I really encourage folks to read about the economics of slavery and the creation of anti-black racism. Shit will make a whole lot more sense after you understand that racism has always served an economic function first and foremost
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Building on that, reading up on impact of "fiscal responsibility" at a national policy level can be a helpful thing. This was something I was under informed on when younger that helped me realize that some of my world view was wrong and not aligned with what I value.
Put (over?) simply, fiscal responsibility at the national level (budget cutting, deficit focus, etc) aren't inherently bad things but are often espoused by people pursuing policies that tend to have inordinate impact on disadvantaged communities. So, it's always worth peeling back a few layers.
100%. Even racism, even misogyny, even homophobia, even ethnocentricism--they are ALL COVERS and intentional distractions from theft by the rich from the poor.
It blew my mind to learn how deliberately, intentionally, and carefully racism was engineered. We did not cover that in school when I was growing up. It was presented like an unfortunate force of nature, when it was mentioned at all.
always. i'm reminded of when someone highlighted that the Civil Rights Act was not because yt people suddenly had a change of heart or cared about equality…it was because we were messing up their money.
Slavery is a system, not just an institution, bc by necessity it imposes itself on all of a slave society's other modes of behavior, dynamics & institutions (social, political, cultural, military etc). And at its core it's an economic system as marxists recognized. It arises only in societies ...
that can take advantage of slave labor for economic/financial gain, as far as I've been able to determine - NOT for ex. in others where the advantages would only accrue in social status / magnifying hierarchy. It also seems to decay / vanish in societies whose economies lose the ability they once...
had to utilize slave labor *for economic gain* effectively.
The latter point is almost never stressed in most historical studies bc severe sustained economic reversion or collapse is relatively rare. Also it's only recently that scholarship has begun stressing how fragile a slave system is and ...
What that means is that the systemic influences of slavery, on things like culture and ideology and politics, are directed primarily at bolstering an inherently fragile economic system, justifying its most hideously oppressive aspects, and distracting from its manifest weaknesses.
Tales of Two Americas is a great book about just this and the long term implications of it. Owned: A Tale of Two Americas is a documentary similar. I love waking shit like this up!
Basic overviews. Preferably articles rather than books. I have multiple disabilities which affect my memory and focus, but I want to better understand the things OP suggested studying.
“Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the United States as primarily a system of race relations—as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco.” - Barbara Fields
"Capitalism and Slavery" by Eric Williams explains this really well. The racism was a result of an economic system, and it then became embedded across generations to keep the system profitable. I have a book coming out next year about money and religion that spends a chapter on this exact topic.
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The latter point is almost never stressed in most historical studies bc severe sustained economic reversion or collapse is relatively rare. Also it's only recently that scholarship has begun stressing how fragile a slave system is and ...