[Agastya]

(11-05-2017 01:06 AM)Samseau Wrote:  

Agastya:

Quote:

Before the civil rights period (and for a little bit after) blacks enjoyed better family structures, but they were also slaughtered on the basis of their race, and utterly precluded from doing anything other than menial work. The "making a living" that Samseau talks about involved working as someone's sharecropper, being denied the right to vote, and living in fear of getting lynched or tortured if you looked at a white woman the wrong way.

"slaughtered" How about providing some numbers instead of imaging things? I see Blacks getting slaughtered today, no joke, actual war zones levels of homicide, nothing like that has ever existed in America's past. Nothing even came remotely close.

Well, let's see...

The NAACP reports that 3,446 black people were lynched between 1882 and 1962. They acknowledge that over a thousand white people were also lynched during this period, and that many states lynched far more whites than they did blacks.

Proof is here: http://www.naacp.org/history-of-lynchings/

Now, one could use this factoid to claim that lynching wasn't a serious problem in society -- after all, 3,446 black people lynched over an eighty-year period equals only 43 black people lynched per year, which is significantly less than the number of homicides in Chicago alone.

762 people were killed in Chicago in 2016, 75% of whom are black. So it is legitimate to say that the death toll from lynching was significantly less than the death toll from gang violence in the states -- with one city's crime statistics dwarfing the lynching statistics of the entire U.S on a yearly basis.

The difference is, however, that this violence is largely relegated to the ghetto, and doesn't affect black people at every level of society. In 2017, a black person can expect to meet a violent end if he lives in the worst ghettos of the most violent cities in the country and engages in gang activity.

Before the civil rights movement, however, a black person could expect to meet a violent end (or at least experience violence) if they did the following:

- Talked to a white woman and triggered her (sound familiar?), creating cases like the torture and murder of Emmett Till. This was a kid who basically got killed for daygaming a white woman in the South.

-- Fucked a white woman and was falsely accused of rape after she got regrets (the cause of one third of all black lynchings in the south)

-- Attained any economic prosperity whatsoever, which would lead to jealous whites burning down their downtown areas and running them out of town (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot). This, by the way, led to the complete destruction of one of the most prosperous and tightly-knit black communities in the country.

-- Tried to attend predominantly white institutions, where, no matter how qualified they were, they could expect to receive a significant level of racial animosity at the very least, and abject violence at the worst.

-- Tried to travel the country (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Negro_...reen_Book_) This was a book of safety guidelines written for the few middle class blacks who owned cars and wanted to travel the country. It detailed exactly which places they should avoid -- places where whites would refuse them service, refuse them car repairs, or even assault them for showing their faces after sunset.

So while modern gang violence probably kills more blacks than white supremacists did in terms of absolute numbers, the climate for blacks pre-Civil Rights was significantly worse. Sure, they may have had better family structures back then, but that meant jack shit in terms of their actual prosperity or economic growth. I will agree that their culture was overall stronger prior to the Civil Rights movement, their living conditions were undeniably worse.

(11-05-2017 01:06 AM)Samseau Wrote:  

If we could somehow bring some Blacks out of the past from 1890 and into this modern world where they could watch their great-granddaughters get banged out by dozens of men and father 5 kids from 4 different fathers, I'd be willing to bet that those Blacks would choose to go back to 1890.

Poverty and promiscuity are bad, but at least they can be surmounted. There ARE blacks who have made it to the middle class and beyond, millions of them in fact. This is a direct result of the Civil Rights movement. Prior to that, black intellectuals and entertainers were a tiny minority, and popular black athletes were basically unheard of, let alone black politicians.

Legitimate institutional racism, segregation, and racist terror may not have destroyed the black family structure, but they crippled it in terms of economic potential and actual performance. This is a pretty obvious point, but being completely barred from anything but menial work made it impossible for most blacks to get anywhere pre-Civil Rights. I doubt any of the family oriented-blacks from the 1890's would have wanted to see their descendant become an obese single mother of 8 children, but they also would be happy she doesn't run the risk of this:

:

or this:

Quote:

Turner was still alive when a member of the mob split her abdomen open with a knife and her unborn child fell on the ground. The baby was was stomped and crushed as it fell to the ground. Turner’s body was riddled with hundreds of bullets.

Which happened after a black woman was accused of killing an abusive plantation owner.

Conditions in the inner city are bad, but at least blacks there have the basic ability to get out, the system isn't completely stacked against them. Blacks prior to the civil rights era did not have that luxury.