'Do not, for the love of God, tell kids that slavery was beneficial' - eviltoast
  • sadreality@kbin.social
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    1 year ago

    Property? That’s a bit broad…

    It was beneficial to slave owners, specifically.

    And their families should be paying reparations for the ill gotten gains.

    • TerryMathews@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      You’re sniping, but I think the parent poster was accurate in what they said. I don’t think it was an euphemism for slave. It was the 1800s. What would you do with a slave if you didn’t own property? If they’re not tilling and planting or harvesting, or keeping house, or cooking, what would they be doing? A horse would be far more effective at pulling a carriage, and keeping one as a sex slave - while it definitely happened - was strongly looked down upon by society at the time.

      If you kept a slave and had no good reason to own one aside from sex, you might well disappear in the night one night - not out of protection for the slave(s) but racial purity.

      • sadreality@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Most property owners ie had a plot of land could not afford a slave… they worked that land themselves and then forced their 6 kids do it for them.

      • pingveno@lemmy.ml
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        1 year ago

        I’ve become partial to a language change to enslaved people and slavers. It emphasizes the humanity of the victims of slavery and refuses to acknowledge the view of human beings as property. Instead enslavement is a property foisted upon the victims and enslavement is an evil perpetrated by slavers.

      • sadreality@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        Cell phone and a car are also property… So is a house…

        Not all property owners were slavers.

      • gaylord_fartmaster@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Slavery benefitted both white and non-white slave owners.

        Edit: at least in the short-term, obviously you could argue differently for long-term effects.

      • SirElliott@beehaw.org
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        1 year ago

        This is an incomplete view of the history of slavery. By the numbers, the vast majority of the people benefitting from chattel slavery were white. However, slave ownership reached similar per capita rates among some of the Native American tribes, and there were instances of slaves being owned by free people of color. Notably, there are a large number of black tribal members in the United States. The United States government signed a number of treaties with the tribes in the 1860s that required them to free their slaves and incorporate them as full tribal members.

        None of this is said to diminish the fact that the American system of slavery was a product of colonization by European countries. But it is rather reductive to claim that only white property owners benefitted from the atrocity that was chattel slavery.

      • sadreality@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        While vast majority were “white”… There were others who owned slaves.

        All of their families should be held accountable and their profits and wealth should be dislodged to pay reperations to the decedants.

        Allowing successors to keep these gains is a crime in of itself.

        • trias10@lemmy.world
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          1 year ago

          How could you even track accounting profits that far back in time to repay today? What if the family descendants are poor today? (They lost everything in the Great Depression, as an example)

          • sadreality@kbin.social
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            1 year ago

            Funny thing about money is that it is all traceable. I am not going to act like it is easy but it is not impossible

            Sure if money is gone, you can’t get blood from a stone… But many families who made money are still ruling us.

            Same thing in Germany with families who profited from slave labor during Nazi regimes…