h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I have an off-the-wall idea. Why don't WE, IN THIS DISCUSSION, try to find a fix things rather than determine if there is blame, where it should lie, should it have a monetary value, etc ?


Reading back through all of this, we have one-helluvan-assortment of people of many nationalities with some VERY strong takes on the situation. I was fortunate enough to grow up in a lower-middle-class Canadian household under the support of the traditional family, ie: Dad worked 70+ hours a week as an independant contractor, Mom stayed home and ran the office side of it and reared the six of us quasi-Catholic demons. I since dropped out of school and have made my own reasonably comfortable middle-middle-class life with a (2nd) wife, a child, grand-kids and still working for probably another 15 - 20 years. So I cannot say that I know truly either side of the "disenfranchised" story. If WE take it a step at a time, with all this world and book-learned experience to be had, WE should be able to come up with some workable ideas.

Starting off, where did it all start? Someone, in the self-interest of profit, enslaved (either physically, economically or emotionally, depending on regional picture) someone and made great profit. Their kids maybe carried on the "tradition" and the kids of the hurting hurt some more. Slowly but surely, socities "grew up" and developed humanity and mostly stopped variations of enslavement. So, six, ten or twenty generations later, some folks are still better off because of the foot-up of previous generations and other folks are not.

Now we get to the crux of it. Why are some folks still not feeling equal? Has today's crowd grown-up in "projects" feeling that life is hopeless? Why is it hopeless? Is it the nationally/provincially/state supported education systems that fail them? Is it the neighborhood atmosphere (for want of a better all-inclusive word)? Their parents for not encouraging them to work harder for more?

Please, someone with historical education or experience, explain the feeling of inferiority or disenfranchisement, perhaps the root cause, and maybe this multi-faceted group can come up with some working answers to push through our "elected" people.

I think you are half wat there Gradient. Its not about the money and its only partly about the slaves and their descedants for me and many others, (though I wouldnt put it past some to only be thinking in terms of $$ , human nature) the more we say that what was done was "alright by their standards lets just move on" the more we will make those mistakes again.

If we can and there are attempts to do so also sueing Lloyds will start to send the message that its not right to profit from the misery of others. We know how much Lloyds made and the company is still in exsistence it and other companies should be treated like any other company that has done something wrong.

sleep tight

"Slavers *knew* their cargo was human but £ came before morals"

That's the whole problem - Did they know they were humans... _Now_ we know that the colour of one's skin doesn't (or shouldn't) make a blind bit of difference, but a few hundred years ago they didn't! Their governments told them it was ok to behave like that and their culture backed up the attitude - Today we know that that attitude is wrong - but did they then? It took losing a civil war to persuade some people that slavery was wrong and that skin colour shouldn't matter - and even then many weren't convinced for hundreds of years (and some still aren't

Maybe I'm repeating myself, but hindsight is a wonderful thing... what we should be doing is looking at what could practically be done to improve today's situation, not attacking people simply because their ancestors were ignorant. - Surely that's almost as bad as attacking someone because their ancestors came from Africa?

Missed quite a few posts there - sorry for the extremely delayed simpost that was a response to something said on the last page.

blicky,

I never said that the programme to help native Canadians should be banned - just pointed out the flaws in the system. As are in all systems, unfortunately.

<>

Of course I'm not saying that, and you know it. You sound tired.

Thing is, once you start in on one sort of injustice they all lead to another one and soon it just starts looking like this world is a huge piece of sh*t and so many people are treated unfairly ,etc etc. And there is a lot of truth in that. But we cannot personally right *all* the wrongs. Mostly we just have to try the best we can with what we've got. Most people on this thread seem to have the right idea. There's a good start.

It's a sad and beautiful world, little brother. Now get some sleep!

az

I was going to bed honest.

They knew they were human but chose to focus on every superficial difference to asauge any feelings of moral repugnance to thier highly profitable trade.

