This coalition wants to fix the restaurant industry’s inequities – Fast Company

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Dook Domini

If restaurants have struggled during the pandemic, restaurant workers are struggling even more, in part because their economic situation was already precarious before the outbreak. The federal subminimum wage for tipped workers is still the same as it was nearly 30 years ago: $2.13 an hour. Now, as many restaurants reopen and workers return, some restaurant owners are arguing that the industry needs to fundamentally change.

In New York, chefs including David Chang and Tom Colicchio are asking the state to adopt a Safe and Just Reopening plan that eliminates the subminimum wage (at $11.80 an hour, New Yorks is higher than the federal version, but still below the states $15-an-hour minimum wage) and allows servers to share tips with back-of-house and kitchen staff. The plan also calls for restaurants to be able to charge a 5% safe reopening fee and seeks payroll tax relief for restaurants.

Many restaurant workers who lost work as the outbreak grew are in crisis now, says Saru Jayaraman, the president of One Fair Wage, an organization that aims to lift tipped workers out of poverty. As the COVID-19 outbreak grew, the nonprofit learned about the details of personal struggles as some workers applied for its emergency coronavirus relief fund. Three months ago, workers were writing in, saying, I really need this money to get groceries for my kids, she says. Now, three months later, theyre telling us, I am at the breaking point. I think Im going to have to steal food for my children. I dont have money for gas to get to the food bank.'

Some workers are facing eviction. Others cant pay their utility bills. I just dont think that people understand the severity of the crisis, Jayaraman says. Now, as many are being asked to go back to work, they face a different problem: Tips are way down because fewer people are eating out. We cannot ask the workers to risk their lives to go back to a very risky situation for a subminimum wage, she says. Not only can we not ask itmany workers are just refusing to do it, which is resulting in a lot of employers just going ahead and paying the minimum wage because they cant get their employees to come back otherwise. So even at a market level, its happening, and thats why legislators need to step in right now rather than putting all of these workers at such severe risk for a subminimum wage.

The subminimum wage is a legacy of slavery, as a recent report from One Fair Wage explains. At the time of Emancipation, restaurant owners turned to newly freed slaves for cheap labor. Tipping at the time was common in Europe, but only as a supplement to full wages; in the U.S., new laws changed the practice so workers would have to rely primarily on tips. Today, in New York, tipped workers are still more than twice as likely to live below the poverty line than other workers in the state, and nearly twice as likely to live on food stamps. Tipped workers who are women and people of color are even more likely to live in poverty.

The restaurant industry needs immediate relief, and needs to address long-standing racial inequities in our industry at the same time, 50 restaurant owners and 200 restaurant workers wrote in a letter to state legislators in New York. (Its worth noting that some restaurant workers have resisted changes to the status quo in the past, fearing that theyll lose tips.) Jayaraman says that momentum is building in many of the 42 other states that also still have a subminimum wage. Some people are calling it the great awakening, she says. Weve been counting, and I think weve been approached by close to 200 restaurants nationwide wanting to transition to full livable minimum wage, either because of the pandemic, or after George Floyds murder, a lot of restaurants reached out to think about how to move away from this legacy of slavery. Joe Biden has also endorsed the idea of one fair wage for all workers. I think, finally, people are seeing that we cant go forward with a system that didnt work, Jayaraman says.

Excerpt from:

This coalition wants to fix the restaurant industry's inequities - Fast Company

Ireland and Slavery: Framing Irish Complicity in the Slave Trade – CounterPunch

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Dook Domini

The first instalment in this two-part series, which focused on dismantling the Irish slaves myth, made three critical assertions: first, that the attempt to draw equivalence between Irish (and British, Scottish) indenture and African chattel slavery was untenable, and callous in the extreme and almost always deliberately concocted at source through flagrant manipulation of numbers and chronology; secondly, that the narrow channels in which the debate has been confined obscure important developments in the evolution of race and race-making in the plantation societies of the Americas; and third, that although indenture and racially-based slavery for life were not comparable in terms of scale or importance in generating the economic foundations that would launch global capitalism, it was also mistaken to regard them as galaxies apart: they were distinct but related forms of exploitation at the birth of the modern world.

In the article that follows I want to turn to a related question, and one that has drawn attention as controversy over the Irish slaves myth has raged on social media: Irish complicity in the transatlantic slave trade. On 12 June theIrish Timespublished anarticlepenned by Ronan McGreevy under the headline Many Irish were implicated in the slave trade and the legacy lives on [since altered: the online version is now headed Links to slave trade evident across Ireland]. McGreevys piece reiterates some of the same points made in a similararticlethat appeared in the (London)Sunday Timesseveral years earlier, quoting independent historian Liam Hogan and citing thedatabasecompiled by researchers at theCentre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slave-ownershipat University College London. Some of this has since made its way into social media, including a post by Hogan himself onMediumand a widely-shared blog from Waterford entitled Tainted by the Stain of Original Sin: Irish Participation in the Atlantic Slave Trade.[1]

Individually and cumulatively these convey a strong impression that the Irish were deeply implicated in the slave trade, and it is this assertion that I want to explore in some depth below. Readers will recall that while acknowledging the important work that has been done in countering the Irish slaves myth, I expressed reservations about the ways in which trends in Irish history writing over recent decades have shaped the discussion. In particular the dismissal of Irelands colonial subjection as either overdrawn or insignificant, and the framing of this discussion in narrow terms of national identity rather than the wider framework of social relations and class conflict, combine to impede an honest reckoning with the past.

An Obscenely Unequal Society

These problems are conspicuous in the way Irish complicity in the slave trade has been framed in the coverage noted above. It is impossible, for example, to spend more than an hour digging in to the Irish connections highlighted in the UCL database without being knocked over the head with the obvious fact that those slaveowners resident in Ireland who were compensated by the British government after emancipation represented, overwhelmingly, the cream of the Anglo-Irish elite, drawn from the (Protestant) landed gentry and with a large proportion of them playing prominent roles in overseeing British colonial administration in an Ireland then under fairly intensive military occupation. A considerable number of them were drawn from the officer class in the British military at the time almost exclusively the preserve of sons of the landed aristocracy and most were large landlords, often owning more than one estate in Ireland alongside residences in London and often multiple plantations in Britains sugar colonies in the Caribbean. One could hardly find a more perfect illustration of the close interrelationship between the ascendancy/gentry and membership of the Anglican Church, British army garrison and [Britains] Irish administration, though the close correlation between Irish slave-owning and the elaborate nexus of British power in Ireland goes completely unacknowledged.

While it is this class that benefitted most directly from slave-owning, two important qualifications are in order. First, there are wider layers of Irish society that profited indirectly from the transatlantic slave trade merchants and big farmers, others engaged in selling provisions to, and purchasing the staples generated by, slave labour in the colonies. Secondly, even among slave owners, there are exceptions to this profile a layer of Catholic elites who also found their way into slave-owning, and whose role we will discuss below. But the arresting fact so conspicuously absent from every recent discussion of Irish complicity is thatthe same unrepresentative Irish elite which benefited directly from the exploitation of African slaves in the British sugar colonies was simultaneously engaged in the exploitation of a desperately poor landless majority in Ireland with a vast military machine at its disposal in both locations to enforce its rule.

While it is possible that the omission of this aspect of Irish complicity can be put down to lack of depth in popular treatment of the subject, its far more likely that the historiographical context touched upon in the first essay has shaped, in profound ways, the packaging of Irelands relationship with transatlantic slavery. In places Hogan has pushed back against the notion that the Irish were uniformly immersed in transatlantic slavery, though little of this nuance has made it into popular discussion. He has been quoted as suggesting that the reluctance to acknowledge an Irish role in slave-trading is rooted in a post-colonial aversion to acknowledging the dark side to Irish history, but readers are justified in being sceptical about the bona fides of an establishment on both sides of the border which devotes such considerable energy to denigrating the revolutionary tradition in Irish history. Conservative trends in academic writing noted earlier find more crass and heavy-handed expression across mainstream print and television media, and are rarely subject to criticism.

Three major, interrelated problems mar the discussion of Irish complicity in the slave trade: a deep aversion to acknowledging the effects of colonial rule in Ireland that coincides, neatly enough, with a framework that emphasises Ireland as an imperial power in its own right: thus the assertion among revisionist historians of an Irish empire in the nineteenth century, at a time when the country did not enjoy even limited self-rule. At many levels this is a complete absurdity, and although beyond the scope of this article, its worth considering the political context in which such an assertion has managed to gain traction.[2]

A third major defect, not unrelated to these, is the conflation of the conditions facing Irelands landless majority with that of an ostentatiously wealthy ruling class, whose opulent lives contrasted so sharply with the circumstances confronting ordinary people. Thedistinction madelater by James Connolly between the Irish rural and urban working classes and the rack-renting landlord and profit-grinding capitalist is pertinent here. As one reflective daughter of the gentry recalled, until its fall in the late nineteenth century Anglo-Irish landowners presided over a feudal order, usually ensconced behind high walls in the Big House, and inhabiting a world of their own[,] with Ireland outside the gates.[3] Absent a frank acknowledgment of these vast disparities, the framing of Irish complicity in transatlantic slavery rests on a complete obliteration of class in 18thand 19thcentury Ireland at the time an obscenely unequal society, and one perched in 1834 (the year Britain compensated former slaveowners) on the very precipice of mass starvation.

Ruling Ireland at the Height of the Slave Trade

As the profile of Irish slave ownership suggests, the profits accruing from involvement in transatlantic slavery were distributed unevenly, with those at the top of Irish society taking the lions share. Overwhelmingly these individuals were drawn from the landed gentry, which after the Cromwellian transformation commencing in the mid-17thcentury hailed overwhelmingly from Protestant and settler backgrounds. Land ownership provided the fulcrum of colonial power for more than two centuries afterward, and by the third quarter of the 17thcentury the sectarian dimension to land ownership was clearly established, with consequences that would endure down to the present day. In a country whose population were overwhelmingly Catholic, more than 95 percent of land was in the hands of an Anglo-Irish elite whose ascendancy dated to the Elizabethan, Cromwellian, and Williamite conquests. A substantial proportion of these were absentee landlords, living most of their time either in England or in the British colonies, including the West Indies.[4]

There were, of course, enlightened individuals among this class who treated their Irish tenants and labourers with a degree of paternalism, but on the whole they saw themselves as a socially and culturally distinct class, and as unapologetic agents of British colonialism in Ireland. They recruited their loyal retainers and the most influential personnel on their estates either from the settler community or directly from England. John Scott, the future Earl of Clonmell, captured the landlords acute sense of separation when he wrote, in 1774, that a man in station [in Ireland] is really like a traveller in Africa, in a forest among the Hottentots and wild beasts. While a cautious man might subdue and defend himselfhe must be eternally on the watch and on his guard against his next neighbours.[5]Thomas Carlyle, the pro-slavery propagandist who dreaded the advent of mass democracy in Britain, noted a kind of charm in the poor savage freedom he observed among rural labourers in the west of Ireland, concluding that the area was as like Madagascar as England.[6]

The massive English garrison stationed in Ireland functioned largely as an instrument for the imposition of gentry rule. In 1834 the same year Britain enacted slave compensation an observer in Tipperary noted the array of bayonets that gave Ireland the appearance of a recently conquered territory, throughout which an enemys army [has] distributed its encampments. It was not only their numerical strength that was striking, but the militarys function. The whole machinery of law and order was at the disposal of the landed elite and, to a lesser extent, the established (Anglican) Church. Magistrates, bailiffs, police inspectors and court officials were largely drawn from among its closest allies, and almost reflexively the gentry treated this repressive apparatus as its own. They had ready access to the colonial administration in Dublin Castle, evident in the request from one Mayo landlord (at the height of the Famine) that a police barracks be erected on his estate to assist in the collection [of] rent.

Increased desperation in the early decades of the nineteenth century saw police and military deployed regularly to suppress agrarian unrest and enforce evictions, and a number of bloody confrontations marked the tithe war of the 1830s, including the deaths of fourteen civilians at the hands of militia at Bunclody in 1831 and of eleven policemen the following year in Kilkenny. Between 1800 and the outbreak of famine the government enacted some 35 Coercive Acts aimed at containing agrarian violence.[7]

Irelands Catholic Elite: an Underground Gentry

Despite the preponderance of the Anglo-Irish elite at the top of society, its mistaken to view Irelands social order in this period in purely sectarian terms, and even the direct spoils of slave-holding extended beyond the settler elite. Despite Cromwells triumph, elements of the deposed Gaelic and Hiberno-Norman nobility had survived with their privilege largely intact. A small number seeing which way the wind was blowing converted to Protestantism. But a more substantial Catholic elite comprised of assimilated Old English and elements of the fallen Gaelic clans had, despite being excluded from the highest levels of power, made their peace with British rule in return for holding on (often as middlemen) to some of their formerly considerable property.

At a time when the masses of the Irish peasantry were mostly un-churched and only nominally committed to far-distant Rome, this Gaelic and especially Old English elite provided the lay leadership for Irish Catholicism. Closely tied to the hierarchy, they financed an ambitious programme of church-building, overseeing Catholic education and sending their sons off to colleges and seminaries on the European continent: it was almost exclusively from their ranks that the church appointed bishops. The Catholic elite looked back obsessively almost to the point of neurosis, Kevin Whelan observes to a Gaelic golden age when they had dominated Ireland, and while they sought restoration, increasingly they pursued an accommodation with British power pledging loyalty to the Crown in return for a relaxation of laws restricting public worship and excluding them from the professions and elected office. Ironically, their influence seems to have been left most unimpaired in Connacht where, having avoided Cromwells worst excesses, the flower of the Catholic gentry flourished.[8]This explains the inclusion of large Catholic landowners like Galways Peter Daly among the list of slaveowners compensated by London.[9]

The elemental conservatism of this small Catholic underground gentry intensified under the strain of revolutionary upheaval in France, heightened again by the social discontent unleashed in the 1798 United Irish rebellion and, in the early 19th century, by increasing agrarian polarisation across Irish society itself. These tensions brought landed Catholics totally out of sympathy with political radicalism into ever-closer collaboration with British rule in Ireland. Throughout the 17thand 18thcenturies they walked a fine line between exploiting the disaffection of the Irish peasantry to further their own class ambitions and straining to ensure that the upheavals unleashed against English invaders did not spill over into attacks on property: above all, Nicholas Canny writes, they were averse to revolutionary action [which] would have placed their own lands and positions in jeopardy.[10]This dynamic controlled mobilisation confined within the narrow channels of the constitutional question provided a template that would underpin Irish nationalism up to the present.

Though it is beyond the scope of this article, the resident Catholic gentrys involvement in transatlantic slavery was mirrored in the more substantial activity of its counterparts in exile on the European continent. In France especially, the tight-knit expatriate communities (mainly Old English) driven by Cromwells triumph to relocate from Galway, Cork and Waterford to port cities like Nantes and Bordeaux formed a mercantile littoral that was deeply engaged in slave-trading particularly in French-controlled San Domingue (Haiti). Whelan describes them as an Irish nation in waiting, and there were fragments of the same groups further south in Spain and in the regiments dispatched for the task of empire-building by Catholic Europe, but their power was fading by the late eighteenth century.

To the extent that Catholic Ireland can be said to have shared in the profits of slavery, this was concentrated mainly among the big merchants and provision suppliers in southern port cities an aspiring (minority) Catholic bourgeoisie which came increasingly to resent the political domination of the landed elite, both Protestant and Catholic. Overwhelmingly the formers fortunes (and the Irish economy more generally) were tied to an expanding British domestic market rather than provisioning the slave colonies. Nini Rodgers suggests, plausibly, that the growing prosperity attending their involvement in slavery helped bolster the confidence of this rising middle class in pushing aside the Catholic gentry and assuming leadership in seeking an extension of Catholic rights.[11] Still, their role in the broader story of Irish involvement in transatlantic slavery is a strictly subordinate one: they owed their position almost entirely to the commercial connections that came their way through the British empire, and by the late eighteenth century even British traders were losing their West Indian markets to cheaper American suppliers.

At a very general level it is no doubt true that, as Rodgersasserts, every group in Ireland produced merchants who benefitted from the slave trade, but as we move down the social order these benefits become less impressive. Perhaps it makes sense to include the ordinary sailors manning Liverpools transatlantic fleet among slaverys beneficiaries, or to assign complicity even to townspeople who consumed slave produce, like sugar; but their stake in maintaining slavery hardly compares with those at the top of Irish society.

The Irish Peasantry: A Stake in Slavery?

British involvement in transatlantic slavery intensified dramatically after the establishment of the Royal African Company in 1672, and by 1760 Britain had overtaken its European rivals as the foremost among those countries involved in the triangular trade. At its most profitable in the peak years of the second half of the 18thcentury, nearly 70% of British tax revenue came from tax on goods from its colonies, and after 1800 slave produce American cotton especially played an essential role in fuelling the dramatic industrial expansion bolstering Britains position in the global economy.

Although it is unquestionably the case that some of the wealth generated during the years between 1760 and British abolition in 1833 made its way to Ireland, its important to recognise that its impact was highly uneven. While this period is viewed by economists as an expanding age for the Irish economy, this expansion was marked by a striking paradox: the concentration of land in the hands of a small minority meant that while agricultural production continued to increaseso did the extent of poverty. This contradiction rested, Tuathaigh suggests, on the uneven distribution of the rewards of increased output.[12]

The notion that Ireland as a whole benefitted from slavery is impossible to square with extensive evidence that all through the period between the late eighteenth century and the onset of famine, conditions for the largest cohorts of Irish peasants small farmers, cottiers and labourers (who, combined, formed a majority of the overall population) declined steadily, year on year. In 1791, 85% of houses in Ireland were of the poorest condition most of them one-room mud cabins with dirt floors. Explosive population growth fuelled increased competition for meagre plots of mostly poor land, and desperation combined with the landlords profit-motive to drive further sub-division. A major survey of British government reports concludes not only that the majority of the Irish people [were] miserably poor, but that they retrogressed rather than progressed during the first half of the nineteenth century. This varied by region with Ulster somewhat insulated by the custom of tenant right and much of western seaboard, by contrast, marked by a condition of continuous and deep poverty but the general trend is clear.

