Your countries role in slavery

[aitm]

I had a thought on a different topic and as I was working on it, it spun off into this.

Humanity has had slavery long, long before it became an "american" thing. I am not familiar with each countries role in slavery but i rest assured that perhaps every society in history has had slaves prior to the 1900's. Many still do today. I could not think of any society that would not consider slavery except in parts of the world where survival alone was difficult enough without having to deal with slaves, so I think maybe the upper arctic areas may have not bothered, but I don't know if anyone knows the full history.

Non-the-less, those of you in countries other than the US. How do you view your countries role in slavery in the relative past and what is your opinion on how "you" did in eliminating it? How do you view the US's role and their role in eliminating it?

I view racism as an active by product of slavery in most cases, people who act or make acts whose intention are to keep other people in places they don't want to be, seems like a likely version of slavery.

So along with that, how do you think your country has handled racism in your country?

I say this because I think, given the rest of the world, that we (the US) have done a decent job despite our obvious shortcomings and would like to hear what your opinions are as to how you view your countries success and other countries successes.

[TomFoolery]

I say this because I think, given the rest of the world, that we (the US) have done a decent job despite our obvious shortcomings and would like to hear what your opinions are as to how you view your countries success and other countries successes.

I think the U.S. participates in it very much today, it's just not the overt kind we had prior to 1865. Look at how we treat migrant workers. Almost all of America's produce is harvested by people who earn next to nothing. Sure, it doesn't fit the literal definition in that we don't literally own them like chattel and they do technically earn money, but it's an industry that thrives on expectation so that we can enjoy apples for $1.50 a pound.

We also participate in slavery overseas. Look at how most Walmart merchandise is made. Then look at industries like chocolate, rubber, clothing, coffee, sugar, cotton, and even gold.

I think the U.S. likes to think it has solved the problem, when it's really outsourced it and altered the paradigm just enough so that most people no longer consider it slavery. I don't know if that makes it better or worse, honestly.

[Mr.Obvious]

Well, Belgium isn't excempt from having a slavery-history. In fact, slavery "boomed" right after we became an official country.
(More or less current) Belgium was officially founded in 1830, basically as a buffer state. By around 1840 my ancestors tried to get their hands on colonies. Which, I may add, they weren't the only European country in doing this. Our King Leopold the Second finally acquired Congo in 1884. Though it wasn't until 1908 until it became an 'official' colony. It wasn't until 1960, I think, that (by then named Belgian-Congo) was annexed and left to it's own soverinity.

1984 - 1960, three quarters of a century... A lot of time for oppression, bigotry, racism and chauvinism to brew. Under Belgian reign the people of Congo suffered horrid slavery. Torture, excessive violence, murder and... darkly iconically remembered: the cutting off of hands. Their people were subjegated, their lives destroyed and their lands deprived of resources (namely the rubber- & copper-trade).

And how did Belgium's own populace regard this? With a naïve sense of certainty that all of this was righteous and not bad at all. To such an extent that it's hard to believe their denial and selfrighteousness at all. Reminding us too much of the German "Wir haben es nicht gewusst" of WWII. Nevertheless, from what we find in literature etcetera from that timeperiod, except for the blatant racism and xenophobia, is the belief that they were actually helping these poor people. Imagine that... thinking they were doing them a favor.
From the racist beliefs of the time that black people were inferior in every way, and that they weren't christians and that their culture was different, and the lie that they were lazy etcetera etcetera... came the idea that spreading our culture and allowing them to serve us was helping them become 'better' people. Or perhaps even the idea, frightingly though it may by today's standards, "making them people". We were bringing them civilisation, this made us the good guys. Or at least, that was the idea.
My "favorite" (though don't take that word too literally) example of this immoral zeitgeist can be found in Kuifje-comics. Kuifje, or better known to most of the world as Tintin, was a Belgian creation. If you've ever read 'Tintin in the Congo', you might see what I mean. (Other example: see The Red Sea Sharks.) From what I've learned, it's my modest opinion that Hergé, the creator of Tintin, didn't make these comics with a racist intention. He lived in a more racist time and was convinced by this ideology of spreading civilisation and that the inhabitants of Congo were happy to serve us and learn from us. And so, while not  trying to be racist, his racist depictions and biggoted convictions stand even taller and are more telling. In any time of the world you can find extremely-racist people, those way-out on the far end of the spectrum. But Hergé was as only racist as the next guy. I don't think he hated black people. I don't think he would've condoned our actions if he'd known the truth of what was going on... And still, while 'only as racist' as the next guy in that time and place, he is tellingly much more racist than 'the next guy' in this day and age. ... But I have to say: A few years ago I remember seeing an African-Belgian man demanding the comic book be banned. And i understood his plight. But I disagreed. Tintin in the Congo didn't make me or anyone, I think, racist. And it can be a propper tool to teach us that our history is racist and bigotted and that we must avoid going down that path again.

