nothing attempts to 'rebut' these facts.The currently approved conceptual framework for American race relations dictates that whites—all of them, simply by dint of being white—are oppressors. Any deviation from this rigid script, no matter how deeply rooted in fact, must be immediately annihilated like a blood-engorged tick.
We are taught that black academic and financial underperformance—as well as black over-performance in crime—are the direct result of slavery’s horrid legacy. There are to be no other possible explanations. To note the hugely embarrassing fact that American blacks live far longer and under vastly superior economic conditions in America than they do in any majority-black nation on Earth may be factual, but it is RACIST because it undermines the ironclad Guilt Narrative that must never be questioned.
Here are some facts that The Script demands you ignore:
- Even at the peak of American slavery, only a tiny percentage of American whites—about 1.5%—owned slaves.
- Leading up to the Civil War, a vastly higher quotient of whites had worked as indentured servants and convict laborers than had ever owned slaves. Most historians, regardless of their political orientation, agree that anywhere from half to two-thirds of whites who came to the American colonies arrived in bondage. The fact that the vast majority of whites existed in a state closer to slavery than to slave ownership is something resolutely ignored in the modern retelling of history.
- Documents from the era show that so-called white “indentured servants” were often referred to as “slaves” rather than “servants.”
- These “servants” did not always enter into voluntary contracts. There is overwhelming evidence that many of them were kidnapped by organized criminal rings and sent to work on American plantations. It is possible that as many, if not more, whites than blacks were brought involuntarily to the colonies.
- The middle-passage death rates for these “servants” were comparable to that of blacks on slave ships from Africa to the New World.
- Indentured servants were whipped and beaten, sometimes to death. When they escaped, ads were placed for their capture.
- They lived under conditions so brutal that an estimated half of them died before their seven-year term of indenture expired.
[Hat tip to L.S.]
What you and the author are leaving out, PP, is the fact that black slaves were systematically DEHUMANIZED. No one with any historical sense would deny that ALL workers are mistreated by their capitalist masters. But the so-called white ones (race is actually a biological fiction) were left with their humanity intact; they were not regarded as subhuman. But that is EXACTLY what epithets like the n-word were and are intended to signify about blacks- that they belonged to a lower species, that they are, as I've heard racists put it, 'animals.' Ditto Jim Crow laws designed to segregate the 'races': rich southern whites apparently had no problem with drinking from the same fountain as their poor 'white brethren,' it was blacks- rich and poor, with whom they refused to have such contact. Racism is about more than exploitation and oppression. There are psychological aspects to it as well, nasty little things like arrogance and hatred, which survive in the warped minds of today's racists, yet poisoning American race relations. (See Sartre's 'Anti-Semite and Jew': http://abahlali.org/files/Jean-Paul_Sartre_Anti-Semite_and_Jew_An_Exploration_of_the_Etiology_of_Hate__1995.pdf) Witness the fool Trump's popularity. Or closer to home: http://www.redfordarchives.org/Observer/2003/2003-07-03-004.pdf#xml=http://www.redfordarchives.org/dtsearch.asp?cmd=pdfhits&DocId=121541&Index=C%3a\inetpub\wwwroot\Observer\idx\Test&HitCount=2&hits=653+654+&hc=18&req=brian+galdes RFGA, Ph.D.
ReplyDeleteThe 1860 census revealed that there were more negro slaves in the north than were in states that later formed the CSA.
ReplyDeleteAnd so what did the liberal abolitionists in the north do? They agitated for the liberation of the negro slaves in the south while they profited from the sale of products produced by their white slaves in the factories of the north because calvinism.
Were there any proposals by the northern calvinists to liberate their white slaves in the north by monetarily compensating the owners of those white slaves?
PUhleeze....
I have much experience. I sent a tough black ghetto girl to Catholic school for three years, tutored her nightly, took her and two daughters of a drug dealer to Mass each week in a murderous area, after college did one year of welfare work in Brownsville (hyper dangerous area of NYC), and several years ago jumped a black criminal and fought him on the street after he broke into my house. My belief...continued non vowed sex by roaming black ghetto men means little Biblical structure to sons' consciences. Even in Freudian terms...fathers produce the superego...not moms. OT...." the severity of a man is better than a woman's indulgence". Yes ghetto moms can be strict...but most are strict when their will is countered not when God's will is countered. The latter is a man's job.
ReplyDeleteWhites no longer have much imput into black ghetto sins. Put Tommy Sotomayor or "TNN news" in youtube search. He is a tough black man who villifies black ghetto culture too far ...but you will deguilt from him if you have such guilt. He believes ghetto blacks now are fully responsible for the chaos in their areas. He will be shot one day...not if....when.