Far from feeling any tangible lift in their circumstances under the impact of slave commerce, the mass of the Irish people were moving further into immiseration, and would in the late forties face a ravaging hunger almost completely unprotected. Alice Elfie Murray offered a poignant description of conditions in Connacht on the eve of the Great Hunger:

The Connaught labourers sometimes hired land for potatoes from their neighbours, [or] took possession of a portion of the waste ground[.] When their potatoes were planted they were often forced to leave their homes and beg in some neighbouring district. Even in Connaught, however, there was a great dislike to begging, and the peasantry were ashamed to be seen by their neighbours supporting themselves in this way. It was rare for any of them to go harvesting in England [as some 35,000 elsewhere in Ireland did annually], for they could not manage to raise the few shillings necessary for the journey. The small occupiers were nearly as destitute, and when their neighbours did not assist them they often died of starvation, as nothing would induce them to beg. There was no season of the year in which the Connaught peasants were sufficiently supplied with food. Their diet was simply inferior potatoes called lumpers eaten dry, [and] small farmers were often forced to bleed the one cow they possessed when their stock of potatoes was exhausted.[13]

This desperation manifested in one of two ways: localised, collective violence carried out by peasant secret societies or (probably more commonly) a fatalistic acquiescence to their circumstances on the part of the powerless majority. An English visitor to Ireland at the close of the eighteenth century noted the sharp contradiction between the language of liberty and a situation approximating slavery: a long series of oppressions, Arthur Young wrote, have brought landlords into a habit of exerting a very lofty superiority, and their vassals into that of an almost unlimited submission:

A landlord in Ireland can scarcely invent an order which a servant, labourer, or cottar dares to refuse to execute. Nothing satisfies him but an unlimited submission. Disrespect, or anything tending towards sauciness, he may punish with his cane or his horsewhip with the most perfect security; a poor man would have his bones broke if he offered to lift his hands in his own defence. Knocking-down is spoken of in the country in a manner that makes an Englishman stare. Landlords of consequence have assured me that many of their cottars would think themselves honoured by having their wives and daughters sent for to the bed of their master; a mark of slavery that proves the oppression under which such people must live.[14]

Liam Hogan has written movingly about conditions on the eve of the Famine, when the extravagance of the covered sedan chair that ferried robed judges back and forth to high court through the streets of Limerick coexisted alongside the ejected tenantry from the surrounding counties who make a run to the cities in search of food but ended up, many of them, as living skeleton[s]bones all but protruded through the shirtliterally starving in the towns dank cellars.[15] Nini Rodgers, comparing the circumstances of Irish cottiers and labourers with those of antebellum slaves in the US upper South, suggests that in purely material terms the former had it worse.[16]This is, of course, a highly problematic comparison: slaverys burden can hardly be reduced to material deprivation, and in many ways the late antebellum years were extremely traumatic for slaves in the upper South, as families were being dispersed and kin sold south and westward to feed the voracious demand for labour opened up by cotton expansion. But as an indicator of the oppression confronting a desperate majority in Ireland it offers a corrective to facile assertions about Irish complicity in slavery. Overwhelmingly the benefits of Irelands involvement in transatlantic slavery went to the same class that presided over the misery that culminated in the horrors of famine and mass starvation.

Frederick Douglass, Slavery and the Cause of Humanity

The difficulty of focusing public outrage on the singular horror accompanying racially-based slavery without losing sight of other forms of inequality was one that we face not only retrospectively as in the current discussion around indenture and chattel slavery but one that abolitionists faced in their own time. The escaped slave Frederick Douglass was shocked by the conditions he encountered during visits to Ireland in the mid-1840s. I see much here, he wrote in March of 1846, to remind me of my former condition, and I confess I should be ashamed to lift up my voice against American slavery, but that I know the cause of humanity is one the world over. He wrote movingly of finding it painful to walk Dublins streets, then almost literally alive with beggars, displaying the greatest wretchedness mere stumps of men, without feet, without legs, without hands, without armspressing their way through the muddy streetscasting sad looks to the right and left, in the hope of catching the eye of a passing stranger[.][17]

And yet, despite all this, Douglass was (rightly) unwilling to draw an equivalence between these dire circumstances and the predicament of his own people in the American slave states. His co-agitator Henry Highland Garnet faced the same dilemma in Belfast where, when thousands came to hear him speak at Newtonards, he baulked when asked by the Presbyterian moderator to denounce tenant slavery in Ireland. Their hesitation stemmed from a number of sources, including a tendency to accept thelaissez-faireoutlook of their day, which held that failure to rise under free labour conditions was the responsibility of individuals rather than anything systemic in emerging capitalism. Marx hadpointed towardan alternative framework when he insisted that the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world, but circumstances made any deeper exploration almost impossible at the time.

By far the main impediment to acknowledging a connection between chattel slavery and other forms of exploitation under capitalism was the regularity with which slaverys apologists tried to bundle false sympathy with the predicament of poor whites into a racist defence of human bondage. There are close parallels, of course, in the far-Rights attempts to concoct a white slaves myth to counter the surging global protests against racism. Douglass pinpointed the dynamic precisely when he observed that a large class of writersare influenced by no higher motive than that of covering up our national sins[;] and thusmany have harped upon the wrongs of Irishmen, while in truth they care no more about Irishmen, or the wrongs of Irishmen, than they care about the whipped, gagged, and thumb-screwed slave. They would as willingly sell on the auction-block an Irishman, if it were popular to do so, as an African.

In a situation where pro-slavery ideologues were trying to convince the public that the slaves had it good, Douglass and others were compelled, for obvious reasons, to focus on exposing the singular brutality of slavery. From our perspective more than a century and a half later, its clear that abolition ended slavery but left deeply embedded racism and global exploitation intact. The systemic inequalities that continue to block the possibilities for human freedom and which today threaten our very survival are felt most acutely by workers who carry the stigma of race carried over from the birth of our modern world. But their fate and ours are bound up together, no less than they were in 1840.

Notes.

[1]Liam Hogan, Following the money Irish slave owners in the time of abolition,Medium(13 Oct 2018); Cliona Purcell, inWaterford Treasures(9 June 2020).

[2]On the impact of renewed armed conflict after 1969 on nineteenth-century historiography, see Christine Kinealy,The Great Irish Famine: Impact, Ideology and Rebellion, pps. 2-5.

[3]Patrick J. Duffy, Colonial Spaces and Sites of Resistance: Landed Estates In 19th Century Ireland, p. 376:http://mural.maynoothuniversity.ie/5594/1/PD_Colonial.pdf.

[4]Duffy, 371; Terence A.M. Dooley, Estate ownership and management in nineteenth- and early twentieth century Ireland:http://www.aughty.org/pdf/estate_own_manage.pdf.

[5]Kevin Whelan, An Underground Gentry: Catholic Middlemen in Eighteenth-Century Ireland, inTheTree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760-1830, p. 35.

[6]Duffy, p. 381.

[7]D. Byrne, cited in Duffy, pps. 376-7; violence at Bunclody and Kilkenny, p. 378.

[8]Whelan, pps. 10-11, 17, 46-48; Nini Rodgers,Ireland: Slavery and Antislavery, 1612-1865, p. 95.

[9]A single Co. Antrim family the McGarel brothers from Larne claimed for nearly 3 times as many slaves (3546) as all nine Galway claimants combined.

[10]Gearid Tuathaigh,Ireland before the Famine, 1798-1842, p. 10; Nicholas Canny,Making Ireland British: 1580-1650, pps. 444-5; 521.

[11]Rodgers,Ireland: Slavery and Antislavery, pps. 158, 173.

[12] Tuathaigh, pps. 2, 124.

[13]Alice Effie Murray, History of the Commercial and Financial Relations between England and Ireland from the Period of the Restoration, p. 366; figures on seasonal labour from Donald MacRaild,Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750-1922, p. 24.

[14]Arthur Young,A Tour In Ireland, 1776-1779, pps. 166-7:https://www.gutenberg.org/files/22387/22387-h/22387-h.htm

[15]Hogan, The 1830 Limerick Food Riots,The Irish Story:https://www.theirishstory.com/2016/02/23/the-1830-limerick-food-riots/#.XwtEXJNKj1I.

[16]Rodgers,Ireland: Slavery and Antislavery, pps. 315-6.

[17]Douglass to William Lloyd Garrison, March 1846:https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass/support12.html.

Originally posted here:

Ireland and Slavery: Framing Irish Complicity in the Slave Trade - CounterPunch

5 Black Suffragists Who Fought for the 19th AmendmentAnd Much More – History

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Dook Domini

When Congress ratified the 19th Amendment on August 18,1920, giving American women the right to vote, it reflected the culmination of generations worth of work by resolute suffragists of all races and backgrounds. Historically, attention has focused on the efforts of white movement leaders like Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. But they worked alongside many lesser-known suffragists, such as Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin, Dr. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee and Nina Otero-Warren, who made crucial contributions to the causewhile also battling racism and discrimination.

For their part, Black suffragists came to the suffrage movement from a different perspective, said Earnestine Jenkins, who teaches Black history and culture at the University of Memphis. Their movement, she says, grew out of the broader struggle for basic human and civil rights during the oppressive Jim Crow era.

But while many 19th-century womens rights advocates got their political start in the anti-slavery movement, not all were keen on seeing Black men leapfrog women for voting rights with the 15th Amendment. Viewing the issues competitively, some leading white suffragists aggressively sidelined Black womenand their broader civil rights issues, like segregation and racial violencefrom the movement. One strategy? Using their platforms to perpetuate stereotypes that women of color were uneducated or promiscuous.

Even after the 19th Amendment passed, promising that the right to vote would not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex, women of color continued to be barred from casting ballots in many states with tactics like poll taxes and literacy tests. Suffrage battles continued for decadesoften against a backdrop of intimidation and violence. Yet mid-century activists, like Fannie Lou Hamer, fought on, knowing the vote was a crucial tool for changing oppressive laws and dismantling entrenched racism. Here are five Black suffragists whose resourcefulness and persistence became instrumental in passing the 19th Amendment.

READ MORE: Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, circa1898.

Library of Congress

At a time in America when the majority of Black people were enslaved and women were rarely encouraged to have political opinionsmuch less share them in publicFrances Ellen Watkins Harper became a genuine celebrity as an orator. Second only to abolitionist Frederick Douglass in terms of prominent African American writers of her era, the poet, essayist and novelist frequently went on speaking tours to discuss slavery, civil rights and suffrageand donated many of the proceeds from her books to the Underground Railroad.

Born in 1825 in Baltimore to free Black parents, Harper received a rigorous education at the Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, founded by her uncle Rev. William Watkins, an abolitionist and educator. As a teenager, she began sending her poemswhich explored abolition, enslavement and her Christian faithto local African American newspapers and published her first poetry collection Autumn Leaves around 1845. Decades later, her novel, Iola Leroy, one of the first to be published by a Black woman in the U.S., told the story of a mixed-race woman raised as white, then sold into slaveryaddressing themes of race, gender and class.

Harper moved North in 1850 to teach, during which time she lived in a home that served as an Underground Railroad station. Hearing the stories of escaped slaves cemented her activism, along with the passage of an 1854 law that forced free Blacks who entered her home state of Maryland from the North into slavery. Unable to return home, she channeled her thoughts into activist writing and speaking.

When it came to the cause of womens suffrage, Harper was convinced it would not be achieved unless Black and white women worked together. But while Harper initially worked with leaders like Stanton and Anthony, she was also one of the first women to call them out in terms of their racism, notes Jenkins. Harpers most famous confrontation came when she spoke at the 1866 National Women's Rights Convention. You white women speak here of rights, Harper told the crowd, calling them out for their lack of female solidarity across racial divides. I speak of wrongs.

READ MORE: 7 Things You Might Not Know About Women's Suffrage

Mary Ann Shadd Cary

Library and Archives, Canada

Mary Ann Shadd Cary, whose parents used her childhood home as a refuge for fugitive slaves, became the first black woman in North America to publish a newspaper, The Provincial Freeman, in which she fearlessly advocated for abolition. After helping recruit Black soldiers for the Civil War and founding a school for the children of freed slaves, she taught school by day while attending law school at night, becoming one of the first Black female law graduates in the United States in 1883. When the suffrage movement gained steam in the 1870s, after the 15th Amendment granted the vote to Black men, she became an outspoken activist for womens rights, including the right to cast a ballot.

Carys legal and publishing background served her well in the fight for enfranchisement. In 1874, she was one of several suffragists who testified before the House Judiciary Committee about the importance of the right to vote. In her remarks, Cary stressed the unjustness of denying womenwho were both taxpayers and American citizensaccess to the ballot box. The crowning glory of American citizenship is that it may be shared equally by people of every nationality, complexion and sex, she told the committee.

READ MORE: Women's History Milestones: A Timeline

Mary Church Terrell, one of the first Black women to earn a college degree.

GHI Vintage/Universal Images Group/Getty Images

Pushed out of the mainstream suffrage movement by white leaders, Black suffragists through the 1800s founded their own clubs in cities across the U.S. Along with church-based organizing, the club movement was the foundation for so much activism by Black women in their communities, says Jenkins. With the creation of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896, suffragists Mary Church Terrell and co-founder Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin became instrumental in consolidating Black suffrage groups across the country. Their agenda went beyond womens enfranchisement, addressing issues of job training, equal pay, educational opportunity and child care for African Americans.

Terrell, an educator, writer and organizer, also focused her work on fighting lynching, Jim Crow segregation and convict leasing, a system of forced penal labor. The daughter of formerly enslaved people who became successful business owners in Memphis, Tennessee, Terrell was one of the first Black women to obtain a college degree, earning both a bachelors and masters degree from Oberlin College. She also became the first Black woman appointed to the Washington, D.C.s Board of Education, and led a successful campaign to desegregate the citys hotels and restaurants.

In an 1898 address to the National American Women's Suffrage Association, she summarized her lifes work: Seeking no favors because of our color, nor patronage because of our needs, we knock at the bar of justice, asking an equal chance.

Educator Nannie Helen Burroughs.

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In more than 200 speeches she gave across the country, educator, feminist and suffragist Nannie Helen Burroughs stressed the importance of womens self-reliance and economic freedom. A member of National Association of Colored Women, the National Association of Wage Earners and the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, she saw voting as a crucial tool of empowerment, an extension of her lifetime commitment to educating African American women. One of her lasting achievements was to launch and run the National Training School for Women and Girls in Washington, D.C.

Burroughs also spoke of the need to address the lynchings of Black Americans throughout the country. The most important question that Black activists were concerned with from 1916 to 1920the years before the 19th Amendmentwere lynching and white mob violence against Black people, says Jenkins. Because of that, activists like Burroughs, Terrell and Wells saw the right to vote as a tool to create laws and protections for African Americans throughout the country.

READ MORE: This Huge Women's March Drowned Out a Presidential Inauguration in 1913

Journalist, suffragist and progressive activist Ida B. Wells, circa 1890s.

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In addition to being one of the most prominent anti-lynching activists and respected journalists of the early 20th centuryshe owned two newspapersIda B. Wells was also a strident supporter of womens voting rights. In 1913, Wells, one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, co-founded the Alpha Suffrage Club, Chicagos first African American suffrage organization. The club was notable for its focus on educating Black women about civics and its advocacy for the election of Black political officials.

But Wells and her peers often faced racism from the larger suffrage movement. When she and other Black suffragists tried to join a national suffrage march in Washington, D.C., in 1913, movement leader Alice Paul instructed them to walk at the back end of the crowd. Wells refused. Either I go with you or not at all, she told organizers. I am not taking this stand because I personally wish for recognition. I am doing it for the future benefit of my whole race.

READ MORE: When Ida B. Wells Took on Lynching, Threats Forced Her to Leave Memphis

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5 Black Suffragists Who Fought for the 19th AmendmentAnd Much More - History

Ireland and Slavery: Debating the ‘Irish Slaves Myth’ – CounterPunch.org – CounterPunch

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Dook Domini

Mural of Frederick Douglass, Falls Road, Belfast. Irish peoples history has embraced both a legacy of identification with the oppressed, and in propagation of the Irish Slaves Myths, elements of racism. Photograph byRoss CC BY-SA 2.0

Over recent months, social media in Ireland and the United States has been saturated with claims and counterclaims about Irish slaves and a broader controversy about Irish complicity in the transatlantic slave trade. The timing of the debate is far from coincidental: a series of false and malicious assertions that the American far Right have pushed aggressively for more than a decade, embraced with enthusiasm by the most conservative elements in Irish America, have grown wings in the new context opened up by the rise of Black Lives Matter. A controversy that has simmered below the surface has taken on new urgency as a fascist Right, emboldened by Trump, finds itself confronted for the first time with a powerful mass movement capable of pushing back. In this context racists in the US are attempting to weaponize a false version of Irish history to undermine BLM. In the south of Ireland, especially, a small anti-globalist Right sees in the controversy a possibility for redeeming their dismal showing in the recent election by drawing people in on the basis of a mawkish, fairytale nationalism. Socialists and all anti-racists have a responsibility in this situation to counter these lies, to build solidarity with BLM here in Ireland and abroad, and to confront racism wherever it is manifested in Irish society.

For the past seven years much of the burden of refuting these lies has been taken on by the Limerick-based independent scholar Liam Hogan. Working his way meticulously through a complicated historical record, Hogan has published extensively on the controversy, and is the main source for coverage that in recent weeks has appeared in leading newspapers in Britain, Ireland and the US. His research shows that a version of the white slave memes first began surfacing in US websites associated with hardcore white supremacists around 2003, but made its way into broader Tea Party circles from about 2013, and has more recently become a staple in the larger far Right that has grown in size and confidence under Trumps patronage. In the article below focused on the whether the experience of Irish indentures in the 17th and 18th century world is comparable with that of African slaves and in a second installment that will follow on Irish complicity in transatlantic slavery, I argue that there are problems in Hogans approach, and in the framework in which he situates these questions. But it should be acknowledged unequivocally that his work has been critical for arming anti-racists against a deluge of lies and misinformation. All anti-racists are indebted to Hogan for taking this on almost singlehandedly.

Far Right Weaponizes History

At the outset its worth taking the measure of the scale of the problem we confront. The notion of Irish slavery may have floated around Irish America in some vague form before 2003, but it does not seem to have played a significant role in underpinning white (Irish American) racism before then, and although by 2013 it had seeped into sections of the Irish American press, it was the white nationalist-influenced far Right rather than these outlets that drove its early dissemination. In Ireland former Irish army officer Sean OCallaghans highly problematic To Hell or Barbados (published in 2001) popularized the belief that Cromwells Irish deportees had been enslaved in the British Caribbean, and was almost certainly the source for Gerry Adams cringe-worthy 2016 assertion that through the penal days [the] Irish were sold as slaves. The careless blurring of the lines between slavery and indenture in OCallaghans work, rooted in sentimental nationalism than a commitment to white supremacy provided an aura of credibility for the Irish slaves meme that it would not have otherwise enjoyed.

To the extent that these falsehoods have taken root more broadly across Irish society, it is important to confront them. But its also worth pointing out that the surge in discussion of the Irish slaves meme on social media does not necessarily indicate growing support for racism. In the south of Ireland at least, where between May and early July 2020 there has been a staggering increase in the volume of such discussion, posts debunking the myth seem to exponentially outnumber those defending it. The five most popular facebook posts over this period related to Irish slaves all debunk the myth; only one in the top ten (from the right-wing student publication, The Burkean) defends it, but with only about 2% of the traction of the leading five.[1]

There are of course right-wing activists and individual racists in Ireland who want to weaponize the meme in the same way their American counterparts aim to do to discredit Black Lives Matter and undermine calls for racial justice but its clear also that there are (confused) BLM supporters and anti-racists even among those who believe at some level that Irish indenture and African slavery were equivalents. The assertion that Africans had been third in slavery in the Americas (after indigenous peoples and white indentures) was earlier popularized by the race conscious editor of Jet magazine, Lerone Bennett Jr., who wrote at the height of the Black Power movement that Africans had inherited [their] chains, in a manner of speaking, from the pioneer bondsmen, who were red and white. Clearly Bennett was blurring the lines here in the same way many do today, but he can hardly be accused of soft-pedaling the horrors of racially-based chattel slavery, and was obviously motivated by the hope that history might be put to work in building cross-racial alliances. The point here is not that populist renderings of the past should be given a free pass when they are put to service in building interracial solidarity they shouldnt but that we need to be attentive to the context in which particular versions of the past gain traction, and the present emphasis on marking off the sharp line between indenture and slavery itself reflects important ideological shifts over recent years.

