Blog 2 Slavery in America

How was slavery woven throughout the American society? This question is easy to see in our readings this week because slavery was the key to the uprising in America. One answer to this was the stereotypical black man the “Sambo” and the black maid. The sambo stereotyped as a lazy black man that was there just having fun and singing. The black maid was a lady who was bigger and always happy to do the laundry and make the food for their master. In reality the sambo was not a typical black man at all and the black maid was normally not big at all. The typical black man was a hard worker and the black maid was skinny often time being a rapped victim by their master. These two stereotypes were and attempt to cover up the wrong doing in slavery by showing happy picture of a black slave. Also slavery was the easiest way to get money because slaves were cheap and they never paid. As years past slavery only became to make more sense for plantation owners because there was a lot of work that needed to be done and it would be very costly to have any other kind of labor to be working for these owners. In the 1700’s there were no tractors or combines in the fields and there wasn’t any for hundreds of years to come. Farm work was hard and very time consuming and owners knew that slavery would make the most logical sense. If there were no laws against it I would have to believe that their would be some slavery but hardly any because of the advancement in technology. Technology put farmers into a place where they could plant and harvest the same amount of acres in one day to what a single slave would take nearly two weeks. Slavery was wrong but it only made logical sense at the time. Slavery did begin not long after the English moved to the Americas. It was not common at this time but there was a showing of some slavery. In the 1860 census there was 4 million slaves and 12 million people in the population. That is a lot of slaves but in the slave states only 4.8 % of people held slaves. This meant that every person that held slaves had on average 10 slaves at this time. To me this shows that not everyone had slaves or needed slaves but the people that needed them had a lot of them. This makes sense because the plantations were large in the south and it would take many people to operate them. Also there were laws being in place to allow the south to keep their slaves and make it harder for other people to take away that privilege. If slaves would run away they were according to law to be brought back to their owners.

How were all people implicated in it? This started when the slave owners took action in the government positions because they were forcing laws to keep the blacks from getting knowledge so that they would not get the idea of making a big revolt. The laws were to help keep the blacks under control and allow slave owners to do what they wished out of the slaves. They also made a fact that runaways would be brought back to their original owners. I would not want to be a slave coming back from being captured as a runaway. The laws really tried to make slavery legal and to keep it that way for many years to come.

What was necessary for it to end? I really believe that southerners believed that blacks were so inferior to the white man and with the laws in place I believe there needed to be a war. The slave owners had so much hatred running through their veins and would not give in until a fight. The slaves and the whites that wanted to free the slaves had to come together. They were too scared to do anything about it before and it took some leadership to come and fight these tough slave owners. Once the war began a slave owner was scared to go to sleep because they never knew if a slave would come into the house and kill them while they sleep. This war had to haunt the slave owners because they knew what they were doing was not right. I hope to believe that not every slave owner whipped their slaves and did bad things but there is no telling what all went down at a slave house.

Even today you can see how society controls people based on money. The rich class controls everything and everyone especially the poor. For instance where my mom works at Minster Machine there is a rich man behind the company. The company is getting slow right now and instead of cutting his large pay cut he decides to cut everyone else’s pay by 19% while he is making over $100,000 per year. In this day in society he is treating his workers like slaves because they still work the same amount everyday but with the pay cut it is hard for people to buy anything but necessities with that the little pay that they are getting. It is not like a person would leave this company because chances are there are no other opportunities for you to find a job anywhere else. Another example is people working at a Wal-Mart who are making very little income. This is fine you are young but it is not enough for the adults that have to pay for the insurance and mortgage on homes and the food that gets put on the table. These people are at the lower class in society and are forced to be because of the rich manager’s decision.

Blog 1

"It is impossible to be an American and not racialize how you feel" (Cornell West). This is a strong statement put towards the United States because he obviously acknowledges that people in the United States are not treated equal. The thing is everyone is that everyone is the same because we are all human beings. The only difference is the thoughts that we believe and what the culture that you are surrounded by. The British and the Indians were completely different almost as if they were living on different sides of the world. Racialization is something that the British did when first seeing the Indians. Racialization is to categorize or differentiate on the basis of race or culture. By racialization the British identified the Indians as savages. According to dictionary.com a savage is an uncivilized human being, a fierce brutal or cruel person, and a member of a preliterate society. To the British this is exactly what they seen from the Indians. Indians were naked hunter-gathers with little farming and extremely uncivilized. The British were all about colonizing and setting up agriculturally and making trade routes back the home country. The British’s view of the Native Americans was that they were torture loving savages, unorganized, and argumentative. The British did not care if the Indians were all killed or migrated far away because they did not want to deal with these uncivilized people. On page 33 of our textbook A Different Mirror states that “Indians seemed to lack everything the English identified as civilized – Christianity, cities, letters, and clothing. Unlike the English, Indians were allegedly driven by their passions, especially the sexuality.” This line really shows that the English and the Indians are very different. To me the term savage is really a harsh word to put towards the Indians because I believe in all honesty that the Indians were nice caring people but the British were to stubborn in their own goals as a colony to care about associating with the Indians. Not every country that moved to the Americas thought that the Indians were savage like the French for example. The French thought that they could work together with the Indians and wanted to learn more about their customs. I believe another difference is that the British ran in to a different tribe that was more hostile than the Indians the French met. The British could not deal with the difference between them and the Indians which resulted in many wars and lots of blood. People died all over the America to the point where not many Indians live today.

So back to my first line of this blog. “It is impossible to be an American and not racialize how you feel.” This was very true then and appears to be very true now. There are examples all around us like what does a farmer look like, a white male that does not care what he looks like. Or a chink which is a person that looks Asian. Or a gangster which is someone who wears baggy pants and has their pants off their ass. We do not need to classify people because everyone should be treated the same and looks should not matter but they are judged by everyone everyday.