It wasn't until the 30th of june 1960 that Congo got it's independence. And on the eve before, this happened:



Here you see a Congolese man, Ambroise Boimbo if I'm not mistaken, stealing the sword of our then king Boudewijn as he was there to sign over sovereignity, taken in Léopoldville (now Kinshasha). I find this, personally, to be a marvelous sign of protest and a beautiful show of spirit against an opressing force one was 'forced' to accept and respect; It's why some see it as the real first moment of Congo's independence. That's up for debate, I guess. But the picture does hang above my desk to provide inspiration at all times.

Sadly, after Congo's independence, it soon faced many problems, summed up as the Congo-Crisis of 1960-1965... But that's a story for another time.

That's as far as actuall slavery goes, in a nutshell, of course. One could go on about immigrant labour and present-day involvement in sweat-shops... But perhaps that'll arise later in the thread... We'll see.

[aitm]

I think the U.S. participates in it very much today, it's just not the overt kind we had prior to 1865. Look at how we treat migrant workers. Almost all of America's produce is harvested by people who earn next to nothing. Sure, it doesn't fit the literal definition in that we don't literally own them like chattel and they do technically earn money, but it's an industry that thrives on expectation so that we can enjoy apples for $1.50 a pound.

We also participate in slavery overseas. Look at how most Walmart merchandise is made. Then look at industries like chocolate, rubber, clothing, coffee, sugar, cotton, and even gold.

I think the U.S. likes to think it has solved the problem, when it's really outsourced it and altered the paradigm just enough so that most people no longer consider it slavery. I don't know if that makes it better or worse, honestly.

Good stuff, I think there is a growing understanding and awareness of the underbelly of the "beast" that is Walmart. The one great little spoken of is the diamond trade. If there were better press we would have better result, but I think there are other powers that be, that keep their hand on the keyboard.

[aitm]

Mr Obvious, what is the racial "tension" like now? Do you still have a good deal of underlying simmering racism?

[SGOS]

I could not think of any society that would not consider slavery except in parts of the world where survival alone was difficult enough without having to deal with slaves, so I think maybe the upper arctic areas may have not bothered, but I don't know if anyone knows the full history.

Someone loaned me a book about the Alaskan Indians while I was docking for a few days in the Juneau area.  That's about as far north as I've read about slavery.  Tribes would travel the coast raiding other tribes for slaves.  One account, by a fur trader, I think from the Hudson's Bay Company,who was attending some kind of pow wow between two tribes, described a couple of big chiefs getting drunk and each bragging about owning so many slaves that they could randomly kill as many as they wanted without sacrificing any labor.

They decided to have a slave killing contest.  One chief would kill a slave, and the other would match him.  They kept it up until they had slaughtered something like 30 slaves.  They quit when one of the chiefs "called Uncle," and gave up because he didn't want to lose any more slaves.  That's fairly close to the account given.  Maybe not exact, but close enough, I think.