You even make a counter point to your own argument. The civil war convinced no one that slavery was wrong it made it illegal. Some people still do it today.

There are those that would have said we dont ned to have the working classes educated beyond the abiity to use machines as they are nothing more than workers. Just because you work on machines does not subvert your humanity or atleastit shouldnt.

Just because these things were done at a time when it was common to ignore the facts is no reason that we should not say today that the companies that were part of the trade were unequivocally wrong and act accordingly.

got to go to bed

Go to bed man!

We'll continue this tomorrow - and I see what you're getting at - I agree the civil war didn't convince people that slavery was wrong (even the civil rights movement in the 60s hasn't done that completely yet).

I'll post again tomorrow

G'night
Whisky

Who knows, you may even notice my post (#60) and explain just how naive I probably am?

Correction: make that post # 61. I guess I'm getting tired too...

Don't worry, I'm not ignoring you... I'll just use the excuse that yours was one hell of a complex idea and it's too late for me to get my head round it tonight...


(Maybe we should all be in bed instead of sat in front of computer screens ?)

Silly me, I sometimes forget that we are not all on the west side of that Atlantic thingey. Have a good snooze

It's almost lunchtime. I'll just keep bookmarking, being from a country where none of this actually happened. Well maori kept each other slaves and winter food but that's a whole 'nuther thing.

marking

Ditto.

Go blicky !!!



Gradient:

>>>Here's my beef: Neither I, nor any member of my family as far back as I have been able to research, was involved in the transportation of slaves from Africa to anywhere else. Yet as a white male I am constantly pressured to take responsibility and feel guilt for actions I nor my ancestors had no part in. The assumption is that if I am white I must be related to someone who had power, wealth or influence.

This would come as quite a shock to my ancestors. The closest they ever got to a mansion was scrubbing its steps. A great number of my ancestors spent their working lives underground, or below stairs and would likely resent the implication that they had something to do with any action taken more than five miles away from their homes.

So who cares about my feelings on the manner? Who is concerned that being portrayed as a cornerstone of a repressive regime that judges people based solely on skin colour hurts my self esteem and damages my sense of racial identity?

And who do I sue?<<<

This is a common argument that comes up in conversations like this. I notice that people from working class backgrounds often take the position that I'm hard done by, or at least I'm not rich, so how am I responsible.

I have 3 responses to this. One is it's important to understand that in historical claims the responsibility isn't directly individual. No-one is saying that Gradient for instance had relatives who were slavers. What is being meant is that if one gets priviledge from the ruling system (that in the US was built on slavery) then one has a responsibility at a collective level to those who are still being oppressed by the ruling system.

Second is that as much as the white working class is oppressed by the capitalist system, as a group of people they are still several steps above others like African americans or Indigenous peoples.

Third, one of the most important ways of understanding oppression and it's dynamics in the world is to look at one's own oppression and one's own class of priviledge. Then to understand that oppression and priviledge in the wider context.

For instance I understand in many ways how the society I live in undemines me because I am female. Because I have looked deeply at this on both a personal and political level, it's very easy for me to intuitively understand the oppression of other groups of people.

Because I have a deep understanding and analysis of gender difference and inequality it also helps me understand the priviledge that I have as a white person - I belong to a class of people that has more power in this society than others.

I know that some white working class people don't like hearing this, but there are classes of people that are worse off than them _and_ white working class people have priviledges in the West that Blacks and Indigenous peoples don't.

This is why it can be difficult for well off white men to understand what all the fuss is about - they tend to be at the top of the pile and so it is more difficult to see how they themselves are undermined by the capitalist system. They often get reactionary against the people who are speaking up about oppression.


The other things that often gets said is things like "I refuse to feel guilty" or "I'm being made to feel bad for things I didn't do". One of the very useful things about looking at one's own oppression and class of priviledge is that you get a context for your feelings.

