Crcata said:
It was individuals, and not in any way shape or form justified in portraying it as the fault of white men. For the same previously stated reasons. You are flat wrong.
So you object to my using "white men" to refer to a collective group of five million men who described themselves as "white men" and were responsible for creating that category and naming it.
Why?
And why are you using words like "fault" to talk about what you otherwise describe as both inevitable and innocent, simply a recognition of what you say is an "objective fact"?
On the one hand, you want me to blame some "individuals" you cannot locate or describe, and not even use their own race labels to describe them, because it unfairly tars the rest of their race; on the other hand you claim nothing blameworthy was done by anyone.
Crcata said:
Also, it was not "all" white men, if you actually knew a thing about history, there were black slavers as well. Also, every race has taken part in slavery in some form or another in history. Some still do. Its factual...you are wrong.
I haven't posted anything here about who did and did not own slaves even in the US let alone throughout history everywhere, and certainly the white men in the US between 1650 and 1850 did not invent slavery and were not unique in adopting it - although the industrialization of it, in the plantations, was innovative and significant.
The brand new and relevant thing they did was invent and establish the current US "racial" classification system - instead of castes, as in India, or tribes, as in the Middle East, we see "races". It took two hundred years to get the system completely straightened out, and even into the 1900s the "white" race was being adjusted to include formerly non"white" groups of people (see my links above), but the basic lumping of all the biologically and culturally varied and diverse people from all over the planet that the "white" men wanted to call "black" was quickly completed - for obvious reasons.
Crcata said:
Just because there are different shades of white,black, etc...does not mean we have to make a label for each shade. That would simply be to much
They aren't shades of "white" or "black" - they are different colors of human skin, and the people who have these different colors of skin are different from each other. That's what you were claiming was important, remember? Skin colors in humans are as important as the differences between species of fish, you said. And they have had names, in the past (high yellow, octoroon, dark tan, swarthy, etc). There's nothing so very complicated about a few names. There should be at least as many names for human skin color as for human hair and eye color, don't you think?
Crcata said:
But yet we can still have labels which assist in administration purposes and identification purposes
Yes. I have been emphasizing that for pages now. That's why the self-labeled "white" men in the US invented these "races" and labeled other people in the first place - to assist in certain administrative and identification purposes. Horrible ugly ones, unfortunately. And we have been living with the consequences ever since - we may be stuck with them for centuries to come.
The question for the thread was whether American democracy - burdened with the consequences of this racial division as it is and will be - can last. It has survived so far in part via oppressing the non-white "races" - sequestering almost all economic and political power in the "white" race. That is unlikely to remain a viable approach much longer.
