this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2024
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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/6682912

My dad was a white slave, Kentucky Republican tells NAACP

top 31 comments
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

What exactly is a dirt farm?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago

Equating forced labor, prison labor, indentured servitude, and poverty to chattel slavery is ignorance at best and serves white supremacy by minimizing the the Atlantic Slave Trade. If you get confused, just ask: Is someone legally allowed to sell my child?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

So what is the term of the child of an indentured servant?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

It's right there in the question: child of an indentured servant

[–] [email protected] 34 points 8 months ago (1 children)

There's wage slavery, there's debtor's prison, there's sharecropping, and then there's chattel slavery.

When 'slavery' is brought up in American politics we almost exclusively mean the latter.

Absolute clown 🤡

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

The situation she was referring to was indentured servitude.

[–] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I’ve never heard a black person say “My father was a slave”, because it’s fucking 2024, what the hell?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Too many unaware of how prison labor works, it seems.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

But Kaaaaarrrrrl! I just love snacking on human faces!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 21 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It's true that there were a significant number of white (European) indentured servants/slaves in the Americas during the first centuries of colonization:

From Barbados to Virginia, colonists long preferred English or Irish indentured servants as their main source of field labor; during most of the seventeenth century they showed few scruples about reducing their less fortunate countrymen to a status little different from chattel slaves – a degradation that was being carried out in a more extreme and far more extensive way with respect to the peasantry in contemporary Russia. The prevalence and suffering of white slaves, serfs and indentured servants in the early modern period suggests that there was nothing inevitable about limiting plantation slavery to people of African origin.

reference

Between 50 and 67 percent of white immigrants to the American colonies, from the 1630s and American Revolution, had traveled under indenture.

Wikipedia article

However, by the 1900s white slavery really only persisted in the form of sexual trafficking of women, which ultimately led to the passing of the Mann Act in 1910. It's also likely that the idea of an organized slave trade at this time was hyperbolic:

While prostitution was widespread, contemporary studies by local vice commissions indicate that it was "overwhelmingly locally organized without any large business structure, and willingly engaged in by the prostitutes."

To claim that her father was a "slave" in the 1930s is a serious misappropriation of the term.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

Sid Meier's Colonization taught me this!

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I'll argue to anyone that every Vietnam and Korean War draftee was a slave, or at least as much a slave as serfdom was.

As bad as chattel slavery, no, but forced into dangerous labor for the profit of an uncaring oligarchy by threats of violence, yes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

If it were me I’d rather be forced to do field labor than be forced to fight a war.

Vietnam was pretty fucking bad.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago (2 children)

We should have never gotten rid of the draft and we should have increased the odds of the rich and the leaders if this country being drafted to the front line positions. It would be a great way to make sure we don't take part in useless wars.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

I'd agree with this as long as it was a draft for general federal service, not necessarily military. We could draft into the park service, NOAA, NIST, the forestry service, BLM, heck I bet we could even figure out how to use draftees in DoE. I don't see any problem with a few years of required federal service for all citizens, and there are lots of options.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 8 months ago

Rich people don't get drafted

'I ain't no senators son...i ain't no fortunate one'

[–] [email protected] 109 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Admitting that you think poor people are slaves isn't the flex you think it is you feckless bag of hair.

[–] [email protected] 66 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Yeah, because growing up poor and being a slave are the same. WTF is wrong with these people?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago (2 children)

It's simply Abrahamic mental illness.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

I initially read this as "Alabrahamic". Couple the mental illness with the desire to show boat and decieve, like "Alakazam! Jesus Saves y'all^TM^!"

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

All 3 of them

[–] [email protected] 213 points 8 months ago (2 children)

When the reporter persisted, Decker explained that her father—a preacher born around 1933, according to the Courier Journal, or 68 years after slavery was outlawed—was “born into poverty” and worked for free with his family on the property they lived on. (It’s unclear whether the adults were paid, though the Courier Journal notes that it sounds more like “Decker’s father was forced by his parents to do chores” and that the family were tenant farmers.)

“My dad had to do chores when he was growing up 😭😭” - KY State Rep. Jennifer Decker

[–] [email protected] 11 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I'd also like to add that slavery was never outlawed in the US, and is still used to this day.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

When the exception makes the rule lol.

[–] [email protected] 65 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Sounds like a share cropper and victim of wage slave capitalism.

Dummy

[–] [email protected] 53 points 8 months ago

Sounds like the run-of-the-mill child labour you see across the US (I consistently did this for my dad till probably about 17).

Not to forget the other type, which is migrant children working in factories illegally.