A Mountain of Falsehoods

Lets get to the heart of the matter: on all the key questions of whether the Irish were the first slaves, or whether their experience as indentured laborers in Britains colonies in the so-called new world was equivalent to that endured by Africans, or of whether indenture is just a euphemism for slavery (as many on social media want to insist), the record is crystal clear and there should be no equivocation. These are all false assertions, almost always deliberately concocted at source through flagrant manipulation of numbers and chronology. Hogan has forensically dissected the numbers game here, and demonstrates repeatedly the dishonesty, embellishment and manipulation of the facts underpinning the Rights disinformation campaign.

There is nothing to be gained by trying to diminish or downplay the suffering endured by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Irish indentured servants a point that some of those arguing Hogans corner seem oblivious to, and one I will come back to in some detail below. But even if we acknowledge the hardships many of them had to endure, and even if we accept at face value the hugely inflated numbers that those disseminating the Irish slaves myth place in circulation, any attempt to conflate or render equivalent their nightmare with Africans experience as slave chattels is untenable, and callous in the extreme.

In scale, in duration, in the wrenching and long-term legacy of transatlantic slavery on Africa itself, in the absolutely central role which black slave labor played in generating the colossal wealth that helped fuel Europes industrial transformation in effect launching global capitalism and the modern world as we know it any attempt to draw equivalences is beyond absurd. By way of illustration, let us take at face value the hugely exaggerated numbers of Irish indentures purported in one prominent meme, which asserts that over an eleven-year period in the middle of the 17th century the British sold 300,000 [Irish people] as slaves. Leaving aside momentarily the question of status, as Hogan points out this number represents six times the total number of Irish migrants to the West Indies for the whole of the 17th century, and almost double total Irish migration to the West Indies and North America in the century and a half after 1630. But leave this aside as well: lets accept that for arguments sake there were 300,000 Irish laborers condemned to some degree of unfreedom in the plantation societies of the Americas.

Now consider a second figure: over nearly three centuries of the transatlantic slave trade some four million enslaved Africans died en route to the new world either while being transported overland to coastal ports in west Africa, at sea during the Middle Passage, or shortly after landing in the new world. That is, thirteen times as many Africans died in transit to the new world than the total number of Irish which the Right insists were deployed as slave laborers. If we use instead the numbers for Cromwellian deportations accepted by credible scholars (10-12,000) then this single measure reveals the absurdity of trying to render these experiences equivalent: forty times as many African died in transit than the total number of Irish sent into indenture in the 1650s. The scale of the far Rights intended swindle is breath-taking: that such idiocy can gain any traction at all shows an almost pathological aversion to facing up to the past among those circling the wagons against the renewed challenge to white supremacy.

Marx on Slavery and the Birth of Capitalism

Marxists understand the centrality of African slavery to the making of the modern world in ways that others, including liberal defenders of the present social order, miss or deliberately evade. For Marx himself, bloody conquest in the Americas (almost everywhere involving genocide against indigenous peoples)and chattel slavery on a scale the world had never previously seen were twin cornerstones of a newly emerging capitalism that would, over a remarkably short period in historical terms, bring under its ambit diverse and far-flung societies across the globe. The different momenta of primitive accumulation [of capital] distribute themselves now, he wrote in the first volume of Capital, over Spain, Portugal, Holland, France, and England. In England at the end of the 17th century, they arrive at a [systematic] combination, embracing the colonies, the national debt, the modern mode of taxation, and the protectionist system. These methods depend in part on brute force,e.g.,the colonial system. More broadly, he insists

The discovery of gold and silver in America, the extirpation, enslavement and entombment in mines of the aboriginal population, the beginning of the conquest and looting of the East Indies, the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signalised the rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. These idyllic proceedings are the chief momenta of primitive accumulation. On their heels treads the commercial war of the European nations, with the globe for a theatre.[2] [emphasis added]

The leading African American scholar-activist WEB Du Bois, deeply influenced by marxist materialism at the height of his intellectual powers, expanded on this argument from the vantage point of the early 20th century, when the global system that Marx identified in embryo had developed into mature form: That dark and vast sea of human laborthe great majority of humankind, he wrote in Black Reconstruction, shares a common destinydespised and rejected by race and color, paid a wage below the level of decent living[.] Enslaved in all but name, he insisted, they gather up raw materials at prices lowest of the low, manufactured, transformed, and transported, with the resulting wealth distributed and made the basis of world powerin London and Paris, Berlin and Rome, New York and Rio de Janeiro. Written in 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, one could hardly find a more fitting depiction of the world we inhabit today, marked by exploitive relations between global capital and a racially stratified, multinational labour force. And of course it is impossible to understand the deep resonance that protests in the US have found across the globe without understanding the ways in which police violence directed disproportionately at this dark and vast sea of human labor reinforces the wider system of exploitation that Marx and Du Bois identified.

This approach to understanding the centrality of slavery serves up a crushing riposte to far Right apologists, but it also marks off an alternative framework from which to understand the evolution of chattel slavery in the Americas one that captures complex aspects of its development missing from the debate thus far, and perhaps excluded by the way it has been framed by Hogan and others. In Ireland the enduring legacy of the revisionist reappraisal of the past is evident in writing on indenture and, more obviously, on Irish complicity in the transatlantic slave trade. Fearghal Mac Bhloschaidh has written perceptively of the ideological thrust of the revisionist project in Ireland: the main current dominating Irish historiography, he asserts, can be best understood as an idiosyncratic Irish manifestation of a wider liberal defence of power, which employs a vulgar empiricism and constrictive ontology to prohibit a radical reading of the past or an awareness of history as process.[3]

Framing Slavery and Indenture

The salience of this historiographical context for framing discussion of Irish indenture and its relationship to African slavery is obvious. Though the terrain of this discussion has been profoundly shaped by the regressive trends identified by Mac Bhloschaidh, this background will go unnoticed by many who happen upon the debate online or in the press. The convergence of the revisionist sensibility in understanding the Caribbean is most obviously manifested in Donald Akensons lectures on the Irish presence in 17th century Montserrat, collected in a volume published under the suitably provocative title If the Irish Ran the World. Drawing on a recent literature that simultaneously denies Irelands colonial past and upholds the notion of an Irish empire, Akenson asserts that the smallest of the main Leeward islands constituted Irelands only 17th and 18th century colony. Indenture figures in his account as a story of rational-choice upward mobility; the text strains to obliterate the distinction between Irish (mainly though not exclusively Anglo-Irish and Protestant) planters and indentured servants, and asserts that indenture was so very different from black slavery as to be from another galaxy of human experience. [emphasis added] Though Hogan is mostly forthright in acknowledging the misery that attended indenture,[4] traces of Akensons cheerier rendering are evident in the present debate.

Three key elements prominent in earlier writing on indenture in the Caribbean and British North America are obscured in the way the recent controversy has been framed. First, an earlier historiography acknowledged, significantly, that indenture was one in a series of solutions by which planter elites attempted to solve the problem of labor scarcity in their new world colonies: in short they could not reap profits selling staple crops on the transatlantic market without an adequate supply of labor, and for a while in the earliest period of Anglo/European settlement white indentured labor seemed a viable option. As the distinguished anthropologist Sindey Mintz put it, planters were, in one sense, completely without prejudice [and] willing to employ any kind of laborunder any kind of arrangements, as long as the labor force was politically defenseless enough for the work to be done cheaply and under discipline. In parts of the Caribbean Irish indentures seem to have played an especially prominent role early on (rooted in the Cromwellian deportations) but in North America indentures were drawn from England (mainly), Scotland and Ireland, without any obvious distinction being made between them. A second element, now largely absent from the debate, is the sense that the turn to African slavery as the foundation for plantation labor was a contingent development, and not preordained by history. A complex convergence of circumstances pushed Anglo planters toward a full commitment to black slavery: improved conditions in Ireland and Britain meant the flow of voluntary migrants dried up; the turn from small-scale tobacco cultivation to sugar in the Caribbean (and from hopes of outright plunder to tobacco export further north in Virginia and the Chesapeake) generated an exponential increase in the planters labor requirements. Finally, British entry into and then domination of the transatlantic slave trade brought a sharp decline in the costs of deploying slave labor, to the point where African slaves-for-life could be deployed on the plantations more economically than white indentures.[5]

Labour, Identity and the Construction of Race

In the face of the malicious attempt to muddy the waters around the horrors of African slavery, it is important to point out the very real, and substantial, differences between indenture and slavery for life. But the evolution of chattel slavery, its place in an evolving system of labor exploitation, the declining importance of indenture indeed any sense of change over time is almost entirely absent from the narrow framework of national identity through which discussion is now focused. And what do we lose in this shift? Most significantly we miss the possibility of grasping what the African American historian Barbara J. Fields has called the incremental construction of race.[6] If it is true, as is now widely accepted, that race is a fiction, and that whiteness was deliberately constructed as a way of marking off racial boundaries and securing the loyalty of white laborers to their social betters, then the new world plantation societies of the 17th and 18th centuries served as the setting in which this process was initiated and then consolidated.

Here Akensons assertion that indenture and chattel slavery were galaxies apart or his insinuation that Irish indentures were simply slaveowners-in-the-making who had not yet found their true calling is misleading, and marks a retreat from a more dynamic and potentially productive framework. Those pushing the Irish slaves myth suggest that indenture is synonymous with slavery, but there are important distinctions: most (though not all) indentures from Britain, Scotland and Ireland were voluntary; in return for transatlantic passage and a modest package of land and tools, etc. at the end of their indentures, they signed away their freedom for terms ranging typically from 4 to 10 years. Historians will continue to debate the evidence from colonial North America and the Anglo Caribbean: there is a basis for emphasizing the special unease that planters exhibited toward their African laborers, and the indications that racial demarcation between African and Christian servants [i.e. whites] was underway from outset. But there is countervailing evidence especially from colonial North America, that points to a period in which race relations at the bottom were more fluid. It was not uncommon during the first half of the seventeenth century for Africans, Europeans, and indigenous Americans in the colonial Chesapeake to work alongside one another, and even to share the same living quarters. No sharp racial division of labor had yet emerged to prescribe which work would belong to a particular group. Contrary to the assumption that racism has always divided blacks and whites, unfree laborers of all races in the early seventeenth century Chesapeake seemed remarkably unconcerned about their visible physical differences.[7] Their lives intersected in many ways, and there is clear evidence that they shared not only living quarters and daily toil, but close personal ties as well. From the fragmentary record we know that at least some white laborers were conscious of the common lot they shared with blacks: We and the Negroes both alike did fare, one servant-poet wrote: Of work and food we had an equal share.[8] An investigation into the death of a Dutch servant at the hands of his master in 1647 illustrates the sense of vulnerability shared among the ranks of the unfree. A plantation overseer testified that when he visited the servants quarters just after hearing of the death of one of their co-laborers, they all

sate very mallanchollye in the quartering house, and [the overseer] asked them what they ayled to bee soe mallanchollye. The Spanyard made answer and said Lord have mercy upon this boye hath been killed by b(l)owes, his conscience told him. Tom Clarke said Lord have mercy upon us that ever it was my hard fortune to come to this countrye for, if this bee suffered, it maye bee my turne to morrow or next daye. The Negro said Jesus Christ my mayster is not good. And they all wept bitterlye.[9]

The construction of race in the vortex of new world conquest, exploitation and inter-imperial rivalry can also explain the fundamental distinction between the form of slavery that took shape in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Atlantic world and every other form of slavery that preceded it. What was distinct about the system that provided the foundations for modern capitalism was its elevation of racial distinctions: though the timing of its development varied here and there, black skin became everywhere in the Americas a marker for slave status. Unlike slavery in the ancient world, where ethnicity and national origin seem to have barely figured in denoting the status of human beings, what developed in the Americas was a racially-defined system of exploitation. And the stigma attached to race, the comprehensive system of racist ideology concocted to rationalize and justify the selective enslavement of black Africans (notions of black inferiority, white superiority), gave grounding and coherence to a set of deeply embedded racial assumptions that outlived slavery, and which very obviously retain their destructive power well into the 21st century.

Wherever historians come down on what the records show for the formative period in race-making, there can be little dispute that racial boundaries became more rigid over time, and that this hardening of the color line was reflected in evolving law and custom. In British North America the critical turning point in the fastening of racial hierarchy the invention of whiteness came as a direct response by colonial elites to a multi-racial rebellion driven by the lower orders.[10]

Finally, understanding both slavery and indenture as evolving solutions to the labor problem rather than as mere reflections of a hierarchy of identities can explain how, as Kerby Miller has suggested, the records of almost every major slave revolt in the Anglo-American world from the West Indian uprisings in the late 1600s, to the 1741 slave conspiracy in New York City, through Gabriels rebellion of 1800 in Virginia, to the plot discovered on the Civil Wars eve in Natchez, Mississippi were marked by real or purported Irish participation or instigation.[11] The planters dread of rebel combinations between the Irish poor and African slaves like their more general tendency to perceive slave plots all around them was more often based on paranoia than firm evidence. What worried masters in Barbados, above all, Hilary McD. Beckles observed, was Irish involvement in slave revolts. In most cases fear outran fact in this regard,[12] he notes, but if it is true that the conditions which black slaves and white indentures worked and lived under were galaxies apart, how can we explain the persistence of this deep anxiety among Anglo slaveowners throughout the plantation societies of the Americas? Ironically, as Miller points out, it was not the much-maligned Irish nationalists of the 19th and early 20th centuries who first constructed the image of Irelands Catholics (and [their] Protestant allies) as inveterate rebels against political and social authority. Rather, it was earlier Protestant (and Catholic) conservatives and counter-revolutionaries, for whom essential (or wild) Irishness seemed the inveterate enemy of the hierarchical systems, deferential habits, and genteel norms that maintained the prevailing, unequal distributions of rights, property, and power.[13]

In obvious ways, the terms of the debate around slavery and indenture have been outside the control of Liam Hogan and others who have stood up to refute the intense disinformation campaign mounted by the far Right and a softer element of right-leaning, sentimental Irish nationalists. Clearly, they have performed an important service in deploying the historical record against sordid attempts to make light of the horrors of chattel slavery. But the narrow terms in which these issues have, until now, been discussed reveal also the persistent influence of conservatism in Irish history writing, itself a variant of a more general retreat among historians away from an engaged social history that attends to the complex relationships between race, class and power and toward a fixation with culture and identity. This can obscure as much as it reveals. Indentured servitude and racially-based slavery for life were not equivalents, nor were they comparable in terms of scale or importance in generating the economic foundations that would launch global capitalism. But they were related forms of exploitation at the birth of the modern world, and the best way to honor the victims of both is to commit to rebuilding the rebel combinations that flickered, tentatively, across the color line among those at the bottom. The odious racism that the Black Lives Matter Movement confronts today has its origins in that harsh world, and its time we buried that part of our past.

Notes.

1. Buzzsumo app, 29 June 2020: data in authors possession.

2. Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Ch. 31: Genesis of the Industrial Capitalist, available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm.

3. Mac Bhloscaidh, Objective Historians, Irrational Fenians and the Bewildered Herd: Revisionist Myth and the Irish Revolution, Irish Studies Review (April 2020): pps. 2,6.

4. On this point see Liam Hogan, Laura McAtackney and Matthew C. Reilly, The Irish in the Anglo-Caribbean: Servants or Slaves?, History Ireland (March-April 2016); pps. 18-22.

5. On these interlinked developments see David W. Galenson, The Rise and Fall of Indentured Servitude in the Americas: An Economic Analysis, Journal of Economic History 44:1 (Mar. 1984), pps. 1- 26. On parallels in the North American context see Kelly, Material Origins of Racism in North America, available at https://www.academia.edu/10195740/Material_Origins_of_Racism_in_North_America.

6. See Fields important discussion of this issue in Barbara Jeanne Fields, Slavery, Race and Ideology in the United States of America, New Left Review 1/181 (May/June 1990): available online at https://newleftreview.org/issues/I181/articles/barbara-jeanne-fields-slavery-race-and-ideology-in-the-united-states-of-america.

7. Kenneth Stampp, cited in Winthrop D. Jordan, Modern Tensions and the Origins of American Slavery, Journal of Southern History28:1 (1962): 21.

8. Jacqueline Jones, American Work: Four Centuries of Black and White Labor (1999), p. 76.

9. North Carolina Deeds, Wills, etc., 1645-51, cited in J. Douglas Deal, Race and Class in Colonial Virginia: Indians, Englishmen, and Africans on the Eastern Shore During the Seventeenth Century (1993), pps. 117-118.

10. On the importance of Bacons Rebellion (1676) in galvanizing Virginia elites and solidifying racial hierarchy in the colonial Chesapeake, see Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (1975), and Theodore Allen, They Would Have Destroyed Me: Slavery and the Origins of Racism, Radical America (May-June 1975): pps. 41-63.

11. Kerby Miller, Epilogue: Re-Imagining Irish and Irish Diasporan History, in Ireland and Irish America(2008).

12. Hilary McD. Beckles, A riotous and unruly lot: Irish Indentured Servants and Freemen in the English West Indies, 1644-I7I3, William and Mary Quarterly 47:4 (Oct. 1990), p. 517. On indenture and cooperation between Irish indentures and African and creole slaves in the British Caribbean see also Aubrey Gwynn, Indentured Servants and Negro Slaves in Barbados (1642-1650), Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 19:74 (Jun. 1930), pp. 279-294. As a corrective to Akensons story of upward mobility, Gwynn reminds us (284) that although after their term of indenture had been completed, the servant was free, and might be allotted land on the island. But not many lived to see the day. Mortality on Caribbean-bound ships was high, a fact that seems to be missing from recent discussions of indenture. In Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624-1713 (1972), for example, Richard S. Dunn reports that on one ship eighty of 350 passengers died of sickness by the time it arrived in port in Barbados in 1638.

13. Miller, Epilogue, p. 23.

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Ireland and Slavery: Debating the 'Irish Slaves Myth' - CounterPunch.org - CounterPunch

Sikoryak’s ‘Constitution Illustrated’ Pay Homage to Comics and the Constitution – PopMatters

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Dook Domini

Constitution Illustrated R. Sikoryak

Drawn & Quarterly

July 2020

How many artists have created their own genres? Robert Sikoryak may stand among few, especially for genres within the comics form.

He has an eloquently simple concept: combine a set of words with incongruous drawings in the styles of famous comics. For his first 2009 graphic novel, Masterpiece Comics, Sikoryak retold classic works of literature, such as The Scarlet Letter, Doctor Faustus, and Crime and Punishment, featuring Little Lulu as Hawthorne's Pearl, Garfield as Marlowe's Mephistopheles, and Batman as Dostoyevsky's homicidal protagonist.

In 2017, Terms and Conditions earned Sikoryak greater attention for an even stranger premise: the complete, unabridged iTunes user agreement with Steve Jobs drawn in 94 pages of constantly changing styles. For The Unquotable Trump, released later the same year, he applied his formula to political satire, inserting Donald Trump cartoon images and verbatim quotes into comic book covers, with an appropriate emphasis on supervillains.

Now Sikoryak delves even deeper into American politics by adapting the most central US text. Constitution Illustrated provides the complete, unaltered Articles and Amendments in 114 cartoon vignettes. The book is both Sikoryak's widest range of comics homages yet and, more oddly, his most practical. Where the iTunes contract was a comically absurd choice because so few people have ever bothered to read it, the Constitution is, of course, a keystone of US law and culture. Sikoryak even evokes a pocket-sized edition, that ubiquitous prop used by politicians and pundits in need of something to clench and wave above their heads.

