I agree designs, it is more painful than believing anyday now a new system will make all the evil go away. Evil will flourish if good people do nothing.
The President addresses the Nation
by designs 257 Replies latest social current
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Truth seeker 674
All I know I was being twenty or so abandoned by my familly and I was dishfellowshipped. I have been discrimrinated against by my own familly et al. Many peoplel don't know what that feels like. Somehow I overcame. Why can't others?
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Violia
Did you get a good solid childhood with parents who were able to feed and clothe you and provide reasonable medical care? did you get to go to school ? Were your parents reasonably normal and showed love for you? Sometimes our foundation is what keeps us from caving in. If someone has told you all your life that you are lesser than others it can effect your self esteem and ability to do anything. I am sorry about what has happened with your parents. I know this is very hard to deal with. No one discounts what is happening to you. It is loathsome that jws treat their children this way.
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Giordano
I think the President used his bully pulpit to good advantage. He has the right to voice his opinion on this issue because unlike Bill Clinton he IS the first black president and has a deeper understanding of race in this country.
Those that want to politicize his remarks sound more like they want to muzzle the man. Sorry that's not going to happen.
"A bully pulpit is a position sufficiently conspicuous to provide an opportunity to speak out and be listened to. This term was coined by President Theodore Roosevelt, who referred to the White House as a "bully pulpit", by which he meant a terrific platform from which to advocate an agenda."
Just about, if not all Presidents have used this platform to speak about many different issues.
He accepted the verdict and called for peace and not violence, and for conversation and understanding. As usual he sets the bar high and expects that we adults can contribute something to a national discussion. This constant harping on Obama's statements parroting far right talk show hosts is as needless a distraction as Sharpton and the failed Jesse Jackson's attempt to be relevant. Read his remarks...... Simon posted them on the first or second page.
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Simon
It seems to me that the white supremacist types like to bring up the past to gloat over it and the black perpetual-victim types like to bring up the past to wallow in it.
Both are always trying to evoke the sins of the past and use it for their own agenda which is never to help the people living right here, right now.
Maybe we should stop bringing up the past and focus on the future?
I think we can all agree that the past was 'pretty shitty' for lots of folk but unlike them we can chose not to live in it.
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confusedandalone
It isn't that simple... this "past" that we want to leave behind benefitted some and had a horrific effect on others. Not to mention that this "past" is not that long ago. The inequality didn't end when Lincoln signed some papers... it didn't end with the civil rights movement... the inequality is still pretty evident in the day to day lives of alot of people. If the people who hold jobs and opportunities for advancement discriminate against people of color (black / brown or red) and do not allow them to participate in an open society based upon their color then the inequality is still there.
Many white supremacist types not only bring up the past but they also bring up the present and act as if the state of certain races of people is all their own doing and that another group or the "system" has nothing to do with it. It can be found in lots of literature and youtube. I think what needs to happen is exactly what is being promoted... open and frank discussion about what got us here.
When you have people who for hundreds of years were told they were no different than apes and had lower intellectual abilities than other humans, when you take away their history, when you take away their gods, when you take away their families and when you take away their wealth, when you kill off millions of people who could have been all sorts of productive members of the planet you have to expect generations to pass before they recover. Truthfully the 1960's was the beginning of that taking place in this country.
Add to that the fact that many people who were around in that time period are still alive and hold to those feelings of thier own racial superiority and you have people in the state that they are in. Many people of color are doing better for themselves and are now passing things on to their children(knowledge / wealth /etc...) so things are improving. Just give it time
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Simon
Many people of color are doing better for themselves and are now passing things on to their children (knowledge / wealth /etc...)
Would you attribute that to hard work and attitude, random chance (e.g. possibly fortuitous location) or something else?
The difficulty many have getting their heads round things is why do African Americans seem to be so different? There are other groups have had serious persecution and also been victims of slavery but who have since prospered (e.g. Jews, Chinese, Irish as already mentioned).
I read a comment somewhere that suggested the groups that had improved typically had no leaders that you could name whereas the black community has a lot of well know, infamous, leaders who don't seem to have done much to actually advance their people's well-being so much as to make a name and career for themselves.
Is it simply bad leadership? The right person hasn't arrived? Usually circumstances create the right person that is needed. I have to say whenever I hear Sharpton or Crump talk I do not feel compelled to help or even hope that someone else helps - they instill the wrong feelings.
