Learning from History

I was going to add this as a PPS to another thread. Then I thought, "no this is bigger than that thread".

A couple posters who I respect may not take kindly to bringing up this point in a new thread. However, this is honestly not any attempt to single them out but rather to address that many many people who feel the same way and therefore make the same argument. This is an argument, that I hope, will one day cease to be used.

the response to slavery and racism in the US if often... I don't want to say defended because I don't like how that sounds because I don't think either poster was trying to defend what happened, but I have often heard this response which is an attempt to deflect. My assumption is that people don't mean or intend to say that racism/slavery was ever okay. But for some reason people keep bringing up the fact that slavery existed outside the US.

And?

Listen to what you're saying. Does that change anything or make anything okay?

For many people on this site, slavery is a word in the dictionary because they have no direct experience with it. Same with racism. Racism is a word in the dictionary and they accept whatever the dictionary tells them it means. Again, this thread is not about calling anyone out or shaming anyone. The reason I believe the subject of race still haunts us is because we often try to ignore it while those who don't ignore it, racists, are using it to be as racist as they please while everyone else is busy pretending its not happening at all and if it is, it's just like being called names at school. So get over it and "be best".

Instead, what we need is an open line of communication; a two-way street on which to trade information and insight. What do black people think about racism? What do white people think about racism? This is not really THAT thread. I mean you're welcome to branch into other subjects. That's fine. The reason for this thread is just to discuss the framing and reliving of history.

While I can argue that slavery, the way it existed in the US, did NOT exist all over the world, this is not the thread for that. It doesn't matter. It is irrelevant. Again slavery is a word. Slavery in other parts of the world is often called "human trafficking" which is different from "indentured servitude" or 'debt based slavery'. These terms are often confused. Human trafficking, as the name implies, is illegal. Slavery in the US, on the other hand, was the law. If you can escape human trafficking you're free. If you escaped your plantation in Alabama and were caught by the police you would be brought back to the plantation where you might either be whipped or lose a foot. You didn't need both feet to pick cotton.

There are similarities between slavery and human trafficking. There is no morality in holding someone hostage against their free will and forcing them to work for you. It's universally wrong. This is sometimes compared to indentured servitude in which a person, who probably didn't have the means to support themselves, became a servant to a family or landowner. Either there was a past debt to work off or the payment for those years of labor would be paid after the service was complete. In the bible a good example of this is Jacob. He worked for 7 years to marry Rachel and then another 7 years to marry Rachel because he was tricked into marrying her sister first. And still, at the end he managed to go free with a lot of his uncle's cattle because he got to set terms that Laban had the choice to agree with.

Everyone didn't have jobs back then like they do now. Abraham was extremely wealthy and so his land and resources were like running a small corporation. He had hundreds of servants. But these weren't people pressed into slavery and kept in chains. And so most people made contracts to take some of the bosses wealth in exchange for their service. And once they were done they could buy their own land and have their own cattle. This was basically a retirement plan of sorts.

Once the Hebrews became a nation they adopted rules that were either murky or flat out wrong. How they treated strangers ("foreigners") wasn't equal and they could, for example, keep a man's wife as their servant until her contract was finished and he would have to leave. But if he wanted to stay with her they put an aul in his ear which marked him as a servant for life. However, this was still his choice. But like I said... murky. Because he could wait for her years of service to be complete and they could be together.

Where the Israelites crossed the line was in war.

People often have a romanticized view of war and its purpose. Wars have different purposes but there's nothing noble about going to war to expand your territory. When gangs fight rivals for their corners, this is a "hostile takeover" of a financial asset. However, no one honestly would think of it as "territory expansion" and excuse it as "conquest". Call it what it is. It's trying to take something that belongs (at least in their minds) to other people. When natives said "no one owns the land" what they meant is that they all live on the land collectively. It's not for sale. It wasn't something, in their minds, that could be owned. And their society was so different who could say that they really understood what this really meant? That ownership = control.

Fighting against that control... that's noble. Fighting to protect your friends and families from tyranny and oppression. That's noble. That's honorable. But when YOU become that tyranny and oppression then the fight loses all of its honor and nobility and you are just the tool for the rich landowners who sent you over there. If beating up a kid and taking his lunch money is wrong for an individual then the same thing is wrong for one group to do to another. The involvement of more people doesn't make it permissible in any way. It doesn't mean victims of sex trafficking who are forced to do it aren't victims because there's many people involved. Even if some of them choose to do it, they are responsible for their choice but not beyond the extent that they are exploited by others.

These forces form, often because of imbalances; imbalances that shift the balance of power from the hands of the many to the hands of a select few.

Those select few are usually those who seek power and wealth over the greater good of all.

