"Wokeism" uncovers new facts about slavery in America

[BacktoCricaddict]

Webster dictionary definition of "woke":

aware of and actively attentive to important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)

 

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A story about how a History graduate student uncovered the largest slave auction ever - 600 slaves sold in South Carolina in 1859. But for truly woke historians, professors and students, we'd still be wallowing in ignorance about the extent of the damage caused to one section of the American population based on nothing but the colour of their skin. So, if today, they are fighting an "identity" based battle, it is because it they that were first grouped in to a identity based on colour, enslaved and then segregated. It was not their choice to be subjugated as a group. The ripple effects are still felt to this day. Yes, I am woke.

 

https://www.propublica.org/article/how-grad-student-discovered-largest-us-slave-auction

 

 

Quote

 

Slavery was a form of mass commerce, he said. It made select white families so wealthy and powerful that their surnames still form a sort of social aristocracy in places like Charleston. 

 

Although no evidence has surfaced yet about how much the auction of 600 people enriched the Ball family, the amount Ann Ball paid for about one-third of them is recorded in her bills of sale buried within the boxes and folders of family papers at the South Carolina Historical Society. They show that she doled out $79,855 to purchase 215 people — a sum worth almost $2.8 million today.

 

The top dollar she paid for a single human was $505. The lowest purchase price was $20, for a person known as Old Peg. Enslaved people drew widely varied prices depending on age, gender and skills. But assuming other buyers paid something comparable to Ann Ball’s purchase price, an average of $371 per person, the entire auction could have netted in the range of $222,800 — or about $7.7 million today — money then distributed among Ball Jr.’s heirs, including Ann.

 

They weren’t alone in profiting from this sale. Enslaved people could be bought on credit, so banks that mortgaged the sales made money, too. Firms also insured slaves, for a fee. Newspapers sold slave auction ads. The city of Charleston made money, too, by taxing public auctions. These kinds of profits helped build the foundation of the generational wealth gap that persists even today between Black and white Americans.

 

Jervey, Waring & White took a cut of the sale as well, enriching the partners’ bank accounts and their social standing. Although the men orchestrated auctions to sell thousands of enslaved people, James Jervey is remembered as a prominent attorney and bank president who served on his church vestry, a “generous lover of virtue,” as the South Carolina Society described him in an 1845 resolution. A brick mansion in downtown Charleston bears his name.

 

Morton Waring married the daughter of a former governor. Waring’s family used enslaved laborers to build a three-and-a-half story house that still stands in the middle of downtown. In 2018, country music star Darius Rucker and entrepreneur John McGrath bought it from the local Catholic diocese for $6.25 million.

 

 

 

Quote

 

Alonzo J. White was among the most notorious slave traders in Charleston history. He also served as chairman of the Work House commissioners, a role that required him to report to the city fees garnered from housing and “correction” of enslaved people tortured in the jail.

 

“Yet, these men were upheld by high society,” Davila said. “They are remembered as these great Christian men of high value.” After John Ball Jr. died, the City Council passed a resolution to express “a high testimonial of respect and esteem for his private worth and public services.”

 

But for the 600 people sold and their descendants? Only a stark reminder of how America’s entrenched racial wealth gap was born, Davila said, with repercussions still felt today.

 

 

[zen]

The White World has been guided by the "White Man's Burden", where non-whites are shown how to live as human beings. Under the umbrella of "this burden", it also exploited the rest of the world. Even in Christianity, "Jesus" is said to have been portrayed as "white" when a Middle Eastern is usually not considered white. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[coffee_rules]

With the amount of focus and attention on racism now, every single hate  crime of the past which would be an outlier , will be portrayed as a norm of those days. That will lead to reverse racism and hate crimes against innocent people . As a student of science, one should look at data and see how prevalent was such practices to outrage against current population who have no clue what their ancestors did. 
 

Next come the madness of reparations, where outrageous demands (million $s) of giving out doles to families now for slavery committed by their ancestors of current taxpayers. 

Edited June 19, 2023 by coffee_rules

[BacktoCricaddict]

https://rollingout.com/2017/08/13/average-white-high-school-dropout-earns-more-than-black-college-grad/

 

“For Black families and other families of color, studying and working hard is not associated with the same levels of wealth amassed among whites. Black families whose heads graduated from college have about 33 percent less wealth than white families whose heads dropped out of high school. The poorest white families—those in the bottom quintile of the income distribution— have slightly more wealth than black families in the middle quintiles of the income distribution. The average black household would have to save 100 percent of their income for three consecutive years to overcome the obstacles to wealth parity by dint of their own savings activity.”

