Cartoon: "reverse racism"

[mahnmut]

Comments

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

Seen it. :p

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Depends. Do they, or did they, demand that folk who had moved to California and had profited from slavery leave all their profits where they made them? Does it make outstate folk show their passports at the borders?

I begin to think that this idea that the US is composed of different 'independent' states gives anywhere in the USA a get out of jail free card for anything, at least according to the 'states rights' promoters.
Is the USA a Union or not? Does it have a common foreign policy? A single president? One Supreme Court? One constitution? Is it in fact a 'Nation-State'?

Be that as it may, as for the statement whether California had slavery or not being relevant or not is dependent upon whether California ever had any discriminatory laws against black folk and for white folk at black folks' expense.

After all, in the terms of the cartoon, and I would suggest in reality, legally enshrined prejudice is just slavery-lite.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

I'm sure you're right.

Now deal with the "Be that as it may" part.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Privilege. A sense of entitlement. Being accustomend to being obeyed.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Damn my spelling.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

It's okay. Maybe white folk deserve lynching sometimes too.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Irony is only as good as its audience.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

So....what's the verdict on California's civil rights then?

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

So, even in sunny California, the cartoon has some relevance.

Mind you, the Chinese are more interesting, given that they're about to become our new overlords, rather than the victims of our oppression.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

You mean the states like Illinois that excluded blacks from entering them altogether and that invented more or less segregation while in the South blacks were legally property? Jim Crow originally referred to a Massachusetts railway car system and only Northern black leaders of the time advocated true equality.

After the Civil War most of those laws, save the significant exception of racially integrated schools were struck down and remained so. Clement Vallandigham made some of the most obscene appeals to racism of any political figure in the USA, and his appeal was definitely powerful in the Civil War-era North.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

And I'm English and Irish.

But:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-Nation_Alliance

seems to indicate that both the UK and the US (along with Japan, Italy, France, Germany, Russia, and Austria-Hungary) were involved in some way or another in oppressing the Chinese.

You may just get away with the Mexican bit, but the Irish had soldiers there too as part of the British Army as then was. :)

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

To some degree. The other side of that is people like Frederick Douglass were advocating "radicalism" that is the political view of racial integration advocated in the 21st Century and while Andrew Johnson had one of the most obscene racist Administrations in US history, Grant was the only President until LBJ to try at all to do something for Civil Rights for everybody (except women).

There *were* people of the time who did advocate full racial equality and one of my favorite Union Generals, George H. Thomas was a Virginian who fought for the Blue.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

I know. :-)

[il-mio-gufo.livejournal.com]

funny how things have turned out entirely differently for the SA region :S i wonder why so? maybe it's because of who was there firstly? i dunno

[il-mio-gufo.livejournal.com]

For some reason, after reading this comment, I suddenly have that Rage Against The Machine song running through my head...you know, the one called Killing In The Name. i'm not sure what the trigger was though \:

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

What do you mean?

[il-mio-gufo.livejournal.com]

as far as jobs and business goes, i suppose i have heard/read a few things indicating that reverse racism in SA looks like blacks/coloureds discriminating against whites. not all mind you, just some.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

To me Clement Vallandigham and company should be given more attention in the history books than they tend to get. It's easily possible for them to try to and end up succeeding in breaking up the USA rather than letting the USA win the war if the price was abolition of slavery. Both sides in the Civil War dealt with strong anti-war movements, it's a whole shadow-side of the war often neglected in favor of the first two years of the fighting (not so much the fighting of 1864-5).

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Perhaps you're talking about the affirmative action which is an official practice. There are some perversions of that, where poorly qualified people get jobs they obviously can't do, just because of their race. Meanwhile, big business to a large extent still remains in the hands of whites.

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Just use the term colonialism or neo-colonialism and you don't even have to be thinking historically!

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Using Irish troops as saying Irish supported English colonialism is kinda like using black Confederate troops to say that blacks were in support of slavery :P

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

Are you entirely sure, old thing: the British Army at the time was volunteer. There was no conscription.

[johnny9fingers.livejournal.com]

In fact, there wasn't even conscription in Northern Ireland during WWII. (And most of the volunteers in the Irish regiments were from the Free State.)

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

You have a Free State? Hey, ours is even Orange!