I just used my copy to check whether the 19th Amendment established the right of women to both vote and hold office or just to vote. The page features a spot-on imitation of H. G. Peter, the first but uncredited Wonder Woman artist. That pairing is a good illustration of Sikoryak's logic and humor. Though unlike the adaptions in The Unquotable Trump, the page isn't an exact recreation (like John Romita's 1975 The Hulk on the Rampage cover), but a formally freer combination of style and subject. (The 19th Amendment, by the way, is just for the right to vote.)

If you're a comics aficionado, Constitution Illustrated is also the ultimate pop quiz. I didn't keep score as I flipped through the first time, but I chuckled when I recognized the logic behind each discordant pairing, especially the superhero motif. For Article I, Section I describing the division of Congress into the Senate and the House, Sikoryak draws two muscular and oppositely colored patriots sprinting in a mirrored pose cribbed from the 1976 cover of The Greatest Race of All Time! Superman vs. the Flash. The two DC heroes are allies on the same team, but they still compete against each other all too often. That antagonism increases when the House's Super Friends face a row of Senate supervillains in an illustration of the House's sole power to create tax-raising bills and the Senate's power to amend them.

Instead of Spider-Man's antagonists Prowler and J. Jonah Jameson watching Peter Parker fall from a window, Sikoryak draws a presiding Chief Justice and a Senator watching the President in the same posean apt illustration for the protocols for trying an impeachment. President Parker bears no resemblance to either Donald Trump or Bill CIinton, but Sikoryak kindly adds tingling spider senses emanata as a helpful clue (something artist Romita did not include on the original 1969 cover).

A 1943-based colonial Captain America blocks a spray of musket bulletsmetaphorically blocking the states' ability to wage war, a power exclusive to the federal government. Sikoryak leaps to 1992 for Article II, Section 2's description of the President's role as Commander in Chief. I admit I didn't recognize Jim Lee's Wild C.A.T.s cover, just the decade-defining style which I took for Rob Liefeld. Happily, Sikoryak provides a cheat sheet in the appendixes, listing the source for each of adaption.

The list of comics artists that get a respectful nod in Sikoryak's Constitution Illustrated is dizzyingly eclectic. It includes Alison Bechdel, Garry Trudeau, Roz Chast, Art Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Charles Schultz, Frank Miller, Scott McCloud, Adrian Tomine, and many more. This book could be used in courses in comics and cartoon history, as it features some of the earliest creators, like Richard Outcault (The Yellow Kid) and Windsor McCay (Little Nemo), and some of the most recent, like Noelle Stevenson (Lumberjanes) and Bianca Xunise (Six Chix).

Black artists George Herriman, Jackie Ormes, Matt Baker, Barbara Brandon-Croft, and Aaron McGruder are represented, as well as the presentation of Black characters by non-Black artists. The Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez tribute is the most diverse, implying a hope that the Electoral College, which it describes should reflect the same level of diversity. Less subtlety, Sikoryak draws a chain-breaking Luke Cage to illustrate the slavery-ending 13th Amendment. His 25th Amendment depicts a Black vice-president assuming the presidencyjust as the Black character John Stewart assumed the role of Green Lantern in DC comics.

My favorite, though it's disturbing, is Mandrake the Magician turning his African servant Lothar partially invisible beneath the census directive to count only "three fifths of all other persons", meaning, of course, slaves. The image unites the racism of the Article with the racism of the 1930s characters. It also highlights how any contemporary analysis of the Constitution must address its deep flaws too. Sikoryak's satirical pairings breathe new and sometimes uncomfortable life into the United States' most living document.

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Revisiting Munnar Strikes: A Fight For The Rights Of Tea Plantation Workers – Feminism in India

Posted on August 10, 2020 by Dook Domini

7 mins read

In the first week of September 2015, on a mundane afternoon, the natives of Munnar (a hill town in the Idukki district of Kerala) were taken aback by the sound of an unknown songwell,more like a collection of loud human voices which followed a rhythm, albeit it did not sing of beauty. It was a song rooted in rage, exploitation and resistancethe source of which were the women tea plantation workers of Kannan Devan Hills Plantation Limited (KDHPL) sloganeering in front of the management office of the company.

Even though tea plantation workers and their work comes under the organized sector, the wage of the workers is lower than most of the unorganized sector workers.The protest (in the form of a strike and road blockage) which lasted for almost nine consecutive days was started on the pretext of the companys decision to reduce the bonus to 10% which earlier was 20%.

The unprecedented nature of this agitation where more than 12,000 women were mobilized, becomes apparent in the first glance at its anatomy. The movement in its entirety was spearheaded by women workers, who came from the most marginalized intersections in the tea industry. Majority of the women were non-unionised, working class, Tamil migrants with little or no formal education belonging to the lower caste communities. The group named itselfPombilai Orumaiwhich translates to Womens Unity, and went on to become a registered all womens trade union. From its very genesis, it were the women workers who occupied the centre as well as the backstagefrom strategy making, to protesting, talking to the media and the crowd, and finally representing the group during the marathon negotiations with the then Chief Minister of Kerala, Oommen Chandy, and the Labour MinisterShibu Baby John which ended in the reinstatement of 20% bonus.

The movement in its entirety was spearheaded by women workers, who came from the most marginalized intersections in the tea industry. Majority of the women were non-unionised, working class, Tamil migrants with little or no formal education belonging to the lower caste communities. The group named itselfPombilai Orumaiwhich translates to Womens Unity, and went on to become a registered all womens trade union.

The men be it tea plantation labourers or the trade union leaders were all merely allowed to occupy the peripheral space both literally as well as metaphorically throughout the movement.

We couldnt feed ourselves or educate our children, so we organized.

The demands and concerns raised by its leaders like Lisy Sunny and G. Gomathi were more nuanced than the simple issue of a wage hike or bonus, and focused on the necessity of anti-capitalist movements to also be anti-patriarchal and anti-caste. They criticised KDHPL for extracting surplus by exploiting the labour of the tea plantation workers without paying them a fair wage and explained their further subordination by the virtue of their gender and caste identities in the hands of male leaders of various party affiliated tea plantation unions like, All India Trade Union Congress (AITUC), Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), and Indian National Trade Union Congress (INTUC).

The unions were called out for being patriarchal in their functioning and structure, by not prioritising the issues raised by women and giving out all the top positions and decision-making power to men, respectively. They were also questioned for being an accomplice to the capitalist class in exploiting the labouring class by not implementing the existing welfare measures efficiently for personal gains. One of the major demands was construction of sanitary toilets which was ignored by the unions in earlier strikes.

The women in the movement spoke openly about the oppressive family structures that uphold power imbalance in the favour of men in marital relations which has made it socially acceptable for men to spend all the hard-earned money including womens wages on alcohol. Alcoholism according to the protesting women rendered them financially incapable to educate their children or access health care facilities. This highlights the feminisation of all the work that is performed outside the site of productive labour, which results in doubling the burden borne by women to earn money and perform care work.

They further elaborated on the existing gender discrimination in the tea plantation work in which women did most of the labour-intensive work like tea leaf plucking and carrying heavy loads which results in various health issues among women in the long run and were still paid lower wages than men even after the Equal Renumeration Act was passed in 1975.

The movement by placing the issues that women tea plantation workers faced in and outside their work together resulted in blurring the boundaries of their domestic and professional lives just how they exist in the realm of reality. A space for assertion of different identities becomes a necessity for any social struggle to escape the creation of hierarchy within its cadre. Pombilai Orumai stands for a newly recognized collective identity which helped these women to forge solidarities on the basis of their shared lived experiences of oppression by the social structures of gender, class, caste and region.

Also read: 6 Strikes By Indian Women That Will Inspire You

To think of this strike only in terms of class relations would be an erasure of the novelty of the space that it has carved out for collective bargaining which calls for a more inclusive reimagination of the labour question.

To challenge Chinas monopoly in the global tea trade, British colonizers started the first commercial tea plantation in India in Upper Assam in 1837 and now India is its second largest producer globally.Since tea could only be cultivated in certain far off hilly areas with very less human civilization, most of the tea workers were migrants belonging to the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes who owned very less in the mainland. These workers have continued to live in deplorable conditions since the beginning.

Tea cultivation is mainly dependent on manual labour and since the colonial times, the entire families of the migrants including children, were employed in it. Sarkar and Bhowmik in Trade Unions and Women Workers in Tea Plantation write that, ...family migration ensured that the labour could be reproduced which in turn would ease the problem of further recruitment in the future. This also meant that one of the most efficient ways to cut production cost in order to gain profit was to pay abysmally low wages to the workers.

Even though the Plantation Labour Act, 1951 makes it necessary for the employer to provide accommodation, medical, educational and creches facilities to the workers and their families, its implementation is yet very poor. The lack of these facilities forces women to devote all their time outside the plantation work in childcare, fetching water, cooking etc. These regions were mostly cut off from the spaces where major collective politics was happening. Post-independence, this isolation was somewhat lessened which led to mass organization of the workers.

Since tea could only be cultivated in certain far off hilly areas with very less human civilization, most of the tea workers were migrants belonging to the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes who owned very less in the mainland. These workers have continued to live in deplorable conditions since the beginning.

In 1948, the first tea plantation workers union Dooars Cha Bagan Workers Unity was formed in West Bengal and even though the trade union movement started late in this sector, it grew rapidly and for a brief period of time it was also militant in nature. The West Bengal tea workers strike with the support of more than 20,000 workers where most women were at the forefront in 1955, is considered to be the most important initial movement in the sector for the implementation of the Bonus Act, Maternity Rights etc.

With the liberalisation of the Indian economy, there was a shift of focus from workers rights to interests of the capitalist classes which made it difficult for the trade unions to demand for labour friendly policies resulting in loss of significant bargaining power of the unions. Most of the prominent trade unions are party affiliated and more than often, the partys agenda side-lines a holistic engagement with labour question and the representation that these unions claim to make reduces to mere tokenism in case of most women workers.

Even though women make more than half of the workforce in tea plantations and a huge chunk of their population is unionised, one rarely sees women as leaders in any of the mainstream unions. The stringent gender roles make working class women time poor and they can rarely take part in trade union activities which require attending meetings and other gatherings, most of which are outside the domestic boundaries. The sexist understanding that women are incapable of leading movements and holding positions of power over men, prevents women from carrying on their association with union wholeheartedly.

As most of these women are at the lower level working positions in the industry, they are rarely given respect or taken seriously. Thus, for women, it has become a never-ending loop of trauma and exploitationa civilized slavery as some call it. In 2018, following the steps of Pombilai Orumai, more than 500 women workers protested against the tea estates of Harrisons Malayalam Ltd. in Idukki and Wayanad districts by slowing down the tea leaf picking process.

The current pandemic in 2020 has brought the worst for these workers as most of the plantations continue with the production process even during the lockdown without implementing any safety measures of social distancing or masks. Given the knowledge that most of these workers especially women and children are anaemic and malnourished, this can prove to be fatal but these state-facilitated capitalist companies couldnt care less. Due to this and non-payment of wages, the workers of Happy Valley tea garden in Darjeeling are on a strike for something which is rightfully theirs.

Also read: Darjeeling: Womens Exploited Labour Behind Our Cups Of Tea

Amidst the states willingness to dilute the labour laws and most male dominated unions apathy, things have looked a little hopeful as these workers, especially women, have started to organise themselves and have spoken up against their exploiters, but the real transformation demands to be structural which still is a far-fetched dream.

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Revisiting Munnar Strikes: A Fight For The Rights Of Tea Plantation Workers - Feminism in India

GUEST OPINION: Slavery was not the issue in Civil War – The News Herald

Posted on August 9, 2020 by Dook Domini

By Norman Fowler, Guest Columnist| The News Herald

The current woke mania has reinforced the lie that politically correct historians,politicians, and pundits have foisted upon the American public, that the War for SouthernIndependence was all about slavery, that it was entirely the Souths fault for defending an evil institution against the benevolent agenda of the North.

The reasons for that tragedy were far more complex, with protective tariffs and states rights far more prominent thanslavery, an issue demagogued by the North and used to justify their illegal invasion. Inthe 1800s tariffs paid for most for most the government with the South paying about 75%of the tariffs but receiving only 25% of government expenditures.

In December 1860 the Chicago Daily Times foretold the disaster that Southern secession and free ports would bring to Northern commerce: "In one single blow our foreign commerce must be reduced to less than one-half what it now is. Our coastwise trade would pass into other hands. One-half of our shipping would lie idle at our wharves. We should lose our trade with the South, with all of its immense profits. Our manufactories would be in utter ruins. Let the South adopt the free-trade system … and these results would likely follow."

The Souths discontent over tariffs was summarized in the Jan. 15, 1861,address ofTexas Congressman John Reagan: "You are not content with the vast millions of tributewe pay you annually under the operation of our revenue law, our navigation laws, your fishing bounties, and by making your people our manufacturers, our merchants, our shippers. You are not satisfied with the vast tribute we pay you to build up your great cities, your railroads, your canals. You are not satisfied with the millions of tribute we have been paying you on account of the balance of exchange which you hold against us.

"You are not satisfied that we of the South are almost reduced to the condition of overseers of northern capitalists. You are not satisfied with all this; but you must wage a relentlesscrusade against our rights and institutions."

The South could see no future in remaining in a Union dominated by the tyranny of a Northern majority and seceded. Concerning the issue of slavery, consider (as M.Y. Griffith explains) that If the Southern states had not seceded, there would have been nowar and slavery would have continued.

If the Southern states had surrenderedwhenLincolnissued his call-up for an invasion force, there would have been no war andslavery would have continued.If Jefferson Daviss first announcement as Confederatepresident had been that the Confederacy was going to abolish slavery, Lincoln and theRadicals still would have invaded the South.

If the Confederacy had informedLincolnatany point during the war that it was going to start an emancipationprogram,Lincolnwould not have suddenly called off the federal invasion.The issue wasSouthern independence, not slavery. Emancipation was a consequence of the warunintended at the outset, and played no discernible role in the northern refusal to let thelower South go in peace.

The fact that the pogrom against the Plains Indians began just three months after Leessurrender also calls into question the notion that racial injustices in the South were the primary motivation for Northerners willingness to wage such a long and destructive war.

In the long history of mankind, there has never been a nation invade another for the sole purpose of freeing an oppressed minority. It is naive to believe that the North did so in 1861.

Finally, consider what award winning economist, well-known author and historical student Dr. Walter E. Williams of George Mason University says: THEPROBLEMS THAT LED TO THE CIVIL WAR are the same problems today big,intrusive government. The reason we dont face the specter of another Civil War isbecause todays Americans dont have yesteryears spirit of liberty and constitutionalrespect, and political statesmanship is in short supply.

The author, Norman Fowler, is a member Sons Of Confederate Veterans and a resident of Panama City.

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GUEST OPINION: Slavery was not the issue in Civil War - The News Herald

Is the street name ‘Uncle Tom’ racist? – DW (English)

Posted on August 9, 2020 by Dook Domini

The ride on the subway line 3 runs straight through the heart of Berlin and ends in the village of Zehlendorf. Out here, the air is cooler than in the hectic city center. There's a fresh breeze, and lakes to swim in are not far away. Roaming the neighborhood around the subway station, you discover stylish residential areas with Bauhaus designs. A Tesla is parked in front of one of the mansions.

"Uncle Tom's Cabin" is the name of the subwaystation in thisdignified southwest area of Berlin, a moniker that professional basketball player Moses Plking has called attention to. "I feel insulted by this. When I drive past here, I always have an uncomfortable feeling," says the 22-year-old Afro-German. That uncomfortable feeling has accompanied the native Berliner all his life. "How much time do you have?" he asks me sarcastically, wanting to know how much detail he should go into when talking about the racismthat he the son of a Cameroonian and a German has experienced in his lifetime.

Professional basketball player Moses Plking opposes name "Uncle Tom" for shops and a subway station

Plking talks about how he was offered a piece of chocolate foam-filled candy as a child, which at that time in Germany had the racist name "N.... Kuss" (N-Kiss). He talks about how he was "welcomed" with monkey calls and bananas waved at him at an away game when he was 16 years old. "That was tough," he recalls. "When I play basketball, I forget all my problems. But atthat moment, the basketball game was part of the problem."

Read more:Harper Lee's 'To Kill a Mockingbird' still resonates 60 years on

The name of the Berlin subway station refers to the US-American novel Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in 1852. The protagonist is an African American slave, good-natured, submissive and Christian, whom the children call "Uncle Tom." Sold several times from one slave owner to the next, he never protests. Yet when asked to reveal the location of two female slaves who are hiding from their master who raped them, he remains silent and is beaten to death.

"An 'Uncle Tom' was a slave who deliberately dehumanized himself in order not to be perceived as a threat [to] his slave owner," writes Moses Plking in his online petition, which at the time of this publication, has been signed by nearly 13,000 people.

Many Black people associate the term "Uncle Tom" with painful experiences; it is akin to "traitor" and an insult in the Black community, he said.

"Nowadays, it's used for African Americans or Black people who stand against their own to the benefit of others, mainly white people," he writes.

Read more:Uncle Ben's and Aunt Jemima logos: How Germany dealt with a similar problem

But to Heinz Ickstadt, German professor emeritus of North American literature, Uncle Tom's Cabin is a "very impressive book" that takes a clear stance against slavery. "The novel contains an amazing analysis of slavery as a profit-making system, with analogies to wage slavery in the industrial North of the US," says Ickstadt. Soon after its publication, it was the best-selling book in the United States, second only to the Bible. Translated into many languages, it became a bestseller worldwide.

Subway station "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in Berlin: Unimaginable in the US

"When the novel was published, there was virtually no black readership; Beecher Stowe was aiming to appeal to white consciousness," says Ickstadt. Her book is a "sentimental novel that tries to impart a change in consciousness by means of emotion." Slavery is depicted as an instrument that tears families apart, separates mothers from their children and turns the helpless into victims. "Neither that style nor that context would be fitting in the present day; that must be taken into consideration in today's reception of the book," he says.

"In the end, he is murdered, but instead of defending himself, he forgives the slave owners while he is dying," says Moses Plking, outraged at the submissive attitude of the book's protagonist. Of course, the book was important for the abolition of slavery. But: "One can be against slavery and still be racist. There are many racist stereotypes in the book."

The renaming of the subway station is long overdue, says Marianne Bechhaus-Gerst, professor of African Studies at the University of Cologne. "For centuries, no one has listened to what Black people have to say about how offensive certain designations are." Up to now, the white majority population has decided what is racist and what is not, she said.

Also a riding club named "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in Berlin-Zehlendorf

In the US, the term is highly perjorative; it would be impossible today to name anything after "Uncle Tom." Rather than seeing Uncle Tom as an icon of passive resistance and the book as a catalyst for the abolition of slavery, the character came to be negatively defined in theater adaptations of the story over the decades to follow that reinforced racial stereotypes.

The term has even entered clinical psychology: The"Uncle Tom syndrome" describes a minority-member person who negates his innate qualities in order to conform to the majority, most often pertaining toBlackand white people.

Yet nearly everything surrounding the Berlin subway station is named after him. There's an Uncle Tom residential area, a hamburger shop, a florist, a coffee roaster, a travel agency. And then there's Uncle Tom Street, about four kilometers (around 2.5 miles) long. "As far as I'm concerned, it can stay that way," says one elderly resident cautiously. "The name is closely linked to the atmosphere here; I'm very attached to the area."

The subway station opened in 1929. Both the station and street were named after a former Berlin restaurant, built in 1884 and demolished in 1978. The original inn named "Wirsthaus am Riemeister" was also popularly called "Uncle Tom's Cabin," as the owner is said to have been an admirer of the eponymous book.

