A History of Racial Conflict w/ Daniel Schmachtenberger and

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techstepgenr8tion
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06 Oct 2022, 12:35 pm

Title: A History of Racial Conflict w/ Daniel Schmachtenberger and Gilbert Morris

I thought this was a really interesting dialog between Daniel Schmachtenberger and Prof Gilbert Morris of George Mason University. It was 3 1/2 hours long but it was the sort of thing I was looking for in terms of actually getting a grounding in the racial issues in the US and what makes them relatively unique.

Back when I was in college and I took some of my diversity electives I took a class called 'Imaging Africa' which was a film class where the professor both showed us a lot of African film and also brought us up to speed on colonialism, how it worked, what the effects were, and I was learning about people like Aime Cesare, Franz Fannon, W.E.B. DuBois. The overall idea was that it was complicated but that the 'basket case' frame that a lot of the west had on Africa was largely a byproduct of colonialism and all of the game theory it had set in motion.

This conversation was helpful in terms of looking at slavery through history and the differences between slavery as it was practiced in antiquity vs. the colonies (ie. if the desire wasn't to outright kill conquered tribes and yet social cohesion had to be kept - slavery was the quick answer for both how to not kill the conquered and yet not have them overthrow one's culture). That put a frame on slavery where there was an understanding that anyone could be a slave, particularly if the neighboring empire conquered them, and accordingly there were a lot of ground rules set in place for how slaves could or couldn't be treated.

It looks like certain moves were made early on by Portugal, requesting authority from the Pope to Christianize Africa as they brought a warning to Rome (really as a pretense) that Islam was spreading in that area - and the pope gave approval. What you then had was, as the area opened, Europeans selling guns to African tribes, then selling guns to their enemies on the grounds that if they didn't buy them they'd be conquered by those who did (good ol' multipolar traps). It was a lot of this activity where conquest between tribes was then giving the Europeans a position to export the conquered for economic utility.

They discussed the pre-1615 to 1690 Americas and actually suggested that racism wasn't nearly as big of an issue at the time and that rights were roughly equal, it's just that as the south started importing slaves to be economically competitive with Britain that it became a staple, that the cognitive dissonance started deepening, and that cognitive dissonance was in the Declaration of Independence.

A lot of the rest they discussed - ie. the reconstruction South, 13th and 14th amendment, etc. I had some familiarity with. I had less awareness of how many slaves had fought in the Revolutionary War and had been re-enslaved afterward, I also didn't know about Rosewood or 'Black Wall Street', but yes - from 1865 forward to about the late 1960's the double-standard was extreme and it took actually building a parallel society, including HBCU's (historically black colleges and universities) to get higher education and have dentists, surgeons, etc., for people of color. Some of the other things they discussed was Jefferson and Washington's slave ownership, differences in attitudes between the involvement of the Americas and Britain related to the trade, and impressing the importance of the idea that because colonialism occurred in such a way where those who were the colonizers had no risk of ever becoming slaves that there was a sense of absolute superiority and thus the kinds of safeguards and humility that were there in slavery of antiquity weren't there when slavery was practiced by the south or by the Spanish in South America.

it sounds like Daniel and Gilbert are going to try and have more of these public discussions and that they really weren't able to scratch the surface of what they really wanted to discuss.

While TBH 2010's pop-'woke' really doesn't excite for me, actually gets pretty depressing when you see calls to 'defund the police' get taken seriously or worse - white academics running around making all kinds of money telling other white people how racist they are or telling people of color how to think, this kind of discussion about the actual details and where it leaves things at the moment is actually interesting because it points toward an actual accounting of things and intimates a clearer starting point to figure out what can be done next.


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cyberdad
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06 Dec 2022, 5:33 am

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
it sounds like Daniel and Gilbert are going to try and have more of these public discussions and that they really weren't able to scratch the surface of what they really wanted to discuss.]


And what is it they want to discuss?



techstepgenr8tion
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06 Dec 2022, 2:23 pm

Halfway in on part 2, fair amount of discussion on fractal competition and systemic paralysis to change frame or even register history in non-monumental ways based on that state of affairs. Prof Gilbert Morris discussed alternatives to nihilism on that point.


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cyberdad
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06 Dec 2022, 3:37 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Halfway in on part 2, fair amount of discussion on fractal competition and systemic paralysis to change frame or even register history in non-monumental ways based on that state of affairs. Prof Gilbert Morris discussed alternatives to nihilism on that point.