No-one can make other people feel something in a conversation like this by simply stating ideas. If you end up feeling guilty, then it's very instructive to look at that. This doesn't mean that you should feel guilty - in fact I've seen alot of white middle class people rendered ineffective by their (usually unacknowledged) guilt, so I think guilt has a limited value. However it is a good place to start if you are genuinely feeling this.

~~~

Saying we can vote our way to a better society only works if you belong to the classes that benefit from the ruling powers i.e. white upper, middle and some working classes.


Whisky:

>>Those were the days of the British Empire happily ruling the waves and sending in a gunboat whenever someone did something naughty. Now, that's not how we do things nowadays<<

Unfortunately this _is_ how things get done nowadays - in the sense that the people with the most power are still abusing that power. The players may have changed (we have multinational corporations now instead of the British Empire et al), but the dynamics are the same. I fully support blicky's analysis here of the same injustices still being perpertrated. That's another reason for understanding this is not an historical issue. We are going to have ongoing problems with this until we stop abusing power.


>>Now, the human species has made a lot of changes to its culture and laws over the last few hundred years (mostly for the better) and whilst things are by no means perfect, even you must admit that, with a very small exception, people are better off nowadays than they were three hundred years ago.
<<

I don't accept this - I think there are many indigenous peoples that would love to have the level of self determination that they had in the past. Not to mention their land.

I also don't accept the argument that slavery was a reasonable thing to do at that time because of the cultural milieu. There were always people from the ruling class that opposed slavery (not to mention the slaves themselves), and I'm pretty sure that it was written about at the time so the slavers would have had access to those ideas.

It's like saying today that running sweatshops is ok because our culture accepts it (blicky has made this point I think). Or that it's ok to cause major polution because companies can still get away with it. Those things are being opposed, so in the future people won't be able to look back and excuse say Monsanto for the huge amount of toxic chemilcas released into the environment on the basis that it was acceptable at the time. (This is perhaps why Monsanto is busy splitting up it's company structure so that when eventually it gets sued it won't lose all it's assets).


What I am hearing is that people think the lawsuit in post 1 is bizaare. On the face of it I might agree, but then I haven't seen an indepth report of the situation. But to argue that we can trust governments to address racism is pretty naive. The only reason governments are addressing racism at all is because people have taken radical action to push the culture to acknowledge the problems. This lawsuit could perhaps also be viewed in that light. Unfrotunately we have a long way still to go.



Sorry if this is a long post - that's been some backlog to get through from the last day or so

>>>Now we get to the crux of it. Why are some folks still not feeling equal? Has today's crowd grown-up in "projects" feeling that life is hopeless? Why is it hopeless? Is it the nationally/provincially/state supported education systems that fail them? Is it the neighborhood atmosphere (for want of a better all-inclusive word)? Their parents for not encouraging them to work harder for more?

Please, someone with historical education or experience, explain the feeling of inferiority or disenfranchisement, perhaps the root cause, and maybe this multi-faceted group can come up with some working answers to push through our "elected" people.<<<

I wanted to reply to this because I think it raises an incredibly important point.


One of the things that seems absent from this thread so far (although I think blicky has been touching on it) is the more intangible legacies of things like slavery or colonisation. Things like the incredible amount of grief that people can feel _ethnically_ when their tribe has survived so much injustice.

I think it can be very hard for white people to understand the extent of this, although we certainly have our own experiences of it. It's much easier to understand things like the prison, violence, and health etc statistics of oppressed peoples, but they are really the symptoms of a deeper thing.

It's easier for me to use NZ as an example but I think the themes are cross cultural. I liken the situation of NZ Maori to someone who is recovering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Europeans and their descendants, aka pakeha, have been in charge here for only 150 odd years. In that time NZ Maori lost something like 90% of their population. There is this idea in colonisation and warfare that to keep a population viable you should never kill more than 10%.