It might be natural for all cultures to dream up the idea of slavery and forced labor at sometime or another.  Virtue doesn't seem to be a human strong point.

[doorknob]

I think the U.S. participates in it very much today, it's just not the overt kind we had prior to 1865. Look at how we treat migrant workers. Almost all of America's produce is harvested by people who earn next to nothing. Sure, it doesn't fit the literal definition in that we don't literally own them like chattel and they do technically earn money, but it's an industry that thrives on expectation so that we can enjoy apples for $1.50 a pound.

We also participate in slavery overseas. Look at how most Walmart merchandise is made. Then look at industries like chocolate, rubber, clothing, coffee, sugar, cotton, and even gold.

I think the U.S. likes to think it has solved the problem, when it's really outsourced it and altered the paradigm just enough so that most people no longer consider it slavery. I don't know if that makes it better or worse, honestly.

Slavery is an interesting topic to me. I agree with every thing you said here and want to add that I feel like the US is headed in the direction of paid slavery. Maybe not to the point like the chinese but still pretty bad. Especially if idiots like donald trump get elected. No one wants to pay their employees. Why? because well that would take away from their wealth. Paying wages is one of the most expensive parts of owning a business. Unfortunately raising minimum wage probably won't help. I feel like it will just contribute to shrinking the middle class into poverty. Why? Because no one is raising the wages of those who make more than minimum wage. In fact most companies are still firing employees that "make too much" so they can hire starving kids fresh out of college for a much lower price. at least this is the trend I'm seeing. Also another little sneaky trick companies are now using to fire older employees for various reasons is now they are starting to retroactively look at long term employees criminal records and fire them for something that happened years ago. Don't believe me?

talk to my mom. She works for pinnacle health and they are starting to fire people for crimes that happened while they were still working there no matter how good of a job they did and continue to do now. I just see so many problems with finding a job today. People who were grandfathered into jobs they got back in the 50's are a little spoiled. Sorry but that's just how I see it. Back then you could get a job with just a high school diploma now you need college to work at mcdonalds.  And you could get on the job paid training back then. Who offers that now? Practically no one.

Granite I'm on disability now but I had a hell of a time finding a decent paying job in my early 20's. No one wanted to hire me. And then once I became a single mom it was even worse because I couldn't do flexible week ends and holidays. I could only work while the daycare was open. That really hurt my ability to get a better job.

Things are just different now. Jobs don't grow on trees.

[Sal1981]

AFAIK, Scandinavian countries never had slaves, not because we were so progressive or something, but because we were ... different.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Slavery is an interesting topic to me. I agree with every thing you said here and want to add that I feel like the US is headed in the direction of paid slavery. Maybe not to the point like the chinese but still pretty bad. Especially if idiots like donald trump get elected. No one wants to pay their employees. Why? because well that would take away from their wealth. Paying wages is one of the most expensive parts of owning a business. Unfortunately raising minimum wage probably won't help. I feel like it will just contribute to shrinking the middle class into poverty. Why? Because no one is raising the wages of those who make more than minimum wage. In fact most companies are still firing employees that "make too much" so they can hire starving kids fresh out of college for a much lower price. at least this is the trend I'm seeing. Also another little sneaky trick companies are now using to fire older employees for various reasons is now they are starting to retroactively look at long term employees criminal records and fire them for something that happened years ago. Don't believe me?

talk to my mom. She works for pinnacle health and they are starting to fire people for crimes that happened while they were still working there no matter how good of a job they did and continue to do now. I just see so many problems with finding a job today. People who were grandfathered into jobs they got back in the 50's are a little spoiled. Sorry but that's just how I see it. Back then you could get a job with just a high school diploma now you need college to work at mcdonalds.  And you could get on the job paid training back then. Who offers that now? Practically no one.