Translation?



techstepgenr8tion
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06 Dec 2022, 3:47 pm

cyberdad wrote:
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Halfway in on part 2, fair amount of discussion on fractal competition and systemic paralysis to change frame or even register history in non-monumental ways based on that state of affairs. Prof Gilbert Morris discussed alternatives to nihilism on that point.


Translation?

Nah, I have no idea what it means either. Just thought it looked cool.


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06 Dec 2022, 3:56 pm

techstepgenr8tion wrote:
cyberdad wrote:
techstepgenr8tion wrote:
Halfway in on part 2, fair amount of discussion on fractal competition and systemic paralysis to change frame or even register history in non-monumental ways based on that state of affairs. Prof Gilbert Morris discussed alternatives to nihilism on that point.


Translation?

Nah, I have no idea what it means either. Just thought it looked cool.


:lol:



techstepgenr8tion
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06 Dec 2022, 4:27 pm

If I feel like being a bit less of a dick for a moment - 'fractal competition' is a way of saying that the current economy and the way people conduct themselves is such a Hobbesian sh--show that few people have any bandwidth for anything other than themselves. Not a climate for understanding of historical traumas to really land outside of nerd circles like The Stoa.

The rest of that sentence probably unpacks itself reasonably well even if a dictionary might be needed in some cases.


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07 Dec 2022, 10:28 am

That one sentence about how the American South adopted slavery "in order to compete with Great Britain" doesnt make any kinda sense.

They adopted slavery in order to SERVE Great Britain as a profitable colony . We didnt become free of Britain until two centuries later. And even after that the southern planters continued to serve both the industrializing American north and the industrializing Great Britain as free and equal trading partners. The British climate is not suited to growing cash crops like tobacco, rice, indigo, or Cotten. So, Britian and the US southern agricultural sector could NEVER be "competitors" even if both parties wanted them to be. :lol:

Having said that -the rest of your orignal post makes sense.

Slavery in the new world took time to evolve, or devolve, into what it became. In ancient Greece and Rome slavery was not linked to race, and slaves had some rights (including property rights, including the right to themselves own slaves).

The New World was settled just after Europe's Middle Ages and ALL commoners still had few rights, and most Europeans were feudal serfs (only a cut above slaves). It took time for slavery to be linked to skin color, and for free non slaves to have actual rights beyond that of feudal serfs (so the gulf between being a slave and a nonslave got greater) as democratic thought began to influence society.

And thats interesting - I didnt know that many American Black slaves became 're enslaved" after the Revolution. But I did know that the expression "to be sold down the river" came from the fact that White swindlers would sell free Blacks traveling with them down the Mississippi -to New Orleans slave traders. That illustrates how only Blacks had to worry about becoming slaves, Whites were immune from that worry just because of skin color. A factor that didnt exist in classical Greece and Rome.



techstepgenr8tion
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07 Dec 2022, 2:22 pm

naturalplastic wrote:
That one sentence about how the American South adopted slavery "in order to compete with Great Britain" doesnt make any kinda sense.

They adopted slavery in order to SERVE Great Britain as a profitable colony . We didnt become free of Britain until two centuries later. And even after that the southern planters continued to serve both the industrializing American north and the industrializing Great Britain as free and equal trading partners. The British climate is not suited to growing cash crops like tobacco, rice, indigo, or Cotten. So, Britian and the US southern agricultural sector could NEVER be "competitors" even if both parties wanted them to be. :lol:

This is why I typically don't find myself responding to most of your posts. There isn't often a lot to learn from them and more often than not they're just a waste of time and energy.

This gold nugget of a logical inconsistency you found in my OP works great if British commonwealths were these perfectly subsumed entities who didn't have to take care of anything on their own shores or earn a living on their own merits (Britain had them covered for everything) and had no conflicts of interest with the isle of Britain as being a colony is something like this perfect meld of internal metadata, like acquiring a foot or a hand and sharing the same circulatory system. I might be autistic and would love perfect cartesian logic where I can find it but I don't know that I've ever lived in such a logically consistent world that competing interests are erased by colonial flags or that competition goes from zero to 100 as the flags turn.

Now, maybe six months to a year ago you caught me calling an east-Asian county 'south-east Asian'. Fair play.

For this one I think it's more in your head.


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