Re: Race and Evolution
- From: "maff" <maff91@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 16 Aug 2005 13:31:31 -0700
jgrisham@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
> Slavery was obsolete due to the invention of the Cotton Gin in 1835.
> Plantations sold off their slaves and they entered into previously
> untouched labor markets.
>
> In the Industrial North, it was a foregone conclusion that paid workers
> relieved companies of the obligations to their families and as in
> England, the companies could seriously underpay workers without regard
> to their family's welfare, institute child labor and endenture the
> worker to "the company store". It was the preferred choice for the
> industrial North.
>
> In the rural South, former plantation slaves filled the void on family
> farms created by children, going West or to the industrial North for
> factory jobs. This was seen as a means of preserving the family farm
> and agricultural production. The continuation of slavery was viewed as
> necessary to balance out the unpredictable trends of industrialization
> and western migration.
>
> Lincoln intended to return the slaves to Africa and sent the U.S.
> military to secure the colonial outpost of Liberia. Liberia remained
> under U.S. control until 1964, however subsequent administrations
> refused to accept the cost of relocating former slaves to Africa.
>
> British Imperialism frowned on reintroducing this population back into
> Africa for fear that democratic reforms would follow and spread to
> British colonies in Africa (Democracy was the "Communism" of the early
> to mid 1900's).
>
> I would imagine Darwin supported the concerns of British Imperialism,
> which helped to prevent Lincoln's final resolution of the American
> slavery problem.
The egalitarian instinct
http://www.guardian.co.uk/saturday_review/story/0,3605,687232,00.html
The British anti-slavery movement was grounded in the belief that
colonial subjects could be 'civilised' by Christianity. But, writes
Catherine Hall, this vision gave way to a harsher view of race
Saturday April 20, 2002
The Guardian
The language of civilisation and barbarism has long provided ways of
marking off self and other, legitimising relations of power between
"the west" and "the rest". The encounter with difference, the
questioning as to "what kind of people they are", and by implication
what kind of people "we" are, has been part of the global world, in its
European colonising epoch, symbolically inaugurated by Columbus in
1492.
"Are they true men?" the Europeans asked of the Indians of the new
world. And once the question of one or several creations was settled,
they continued to debate the nature of "the Indian", "the Aboriginal"
and "the African". They, in turn, debated the nature of the white man.
After the demise of European imperialism, the formal power of the
British empire was immeasurably diminished. But the decolonisation of
the mind was a different matter. As Frantz Fanon observed, black people
had internalised their inferiority: decolonisation had to be about the
creation not just of new states but of new subjects, new men and women.
.
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- Race and Evolution
- From: Not Quite Extinct
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