[taylodl]

Slavery in the United States was an especially brutal form of slavery referred to as chattel slavery. In this form of slavery the slaves are not regarded as even being human, they are treated with the same regard as one would treat an ox. American slaves were not the working class as you describe.

[chinesempire]

Do you think Leopold the II slaves in Congo were considered human beings?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atrocities_in_the_Congo_Free...

Do you think slaves in Japan were treated equally?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Japan#:~:text=Jap....

There is nothing special in US slavery, except it happened in US and US has been culturally relevant for the west since the end of WW2

One thing is the historical reasoning about it, another is thinking that it happened only to one place in the world and only those people can talk about it.

Don't get me wrong, slavery is a terrible and unjustifiable crime, but it didn't start in US and it didn't end in 1861

[taylodl]

The United States was not the only country to ever employ chattel slavery - it's not unique in that regard. It is unique in that it's the only country to end slavery due to civil war - a fact I think is very important in this discussion. There are to this day a number of "rebels" as they call themselves who believe themselves to be intellectually and morally superior to black people, they want to keep black and whites separated, and they want to remind blacks of their inferiority by prominently displaying statues of Confederate Generals in the public square and promulgating the use of terms reminding blacks of their inferior social standing. Terms such as blackmail, blacklist, and master/slave. There's way more behind this than just slavery and snowflakes getting their feelings hurt.

[baggy_trough]

Associating your second to last sentence with Confederate-supporting racists is a vicious distortion.

[chinesempire]

> terms such as blackmail

Isn't it weird that people that don't know words etymology want to decide what they mean for the rest of us?

> 1550s, "tribute paid to men allied with criminals as protection against pillage, etc.," from black (adj.) + Middle English male "rent, tribute," from Old English mal "lawsuit, terms, bargaining, agreement," from Old Norse mal "speech, agreement;" related to Old English mæðel "meeting, council," mæl "speech," Gothic maþl "meeting place," from Proto-Germanic mathla-, from PIE mod- "to meet, assemble" (see meet (v.)).

In 1550 USA didn't even exist, not even in the form of colonies, that formed after 1600.

The first known settlement in what we call US today is by the Spanish in 1513 that reached Florida.

So no, blackmail doesn't mean what you think it means and doesn't come from where you think it does.

[taylodl]

Surely someone as smart as you understands the difference between denotation and connotation?

[chinesempire]

That's not true.

In UK for example anti slavery movements are born during the civil war as well.

But chattel slavery was already abolished for a period in the 12th century, before the Norman occupation that reinstated it.

US abolished it after a civil war because every other country already did it without having to kill each other, but civil war was really about money and taxation.

It didn't start to abolish slavery.

[asjw]

I'm sorry it came out this way, it means we have no shared history and values that we can rely on in a discussion

I was replying to

> So structural racism has ended?

The obvious answer would have been "does it end if we remove master/slave from tech terminology?"

But I wanted to give more context, because I believe people can and will understand things when they learn about them in a deeper way

Racism and slavery are two completely different problems, the first existed before races were even considered a thing (for like thousands of years, you might not understand the difference, but 7-8 thousands of years is a really loooong time, imagine that Egyptians to Romans were older than Romans are to us today!), the former hasn't died when slavery was abolished.

Is slavery in the US the worst episode of dehumanisation we can think of, when literally the Nazis no more than 80 years ago were slaughtering and torturing in concentration camps millions of innocent people just because they didn't like them?

They were kept behind walls and deprived of any humanity that was left. I don't think I need to make the list of the atrocities they suffered...

There are no stories of free slaves or good masters that led them have their own piece of land in some plantation in Virginia.

The few that came back have lived among us, they are our grandparents, parents, uncles ...

We've heard their stories, we didn't just read them on books.

My dad met his father (my grandfather) when he was 5, he was captured by Nazis and believed dead.

I never met him because he died young, from the consequences of the imprisonment.

So please don't assume we cannot understand.

Racism and slavery sometimes can fuel each other, but generally slavery is a tribal thing, racism is philosophy gone bad.

Even Gandhi has been criticized for being racist, he didn't enslave anybody, did he?

You can have racism without slavery and slavery without racism

That was the point