In my view, Jedi have also was been protectors of balance, willing to fight against evil and oppression when they take root. To be a universal force for good, good and evil must have universal definitions. It's not just bad when its happening to you. And its not good just because it's good for you or works out to your benefit or advantage.

So why, in dealing with past evils, mistakes, and everything in between that have hurt and oppressed others, why is there a need to deflect; to say that the same thing happened over here or there or this time history or this other time in history? If it's wrong, it's wrong. Is it really so complicated?

its Hard to talk about racism for me because it’s such a blind hate to me that keeps being passed and passed and no one wants to do anything about it - so I decided to kill it once and for all in me and in my family.
Color isn’t a description for people. We stoped that flat cold. It changed things. We make it a point to teach random kindness in form of assisting the elderly - regardless of - race gender or anything like that -
This year we adopted the use of the terms “grandma and grandpa “ as a attempt to calm us and connect us one to another - in our immediate circle. I’ve watched the mental and upset from impatience go from ten. . . To genuine concern - real quote from the wife- “ grandma can’t see over the wheel - I hope she makes it home. “
I’m about erasing lines and taking stickers off any day, especially the ones that keep me - salty and grouchy. Racism keeps me salty and grouchy for days.
I guess that to each of us to figure for our selfs hu...

I’m effected by racism almost weekly.
Face to face.
In real life.
I’ve changed the way I combat it in my life. I’ve changed what I plant today. I’ve even been able to be blessed to be a part of a few freeing moments in life as well. Most folk I meet - understand racism it’s a good thing.
How
How
How
To get rid or away or change - yea it’s there - but how to do something different- that’s the million dollar questions that springs change worth passing.
How do we NOT repeat history... at least the parts that we know arnt worth passing?

Are we even trying ?

Are you suggesting problems have to be understood and defined by the experience of the victim? That seems like a bad way to understand the evolution of the cause of the problem to me, as I find problems are better avoided by understanding their causative factors before they become causative agents with resultant effects.

ZealotX wrote: To be a universal force for good, good and evil must have universal definitions. It's not just bad when its happening to you. And its not good just because it's good for you or works out to your benefit or advantage.

Yea, I use good and bad together as a subjective set, and compassion and evil as an objective set. It's too difficult to work purely on the subjective obviously, and its hard to get a pure objective measure.
But things being measures, and that the details are so very difficult to track, together means the absolute is not really of relevance for those objective concepts, but rather a mix of what is available tends to be what we can work with. The intention of the perpetrators is the most useful one to measure IMO - not the impact. Though often times not knowing the intention means we need to work with what is apparent rather then the why, and that is when the impact becomes a most valuable measure.
So to me balance can mean finding that fairness in subjective bias being a predominate data source with limited objective data. But also in this regard to me the balance is in distributing compassion to all parties with subjective positions while holding those responsible who have created the imbalance. It's just that subjective and objective in this context are different, and the objective is easier to work with albeit not usually possible. Dealing in the subjective only is what just feeds cycles of conflict, because every mug thinks his pain is worse then others.

Exploring it fairly for accurate understanding of events means understanding others bias, but to do that we have to understand our own and limit or remove it. From there we can slice away the rhetoric of pain which might obscure important details to better understand really what happened and where fault is distributed. That process is not complicating things, its clarifying them. The process of clarifying things is not one to ignore any particular subjective experience but rather understand it within the bigger picture. Focusing on one particular person or communities subjective experience of an event does not inform the bigger picture as much as it informs the experience of that individual of society, so the approach taken is best aligned to the purpose of the approach. In the context of learning from the past, its much better to identify causative agents in as much detail as possible so problems can be avoided before they grow too big, and in that regard it would seem better to explore it as the bigger picture then any narrow focus on one part of it's result.

Two fundimental teachings here is letting things go and forgiveness . So yes slavery happened and we all know it and we know it was very bad . We do need remiders so this atrocity will never happen again . But we don't need to make this a weapon in our arguments ! Those people who committed these acts are dead and we can't do jack about it . Everyone who lived through those times are dead nothing we can do now besides let go of all the negative emotions . The only thing that the topic of slavery " in the sense of old age methodology " is good for is a reminder to not let it happen again and as history . No amount of arguing with each other will change this in anyway no matter how hard you try .

Malicious wrote: Two fundimental teachings here is letting things go and forgiveness . So yes slavery happened and we all know it and we know it was very bad . We do need remiders so this atrocity will never happen again . But we don't need to make this a weapon in our arguments ! Those people who committed these acts are dead and we can't do jack about it . Everyone who lived through those times are dead nothing we can do now besides let go of all the negative emotions . The only thing that the topic of slavery " in the sense of old age methodology " is good for is a reminder to not let it happen again and as history . No amount of arguing with each other will change this in anyway no matter how hard you try .