What the author and I are leaving out, R.A., are the well-known and sometimes seemingly 'celebrated' facts about how blacks were systemically dehumanized by whites. That's left out here, because that's not the topic of this post, which is what is left out by the familiar mainstream narrative. Namely, things are not entirely black-and-white: the word "slave" comes from the 'Slavs' who were once dehumanized as the blacks were in our own modern history. There were white slaves in our own country. There were black slave owners in our country (look it up). And the egregiously over inflated figures on black lives lost in the 'middle passage' of the slave trade come from misapplications of equally over-inflated figures about Indian lives lost by the well-meaning Dominican friar, Bartolomé de las Casas (c. 1484 – 18 July 1566). (I have a lot more on this, but no time here to go into detail.) Whatever is true needs to be known.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteDear Dr. Allen When The One True Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church condemned the exaltation of race, it was condemning a fiction?
MIT BRENNENDER SORGE
8. Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community - however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things - whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.
Dear Dr. Allen . The kidnapping of whites and then selling them into slavery was not dehumanising?
ReplyDeleteThe idea that negroes suffered worse degradation than other races (well, except for the jewish race) is itself a form of racism
A quick search on google reveals all manner of incendiary facts which have blowed-up the narrative and no modern-day Humpty Dumpty can reassemble it, although modern H.D's will fight tooth and nail against them
ReplyDeletehttps://violenceagainstwhites.wordpress.com/white-slaves/
ABS doesn't want to get very far into the captious question of - does race egis? - other than to note that science says yes -
ReplyDeleteAre there differences in the research concentrations of these two groups of experts? Yes, most decidedly there are. As pointed out in a recent 2000 edition of a popular physical anthropology textbook, forensic anthropologists (those who do skeletal identification for law-enforcement agencies) are overwhelmingly in support of the idea of the basic biological reality of human races, and yet those who work with blood-group data, for instance, tend to reject the biological reality of racial categories.
I happen to be one of those very few forensic physical anthropologists who actually does research on the particular traits used today in forensic racial identification (i.e., "assessing ancestry," as it is generally termed today). Partly this is because for more than a decade now U.S. national and regional forensic anthropology organizations have deemed it necessary to quantitatively test both traditional and new methods for accuracy in legal cases. I volunteered for this task of testing methods and developing new methods in the late 1980s. What have I found? Where do I now stand in the "great race debate?" Can I see truth on one side or the other—or on both sides—in this argument?
Bones don't lie
First, I have found that forensic anthropologists attain a high degree of accuracy in determining geographic racial affinities (white, black, American Indian, etc.) by utilizing both new and traditional methods of bone analysis. Many well-conducted studies were reported in the late 1980s and 1990s that test methods objectively for percentage of correct placement. Numerous individual methods involving midfacial measurements, femur traits, and so on are over 80 percent accurate alone, and in combination produce very high levels of accuracy. No forensic anthropologist would make a racial assessment based upon just one of these methods, but in combination they can make very reliable assessments, just as in determining sex or age. In other words, multiple criteria are the key to success in all of these determinations.
But what is interesting to ABS is the recent taboo about race amongst some of those in the academy who are at liberty to advance or oppose innumerable other things but if one does not deny race exists, he is immediately suspect of atavistic inclinations
I'm familiar with the idea that 'race' is a 'fiction', a social 'construct.' Yet we all remember checking lists in which people were asked to identify their race: 'hispanic', 'negro' (or 'black'), 'native American,' 'Arab,' 'caucasian', etc.
ReplyDeleteMy answer to the question, "Is 'race' a fiction?" would be: "Yes, and no. It depends what you mean."
I would compare it to the concept of 'matter' in physics. Once physics moved beyond the strictly empirical and began probing mathematical models of physical reality, it came up with all sorts of empiricschematic images for aspects of that reality inaccessible to our five senses, like the Niels Bohr quantized model of the atom. Do atoms exist? Well, yes and no. Not in the sense thought by Democrates, who coined the term, which comes from two Greek parts of speech: 'a' (which negates what follows it, as in 'a-moral'), and 'tom' (which means 'cut', as in 'lobotomy,' 'tonsillectomy,' or 'appendectomy'), which was meant to refer to the 'uncuttable,' indivisible, individual building blocks or all material reality.