Today, also nearby, is the "Uncle Tom's Cabin" riding club. On this summer evening, several riders are out with their horses. What do they think about the requested renaming? "It's a difficult subject," one woman says, vaguely.

"The name should stay," a 23-year-old woman says, as she changes from her riding boots into her sneakers, demonstratively rolling her eyes as she does so. "I find all of this totally over-the-top. It hasn't bothered anyone before! Even my Black friends haven't complained."

"I think it's great that history is suddenly awakened from its slumber concerning public spaces and that an important discussion is taking place," says Professor Aleida Assmann. "Suddenly, symbols like street names and monuments are no longer boring. Rather, they have become a symbolic weapon in this current situation of reorientation."

Assmann's research concerns collective memory and historical places. "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a place of remembrance for the residents of area, recalling the inn where people would go during their outings in the woods. "If I imagine that it is to be renamed, then a historical 'cluster' would be eliminated. The previous name would be wiped out; it would disappear from history."

Debate about symbols: Who decides what is racist?

But beyond local history, in her view, the memory of global history is also important: The author Harriet Beecher Stowe was part of the abolitionist movement to abolish slavery founded at the end of the 18th century. "Today, this movement no longer has a good reputation, partly because it was a Christian movement then and we live in a secular world today, and partly because it was the whites who spoke for Black people," Assmann adds. Though it was very important for human rights worldwide at that time, in the current context of the Black Lives Mattermovement, it is outdated.

Moses Plking's petition reflects contemporary issues, Assmann believes. Yet instead of a renaming, Assmann argues for an extension and explanation of the name, by way of information boards, for instance. "It is not a matter of muzzling the movement, but of allowing society to learn about its common history."

Dialogue is also important to basketball player Plking. He knows how connected many residents of the area feel with the name. He would also like to exchange ideas with local politicians and hold public discussions. But he will not be deterred from his wish for it to be renamed.

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Is the street name 'Uncle Tom' racist? - DW (English)

‘Life In the Iron Mills’ Told of the Suffering of Americas Working Classes – Teen Vogue

Posted on August 9, 2020 by Dook Domini

Teen Vogue labor columnist Kim Kelly wrote the forward for the new release of Rebecca Harding Davis 1861 novel, Life in the Iron Mills. An abridged version of Kellys excerpt is below.

A cloudy day; do you know what that is in a town of iron-works? asks Rebecca Harding Davis in the very first line of her groundbreaking novel, Life in the Iron Mills. 159 years after she penned those words, one can still picture how that day must have looked and felt, with the black industrial smoke hanging heavily in the air, ash staining every surface it touches, grey lines carved into the haggard faces of passers-by. It must have been hard to breathe, even in younger cities upon whose poisoned earth farmland and forests had once stood. There are places like that now, too, cursed with the legacy of humanitys ravenous thirst: vast manufacturing cities in China where everyone wears masks to breathe; polluted air creeping across heavy industry sites in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh; deforestation fumes choking Cameroon; wildfires in Australia and the U.S. West Coast strangling whole towns.

The white-hot wave of industrialization and urbanization that swept the globe in the 19th century revolutionized the way that human beings work, live, consume, and die, permanently altered how society functioned, and unwittingly set the stage for the ravages of late capitalism, as well as the current climate crisis. Before the Industrial Revolution, agriculture was the primary industry; pollution was minimal, and most people lived in rural areas and worked outside. After the great change, laborers flooded into cities in search of work. They found work, alright but as Davis illustrates, all too often, these workers ended up paying a heavy price.

Class divisions were redrawn like battle lines, with wealthy capitalists and industrialists indulging their whims for gorgeous mansions while the poor and working classes were squeezed into rickety boarding houses, stinking tenements, and dank cellars. When new immigrants came in hopes of building better lives for themselves and their families, they were swept up into the labor pool by greedy bosses who saw a chance to extract as much value from their bodies as possible. It was a miserable time to be alive without the benefit of also being rich. Whether they were native born or came from elsewhere, a 19th century factory workers living conditions were utterly grim; diseases ran rampant, sewage pooled in the streets, and people of all ages starved physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Wage slavery was a death sentence. Some workers paid the cost of urban living with their blood, sweat, and tears, and managed to carve out something resembling a decent existence; others struggled, living hand to mouth, their bodies and spirits broken as soon as they could walk. An unfathomable number paid with their lives.

And for a very long time, their stories were left untold. In a time before public school was both free and compulsory (a feat the U.S. did not achieve until the 1920s), most members of the laboring class were illiterate, and many immigrant workers were without a firm grasp on the English language. But more importantly and shamefully their day-to-day lives were left undocumented and unexamined because no one in the middle and upper classes was listening to what to the faceless masses had to say. Those who enjoyed higher social and economic privilege knew that those workers they saw trudging through the streets to and from the mills were doomed to lives that were poor, nasty, brutish, and short, but, then as now, didnt necessarily see it as their problem. This is part of what makes Life in the Iron Mills and its smoke-smudged take on literary realism so extraordinary. Rebecca Harding Davis was born into a life of relative ease and had next to nothing in common with the workers in her story, and yet she writes about them and the proletarian struggle with such compassion and depth of insight that its hard to believe she was merely watching from the window.

The novel provokes questions that were still grappling with today. What are roses to a worker whose only thought is bread? What are dreams to someone who barely has time to sleep? How many people are there out there now, working dangerous, soul-sucking jobs instead of following their passions? How many more will have to suffer before this wretched capitalist system finally breaks down and sets us all free?

-Kim Kelly, Philadelphia, 2020

Want more from Teen Vogue? Check this out: Emma Goldman, One of Historys Best-Known Anarchists, Left an Outsized Legacy

Stay up-to-date with the politics team. Sign up for the Teen Vogue Take!

John Oliver Examines Whitewashed U.S. History in the Wake of George Floyd – Rolling Stone

Posted on August 9, 2020 by Dook Domini

John Oliver spends much of his time on the Last Week Tonight discussing the inequalities currently present in American systems. But on Sunday night with the country still reeling from the killing of George Floyd he devoted an entire segment to U.S. history and how whitewashed the teaching of it has remained in most American schools.

Kicking off with a discussion of Juneteenth and the Tulsa, Oklahoma, race riots both of which received renewed attention from white Americans after they were featured in an episode of Watchmen Oliver highlighted how many non-black Americans still have trouble reckoning with the full scope of the countrys history of slavery and subsequent discrimination of black people. The idea that George Washington freed his slaves, for example, is exaggerated; the founding father specified in his will that his slaves could only be freed after his wifes death, meaning that, in the end, only one enslaved person was freed from his ownership.

Oliver emphasized that there are no national social studies standards in the U.S. to determine which historical figures or topics are discussed in the classroom, resulting in wildly varying state requirements. According to a CBS report, seven states do not directly mention slavery in their state education standards, while 16 mention states rights as a cause for the Civil War. Much of that is thanks to organizations like the Daughters of the Confederacy, who advocated for states in the South to present the Confederacy as made up of just rebels, rather than slave owners. As a result, the inaccuracies presented in those mid-century textbooks have reverberated for generations of American education.

Some slaves were good workers and very obedient, one Alabama textbook reads. Many took pride in what they did and loved their captains and the plantationOthers were lazy, disobedient and vicious.

White supremacy has not been fully reckoned with in American history lessons, Oliver said, and that reckoning process will be an uphill battle as long as Fox News anchors and other right-wing pundits spin any discussion of anti-racism into cannon fodder. But slavery is embedded within the foundation of America, right down to the Constitution, with the Three-Fifths Clause and the Fugitive Slave Clause.

The fact that the Constitution is infused with racism does not mean its canceled, Oliver said. Its not a YouTuber which was just now realizing it was wrong to do blackface for 14 years, and it definitely doesnt mean that kids shouldnt learn about it. But they should be taught to see it as an imperfect document with imperfect authors who both extolled the ideals of freedom for all while at the same time codifying slavery.

Moreover, Americans cannot keep viewing their historys progress as constant and inevitable. The century between the end of the Civil War and the start of the Civil Rights movement often glossed over in U.S. history classes was marked by a backlash from white Southerners toward successful black progress during Reconstruction. The Ku Klux Klan was founded during this era, at least 2,000 black people were lynched, and by 1877, Reconstruction was deemed a failure as Southern states took local control of racial divides.

In 1898, the only coup dtat to ever take place on American soil occurred in Wilmington, North Carolina, where a mob of 2,000 armed white men killed over 60 black residents and replaced the citys multiracial government with white supremacists. And if this is the first time youre hearing about the only coup on American soil, youre not alone, Oliver said.

The March on Washington, as it is often taught in school, was known fully as the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and its economic aims were front and center; it was a fight that Martin Luther King Jr. would become passionate about in the final years of his life. It didnt cost the nation one penny to integrate lunch counters, he would say in a speech from 1968. It didnt cost the nation one penny to guarantee the right to vote. But now, we are dealing with issues that cannot be solved without the nation spending billions of dollars and undergoing a radical distribution of economic power.

The truth is, Oliver noted, the Civil Rights Movement was longer, messier, and more complicated than Kings I Have a Dream speech, and was thwarted in more of its aims than many of us were taught in school.

Most egregiously, U.S. history lessons often dont connect the historical dots to the present day, such as the wage and wealth gaps between white and black Americans, which are larger now than when King advocated for wealth distribution. If you dont teach history properly, all you see are those effects, and not the causes, Oliver said.

NOTABLE WOMEN OF SAN DIEGO Commemorating 100 years of the 19th Amendment when women took the vote – The right of citizens of the United States to…

Posted on August 9, 2020 by Dook Domini

NOTABLE WOMEN OF SAN DIEGO Commemorating 100 years of the 19th Amendment when women took the vote

Professor Iris Engstrand at a Chargers game with granddaughter Madison. (Courtesy of Iris Engstrand.)

Newspaper clipping of Celia Sweet and her speed boat, Relue. (Courtesy James Sweet and Janet Sweet Corey.)

The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex so goes the text of this celebrated passage.

Womens suffrage ended on Aug. 18, 1920, culminating nearly a century of protest. Though she took the vote, other rights granted continued to evolve to live free from violence, slavery, and discrimination. The right to be educated, own property, and earn an equitable wage.

Interestingly, German-Jewish immigrant Louis Rose, who settled the community of Roseville in Point Loma some 150 years ago, showed himself to be an early feminist in that he deeded property to women. How startling!

A number of well-known women of San Diego began to assert themselves beyond the kitchen. For example, in the late 1880s, humanitarian visionary Kathryn Tingley created an international community of free thinkers, known as Raja Yoga Academy, or Lomaland. It became a highly regarded educational institution.

At about the same time, American horticulturalist Kate Sessions was cultivating plants. In 1892, she leased 30 acres of land in City Park and planted 100 trees a year. She would become known as Mother of Balboa Park, and was connected to the philanthropic generosity of businessman, George Marston.

But there are other women whose contributions to San Diego ought to be remembered.

THE FIRST FEMALE HARBOR PILOT

Celia Sweet of Ballast Point was the lightkeepers wife. James, and often Celia, tended the bay beacons and lamp in the tower. He also built boats known as Sweet Craft. In 1907, Sweet christened Pilot, San Diegos first motorized harbor-pilot vessel, Celia bursting the champagne bottle against its bow.

While raising two children, Celia became the first federally licensed woman harbor pilot in San Diego, and also ferried passengers across the bay to Coronados Tent City. When she could solicit no female competition, Celia raced the Relue against her male equals of San Diego Yacht Club. Sweets 28-foot Relue set a Pacific coast speed record of 22 knots.

SOUTHERN BELLE SAVES SURFING IN SAN DIEGO

An extrovert known as Miss Billy Riley of Oklahoma burst onto Shelter Islands entertainment scene when tourism efforts were flailing. Through evolving monikers of the 1960s Windsong, LEscale, Half Moon, and Humphreys Miss Billy became the first woman manager of a major hotel and eventually part owner. She served as the first female president of the San Diego Hotel-Motel Association, director of San Diego Chamber of Commerce, and strongly advocated the construction of Ocean Beach Fishing Pier.

Miss Billy will be remembered for defending the 1966 World Surfing Championships when city officials uttered disdain for the whole affair. Five years earlier, surfers had misbehaved during a similar event, she said, and the city was forced to consider the future of surfing in San Diego generally.

I gathered a bunch of those 200 surfers in the parking lot of Bali Hai and told them youre going to have a rough time in our city people think youre a crummy bunch. We expect you to conduct yourselves honorably to represent the surfing industry. As it was, surfing greats Kimo McVay, Nat Young, and the Duke Kahanomoku took to the waves in Ocean Beach, while spectators crowded the new pier.

In downtowns Gaslamp District, Billys name appears on the outside bronze plaque of the Horton Grand Hotel. Wed heard that the old Horton Hotel and Kahles Saddlery were being torn down and felt the urgency to preserve what we could, she said. Some of us moved sections of those buildings into storage in an old garage on Island Avenue, brick-by-brick, windows, and everything. And when the time came, we, and other investors, recreated a hotel. The Horton Grand is a testament to Miss Billys tenacity and goodwill.

THE CITYS HISTORY PROFESSOR EMERITA

Iris Engstrand, Ph.D., has taught thousands of students at University of San Diego over 49 years as a professor of American history. In turn, she says, These students have themselves become teachers and authors. They serve as politicians, city planners, national and state park employees, mayors, and in other positions of leadership. Teaching others is truly a gift that keeps on giving.

Of relevance is Engstrands pictorial history of San Diego, first published in 1980 and reprinted three times in revised editions. This factual account, she says, tells a complete story of San Diego beginning with the indigenous population and continuing through the Spanish, Mexican, and American periods.

Other notable women were to be recognized at this years Congress of History of San Diego and Imperial Counties, an annual two-day conference. But Remarkable Women 1920-2020 fell by the pandemic wayside. The Congress is scheduled to reconvene, fingers crossed, on Feb. 26-27, 2021, when the contributions by women over the past 100 years will be celebrated.

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NOTABLE WOMEN OF SAN DIEGO Commemorating 100 years of the 19th Amendment when women took the vote - The right of citizens of the United States to...

The war that saved and changed the world – The Boston Globe

Posted on August 9, 2020 by Dook Domini

No wonder that two of the top-10 songs of 1945 were My Dreams Are Getting Better All the Time and Accentuate the Positive.

And yet this week, three-quarters of a century after the end of the conflict that left the United States preeminent in the world and the savior of Europe, the dreams seem darker and the positive, elusive. American citizens are banned from entering the Continent because of the rampant spread of the coronavirus in their homeland, the American president is reviled by most of the countrys traditional allies, and the institutions that far-sighted American statesmen used to construct the architecture of the post-war era diplomatic and economic structures are either in tatters, in turmoil, or in trouble.

For Americans, the long look back to the sense of infinite possibility of those days has become a sentimental journey the title, as it happens, of the number one song of 1945.

We talk loosely of the Greatest Generation, those who stepped into the breach to win the war and lived into the promise of the peace that followed. And many great things were in fact begun in those days:

The first slender slender and appallingly inadequate stirrings of justice for Black Americans, eight decades after the war that ended slavery. The making of an economic boom that seemed built to last forever, and that might even throttle poverty at last. And the necessary diminution of the power of corrosive nationalism around the world the malign force that fueled two catastrophic world wars with the birth, among other historic innovations, of the United Nations.

But retrospect makes it clearer by the day that this was work more begun than completed. Black lives still dont matter enough. Economic inequality is graver than ever. Nationalism of the most worrisome sort is on the rise, here and elsewhere in the world. And so on, missions still to accomplish.

Still, it is a good time to reconsider those days and those dreams.

That postwar world, weary from 2,194 days of brutal conflict and mechanized death, looked to America the postwar equivalent of what Churchill had called the sunlit uplands for leadership, and for inspiration.

The United States was not only ready to assume this role but it was totally rational that it should do so, said Jeremy K.B. Kinsman, who has served as Canadas ambassador to Great Britain, Russia, Italy, and the European Community. There was nothing bad about it, which is why the Trump phenomenon of America First is so troubling to so many of Americas closest friends.

In abandoning two centuries of isolation, the United States not only joined the international order but also reshaped it.

Despite all the mistakes and tragedies since then, including two long wars in Asia, there have been some phenomenal successes, said Adam Roberts, emeritus professor of international relations at Oxford. In 1989 and 1990 the Soviet Empire, and then the Soviet Union itself, collapsed, and now in 2020 we can celebrate the fact that major inter-state war has been avoided for 75 years. The trouble is that this is no time for celebration. The US, like the UK, is floundering in a COVID-19 mess largely of its own making.

* * *

And so this is a bittersweet anniversary, the sweet coming from the celebratory reflections; the bitter coming from the promise that went unrealized, and the promises unfulfilled.

I do believe the World War II generation was ideally suited to take on the historic challenge of a two-front war because so many members were hardened by the experience of the Depression, said broadcast journalist Tom Brokaw, who took the Greatest Generation tag for the title of his bestselling book, in an interview for this essay. But he added that when people question the label he has a ready response: I said greatest. I did not say perfect.

That great but imperfect generation was so powerful a presence in modern American life that for 14 consecutive elections in the 20th century, at least one of the major-party presidential nominees was involved in the war 50 percent more elections than those contested by the 18th-century Founders.

That group of politicians was marked by the war, as people involved in all-consuming events like war are, said Angus King, who taught a course in leadership at Bates College and Bowdoin College before being elected to the Senate from Maine as an Independent. We saw it in the Civil War... and today, when politicians who were in Iraq or Afghanistan have an aura. And certainly this is the case with the World War II presidents.

And would-be presidents.

World War II changed my life and the lives of countless other Americans, said the Republicans 1996 presidential nominee, former senator Robert J. Dole of Kansas, who was gravely wounded in the last days of World War II and at age 97 is one of the 300,000 veterans of the war still alive. We paid a heavy price I paid a heavy price but we prevailed. It took me years to recover. Im still recovering. But it was worth it. Fighting in that war was the most important thing I did in my life.

Just as important was what followed the war: the high hopes of the veterans, of those on the home front, of millions abroad, in displaced-persons camps, in the squalor of wrecked cities, in countries where the manufacturing base was destroyed and the agricultural prospects minimal.

On anniversaries like this, we salute how much was accomplished in those 75 years. And yet:

It would have been inconceivable to those imagining the postwar world, that life expectancy in the United States would be lower today than that of Poland, Germany, Italy, and Japan, countries left destroyed by ground combat and airborne assault. It would have been beyond comprehension that the cost of a college education, brought within the reach of millions because of the generosity of the GI Bill, would be beyond the grasp of millions in 2020. It would have beggared belief that American prosperity had not reached into the bottom quarter of the workforce. It would have astonished the 350,000 women who enlisted in the armed forces and the many hundreds of thousands who worked in wartime factories 310,000 of them in the aircraft industry alone, 65 percent of the total aviation-manufacturing workforce that 75 years later, women would still be fighting for equality in the workplace and were earning on average about 81 cents to the dollar that men were earning.

Very seldom do you get a crack in time when there is so much to be rebuilt, said Stephanie Coontz, a historian at Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. We blew it after World War I but after World War II it looked as if we might do it, though we did not include Blacks and women. At times like this we dont look back at the way things were, but at the way we hoped things were becoming.

Moreover, in the peace that emerged after the war it would have been difficult to imagine that Americans of color, many of whom joined in the fight for freedom around the world, still do not enjoy the fullness of freedom and equality at home or anything close to it and that the ethnic and religious hatred that the soldiers, sailors, and aviators of World War II thought they were eradicating from the face of the earth would have remained a scourge on the earth.