Granite I'm on disability now but I had a hell of a time finding a decent paying job in my early 20's. No one wanted to hire me. And then once I became a single mom it was even worse because I couldn't do flexible week ends and holidays. I could only work while the daycare was open. That really hurt my ability to get a better job.

Things are just different now. Jobs don't grow on trees.

So what are you suggesting? Wages should remain stagnate and artificially low so that companies won't have to find ways to keep labor costs down? Maybe I'm missing your point, but it seems that you're upset that older workers are being systematically terminated merely because younger people actually want to earn enough money to make it worth bothering to get out of bed in the morning to go to work?
This is not a new phenomenon. Older workers have always been moved out in favor of younger workers. When was the last time you tried to feed a family on $7.25 an hour?
A few years ago my daughter worked cleaning offices for $8 an hour. She has 2 kids and even with the subsidies of food stamps she lived with the constant threat of eviction and hunger. She held that job for 3 years and the largest raise she ever got was a nickel an hour so after 3 years she made a wopping $8.15 an hour.
The truth of the matter is when a company doesn't pay a decent wage they can't retain anyone longer than a few weeks at best. 

[CloneKai]

Non-the-less, those of you in countries other than the US. How do you view your countries role in slavery in the relative past and what is your opinion on how "you" did in eliminating it? How do you view the US's role and their role in eliminating it?

So along with that, how do you think your country has handled racism in your country?

I say this because I think, given the rest of the world, that we (the US) have done a decent job despite our obvious shortcomings and would like to hear what your opinions are as to how you view your countries success and other countries successes.

compared to rest of the humanity US has done a good job. and it should after all it is a global superpower.
my region, the subcontinent apparently did nothing to abolish slavery
i wasn't taught anything about it, so i googled, the East india company abolished it in 1843. so the white man did it and that might be a reason why i wasn't taught anything 
and we still have some horrible thing called bonded labors.

can't say much about racism, but yeah we have it and i don't think it depended on slavery though. more to do with regions and language here.
surprisingly, islam is not a racist religion, atleast not that i know of. but still racism exist there. i wonder what is wrong with human race.   

[Baruch]

AFAIK, Scandinavian countries never had slaves, not because we were so progressive or something, but because we were ... different.

In modern times.  In early times you had thralls (Scandinavian word) and the big Viking business was selling kidnapped red haired Irish/Scottish girls all the way thru Kievan Rus to Baghdad.

[Baruch]

compared to rest of the humanity US has done a good job. and it should after all it is a global superpower.
my region, the subcontinent apparently did nothing to abolish slavery
i wasn't taught anything about it, so i googled, the East india company abolished it in 1843. so the white man did it and that might be a reason why i wasn't taught anything 
and we still have some horrible thing called bonded labors.

can't say much about racism, but yeah we have it and i don't think it depended on slavery though. more to do with regions and language here.
surprisingly, islam is not a racist religion, atleast not that i know of. but still racism exist there. i wonder what is wrong with human race.   

Muslims were slaving racists to African people ... buying/kidnapping African people on the West coast, transporting them to the East coast, and thence into Yemen and Oman.  India didn't need much of a slave trade, because the caste system (see untouchables) sub-summed it.  Today there is racism in Islam ... because it is Arab racism ... but not elsewhere.  Arabs have always had a slave trade, and now abuse domestic workers from Pakistan and Indonesia rather than slaves from Africa.

Indentured servants is a common gateway into slavery.  That was the legal basis for enslaving Americans in the English colonies.  Then debt slavery was added.  With the American Revolution, indentured servitude was ended for White folk, but not for Black folk.  Indian folks still resent everything the British did and most resent everything the Muslims did before that (if they are Hindu).  Islam and later British liberalism freed millions from the caste system.