When asked what 'atoms' were, modern physicists used the Bohr-Rutherford models of the atom to show that the 'atom' indeed has divisible parts -- electrons, protons, and neutrons -- and suggested that if the nucleus of an atom were the size of a basketball, the eletrons would be over a mile away, and thereby concluded that most of what we commonly take for 'solids' in our naive pre-theoretical experience is nothing but 'empty space.'
This view that 'reality' is something quite 'other' than we experience in our naive pre-theoretical perception of the world was reinforced when modern mathematical physicists began further developing empiriometric models of sub-atomic structures, like the supposedly six varieties of 'quarks' that exist on a sub-atomic level. The trouble was that there was nothing empirioschematic about these models, since 'quarks' can only be mathematically quantified but not empirically observed. In fact, it's impossible even to specify their 'nature.'
Bertrand Russell already anticipated this quandary in the the 20th century when he responded to questions about the reality of 'matter' with the humorous assertion: "What is matter? Never mind. What is mind? No matter."
So, is 'matter' real? Why of course. In our everyday experience we confront it all the time: solid oak, steel, rock, etc. We open doors rather than trying to walk through walls, because walls are solid. We avoid crossing railroads tracks in front of speeding trains. We avoid crossing roads in front of speeding Mack Trucks. We know matter is real.
Does this mean physicists are wrong in suggesting that most of what we consider 'matter' is empty space? Well, again, it depends. If they intend to denigrate and deny the reality of 'matter' in our everyday experience, they're obviously and hypocritically wrong, since they themselves treat 'matter' as 'solid' too. But if they mean that in their empiricoschematic models of nature that what appears as a 'solid matter' can be further broken down into sub-molecular and sub-atomic quanta, then of course they are right.
The error of mathematical physicists, however, is to suppose that their empiricoschematic models can serve as a substitute for reality itself. It can't. Insofar as these models are themselves still tied to empirical perceptions in the perceived world, they can be taken as modeling nature; but insofar as they are several steps removed from empirical perceptions, they themselves become mathematical 'fictions' rather than what Richard Rorty called "mirrors of nature."
Dear Doc. You are a real treasure and ABS learned more from this one response than he did in his philosophy courses.
ReplyDeleteRace and ethnicism are about differences. They elevate the obvious differences among men to a level of abstraction. There are winners and losers in such an exercise, and it all depends on who is doing the abstracting. Politics.
ReplyDeleteThe strategy of the losers in our democracy has been to deny that differences exist in certain venues, and that in other venues they not only exist, but are to be celebrated and treasured. Politics.
There is always the alternative of avoiding abstractions altogether, but that is only possible if men have no interest in exploiting one another. Men have every interest in exploiting one another. Politics.
I know exactly what the topic of your post is, PP, and I am saying that it is irrelevant to the LARGER topic of race relations in America. Like I said, okay, lots of whites were mistreated in this rotten country too- so what? Lots of 'mainstream' commentators overlook that fact- again, so what? Plenty of blacks aren't aware of it- one last time, who cares? Your whole post is, thus, just one big fat red herring. What you should be focusing on instead is the REASON blacks would offer for their suspicion of whites, even when it comes to interpersonal relationships, which would have nothing to do with economic injustice. That reason, as I indicated, is the systematic dehumanization of blacks in this (again) rotten country, a fact distinguishing them from all the other exploited racial/ethnic groups you mention. (And, no, the exploiters of whites brutalized them, but, as I said, never attempted to justify it by declaring them to be of lower species.) Blacks have a darn good reason for mistrusting whites, as it is common knowledge that many of them either persist in the use of the dehumanizing n-word (and other racial epithets and/or not so clever code words like 'them' or 'those people') or countenance its usage by their friends and relatives, not to mention simply REFUSE to live anywhere near blacks. (I've lived in and around Detroit all my life, which is as segregated as it gets, and watched white flight with my own 2 eyes and heard all the stupid, ugly excuses for it with my own 2 ears.) LBJ, for heaven's sake, was caught using the n-word by Roger Wilkins (see Eyes on the Prize, segment on civil unrest in Detroit). As for the ontological status of race, it is not a natural kind because it explains nothing, unlike, say, feline or human being. Atoms, on the other hand, still play an explanatory role in physics, even though they turned out to be 'swiss-cheesy'. RFGA, Ph.D.
ReplyDeleteProfessor Dr. Robert Allen,
ReplyDeleteExcellent. Then I'll let you have the last word. Accordingly, I invite you to submit a guest essay on my blog setting forth the views you think I should have expressed. It will give us all an opportunity to learn from the best. Please send it to me at phblosser[at]gmail[dot]com with "GUEST ESSAY" in the subject line.
Thanks,
PP