World War II uncovered laid bare for us that hate is capable of bringing on the greatest evil, said Rabbi Jeffrey Myers of the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, where two years ago 11 Jews were murdered while he led them in Sabbath prayer. It makes me pause and wonder 75 years later whether we have accomplished all that much. The good people on this earth have been engaged for millennia in this work, and the anniversary of the end of the worst period of hate in history reminds us that there is so much more work to be done.

* * *

Three-quarters of a century is, to be sure, a long time. It is the distance between Shays Rebellion in Western Massachusetts and the outbreak of the Civil War in Charleston, S.C., between the election of Benjamin Harrison and the assassination of John F. Kennedy, between Pearl Harbor and the inauguration of President Trump.

The America of 1945 was without supermarkets, freezers, dishwashers, even ballpoint pens. Since then the shopping center sprouted, was converted to a mall, and then just about died. Popular music went from 78s to LPs to eight-tracks to CDs to iPods to streaming services. The births of Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Trump, Dolly Parton and Cher were a year away.

But an economic explosion was imminent, fueled by consumer demand that had been building during the Depression and war years. In the immediate postwar period, personal consumption expenditures created an average annual growth rate of per-capita GDP of 2.5 percent, according to a study that senior analyst Nick Bunker prepared in 2014 for the liberal-leaning Washington Center for Equitable Growth.

But that galloping growth would not prove to be equitable growth not nearly.

The gap between those high on the income ladder and those in the middle and lower rungs did not change substantially from the end of the war until the 1970s, when the gap began to widen. The share of income growth captured by the top 1 percent in Massachusetts between 1945 and 1973, for example, was 2.9 percent. That figure rose to 50.4% in the period from 1973 to 2007, then to 58.4 percent in the eight years that followed, according to the Economic Policy Institute.

Today, in fact, the average income of the top 1 percent of Massachusetts residents is $1,904,805, while the average income of the other 99 percent is $61,694, a top-to-bottom ratio of about 30 to 1.

The result is a different United States from the one many dreamed of at wars end. In effect, the anthropologist and author Jared Diamond has written, the U.S. is a country of 328 million inhabitants that operates as if only 50 million of them matter.

All that, despite the massive exposure of Americans to education, regarded for generations as the sturdiest ladder of social and economic mobility.

In years leading up to the war, the United States, in the characterization of the Harvard economist Claudia Goldin in a 1998 study, pulled far ahead of the rest of the world in high-school graduation, with a rate of 50.8 percent. There are conflicting figures for high-school graduation today, but there is a consensus that the figure has risen by more than half since then and that the rate for Blacks and for Hispanics is lower than that of whites. An engine of opportunity has stalled.

The GI Bill opened the college gates to World War II veterans in what Ira Katznelson, the Columbia historian, called the single most important piece of legislation ever passed in America to create a modern middle class.

Today the typical college graduate earns about $80,000 while those with only a high school degree earn about $36,000.

But in education, as in all areas of American society, the cruelest dividing line was race.

The benefits of the GI Bill for Black veterans were, to be sure, substantial, but they were not equally distributed, in part because of the role the states played in the program. State legislatures, for example, voted enough money for every white person to attend universities in South Carolina, Alabama, and Mississippi, but not enough for Black person to enroll in the states historically Black colleges.

It was a period when middle-class America was invented among whites, said Ivory Nelson, who was president of Lincoln University, a historically Black institution in Pennsylvania, from 1999 to 2011. But middle-class America for Blacks doesnt exist even now.

The effect was to cement, even to widen, the distance between white America and Black America, despite the achievements of the civil-rights movement and the advancements some now under siege of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

The country never dealt with the race question, said Larry Davis, founder of the Center on Race and Social Problems at the University of Pittsburgh. It didnt want to deal with it because it wouldnt admit guilt. We let the South have its way. ... After World War II the country continued to sacrifice Black people to keep the South happy. Can you imagine how much wealth of Black people was lost?

This failure cut especially deep for Blacks who had high hopes that World War II would be not just a chance to save the world for Democracy but to perfect our own. This was a vision captured poignantly in the so-called Double-V Campaign, begun after a 26-year-old wrote a letter to the Pittsburgh Courier, a Black newspaper, asking: Should I sacrifice to live half American?

What came of his question was a new push for two victories, one overseas, the other at home.

Some progress has been made, to be sure. But according to research by Patrick Bayer and Kerwin Kofi Charles set out in 2018 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Black-white wage gap has returned to Truman-era levels.

We may have won victory in World War II but we havent achieved the second V in the Double-V Campaign, said Rod Doss, the Couriers current editor and publisher.

* * * *

In no war was the home front more important than it was in World War II, and in no conflict did war produce more changes at home, including an increase in home ownership from about half of Americans in 1945 to two-thirds today, according to the Census Bureau.

And there were tremendous changes in gender roles inside those homes. The numbers of women at work went up during the war, the Harvard historian Nancy Cott said, but what was more important was the kind of work highly paid industrial work women were doing. By 1952, there were 2 million more working wives than there had been during World War II.

But another big change came shortly after the war, when changes in the federal tax code favored married couples who had one primary earner. The result was that a man who supported a woman not employed outside the home paid substantially less in taxes than a single man making as much money.

Womens gains were often sacrificed, said Rebecca Davis, a University of Delaware historian. It became clear that society thought it more important to preserve mens jobs.... It helped explain a lot of anger women had in the 1960s and even now.

And as the late 1940s rolled into the 1950s, vast transformations were underway in American domestic life.

The 1950s were a unique moment in the history of marriage and the family, said Christine Whelan, director of the Money, Relationships and Equality Initiative at the University of Wisconsin Madison. Never before had so many people shared the experience of courting their own mates, getting married at will, and setting up their own households. Never had married couples been so independent of extended family ties and community groups. Never before had so many people agreed that only one kind of family was normal.

There is, thankfully, no such agreement today.

Americans also roared out of World War II with enormous confidence in progress through science. Nuclear weapons technology could be used for peaceful energy. The DuPont Co. had spoken of better living through chemistry since 1935, but after 1945 it became a conviction rather than a slogan. Scientists began to understand DNA, to battle disease with new and more powerful tools, and to achieve remarkable feats of exploration through NASA.

The decade after the war was the true high point for doctors and scientists; the pinnacle may have been Jonas Salk and his polio vaccine, with research financed by the March of Dimes and its more than 100 million Americans contributors.

We came out of World War II with science in the ascendancy, said Richard Scheines, a Carnegie Mellon University expert in the philosophy of science. We thought we could feed the world. We thought there could be clean energy, It turns out that the world is more complicated than we thought. It turned out that we couldnt figure everything out.

That was never so clear as it has been this year, when the coronavirus consumed more American lives than the Korean and Vietnam conflicts combined.

There was confidence science could solve all the problems the world faced and that all infectious diseases could be taken care of, said Jason Opal, a McGill University historian who is writing a history of epidemic diseases in the United States with his father, Steven Opal, a clinical professor of medicine at Brown. Now we know better, and we have lost confidence in our ability to solve our problems. The decline in science is part of the decline in the morale of America.

That is not the only decline from World War II-era heights that America is experiencing today. Its decline in international prestige and global influence is one of the themes of the era.

The US was the key player in establishing a liberal international order, said Kiron Skinner, former director of policy planning in the State Department in the early Donald J. Trump years. Today the international order is adrift and the ideas the US helped shepherd are being contested not only by other powers but also inside the US.

Nowhere is that more apparent than at the United Nations, founded amid soaring rhetoric and hopes in the war-ending year of 1945.

It was the silver lining of the Second World War, said Stephen C. Schlesinger, author of a 2003 history of the San Francisco conference that created the UN. These people had seen 30 million people die in the First World War and 60 million in the Second World War and wanted to make sure that a Third World War would never happen.... Today nobody is happy with it today except that it has lasted 75 years.

When World War II ended, there was no doubt that the strongest economy was in the United States. It was the collective sense of the global markets that US government bonds were the most risk-free asset and that the dollar was the worlds reserve currency, notions codified in the fixed exchange rates that came out of the Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944.

If we lost the war, none of that would have been the case, said Matthew J. Slaughter, the dean of Dartmouths Tuck School of Business Administration and a member of George W. Bushs council of economic advisors. A lot has changed, but the US dollar is still the worlds most important currency.

We had licked the Depression and won a just war, and the country was punch-drunk at VJ Day, said David M. Kennedy, the prominent Stanford historian. The world was wide open for those of that generation who survived. A lot of the aspirations of the moment were fulfilled. But we look a little less triumphant today. For sure we have some steps to go, and I wonder whether this journey ever ends.

And where it will take us. The generation that won the war and prospered in peace, made the world, in many ways, a better place. Better, but not perfect.

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The war that saved and changed the world - The Boston Globe

Confederate monuments: What the men honored by statues did and believed – Times Record

Posted on August 9, 2020 by Dook Domini

This story is part of The Confederate Reckoning, a collaborative project of USA TODAY Network newsrooms across the South to examine the legacy of the Confederacy and its influence on systemic racism today.

The white men stand, immortalized in metal and stone, in parks, public squares and the halls of government.

Statues of prominent figures in the Confederacy are a common sight in the South. But the visibility of their monuments often belie the way their lives and legacies are obscured by myth.

Like other symbols of the Confederacy, such memorials have been defended for generations as pieces of Southern heritage, or simply uncontroversial artifacts of history. But for many people, they are ever-present reminders of racial discrimination and violent oppression that has never gone away.

The removal of statues of Confederate leaders as well as those of others who promoted or profited from slavery and racism has become a focal point of calls for a true confrontation with racial inequality in the United States. As part of that conversation,USA TODAY Network newsrooms across the South are taking a critical look at several such figures to understand who they were and what they believed.

For more than four decades, a bronzesculpture of thebust of Confederate Lt. Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest has been featured prominently in the Tennessee state Capitol.

A statue portraying Forrest was one of three removed in Memphis in late 2017 afterthe city found a loopholeto legally take down the monument that residents widely agreed should not stand in a public park.

But as the fate of the Capitol bust hangs in the balance pending a state commission meeting later this year and after years of debate among Black and white lawmakers, and Democratsand Republicans who was Forrest and why is he so controversial more than 150 years after the Civil War?

Among the most notorious parts of Forrest's legacy is his reported involvement leading Confederate soldiers in the West Tennessee Battle of Fort Pillow in April 1864, which has commonly become known as a massacre of surrendered Union troops, many of whom were Black.

Primary documents from a variety of sources refute argumentsmade by some Forrest apologists including some who have raised the possibility during conversations at the legislature about the bronze bust and Forrest's legacy that he was not responsible for the mass killings at Fort Pillow.

"We've been going through these excuses for Bedford Forrest for the longest while, and none of them are holding up under scrutiny," said Richard Blackett, a history professor at Vanderbilt University.

In 1868, Forrest gave an interview with a Cincinnati Commercial reporter that was widely published in newspapers around the country. In the interview, he said the Ku Klux Klan had "no doubt" been a benefit in Tennessee. While he denied being an official member, he said he was part of the organization "in sympathy," and later when Forrest testified before Congress about the KKK he eventually disclosed that he was familiar with rituals and practices.

Repeatedly in the 1868 interview, Forrest tried to suggest that he had more disdain for white Radical Republicans and Northerners trying to infiltrate Southern politics than he did African Americans, but he still remained fiercely opposed at that point to Blacks gaining the right to vote or having equal standing in society.

"I am opposed to it under any and all circumstances," Forrest said.

"And here I want you to understand distinctly I am not an enemy to the negro.We want him here among us; he is the only laboring class we have."

Jefferson Davis was a man of many words. He literally wrote volumes during his lifetime and spent the last decade of his life writing about the history of the Confederacyandan in-depth analysis of the Civil War.

But Davis (1808-1889) most notably is known for his role withthe Confederate States of America, of which he was named its first and only president.

Susannah Ural,professor of history and co-director of the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi, said Davis seemed to be a natural choice for president of the Confederacy.

Although he did not support secession, he felt duty-bound to represent his state, which voted to secede, and the new government to which he was appointed president. However, he also believed secession was a right afforded tothe states.

Davis wrote in his book,"The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government," that slavery "was not the cause of the war, but an incident."

In his preface to the bookhe said,"the States had never surrendered their sovereignty," and that states should be allowed to make their own decisions regarding slavery.

Davis saidthe federal government was usurping its authority by forcing unwanted laws on the states, first and foremost the abolition of slavery, which was an integral part of the Southern states' agricultural economy.

"(Slavery is) the primary cause, but it's not the only cause," Ural said. "When you talk about states' rights, when you talk about what powers the federal government should have versus state authority, one of the centralissues to states' rightswas the right to slavery."

However, she said, determining the Civil War happened because of slavery isn't entirely accurate.

"There's never one cause ofa war, and things thatmotivatepeople to fight in a war change over the course of time," she said. "To boil the Civil War down to slavery is problematic, but the bigger problem was that for decades, we just kind of pushed slavery aside and didn't really talk about it."

Even in his last days, Robert E. Lee, the Confederate general, had already become a myth a myth that gave a defeated South something to cling to; a means of understanding its defeat.

In 1865, Lee surrendered to Union Gen. Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Courthouse in Virginia. His exploits during the war and his canonization by defeated Southerners have rendered him among the most famous losers in military history.

To Emory Thomas, who wrote "Robert E. Lee: A Biography,"published in 1995, historical evidence shows Lee was a man who lived by a strict moral code, a sense of honor and duty; a great soldier and engineer who rose to the challenges he faced.

He was also a slave-owner and a white supremacist. While Lee believed slavery was morally wrong, he did not believe the abolition of it should come through the works of man, but, instead, the will of God.

In an interview, Thomas referenced a famous letter Lee wrote about slavery in 1857. In it, Lee distilled his views as a slave owner on race.

"In this enlightened age, there are few I believe, but what will acknowledge, that slavery as an institution, is a moral & political evil in any Country. It is useless to expatiate on its disadvantages. I think it, however, a greater evil to the white man than to the black race," Lee wrote. "The blacks are immeasurably better off here than in Africa, morally, socially & physically. The painful discipline they are undergoing, is necessary for their instruction as a race, & I hope will prepare & lead them to better things. How long their subjugation may be necessary is known & ordered by a wise Merciful Providence. Their emancipation will sooner result from the mild & melting influence of Christianity, than the storms & tempests of fiery Controversy."

In that letter, and other moments throughout his life, including testimony before Congress after the Civil War, Lee displayed views on race that Thomas described as compatible with social Darwinism a worldview that arose later in the 19th century and early 20th that Western governments, particularly that of the U.S., used to justify colonization, war and imperialism.

In 1862, he wouldfree his father-in-law's slaves, as required by the man's will, a matter of weeks before the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

"He anticipated social Darwinism In the evolutionary pyramid of human beings, I think he saw white folks like himself at the top. And African Americans somewhere down the ranks, above American Indians whom he really thought were dreadful," Thomas said.

Known as the "Boy Hero of the Confederacy," Sam Davis' story was resurrected from obscurity in the late 1800s by journalist Archibald Cunningham, founder of the Confederate Veteran magazine. There are monuments erected in Sam Davis'honor. His boyhood home is on the National Register of Historic Places and operates as a museum.

Barely 21 in 1863, Davis was hanged for his refusal to give Union Army Gen. Grenville Dodge the names of Confederate spies. "I would rather die a thousand deaths than betray a friend," Davis said moments before he was hanged on the Public Square in Pulaski, Tennessee.

Davis wasnt a boy, but a young man whose bravery is immortalized as a symbol of the Confederacy and the Lost Cause, said Brenden Martin, a Middle Tennessee State University history professor. The underpinning of the Lost Cause was that the Confederacy was "right all along" and had a right to secede from the United States.

"All youve got to do is look at the (Confederate) Articles of Secession. The people who brought about the secession (from the United States) made it clear it was about preserving the institution of slavery," Martin said.

Slavery was the backbone of the Southern economy, Martin said.

And the Davisfamily plantation was steeped in that economy.

Data from the American Battlefield Trust notes that Charles and Jane Davis, Sam Davis' parents, originally owned a830-acre plantation located in Smyrna. By 1860, there were 51 enslaved people owned by the Davis family. Sam Davis also had his own slave, named Coleman Davis,who was gifted to him when he was a boy.

Anarcha was at least 17 when the doctor started experimenting on her. The year before, she suffered terrible complications during a 72-hour labor that opened a hole between her bladder and vagina and left her incontinent.

The man who held Anarcha in bondage outside Montgomery sent her to Dr. J. Marion Sims sometime in 1845. She was one of at least seven enslaved women sent to Sims by white slaveholders. They had the same condition as Anarcha, known as a vesicovaginal fistula.

Sims wanted to find a way to address it. From 1845 to 1849, the enslaved women became experiments.

By Sims own account, Anarcha underwent 30 operations as Sims tried different approaches to repairing the fistula.

These women could not say no. Neither Sims nor the white men who held them against their will showed interest in their opinions. Deirdre Cooper Owens, a professor of medical history at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and author of "Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology," said if the women protested, they "could get beaten, or they could get ignored."

Anesthesia, Cooper Owens said, was not in wide use at this time.

Despite that, a statue of Sims unveiled in 1939 remains on the grounds of the Alabama Capitol in Montgomery. A bust of Sims also stands in Columbia, South Carolina. New York City officials removed a statue of Sims in Manhattan in 2018.

Andrew Johnson considered himselfa champion of the common man but only when those common men were white.

The 17th president of the United Stateswas a common man himself. Born into poverty in 1808, he escaped indentured servitude in North Carolinabefore moving to Greeneville, Tennessee, where he worked as a tailor,owned slaves and launched his political career as a Democrat.

When President Abraham Lincoln died from an assassin's bullet just six weeks after Johnson took office, a fractured countryfound its stubborn new president lacked Lincoln's ability to navigate theend of the Civil War with nuance and sensitivity.

Although Johnson had helped Lincoln end slavery across the land, he nowclashed with the Republican-controlled Congress by planting himself firmly in the way of rights for newly freed slaves. He soon grew widelyunpopular and became the first president ever to be impeached.

Johnson believed in what's called "herrenvolk democracy" the idea that the lowest white man in the social hierarchy should beabove the highest Black man, said Aaron Astor, ahistory professor at Maryville College who researches the Civil War-era South.

In 1860, the year before the Civil War broke out, Johnson said white Southernersfelt so threatened by the prospectof Black freedom that poor men would unite withslave ownersto exterminateslaves rather than see them freed.

Albert Pike is a name well-known in Arkansas history as both a Civil War general of Native American troops and a newspaper editor.

Although Pike was known nationally after the Civil War for his involvement with the Freemasons, he gained national attention again on June 19, 2020, when a statue dedicated to him in Washington, D.C.,was toppled by a group of Black Lives Matter demonstrators. The monument to Pike was the only one of a Confederate Civil War general in the District of Columbia.

Pike was a Boston transplant to Arkansas who initially resisted secession, but followed the lead of his fellow Arkansans in fully supporting the Confederacy and even servedas an appointed brigadier general in at least one battle in Arkansas.

By the end of his life, Pike had risen among the highest ranks of the Freemasons.

Before the Civil War, he had moved from the Fort Smith area to Little Rock to pursue a career as a journalist. He eventually became editor and owner of The Advocate where he reported on the Supreme Court of Arkansas.

When the Civil War broke out in 1861, Pike was called up to be a brigadier general over a troop made up of several Native American Tribes. He was cited as being an advocate for Native Americans and the wrongs they suffered at the hands of the white man.