They lost the majority of their land, and so their capacity to support themselves. There were active policies to stop them from using their language....the list goes on and on.

Alot of pakeha here don't know their ancestry back beyond NZ. Maori are a people who can recite their geneology back for 1000 years or more. This is why the idea that 100 or 200 years ago is in the past is such an ethnocentric one. Most pakeha forgot what happened in the 1800s but Maoris never did because they had to live with the consequences ever since.

All those losses create enormous shock and bereavement. Anyone who has worked with trauma survivors knows that there is not alot you can do until you get the person out of the traumatic situation and into a place of safety and resource. I would say that Maori are just getting out of the situation now - they are getting some land back and they are getting financial resources. There has also been an incredible renaissance of their culture in recent decades as well.

I think that until pakeha are willing to _feel_ this, and what it means they will never understand Maori reality. And feeling it means risking feeling guilty, not for what happened 150 years ago, but for what is happening today. I think once pakeha make that step a whole new level of understanding opens including being able to see Maori in all their complexity (instead of the victim/bludger dualistic view that exists today).


I'm not sure if I have gotten my point across. It is hard to convey the depth of the injustices and what they have really meant to the people involved in a post like this.


Reverend if you want to know what is really going on I would encourage you to pick the people you want to know about - in this case African americans?, and to read as much as you can handle of the really hard stuff - the books you don't want to read because it hurts too much.

I'd be interested to know to what extent people understand what I am meaning in my last post. I'm not sure how familiar people are with PTSD and it's effects, and whether that has been a useful analogy.

I really wanted to get across that this isn't all something in the abstract - that there is such a thing as collective grief, depression, hyperreaction etc.. And that this is still having a huge impact on many peoples (including to some extent white people who are by and large in denial about it).



kea.

I believe in a collective grief so I believe in a collective conscious too. I think you have a valid point Kea.

I also believe memories live within us.
If so, generations that have suffered in a similar way must have living remnants inside of them. If you leave the fight or flight mode on for generations it is bound to affect a family especially when generations coexists in the same close space. More compassion or forgiveness can result, humility or passiveness too maybe. It's not neccesarily hate , score keeping or a fueled desire for revenge.

Reminds me of generations of possible new terrorists

Paid or not, minimal compensation is made for slave labor. Housing only where absolutely neccesary (in past times!) - food. Barely enough to keep slaves alive, never enough to keep them healthy or alive beyond their prime. This is never enough to give new generations vision or choices to create change for themselves.

Profits overuled humane treatment. It seems the least (and most) that could be paid back is an opportunity at an education. In some law suits on the books it remains to be 20 acres and a mule that is requested by families. It would not be a bad compensation either.

We have not come so far when poor families continue to sell their children! Some countries (UK may be one)want to lower the age of consent which only serves to aid this practice. It will take people far removed from the consequences to make or break this practice. The cheap sale of girls resulting in one small payment to a family for a "disposable" human beingis cruel. They are not even valued as a long term asset.
*sigh*
It can be stopped. I meantion this because it does not lend hope to humans being re-valued and compensated for past times.

Things have hardly been comprehended or discussed because no fair settling of the debt can ever be done but it is no excuse not to try.
Any slate can have hope for being wiped cleaner with both sides involved

Beautiful and wise words Abbi.

I like your comment about compassion, forgiveness and humilty. It reminds me that it is often easy to see people that have been oppressed in terms of the negatives and to lose sight of the strengths that can arise in people too.

Simple as it seems, I kinda like the idea of "20 acres and a mule". Mind you, you'd have to deal more in today's currency, ie: an adequate residence, owned outright and reasonable access/transportation to gainful employment. It seems like a start.

On the other hand, I've seen first-hand that some folks, given (literally) a house can tire of it in a few years. Or just don't like the maintenance. So they destroy it (fire, water damamge, etc) and cry until the crown builds another one. So that gives you atleast one variation of some people that you just cannot help. They really don't want things to be better. Still, you gotta start somewhere.

Again, Happy Poets, one and all