What a breath of fresh air.
Just imagine if we all started practicing what we preached?

Malicious wrote: Two fundimental teachings here is letting things go and forgiveness . So yes slavery happened and we all know it and we know it was very bad . We do need remiders so this atrocity will never happen again . But we don't need to make this a weapon in our arguments ! Those people who committed these acts are dead and we can't do jack about it . Everyone who lived through those times are dead nothing we can do now besides let go of all the negative emotions . The only thing that the topic of slavery " in the sense of old age methodology " is good for is a reminder to not let it happen again and as history . No amount of arguing with each other will change this in anyway no matter how hard you try .

Good contributions to the discussion so far.

Question for you:

Do you perceive every conversation about racism to be about slavery?

Has any one ever won an argument over racism?

Show of hands any one?

And what was really won?
Just wondering
Rhetorical if ya like.

Are you suggesting problems have to be understood and defined by the experience of the victim?

No, let's picture it like this.

Let's say that a woman is raped on the way home from work. There were two witnesses. One came forward and tried to stop it. One participated in the act. One witness saw the abduction but ignored it. Another witness saw the rape and ignored it. None of the witnesses so far saw the entire thing, which actually started 2 weeks prior, when the rapist asked the woman to dance and she said no and he called cyber stalked and bullied her for those 2 weeks. Two witnesses saw almost everything. One of them was the rapist, the other the victim. The victim is the only one who clearly saw the face of the perpetrator and his facial expressions.

The victim says she was raped but the perpetrator says that it was consensual.

So let's become the investigators:

Which witness has the best understanding of what happened? Is the woman making it up? Maybe the accusation is payback for being cyber bullied. Maybe the rape was payback for the rejection. The accused certainly knows what he did and why but is he going to tell you? Is he going to incriminate himself and solve the case for you? Is the victim making it up? We could use the cyber bullying as evidence but shouldn't she just have forgiven the guy for that and moved on? He said it was consensual so maybe she's lying.

Each witness can only give you their unique perspective on the situation. The guy is going to claim he's innocent because he knows its his word against hers. It would be foolish to trust his perspective because he has every reason to lie. But... his words can be used against him, especially if his details don't match the other witnesses. Other witnesses can also provide reason to believe the woman is telling the truth if her details match up to their statements.

Now... let's complicate it further. What if the woman is related to you? What if she is your wife or sister?

If the witnesses who ignored it saw that it was their sister, they probably wouldn't have ignored it. If the witnesses saw their own wife they would probably be trying to fight the guy off themselves.

When it comes to racism it's like a woman who is continuously raped by the same guy. It happens often enough that she expects it and takes extra precautions around men. Because of her experiences she starts taking self defense classes, and she starts researching rape. She wants to understand who, what, why so she can cope the best she can. She figures that he does it to feel powerful in order to compensate for getting bossed around at his job. But she doesn't know everything about him. Maybe he's been sexually molested before. She also stops trusting these same people that keep acting like they don't see what's happening even though it happens repeatedly. So she starts filming the guy on her new smart phone. And even then, people still don't believe her. Maybe because they don't want to. Maybe because the guy is their brother... or husband... or best friend.

Whether people participate in racism or not, there is no question that there are different groups involved. There are groups that are racist. There is a group that is the victim of their racism and may or may not fight back. There are people who help that group (like the abolitionists and people like Bernie Sanders); some in private and some in public. There are people who just don't care because its not happening to them or anyone they care about. There are people who see but just don't want to get involved. There are people who don't want to confront the guy as well as people who know him and want to protect him. There are people who think she's a liar because they think they know him and assume he wouldn't do it. There are people who see him as so much like themselves that they get defensive as if they were the ones accused. Everyone is biased and so everyone's understanding is relative to their own experience.

What we should take from this is that what we should do is not lean on our own understanding but assemble a greater understanding from all the various pieces. However the biggest piece is going to come from the victim and the perpetrator. And if you cannot get the perp to talk, because he has a motive to lie, then you cannot dismiss the experience of the victim. And maybe there will even be some kind of movement... like some kind of "me too" to support the woman getting raped; to raise awareness and say to the world that this pattern of behavior is not okay.

Carlos.Martinez3 wrote: Has any one ever won an argument over racism?

Show of hands any one?

And what was really won?
Just wondering
Rhetorical if ya like.

I have. What you win is greater understanding.

its Hard to talk about racism for me because it’s such a blind hate to me that keeps being passed and passed and no one wants to do anything about it

Thank you for proving that everyone can do something about it.