When it came to African Americans, however, Pikes view of slavery was one that claimed it was a "necessary evil." He claimed that slaves would not be able to hold any other job and that they were treated well by their masters. He even admitted to having his own slave for "necessary" work.

Gen. Alfred Mouton has become one of Acadianas most polarizing historical figures. His statue, standing on city property in the heart of downtown Lafayette, has been the focus of public outcry, protest and legal battles for decades.

As support is increasing to remove the statue, most of the controversy over Mouton has focused on the fact that he owned Black peopleas slaves and fought for white supremacy during the Deep South's most oppressive era.

While Mouton is hailed by some as a hero from Lafayette's oldest family who fought to defend his hometown from Union forces during the Civil War, the famous son of former Gov. Alexandre Mouton helped wage another civil war here.

Mouton, along with his father, trained the "Vigilante Committee" in Lafayette Parish, a group that would carry out their own form of violent justice against Black residentsthrough whippings, expulsions and lynchings.

From the late 1850s to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, Mouton-backed vigilantes fought against other groups in Lafayette Parish's own civil war.

Confederate monuments: What the men honored by statues did and believed - Times Record

Kangalee: Why capitalism is the new slavery; and emancipation revolution remains unfinished – Wired868

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Dook Domini

[] The very prosperity that slavery brought to British capital was to eventually make slavery redundant. The capital accumulated throughout slavery led to investments in science, technology and engineering, created the industrial revolution, brought into being productive forces based on machinery, speeded up the process of proletarianisation of the British rural population, changed the social structure of Britain and prepared British capitalism for its task of bringing the whole world into the capitalist market.

In the process slavery became obsolete, an historical anachronism. But not because a system has become historically unnecessary will it fall of its own accord. The slave did not wait for it to fall they battered the slave system with continuous insurrection.

The abolition of slavery did not mean an end to the exploitation of labour; it merely changed its form

The following column on Labour and Emancipation was shared by Gerry Kangalee of the National Workers Union (NWU):

Emancipation Day should be a day of great significance to people of the African Diaspora in the Caribbean. But it should be of significance not only to Africans in the society; but to all peoples who have known the oppression characteristic of European and North American imperialism, which oppressed, dominated, enslaved and eliminated whole peoples, particularly non-white peoples.

But which also constructed an elaborate ideological justification for its brutality toward non-white peoplean ideology, or should I say a demonology of racism, based on the most despicable pseudo-science which reached its highest level in South Africa. It was called apartheid!

Emancipation Day brought an end to 250 years of slavery in the British-controlled Caribbean and opened up a whole new era in Caribbean History, which, instead of leading to the death of racism, only developed and strengthened that ideology with the introduction of Indian indentured labour.

What then is the relationship of emancipation to the labour question?

It is pretty clear that the central question of modern Caribbean History is the question of labour: the need for regimented, captive labour; the shortage of labour; and what Labour (in its personified sense) does, feels and thinks.

The question of Labour is inseparable from the question of the sugar/mono-crop economy, and from the question of immigration into the West Indies, intra-migration within the West Indies and migration from the West Indies.

The fundamental statement about Labour in the Caribbean is that Labour has never had the decisive, dominant say in how the society is to be organised, even though labour is the foundation of the economy. Exploitation and repressioninstead of freedom and powerhave so far been the lot of Labour.

Slavery was about the extreme exploitation of Labour so that Capital could be accumulated and used to colonise the world. The slave as different to the wage slave or modern worker did not sell his labour power for a wage. His labour power was forcibly appropriated.

It was so appropriated that not only did the slaves labour power belong to the slave owner, the slave himself belonged to the slave owner.

The slave was part of capital. And if it is agreed that capital is accumulated or dead labour, then the dominance of capital over labour reached its most barbaric state with the slave systemwhere the living worker/slaves life was absolutely dominated by the frantic scramble of British Capital to accumulate more and more in order to exploit more and more labour so as to accumulate more and more capital in a continually expanding spiral.

There have been many vivid descriptions about the conditions of slaves in the Caribbean, but none more appropriate and gut-wrenching than Kamau Brathwaites poems, All Gods Chillun, contained in his major work The Arrivants:

Boss man rates gain:

I am his living veinof sustenance:his corn, his meat, his grain

Boss man lacks pride:

So hides hisfear of fear and darknessin the whip

Boss man lacks pride:

I am his hideof darkness. Bide

the black times Lord hide

my heart from the lips

that spit

from the hate

that grips

the sweating flesh

the whips

that rip

so wet so red

so fresh!

The quotation brings out two important aspects of slavery. The first deals with the fact that the slave owner was nothing without the slave: the slave owner absolutely depended on the slave in order to survive.

The second is that Labour had to be subject to absolute coercion. Slavery without coercion is a contradiction in terms.

Lets deal with the first aspect: I am his living vein/of sustenance/his corn, his meal, his grain.

What is being said is that capital is nothing without labour. It is precisely in the exploitation of labour that capital grows and assumes absolute dominance over the whole of society.

But if we take a look again at the quote l am his living vein of sustenance, it describes much more than the mode of organisation of labour called slavery. It also describes the relationship between the modern working class and the capitalists.

It is, in fact, a description of the relationship between Capital and Labour. It says that Capital is parasitic; it feeds and grows upon Labour. And, in the process, it emasculates, dominates and alienates Labour which is Capitals living vein of sustenance.

While slavery was abolished, the exploitation of Labour by Capital continues under changed and constantly changing forms. The exploitation of labour during slaverys hey-day could be carried out in no other way than by forcible, physical appropriation and coerciongiven the level of the productive forces and the state of evolution of society and the ideologies and philosophies arising therefrom.

But by the time the slaves were emancipated in the l830s, the British ruling class had gained enough experience in exploiting its own working class to be confident that emancipation would not mean the end of colonial imperialism in the Caribbean, and the domination of Capital over Labour and White over Black.

They also had enough experience to know that if Emancipation did not come from above, it would come from below. And if it did come from below, the status quo would be radically different.

The Haitian Revolution had taught them that the slaves were not going to put up with slavery for much longer and they were determined to be free, whether by petition or by violent means.

Ever since Eric Williams published his book Capitalism and Slavery, reactionary and racist European historians have been forced to recognise that the changing needs of capitalism made the abolition of slavery an historical necessity.

Before the publication of that book, Eurocentric history had postulated that it was the agitation of the so-called humanitarians, the Wilberforces and the Clarksons, that led to Emancipation.

Today, it is generally accepted that it was the changing needs of capitalist, political economy which gave rise to Wilberforce and Clarkson. The humanitarians did not agitate for emancipation because they were against the brutalisation of Africans by Europeans or against mans inhumanity to man.

They recognised that for capitalist economy to stand, pre-dominant remnants of pre-capitalist social formations had to be dealt with; and that slavery as a form of labour organisation was much more wasteful and expensive than the new powerful and gigantic forces of production brought into being by the then ongoing industrial revolution.

The spokesmen of the British Bourgeoisie knew that for British capitalism to really create and dominate the world market, preferential treatment for West Indian sugar had to go, colonial monopolies had to go.

In British capitalisms development into capitalist imperialism, free trade was an absolute necessity. The West Indian plantocracy was naturally opposed to free trade. They had to be dealt with. They were dealt with by the method of destroying the basis of their power: slavery!

The American bourgeoisie had to go to war 25 years later with the American slave plantocracy in order to clear the way for the expansion and development of American Capitalism. This is pretty much accepted today by right wing historians.

What is frantically hidden is that while it was recognised that the abolition of slavery was a historical necessity for the further expansion of capitalism, the political realisation of that goal did not depend on intellectual understanding, but on the outcome of the clash of class interests both within the UK and in its colonies.

The argument about whether slavery should be abolished or when slavery should be abolished could have gone on for another generation. The decisive push toward Emancipation came from the movement of the slaves themselves.

The objective laws of capitalist development can only operate and be discerned in the subjective activity and struggles of the contending class forces in capitalist society.

The intervention of the slaves settled all debate and pushed the ruling classes to hasten the end of slavery. If they had not, the slaves inevitably would have. This perspective is useful in understanding the forces that led to the end of apartheid in South Africa.

The opening shot in the drama of the slaves intervention began in 1791 with the great Haitian Revolution which began only two years after the French Revolution. The significant thing about the revolution in Haiti is not so much that the slaves revolted. Slaves had always revolted.

The fundamental dynamic of West Indian history is to be found in the spiral of repression and resistance that continues to this day. The significance of the Haitian Revolution is that it succeeded; and in succeeding, opened a thirst for and an ideology of liberation that spread throughout the Caribbean.

The Haitian Revolution shattered, at least from an historical point of view, the myth of the docile negro; the myth of the intellectually, physically and morally inferior African.

The myth led to British philosopher David Hume, saying: I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. The myth led the third President of the USA Thomas Jefferson, who made so much noise about the rights of man to say: I advance it therefore as a suspicion only that the blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowment both of body and mind.

After the Haitian revolution, only pseudo-scientists and dishonest intellectuals like Trollope and Froudewho was so devastatingly dealt with by John Jacob Thomas, the Afro-Trinidadian linguist and educator in his book FROUDACITY, published in the 1880scould still argue with equanimity that Blacks were an inferior people.

What the revolution in Haiti did was to spawn a series of never ending revolts throughout the Caribbean that convinced the colonial authorities that it was time for slavery to go.

In the words of one historian: Economic change, the decline of the monopolists, the development of capitalism had now reached their completion in the determination of the slaves themselves to be free.

Lets sum up what led to emancipation. In the late 15th and early 16th century, the West Indies became the sugar pots of Britain and Western Europe. Sugar was produced by slave labour which was procured on the coasts of West Africain the process destroying many societies and civilisations which were as developed as those of Western Europe.

The trade in slaves, the production of sugar by slave labour and the trade in sugar gave rise to astronomical profits for British capitalists. So invaluable were the West Indian sugar islands to mid-eighteenth century Europe that at the end of the seven years war between Britain and France in 1763, which Britain won, the French were quite content to let the British keep Canada in exchange for Guadeloupe.

The very prosperity that slavery brought to British capital was to eventually make slavery redundant.

The capital accumulated throughout slavery led to investments in science, technology and engineering, created the machine-based industrial revolution, speeded up the process of proletarianisation of the British rural population, changed the social structure of Britain and prepared British capitalism for its task of bringing the whole world into the capitalist market.

In the process slavery became obsoletean historical anachronism.

But not because a system has become historically unnecessary means it will fall of its own accord. The slave did not wait for it to fall; they battered the slave system with continuous insurrection.

The British Government took readings and instituted Emancipation from above rather than afford more Haitis in the Caribbean. That is how Emancipation came about.

What we must now look at are its lessons. The abolition of slavery did not mean an end to the exploitation of labour; it merely changed its form. When the masses revolted, Emancipation was conceded, but the plantation system survivedand indeed expanded on the basis of indentured labour, which carried forced labour into the twentieth century.

Emancipation did not remove colonialism, did not put power in the hands of the working people. In l937, when the wage slaves revolted, the colonial authorities conceded limited rights to the people; but the cause of the revolt, the exploitation of labour by capital, continued.

When the people of the Caribbean demanded independence and control over their destinies after the Second World War, we were diverted with political independence under the rule of middle-class professionals who implicitly supported capitalism.

When, in 1970, the working people demanded economic independence, an end to racism and power to the people, the ruling classes in T&T, who are allied with international capitalism, gave us localisation and state capitalism. The exploitation of Labour by Capital remains.

Emancipation, while carrying society to a more advanced level, did not solve the basic contradiction of West Indian history: the capital-labour contradiction. It simply placed it on a new footing.

The resolution of that contradiction lies solely in the hands of the modern working class. That is our historic mission.

Let us make haste and complete the unfinished revolution that our ancestors began.

See the original post here:

Kangalee: Why capitalism is the new slavery; and emancipation revolution remains unfinished - Wired868

Human trafficking: The pandemic creates opportunities for those involved in this hidden crime – Daily Maverick

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Dook Domini

In 2013 the United Nations General Assembly held a high-level meeting to assess the situation regarding human trafficking. At that meeting, members also signed a resolution and designated 30 July as World Day against Trafficking in Persons.

This ongoing scourge that besieges the world is so much more prevalent than any of us fortunate enough to live in a suburban bubble can comprehend. Google human trafficking and you wont find an easy answer as to exactly how many people it affects. The reason for this is because the crime of trafficking in persons (also known as human trafficking, modern-day slavery and shortened as TIP), is by its very nature a hidden crime.

The best current estimate is a triangulation of data by various international and non-governmental organisations, including the International Labour Organisation, which estimated in 2017 that 40 million people globally were victims of modern-day slavery. This included 25 million people in forced labour, and another 15 million people trapped in a forced marriage.

As with most things, the key to understanding a problem is to start with an accurate definition. In the case of human trafficking, much confusion remains, affecting everything from first responders response, to prosecution, victim identification, and most importantly, having an appropriately trauma-centered response for victims of trafficking.

For starters, a victim does not need to be transported between locations to fall into the definition of being a victim of trafficking. In fact, the definition used by the US state departments annual TIP report for 2020 separates trafficking into two elements: sex trafficking where a commercial sex act is induced by force, fraud or coercion, or if a person is under 18; or labour trafficking which is the recruitment, harbouring, transportation, provision, or obtaining of a person for labour services, through use of force, fraud, coercion or subjecting them to involuntary servitude, and debt bondage or slavery.

While sex trafficking still makes up the greatest number of detected trafficking cases globally, trafficking for forced labour is the most common form detected in sub-Saharan Africa. Crucially, that is detected cases. Of the 40 million people estimated to be caught in some form of slavery, only slightly more than 100,000 victims were identified globally in 2019. Of these, prosecutions took place in 11% of cases, with corresponding convictions in 9%.

Amid everything that is going on in the world, why should anyone who is not a policy maker, or anti-trafficking campaigner or practitioner, possibly care about this on top of a pandemic and everything else? Because the pandemic is having an impact on trafficking in all its forms.

Think about it: people who are being trafficked (for whatever reason, be it sex or labour) are already incredibly vulnerable. Consider that someone who is trafficked is not necessarily kidnapped, but often lured away with the promise of a better life. And given that their lived experience is probably so horrible, they willingly accompany the prospective perpetrator. This is how so many hopeful language teachers in Asia, or domestic servants to the Middle East, or farm workers in the Western Cape, end up being enforced servants or sex slaves.

With Covid-19, vulnerabilities have increased for most people around the world be it additional pressure on income, job, home, and resilience in general. But vulnerabilities have increased exponentially for people who were already vulnerable, and thereby existing fault lines in our society are exacerbated with regards to inequality and access to basic human rights.

Where there was hunger before, there is now dire malnutrition; where there was already high unemployment, there is now a national crisis that threatens our social fabric as more people than ever before face the reality of never returning to work. There have also been the untold pressures of the pandemic on emergency services, from policing to medical care.

While these have affected nearly everyone in the world, they have converged into a storm of epic proportions for people on the fringe of being exploited. And there is a reason for this. The trade in human beings is one of the most profitable industries in the world. The International Labour Organisation reports (2014) that human traffickers earn profits of nearly $150-million per year.

Now consider the current situation where kids are out of school and deprived of an environment that could potentially detect wrongdoing or vulnerabilities; many vulnerable people are out of work (including millions of immigrants without access to government aid), and willing to do almost anything to feed their families; and police and other law enforcement agencies are so occupied with catching small-scale transgressors of lockdown regulations that they spend less time on more complex crimes like human trafficking driving it further underground, to the detriment of victims and the benefit of the perpetrator.

Take a recent example of a 17-year-old girl who was trafficked by her 31-year-old boyfriend. The scrawny blonde teenager was brought from her home town in Mpumalanga to a suburb of Pretoria. Here, her boyfriend kept her hostage in a corrugated iron shack where he sold her for sex until an informant managed to get a message to a member of the national task team on trafficking. A police investigator with the Hawks, he went to the location and spoke to the perpetrator under the guise of looking for directions.

This story has a reasonably good ending. The victim was saved and is presently in a safe house. The perpetrator was arrested and will hopefully be charged and face trial. But only a fraction of cases ever come to light. And many of them are not as obvious as a girl locked in a shack being sold for sex.

Most cases in South Africa are far more mundane and quite possibly involve the person who picked the grapes for that wine you currently pine for under lockdown. The reality in South Africa, since before apartheid, is the cheaper the labour the better, and many industries (mining and agriculture in particular) are willing to cut corners and look the other way when dodgy labour brokers bring bakkie loads of workers to pick grapes and dig for minerals.

As a country, and as humanity, we should all pay more attention to where our food and our commodities come from. Start asking questions and demand transparency in labour practices. There are many global initiatives and programmes one can support, involving fair trade in consumables and luxury items. And yes, if you want to help fight human trafficking, you will need to pay attention and be willing to pay a fair wage for employees.

If you suspect a case of trafficking in persons, please call the national hotline at 0800 222 777. Rather be safe than sorry. If something at your spa, coffee shop, or even in the alley behind a school or mall seems off, it very well might be. DM

Susan Marx is an international human rights and development practitioner with experience in Africa, the Middle East and Asia. She is currently overseeing a Southern Africa anti-human trafficking project for the American Bar Association in support of the Africa Prosecutors Association.

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Human trafficking: The pandemic creates opportunities for those involved in this hidden crime - Daily Maverick

Why Does The Fashion Industry Care Less About Garment Workers In Other Countries? – Forbes

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Dook Domini

A garment worker carries unfinished pants in Dhaka, Bangladesh during the coronavirus pandemic, July ... [+] 19, 2020.

Revelations of unjust and dangerous treatment of garments workers in the global fashion industry continue to surface in the mainstream media. When the story broke about non-paying brands leaving factories in Bangladesh at crisis point, a series of initiatives were launched to raise awareness of the impact on garment workers, and provide them with aid. It is difficult, however, to determine how these initiatives will drive lasting change for garment workers, who continue to live hand to mouth despite decades of living-wage debate and aid initiatives.

Is aid and raising awareness a long term solution, or a band-aid driven in some instances by a savior complex? We may feel good about liking such campaigns on Instagram and sharing popular hashtags to show solidarity or concern, but does this result in any material difference to garment workers? How does their situation change due to this raised awareness? What really needs to change so that workers receive a living wage and job security, and why hasnt this happened already?

Evidence of just how tragic the situation has become for garment workers in Bangladesh was revealed recently in a shocking article in the Dhaka Tribune. The article revealed that newly married garment workers, Keya Akter (18) and Sharif Hosain (19), were forced by a private hospital to sell their newborn baby, to pay hospital bills. Sharif Hosain explained to me during a telephone interview that Central Hospital Gazipur refused to release their baby, who was born by c-section (a procedure they were advised was necessary, but with little evidence to back this up) until the bills were paid in full. Sharif said that following threats of legal action and prosecution against his wifes entire family for non-payment, Keyas mother contacted a childless couple known to the family, and arranged the sale of their newborn babyan incomprehensible situation for those living with free access for all to public healthcare in countries like the U.K. The Dhaka Tribune reported that when police were alerted, the baby was returned to Keya and Sharif, and the money repaid to the childless couple by a police commissioner.

During our interview, Sharif said that he and Keya had worked together for a year in a garment factory in Dhaka sewing vests and shirts, until the factory closed in April this year. He offered to give details of the factory, but is unable to read or write, and speaks Bangla only, so could not communicate these details clearly. Sharif lost his job due to Covid-19 before their child was born and was not paid for his last two months of work. Keya stopped working 5 months into her pregnancy. This left them without money for basic necessities, let alone extortionate hospital bills.