Is the leadership irrelevant? I have a hard time believing that good or bad leadership of any group makes no difference at all.
Is it the people? Harder to come up with answers when you increase the size of a group beyond a handful - so many differences to account for and obviously a loaded / charged question for anyone to answer!
Is it the culture? Has crime and violence taken over and become a way of life for a critical mass so that it's now simply 'the norm'?
Why do people live one life over another? Some obviously don't get much of a choice but I think many do and simply make what we'd consider to be poor choices.
Why?
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Marvin Shilmer
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“Is it simply bad leadership? The right person hasn't arrived? Usually circumstances create the right person that is needed. I have to say whenever I hear Sharpton or Crump talk I do not feel compelled to help or even hope that someone else helps - they instill the wrong feelings.”
I remember when Bill Cosby offered public comment trying to help the black community, and young men and boys in particular. The disparity of how his words were responded to within the black community was pretty wide. The black community rightly wants more educational and economic opportunities for its young. Yet the reaction to Cosby was nearly paralleled level of education. Blacks with more education mostly embraced what he had to say and blacks with less education mostly trashed him. I was left wondering why the less educated don’t listen to the more educated. I was left wondering the same as you. Why?
Marvin Shilmer
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Violia
black theology seems to be at the root of this separatism that keeps blacks from moving forward
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sammielee24
I can't make anyone believe anything. People choose what they wish to learn. They choose what to ignore. To say that Irish or English or Indian people were not enslaved is to ignore your own history. In order to progress, you have to understand what unifies you as a nation and who profits from dividing it. The USA was built on slavery - it was divided by politics.
You need only read up on the Black Irish - the breeding of young Irish girls with black slaves in order to get a better price for the light skinned babies. Profit from slavery.
Human bondage is slavery all the same. Power and wealth, profit on the backs of a human regardless of color is still inhumane. Until this is understood - you will not move forward. In England when slavery was finally abolished, the slaves were not just allowed to freely go into the night - they had to be bought from the owners by the government. That money came from the taxpayers of that day and the largest slave owners stood to profit immensely and still retain that wealth to this day. In America, initially some of the slave owners were also compensated for the freedom of the slaves - paid for by the public coffers. sammieswife
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THE IRISH SLAVES
At the beginning of the 17th Century, in the reign of James I of England, England faced a problem: what to do with the Irish. They had been practicing genocide against the Irish since the reign of Elizabeth, but they couldn't kill them all. Some had been banished, and some had gone into voluntary exile, but there were still just too many of them.
So James I encouraged the sale of the Irish as slaves to the New World colonies, not only America but Barbados and South America. The first recorded sale of Irish slaves was to a settlement along the Amazon in South America in 1612. However, before that there were probably many unofficial arrangements, since the Irish were of no importance and details of how they were dealt with were not deemed necessary.
In 1625, the King issued a proclamation that all Irish political prisoners were to be transported to the West Indies and sold as slave labor to the planters there. In 1637, a census showed that 69% of the inhabitants of Monsarrat in the West Indies were Irish slaves. The Irish had a tendency to die in the heat, and were not as well suited to the work as African slaves, but African slaves had to be bought. Irish slaves could be kidnapped if there weren't enough prisoners, and of course, it was easy enough to make Irish prisoners by manufacturing some petty crime or other. This made the Irish the preferred "livestock" for English slave traders for 200 years.
In 1641, one of the periodic wars in which the Irish tried to overthrow the English misrule in their land took place. As always, this rebellion eventually failed. As a result, in the 12 years following the revolt, known as the Confederation War, the Irish population fell from 1,466,000 to 616,000. Over 550,000 Irishmen were killed, and 300,000 were sold as slaves. The women and children who were left homeless and destitute had to be dealt with , so they were rounded up and sold, too.
But even though it did not seem that things could get worse, with the advent of Oliver Cromwell, they did. In the 1650's, thousands more Irish were killed, and many more were sold into slavery. Over 100,000 Irish Catholic children were taken from their parents and sold as slaves, many to Virginia and New England. Unbelievably but truly, from 1651 to 1660 there were more Irish slaves in America than the entire non-slave population of the colonies!