 

https://t.co/Iel4v5koe0

Racial wealth differences cannot be explained by education, employment, or income. Economists estimate that, by far, the largest factors explaining these differences are gifts and inheritances from older generations: a down payment on a first home, a debt-free college education, or a bequest from a parent. Insofar as we are truly interested in living up to the American promise of economic opportunity for all, we need to acknowledge and address the role of intergenerational resource transfers, non-merit based attributes related to circumstance at birth. Given the roles of intergenerational wealth transfer, and past and present barriers that have kept black families from building wealth, private action and market forces alone cannot be expected to address wide-scale racial wealth inequality. Public sector intervention is needed.

[coffee_rules]

45 minutes ago, BacktoCricaddict said:

https://rollingout.com/2017/08/13/average-white-high-school-dropout-earns-more-than-black-college-grad/

 

“For Black families and other families of color, studying and working hard is not associated with the same levels of wealth amassed among whites. Black families whose heads graduated from college have about 33 percent less wealth than white families whose heads dropped out of high school. The poorest white families—those in the bottom quintile of the income distribution— have slightly more wealth than black families in the middle quintiles of the income distribution. The average black household would have to save 100 percent of their income for three consecutive years to overcome the obstacles to wealth parity by dint of their own savings activity.”

 

https://t.co/Iel4v5koe0

Racial wealth differences cannot be explained by education, employment, or income. Economists estimate that, by far, the largest factors explaining these differences are gifts and inheritances from older generations: a down payment on a first home, a debt-free college education, or a bequest from a parent. Insofar as we are truly interested in living up to the American promise of economic opportunity for all, we need to acknowledge and address the role of intergenerational resource transfers, non-merit based attributes related to circumstance at birth. Given the roles of intergenerational wealth transfer, and past and present barriers that have kept black families from building wealth, private action and market forces alone cannot be expected to address wide-scale racial wealth inequality. Public sector intervention is needed.

Is that your opinion or quoted text? Obviously, inheritance plays a very important role and employment and wealth generation for middle-class to move up, they need to make the right choices with the opportunity available. Most white families with low education qualifications do have inheritances from past generational wealth acquired.  You want public welfare to set the imbalance right? Taxing the inheritance heavily is one way to balance out the gap.

[BacktoCricaddict]

44 minutes ago, coffee_rules said:

Is that your opinion or quoted text? Obviously, inheritance plays a very important role and employment and wealth generation for middle-class to move up, they need to make the right choices with the opportunity available. Most white families with low education qualifications do have inheritances from past generational wealth acquired.  You want public welfare to set the imbalance right? Taxing the inheritance heavily is one way to balance out the gap.

It's quoted text. I am not that articulate :-).

 

Many, many African-American families have made excellent choices, but as the article says, even when they get an education, they are behind white people who have no higher education.

 

"Taxing the inheritance heavily is one way to balance out the gap."

Good luck trying to get a single Republican to vote for that.  The other thing that makes me take pause on these initiaves is government misappropriation of funds.  Yeah, you collect more taxes and then it disappears into the morass of government waste and does not reach the people who deserve it. But should that stop us from even trying?

 

One thing that I always get from my desi brothers is - "but we came with nothing and we made it."  I disagree with the "with nothing" part.  Most Indians over the last 25 yrs came with a degree in a field that almost always guarantees a lucrative job.  And in most cases, this degree was subsidized by some govt entity in India (govt colleges).  Many others were sponsored by business-families who gave them jobs and support to survive one generation.  Of course, we all worked hard but our starting blocks were not at the same place as slave-descendants - just getting to the point of getting a degree is a huge barrier for many, many African-American families for a variety of reasons described in the links and it is not justified to compare their plight with that of the typical Indian immigrant. 

 

 

[coffee_rules]

1 hour ago, BacktoCricaddict said:

It's quoted text. I am not that articulate :-).

 

Many, many African-American families have made excellent choices, but as the article says, even when they get an education, they are behind white people who have no higher education.

 

"Taxing the inheritance heavily is one way to balance out the gap."

Good luck trying to get a single Republican to vote for that.  The other thing that makes me take pause on these initiaves is government misappropriation of funds.  Yeah, you collect more taxes and then it disappears into the morass of government waste and does not reach the people who deserve it. But should that stop us from even trying?

 

One thing that I always get from my desi brothers is - "but we came with nothing and we made it."  I disagree with the "with nothing" part.  Most Indians over the last 25 yrs came with a degree in a field that almost always guarantees a lucrative job.  And in most cases, this degree was subsidized by some govt entity in India (govt colleges).  Many others were sponsored by business-families who gave them jobs and support to survive one generation.  Of course, we all worked hard but our starting blocks were not at the same place as slave-descendants - just getting to the point of getting a degree is a huge barrier for many, many African-American families for a variety of reasons described in the links and it is not justified to compare their plight with that of the typical Indian immigrant. 

 

 

So, what’s the solution where the quoted text says - “Public sector intervention is needed.”

 

I read it as welfare. Anything the government undertakes using publiclmoney will go waste. Need non-profit NGOs with private donors to tackle individual cases who come for help.