This shocking situation is not an isolated incident, explained Nazma Akter, founder of the Awaj Foundation, an NGO providing training, and emergency support to garment workers facing destitution, discrimination, and violence. Akter explained during a separate telephone interview that it is commonplace for workers to attend public hospitals, only to be diverted to private hospitals for, often unnecessary, tests and surgery by doctors who own chambers there and stand to gain large profits and commissions. She told me of Awaj Foundation members being forced to sell land and empty their savings to pay doctors and hospital bills.What needs to happen right now to prevent this tragic situation repeating, I asked Akter? Workers need a living wage and a social safety net, she said.

Nazma Akter, Founder, Awaj Foundation, takes part in The Wages: What Should Fashion Brands Do? ... [+] panel discussion at the Copenhagen Fashion Summit, 2019

So far, action to address the garment worker crisis has come mostly in the form of aid and high profile media campaigns, alongside a grant of 113 million from the EU to pay three months salary for 1 million garment workers, who were left unemployed due to canceled garment orders in Bangladesh. After Remake launched Payup in April, up to 19 additional brands committed to paying their suppliers in Bangladesh, but many remain silent and non-committal, apparently without consequence beyond bad press. This makes it hard to connect aid and awareness with actioning safe, dignified work environments and living wages in the long term.

While the 'Payup' campaign was being put into action, Bangladesh entered lockdown on 26th March, with transport shut down and businesses closed. The garment industry, however, was given an exemption from the lockdown. In an interview with the BBC, a garment worker said: In my factory, there are so many of us working in such a small place, which increases the risk of coronavirus infection. I'm scared for my life." Despite this fear and a lack of access to proper healthcare, coupled with the threat of job loss or unpaid salaries due to brands not paying suppliers (as in the case of Sharif Hosain) garment workers in Bangladesh have so far been offered ad hoc aid, at best.

Fast forward to July and a report was published in TheTimes revealing cramped working conditions, below living-wages, and garment workers being forced to carry on working in the garment factory Jaswal Fashions despite testing positive for Covid-19. The factory was reportedly manufacturing clothing for fast-fashion brand Boohoo, who then hit the headlines in conjunction with a modern slavery inquiry. Boohoo was dropped by the retail stockists Next, Asos and Zalando, and saw a sharp decline in share price, with over 1.5 billion wiped off their value (almost a third) within days. These decisive actions signaled a lack of tolerance from brands, investors, and consumers for unethical treatment of garment workers, sending a warning signal to brands working with manufacturers who dont pay living wages or care adequately for staff. But why the dramatically different response this time, with retail, financial and government intervention, when the BBC article reporting the same issue resulted in no known action months before?

Love Island Launch night with boohoo.com, Liverpool, England.

The first case involved a factory and garment workers in Dhaka, Bangladesh. The second was in Leicester, U.K. That is the only material differencegeography. This casts a horrible truth at the heart of the unethical treatment of garment workers: brands care (and act) when the exploitation is on their doorstep, but not when it is further afield in Asia. The proximity of the factory to Boohoo operations in Manchester and U.K. retailers was too close for comfort. Despite both news stories being shared in the U.K. media, the lack of action in the case of the Bangladeshi workers suggests a lack of empathy and interest in their plight, beyond social media likes in support of campaigns to aid garment workers.

I discussed this situation with Dr. Lipi Begum, Educator, and Researcher of Fashion Business, Innovation, and Inclusivity at London College of Fashion. Her father, who is of Bangladeshi origin, worked in a textile mill in Manchester when her family emigrated to the U.K., and she believes that there are people in Leicester now working in similar conditions to those he experienced then, and that other garment workers in Bangladesh are experiencing today. Garment workers globally are vulnerable and exploited for commercial gain with their skills undervalued, according to Begum.

The imbalance in response to the two situations demonstrates bias and prejudice that attaches a lower value to the work, and workers, in countries such as Bangladesh. Dr. Begum explained to me that this extends to a lack of recognition of the innovation and skill in the garment and textile industry in Bangladesh, and instead a focus on cheap labor. There is much added-value that could come from closer partnerships between brands in Europe and manufacturers in Bangladesh, she says, but despite the expansion of the university design and trend forecasting curricula in 2011 at Bangladesh University of Fashion & Technology (BUFT) in partnership with London College of Fashion and Dr. Begum, brands have not engaged factories in providing this extra value. She believes they continue to perceive Bangladesh primarily as a place for high volume, low-value products that must be as cheap as possible, despite brands like Lidia May and London-based emerging design talent Rahemur Rahman producing their luxury leather goods and high-end fashion collections in the capital, Dhaka.

To ensure living wages for garment workers, the consequences Boohoo faces should be faced by all brands, regardless of where their manufacturing is done, if they are linked to unethical practices and worker exploitation. The current business model, which squeezes factories on price, with the brands holding the power in most cases, must change. Equitable partnerships are seen by fashion industry analysts and advisors as to the prime solution to several fundamental problems the industry currently faces, including inaccurate pricing, low wages, lack of investment in new technologies and upskilling, the oversupply of stock, a lack of digital transformation, supply chain opacity and prohibitively long lead times. To achieve living wages, the model of making cut-price clothing with a margin of cents in high volumes will not deliver.

Entrepreneurs in fashion and retail are proposing new models that are built upon shared equity and data-based style selection, in response to the consumer market, rather than flooding it with products subjectively decided upon by a buyer, based on instinct. Cally Russell of Mallzee told me that if the root cause of suppliers being squeezed to the tiniest of margins per unit is because the brand expects to have to discount by at least 20-30% to shift the product, then the model has inbuilt failures. And garment workers are paying the biggest price for this.

Lost Stock is a startup putting together boxes of abandoned stock (unpaid for by brands) and selling them to consumers based on color, style, and size preferences, with the bonus of knowing that 37% of the proceeds go to the respective garment workers in Bangladesh. Russell states that he was warned by several industry insiders not to pay factories directly for the boxes, due to a risk that they may not pass the funds on to the workers, or they may use the funds to keep their business afloat, or worse, they may close down. The Lost Stock initiative, created by Cally Russells team at Mallzee, has been met with criticism from the likes of Remake, who say that Lost Stock lets non-paying brands off the hook. Russell openly admits that there are flaws in the initiative and that they entered into it somewhat naively, with a steep learning curve ensuing. He explained that Lost Stock Pays the freight on board (FOB) price of the stock to the factory in part cash (30%) and part vouchers from NGOs (equivalent to the 37%) for the garment workers, which are then distributed by the factory. NGOs are prohibited from distributing cash in Bangladesh. The remainder of the revenue is split between logistics, transaction costs and postage, with 9% going to Lost Stock, which Russell hopes will cover the cost of their 25 staff and any returns.

Garment factory, Dhaka, Bangladesh, July 25, 2020.

When I asked Russell the likelihood of this initiative leading to living wages and dignified working conditions, he explained that Lost Stock is a proof of concept for a long-term business venture (currently under wraps) based on shared equity partnerships between a retail business and a handful of factories in Bangladesh. In the model, the garment styles and volumes will be manufactured based on aggregated eCommerce data from Mallzee, which indicates macro trends and shifts in consumer behavior and preferencesessentially, producing what there is a demand for, and nothing else, thereby securing living wages in place of heavy discounting.

This is the crux of a fashion industry where garment workers are paid a living wagenew business models where the power dynamic between brands and manufacturers is equal and there is transparency from end-to-end. Where manufacturer and supply chain stakeholders arent forced to relinquish a fair piece of the pie to make up for losses caused by bad decision making by retailers and brands. In conjunction with this is digital transformation, and the implementation of streamlined processes to allow production on-demand based on emerging consumer trends. This may be trickier to navigate with Bangladesh tending to have logistical limitations that can threaten the fast turnaround of products. It is clear though, that new business models have living-wage capacity built into pricing structures so that workers like Keya Akter and Sharif Hosain are not at the mercy of ad hoc aid and institutional exploitation in times of crisis.

Update - 01/08/20: Some examples of recent campaigns have been removed at the request of employees of those organisations, and one expression edited as part of the same request.

Read the original here:

Why Does The Fashion Industry Care Less About Garment Workers In Other Countries? - Forbes

We Can’t Return to the Way Things Were Before. For Philanthropy, the Way Forward is Reparations – Inside Philanthropy

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Dook Domini

This summers powerful uprising for racial justice has breathed new life into the centuries-long call for reparationsand philanthropy should be adding our voices.

On the federal level, a bill that would establish the first commission on reparations in the United States, sponsored by Rep. Sheila Jackson (Texas), may be heard in the House this summer. Meanwhile, cities are taking it upon themselves to begin the process: This month, Asheville, in my home state of North Carolina, and Providence, Rhode Island, both took steps to begin the process of reparations, investigating how our current cities have been scaffolded on wealth stolen from enslaved Black people and Indigenous people.

This progress shows us that these efforts will be slow and deliberate, but also that we can each take action toward reparations in our own spheres of influence. Leaders of the inextricable sectors of philanthropy and finance, with our immense wealth, must take it upon ourselves to advance reparations in ways that are already within our power, now.

The spirit of reparations is that those who hold the bulk of ill-gotten resources and influence must hold responsibility for repairing the harms done. As movers of money, we have the ability to take immediate action to get resources into the hands of those who have been marginalized and excluded by wealth-holding institutions for generations. Collectively, American foundations have approximately $1 trillion in assets. Rather than waiting for Congress to act, or leaving the work of reparations to spread on a small, local level, finance and philanthropy could work in tandem to drive wealth into the hands of Black and Native Americans today. Undertaking reparations would begin to pay philanthropys centuries-long debts in a transformational way, building beyond this current moment and short-term, reactive grantmaking and pledges that run the risk of fizzling out in months or a year.

As Ive argued before, philanthropy could take 10% of its assets10% tithed from each foundation in existenceand establish a trust fund led by Native Americans and Black Americans that would support asset-building projects, such as home ownership, education or startup funds for businesses. This reparations tithing among foundations could happen right now, without legislation, as a demonstration of commitment from the philanthropic community, which has long been called out for its ongoing failures to adequately support the leadership of Black and Indigenous people. This trust fund would not entail yet another arduous grant applicationinstead, it would be premised on actual trust with these communities. There can be no specifications around how that money is spent once its in their hands, no reporting requirementsno strings attached.

This is not the only trust fund-like program that philanthropy and social and ethical finance could undertake. Professor William A. Darity Jr. has developed an idea for what he calls Baby Bonds, another kind of trust fund held for every child born in the United States, with the amount in the fund based on the wealth of the childs family, rather than based on race or heritage. Bill Gates baby might get $50, Darity has suggested, while the baby of the lowest-income family might get something in the thousands or tens of thousands. In this instance, the benefit to Black, Latinx and Indigenous families would counter the racial wealth gap, a legacy of slavery, colonialism, redlining and other policies that has created a reality where, in 2016, the median household wealth was $171,000 for white families and just $17,600 for Black families. To be clear, Darity does not wish to categorize this as a reparations program, as it does not specifically or exclusively address the needs of Black Americans. However, from an outcome-based perspective, this program is another transformative option available to philanthropy and finance right now as a means of addressing racial injustices.

Finally, a true commitment from the finance sector to the spirit of reparations could involve throwing support behind a financial transaction tax (FTT). Movements of low-wage workers in New York are currently proposing this as one option in their campaign to #MakeBillionairesPay for budget shortfalls and relief for workers in New York state. This miniscule fee charged on the trading of stocks, currencies, debt instruments (like bonds and treasury notes), and derivatives (futures and options) would hardly be felt by investors. However, an FTT of 0.25%$1 on every $400 of stock tradedwould generate hundreds of billions of dollars. Based on who trades stocks, only the most affluent communities, the top 10% of households, would even perceive the impact.

Even with a more conservative rate of tax, such as that proposed in the Inclusive Prosperity Act introduced in 2012 and 2015, there would still be $220 billion generated per year. With a handsome sum like $220 billion, we could also look at funding broad social programs like free universal healthcare or free universal college education, which, as the Movement for Black Lives has suggested, would disproportionately benefit Black Americans, and could be part of a reparations portfolio. We could take a chunk of that money and buy land for Natives: land to which we actually have full property rights. In short, we could begin to balance out the institutional white supremacy that has siphoned wealth away from us for generations.

Philanthropy and finance hold immense wealth and influence across society, and both sectors have the means to facilitate transformative changes in the lives of Black and Indigenous people today. Reparations are the ultimate way to build power in communities from which wealth has been stolen, a major step toward decolonization. The sectors of philanthropy and finance must interrogate our complacency and embrace the risk of leaving behind our old waysleading the way for the government finally to follow suit.

Edgar Villanueva is the author of Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance and the founder of Liberated Capital, a philanthropic initiative designed to practice the values of reciprocity and equity outlined in the book.

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We Can't Return to the Way Things Were Before. For Philanthropy, the Way Forward is Reparations - Inside Philanthropy

A Lack of Vision: The Missed Opportunities of the Skywalker Saga – The Emancipation of Anakin – Flickering Myth

Posted on August 6, 2020 by Dook Domini

Anghus Houvouras begins a deep dive into the Skywalker Saga

Believe me, I wish I could just wish away my feelings. My relationship with Star Wars has changed significantly over my lifetime. From the first movie I ever saw in theaters to the pop culture universe I gleefully devoured in the form of comic books, video games and action figures and eventually into periods of confounding confusion with the prequels to absolute ambivalence to the direction (or lack thereof) taken by Disney. Star Wars is the film series Ive written the most about in over 20 years of cinematic ramblings. This time, however, I am taking a deep dive into the entire Skywalker Saga to examine the most profound disappointment surrounding the series. I am not a fan of being an armchair filmmaker and re-writing cinematic narratives. The goal of a critic is to criticize what is or is not there. You can criticize plot points that make little sense or how a character is presented, but it is never the job of a critic to posit what the story or choices should have been. The job of the critic is not to create fan fiction.

So in this case, I am not really being a critic talking about the overall quality of the Star Wars movies, but story elements introduced into the films that could have better served the overall plot. I am not creating new characters or story elements; I am merely reflecting on included character elements that could have created a potentially more engaging and interesting story if they had been explored or extrapolated upon.

I will warn you now that this is a journey; a long, labored look at creative threads within the Star Wars movies that are never properly stitched together. An examination of repeated oversights that took a toll on what was once Hollywoods most storied franchise.

A Slave Named Anakin

All of this begins with the prequels: George Lucas ambitious origin story is a mess that centers on a terrible, cringe-inducing love story. This love story eventually provides Anakin with a reason to betray his friends and beliefs in order to have a slim-to-none chance at saving his secret wife, Padm. There was something about Anakins transformation to the dark side that always felt slight. His logic, or lack thereof in choosing Palpatine over the Jedi Council, and his best friend Obi-Wan felt like a switch being turned, rather than a dimmer switch being slowly moved from light to darkness.

There are many different pieces in the prequel trilogy that could have been connected to create a more compelling turn. One that would have made sense for the character as well as giving Anakin an actual reason to turn on the Jedi and embrace Palpatines ideologies of totalitarianism.

Anakins Desire To End Slavery

Anakin Skywalker and his mother Shmi were slaves, though, in the Star Wars universe, this version of slavery seems more akin to indentured servitude. His formative years were spent doing the bidding of others and watching his mother work tirelessly as the life drained from her. Her hopes and dreams snuffed out by an unfair social system. There is no doubt that the experience of being a slave would be a deep cut that never properly heals. The notion of Anakin being a slave is something of a vital plot point in The Phantom Menace. His status as a slave creates a conundrum that Qui-Gon must navigate through. However, once they leave Tatooine, the concept, and all the potential character-building implications of slavery are pretty much abandoned.

Hurt People Hurt People

Anakins turn to the dark side is presented by George Lucas as an ideological conflict with the Jedi and act of blind devotion to the woman he loves. The former is never really presented in a sensible way.

Would it not have made a lot more sense if Anakins beef with the Jedi and what the order represents had revolved around his desire to return to Tatooine to free his mother as well as the others held in captivity? Should that not have been the crux of his ideological battle with his fellow Jedi? Anakins slavery and captivity could have been a deep scar that never healed. The tragedy of Darth Vader could have been the product of a childhood trauma that is already built into the story. Instead of love-struck idiot, Anakin could have turned to the dark side over an actual injustice in need of rectification.

Anakins central struggle could have been about something meaningful: the idea that the Jedi do not wage wars on behalf of the disenfranchised or that they work to bring about peace and justice to the galaxy and are nothing more than the enforcement arm of a corrupt system that chooses political prudence over doing what is right. Anakins frustration with the Republic and the Jedi who serve them could have brought up something salient and actually made the existential conflict of power and responsibility ideologically engaging.

Why do the Jedi not help the suffering and use their abilities to engage the kind of everyday evil that plagues the Outer Rim of a galaxy far away? So often, the Jedi are portrayed as righteous heroes, but their portrayal in the prequel trilogy has them acting more like military consultants who are dispatched to work out conflicts and act only when duly elected officials and aspiring overlords give their blessing.

In my opinion, Anakins conflict should have always centered on his desperate want to return to Tatooine and free his mother. His training and ascension in the ranks of the Jedi would have been to serve that purpose. He has no interest in betraying the Jedi, but he knows that if he becomes as powerful as Qui-Gon predicted, he would possess the ability to free his mother, and perhaps convince his peers to join him on a quest to liberate the slaves of the universe.

This small pivot makes a few things, most notably, Palpatines pitch to Anakin, more intelligible. Palpatine wants to rule, and pitches Anakin on the need for strong hands to enforce the rule of law for the entire galaxy. Throughout his time on Coruscant, Anakin witnesses several moments of wishy-washy politics including political infighting that allows people to continue to suffer. He is there firsthand when Padm decides to go rogue and tries to free Naboo. He is also there to see Qui-Gon tell Padm that the Jedi are not there to fight a war.

What if Anakins inability to progress within the Jedi Order is based on the Council sensing his desire to go rogue and free his mother, believing that his quest for enough power to free the slaves could be a path to the dark side?

If he actually engaged in this existential crisis of the Jedi Order, some bad lines for Revenge of the Sith would make sense. When Obi-Wan confronts Anakin before their video game saber fight begins, he spews out lines like I believe the Jedi are evil, to which audiences collectively went Huh? Sure, the Jedi have been paralyzed by bureaucracy and often act to serve their own best interests, but nothing they did in the prequel films would make that line remotely accurate. I am sure Lucas included that line to show how removed from reality Anakin had become. If Anakin had lost his mother due to his and the Jedi orders inaction, that line would have actually made perfect sense.

We could have had an Anakin who broke from the Jedi ranks and joined up with Palpatine because he craved the power to impose his will on an unjust and uncaring universe. You could say there are light shades of that in the prequels, but they are never filled in or darkened. Anakin never gets a coherent character arc. His transformation into Darth Vader is sound and fury, signifying nothing. Even before he is brutally mutilated and his burnt husk is buried within a cybernetic shell, Anakin was little more than the approximation of a three-dimensional character.

Tying his internal and ideological conflict to the scar tissue of slavery could have solved that.

To be continued in Part II: Pharisees and Fiancees

Anghus Houvouras

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A Lack of Vision: The Missed Opportunities of the Skywalker Saga - The Emancipation of Anakin - Flickering Myth

Confederate monuments: What the men honored by statues did and believed – Booneville Democrat

Posted on August 4, 2020 by Dook Domini