In 1652, Cromwell instigated the Ethnic Cleansing of Ireland. He demanded that all Irish people were to resettle west of the Shannon, in arid, uninhabitable land, or be transported to the West Indies. The Irish refused to relocate peaceably, for the most part, since they couldn't survive if they did.
A law, published in 1657, read:
"Those who fail to transplant themselves into Connaught
(Ireland's Western Province) or (County) Clare within six
months... Shall be attained of high treason... Are to be sent
into America or some other parts beyond the seas..."(1)
Any who attempted to return would
"suffer the pains of death as
felons by virtue of this act, without benefit of Clergy."(2)
The soldiers were encouraged to kill the Irish who refused to move; it was certainly not considered a crime. But the slave trade was so profitable that it was much more lucrative to round them up and sell them. Gangs went out to fill quotas by capturing whoever came across their path; they were so industrious that they accidentally captured a number of French and English and several thousand Scots in the process. By Cromwell's death, at least 100,000 Irish men, women, and children had been sold in the West Indies, Virginia, and New England. While most were sold to the sugar planters in Barbados, Jamaica and throughout the West Indies, some writers assert that at least 20,000 were sold to the American colonies. (3) The earliest record of Irish slaves in America was in 1620, with the arrival of
200 slaves. Most of the documentation, however, comes from the West Indies.
In 1742, a document entitled Thurloe's State Papers, published in London, opined that:
"..It was a measure beneficial to Ireland, which was
thus relieved of a population that might trouble the planters; it
was a benefit to the people removed, which might thus be made
English and Christians ... a great benefit to the West India
sugar planters, who desired men and boys for their bondsmen, and
the women and Irish girls... To solace them--------------------
The enactment of 1652 in the British Isles:
“it may be lawful for two or more justices of the peace within any county, citty or towne, corporate belonging to the commonwealth to from tyme to tyme by warrant cause to be apprehended, seized on and detained all and every person or persons that shall be found begging and vagrant.. in any towne, parish or place to be conveyed into the Port of London, or unto any other port from where such person or persons may be shipped into a forraign collonie or plantation.”The judges of Edinburgh Scotland during the years 1662-1665 ordered the enslavement and shipment to the colonies a large number of rogues and others who made life unpleasant for the British upper class. [B](Register for the Privy Council of Scotland, third series, vol. 1, p 181, vol. 2, p 101).
Historian Oscar Handlin writes that in colonial America,
White “servants (slaves) could be bartered for profit, sold to the highest bidder for the unpaid debts of their masters, and otherwise transferred like movable goods or chattels…The condition of the first Negroes in the continental English colonies must be viewed within the perspective of these conceptions and realities of White Servitude.”
(Michael A Hoffman, They Were WhiteThis ship from London with people to sell will give credit to buy the “servants”
from the Virginia Gazette, March 28, 1771
Notice the advertisement, the ship, Roneta, just came from London with “a parcel of very likely Servant men and boys”
to be soldWhite slaves were owned by Negroes and Indians to such an extent in the South that the Virginia Assembly passed a law against the practice!
“It is enacted that noe negro or Indian though baptized and enjoyned their owne ffreedome shall be capable of any such purchase of christians…”Christians meant Whites
Statutes of the Virginia Assembly, Vol. 2, pp. 280-81)Runaway Irish Slave:
Oscar Handlin says that
“Through the first three-quarters of the 17th century, the Negroes, even in the South, were not numerous…They came into a society in which a large part of the White population was to some degree unfree…The Negroes lack of freedom was not unusual. These Black newcomers, like so many others, were accepted, bought and held, as kinds of servants.”He goes on to say that the desire for cheap labor caused the elite merchants and land owners to enslave not only the negroes but their own White kindred as well
Blacks were much more expensive than Whites, Therefore, Whites were mistreated more often than blacks
During the Colonial period, Whites did the harder work, such as digging ditches, clearing land, and felling trees.
The frontier demands for this kind of heavy manual labor was satisfied primarily by White slavesAs late as 1669 those who had large scale plantations were manning them with White slaves, not negroes.
That’s the way it was done in the mother country, Great Britain!
In 1670 the Governor of Virginia said that he had 2000 Negro and 6000 White slaves.Hundreds of thousands of Whites in colonial America were owned outright by their masters and died in slavery.
Even the blacks knew this. If they were made to work too hard they accused their masters of “treating them like the Irish”