[Baruch]

AllPurposeAtheist ... in the US since 2008 ... people 50 and older are in demand ... for as long as we are not yet retired.  There is less effort to replace older workers with younger workers, because the financial pressure is relieved by moving production to Asia.  The thought is, no reason to train Millennials for jobs that will shortly cease thanks to automation.  The US is nearly as robot crazy as the Japanese.  When the US couldn't off-shore jobs ... we routinely discriminated against older workers (who get paid more), and imported immigrants by the tens of millions.  Now even the Mexicans are returning home ... because an Asian is doing work a Mexican wouldn't do.  There is still a large net immigration to the US of course, just not as massive, and they are coming more for political reasons, not because of poverty back at home.

[aitm]

This is not a new phenomenon. Older workers have always been moved out in favor of younger workers.

True enough, but one of the more interesting things about a recession, is that while competitive pricing has to be dropped in order to get the job,  likewise the thought was to go for younger less experienced workers. But as always the dark side is that the demand for quality did not drop. Making a mistake on a large construction project where the profit is only hovering around 3% can turn into a colossal nightmare for a company with little left in the till. I was brought back not because more work was available, but because not knowing your job in a small % of profit far outweighs the cost of pricy supers when improper layouts of tilt panels can cost 20 to 30 grand in a fuck up.

In many scenarios for those of us less equipped for higher paying jobs that require degrees or specialized educations, the road to success is still the same. I always tell younger workers that I started in the ditch with a shovel just like them. I am not especially smarter than they are, the secret is no secret. Be there EVERY day ON time and simply outwork the person next to you. Keep your mouth shut and your ears open. Learn. It is really that simple.

[Mr.Obvious]

Mr Obvious, what is the racial "tension" like now? Do you still have a good deal of underlying simmering racism?

Well... As I have not performed any noteworthy research into Belgian views on multiculturality, slavery and/or racism during my studies, any info here is purely out of my own experience. And from that I would not conclude us to be a 'particularly' racist country. With that I mean that we are not institutionaly racist, by anything I can think of. We'll have racist people and racist groups even, but I think you can find that everywhere in the world, sadly. And yes my grandparents and parents still use the word 'neger', which translates to the word "nigger" when referring to a person of Africa(n descent). But... not saying that it makes it right, they would not use it as an insult, if that makes sense. You have the passive generalizing and to be honest insulting stereotypes which surface on occasion. But nothing, I would say, that makes us stand out as a racist country as a whole.

Perhaps a big difference between American enslaving of Africans and Belgians enslaving of Africans was that, if I'm not mistaken, relatively speaking less slaves were immigrated here. (I might say none, because we were never taught in school that they were immigrated. Or at least I don't recall it. But perhaps there were.) There was no culture of having a black manservant or having these slaves out in the fields in Belgium or anything like that. Belgians in Belgium weren't typically 'slaveowners' here,  there were slaves in Congo which was owned by Belgium and who were suppressed by Belgians in Congo. Which means that after the ties were cut between Belgium and Congo, my ancestors didn't lose 'owning' human beings and there was not such a great conflict of two groups of people, previously devided by rank, that had to learn to coincide after ages of abuse in Belgium itself. Just a hypothesis. But it would explain my personal experiences in which relatively more racist comments are made towards people who immigrated to Belgium to work there in poor conditions for poor wages, for example the Mine-workers. Because while they weren't slaves, they were clearly regarded a lower 'class'.

Now, I work as a social worker here in Belgium. We have an extensive (yet in my opinion failing) social safety net. In my line of work, you can imagine, I typically meet the most impoverished of citizens in Belgium; both legal and illegal. And many of my clients at some point or another make racist remarks or claim to be subject to a racist society. But truth be told I don't see much evidence for racism in Belgium in an institutionalized way.
Long story short: I guess we're the country equivalent of being racist kind of just like how the next guy is. There will be occurances of it, and we must all try to not be it as much aspossible. And with that there will always be some "tension", but not excessively. And I wouldn't call racism inherent to or marking of Belgium. We're racist in that kind of way that everyone's a little bit racist.

https://youtu.be/RovF1zsDoeM