Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Was American slavery ever justified?

Jerrin R

I am going to focus on the idea of racism and how it started and how it was justified by the American mainstream through the use of resources like religion.
Societies in particular Western Society has always relied on a book called the Bible to justify slavery. When slavery was abolished they used science to justify inferiority of minorities. When science failed they use economics and ignorance to continue to propagate the ideas of covert racism.
Race was a human construct which helps classify people into different groups based on geographical origins of their ancestors. It helps to use race as a way to exploit individuals from minorities for economic purposes. Racism was a social construction that allowed white slaveholders to pass on human capital to their descendants and to ensure that they would have an advantage with the competition in the macroeconomic scale by providing themselves with unlimited capital, specifically with an unlimited source of human labor capital.
Racism was supposedly destroyed by the civil rights actions but they still persist in actions that are done to minorities. An example of this would be the segregation of housing which could happen because , "black people devalue the neighborhood". Often people use examples and statistics to show how black people are inferior to other people but they fail to mention how black people became that way.
How do you take people that used to be part of some of the most ancient cultures with highly developed social structures and use them as labor capital. You cannot take that person and use him/her as a slave unless you modify that individual.

The loss of family connections and continued loss of family members can over time tell a population to stop investing their best in their significant other and their offspring. This is something that was learned by former slaves from their previous environments and which they continue to follow.
Without a family a child lacks financial support, educational support, moral support, love, security and many other basic needs with most of us take for granted.
Without education the only jobs available are dead end jobs or else to turn to crime. Crime leads to loss of resources of a society which can lead to even further lack of investment in that area. When the media needs to sell papers it has to use interesting topics. Thus is pays attention to crimes committed by black people which is then attributed to the character of all black people. This leads to even more problems because even with education you do not have the same respect or pay because you are supposedly criminal by nature.
Thus racism is continually fed to us from when we are little children and we are born and socialized into a world of racists practices.
These videos show how the Bible was misused, misinterpreted, and capitalized on in order to use it as a method of controlling slaves. This can actually back fire when slaves / their descendants read the bible as can be seen in these videos.

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