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Highlighting black people does not place them "over" anyone. We are not replacing another museum with this one. There are plenty of African exhibits in the Natu

Highlighting black people does not place them "over" anyone. We are not replacing another museum with this one. There are plenty of African exhibits in the Natural History museum and elsewhere and those are great, but it's not the same. Do you not think slavery, Jim Crow, civil rights, etc. is a worthwhile topic? Is it not clearly an extremely important area that deserves an entire museum, rather than a couple exhibits here and there? And finally, imagine a hypothetical country where we enslaved black people for 100 years, and then ceased all slavery and racism completely. One day there were slaves, the next slavery is abolished and nobody is racist. Is the problem solved? Are black people now equal to everyone else? No, because history didn't disappear, they still used to be slaves. They have no money, no land, no friends in power, no education, etc. Their lives still suck, no matter how impartial everyone else is. Again, you can't solve a problem by ignoring it. Pretending black people have no disadvantages and can be treated exactly the same as white people is just naïve, and impractical. It is not racist to acknowledge existing racism, and try to counteract it. There is a line, and it's completely possible for racism to negatively affect white people, but building a black history museum does not come anywhere near that line.

SamUK96 10y ago
But, do you think that black people really still suffer from such "post-racist-society" effects nowadays, like in your hypothetical country? I doubt.
- pj_mukh 10y ago
  Great question! Why don't we ask Black people? :) After all there isn't really an "objective" measure of oppression, its simply the sum total of people's experience, which museums like this try to capture.
- burkaman 10y ago
  Yes, I do. This is easy to see with studies of job applications, loan applications, etc. We don't have to guess.
michaelbuddy 10y ago
you forget given all the race mixing done during the period of slavery, there were plenty of people from the beginning of slavery that really just did these things because it was part of culture. Many many african americans have european blood in them. And many of them are descendents of people who were in loving yet secretive relationships. It is undeniable that some slave-owners owned slaves in order to keep them as workers, and they weren't necessarily "mistreated" more like they were safer as slaves and couldn't be released anyway.
- burkaman 10y ago
  This is kind of a weird comment. Racism and prejudice work off of skin color, not DNA. Having "European blood" does not help you. Having "loving" ancestors is not helpful either. I think it's good that some slaves were treated well, but I'm not sure how that's relevant here. They were still slaves.
- aomurphy 10y ago
  And many were raped. Repeatedly. In a culture where this was thought of as normal. How can a relationship be consensual and loving when one partner literally has the right to order the other, to harm the other in any way, to literally kill the other? If there were so many consensual and secret relationships, why did white slave owners talk so openly about rape of black women (and white women actually, read William Byrd Carter II's diary, it's a shocking horrible thing), and speak so strongly against any sort of liason between white women and black men? Black slaves lived in a world where killing your rapist would get you found guilty [1]. Surely there were some loving relationships (people are diverse), but just as surely the majority were not. And what were slave-owners trying to protect slaves from? If slaves had it so good under slavery, why did thousands and thousands attempt to flee at great risk to their own life? Why did they overwhelmingly vote for the Republican Party after reconstruction, again at great cost to their own lives? Why did so many who did flee write about the evils of slavery, and campaign against it, and no free black wrote for it? All slaves were owned to extract economic value of them, they were huge capital investments. [1]http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/celia/celiaaccount.html http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/celia/celiaacc...
dmix 10y ago
Considering the US wasn't the only country with slavery, I'm curious if other countries have museums dedicated to the subject? It seems whenever someone brings up slavery everyone automatically thinks of America. Slavery was very widely popular in China, south east asia, and most notably the middle east during that era. I've also heard there's still as many slaves today in Africa as there were in the 1800's America: > Forced labor in Sub-Saharan Africa is estimated at 660,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_contemporary_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_contemporary_Africa Maybe it's a good thing Americans are so interested in the subject, as everywhere else that legacy, and in the case of modern Africa the reality, is not being confronted. But at the same time I feel like there are risks of seeing it as a uniquely American issue rather than a human one that the majority of the earths population's has had some connection to in the past. The larger narrative about Jim Crow laws and state sanctioned racism in the modern era is still somewhat unique to the US though - at least in the western world. Otherwise this is largely the consequence of America being the dominant media and news engine for the world. It gets the greatest amount of inward reflection regarding their responsibility for the guilt of past human failures.
- burkaman 10y ago
  I agree, slavery should be documented and confronted everywhere. I do think other countries have museums, which is good. There's a fairly well known one called House of Slaves in Senegal, for example. I'm sure there are many more elsewhere.
michaelbuddy 10y ago
The United States ended slavery. I mean it still exists in some regions of Islam, but we ended it in the West. We should be proud of this part of our history. Many lives were lost during this period. Thank goodness for the Lincoln and the Republicans for ending slavery as well as for voting for civil rights in the 1960s. Democrats were awful. Democrats I think have a lot of underlying shame over this, which is why they often virtue signal to avoid coming to grips with the evils of the Democratic Party.

SamUK96 10y ago

But, do you think that black people really still suffer from such "post-racist-society" effects nowadays, like in your hypothetical country? I doubt.

pj_mukh 10y ago
Great question! Why don't we ask Black people? :) After all there isn't really an "objective" measure of oppression, its simply the sum total of people's experience, which museums like this try to capture.
burkaman 10y ago
Yes, I do. This is easy to see with studies of job applications, loan applications, etc. We don't have to guess.

michaelbuddy 10y ago

you forget given all the race mixing done during the period of slavery, there were plenty of people from the beginning of slavery that really just did these things because it was part of culture. Many many african americans have european blood in them. And many of them are descendents of people who were in loving yet secretive relationships. It is undeniable that some slave-owners owned slaves in order to keep them as workers, and they weren't necessarily "mistreated" more like they were safer as slaves and couldn't be released anyway.

burkaman 10y ago
This is kind of a weird comment. Racism and prejudice work off of skin color, not DNA. Having "European blood" does not help you. Having "loving" ancestors is not helpful either. I think it's good that some slaves were treated well, but I'm not sure how that's relevant here. They were still slaves.
aomurphy 10y ago
And many were raped. Repeatedly. In a culture where this was thought of as normal. How can a relationship be consensual and loving when one partner literally has the right to order the other, to harm the other in any way, to literally kill the other? If there were so many consensual and secret relationships, why did white slave owners talk so openly about rape of black women (and white women actually, read William Byrd Carter II's diary, it's a shocking horrible thing), and speak so strongly against any sort of liason between white women and black men? Black slaves lived in a world where killing your rapist would get you found guilty [1]. Surely there were some loving relationships (people are diverse), but just as surely the majority were not. And what were slave-owners trying to protect slaves from? If slaves had it so good under slavery, why did thousands and thousands attempt to flee at great risk to their own life? Why did they overwhelmingly vote for the Republican Party after reconstruction, again at great cost to their own lives? Why did so many who did flee write about the evils of slavery, and campaign against it, and no free black wrote for it? All slaves were owned to extract economic value of them, they were huge capital investments. [1]http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/celia/celiaaccount.html http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/celia/celiaacc...

dmix 10y ago

Considering the US wasn't the only country with slavery, I'm curious if other countries have museums dedicated to the subject? It seems whenever someone brings up slavery everyone automatically thinks of America. Slavery was very widely popular in China, south east asia, and most notably the middle east during that era. I've also heard there's still as many slaves today in Africa as there were in the 1800's America: > Forced labor in Sub-Saharan Africa is estimated at 660,000. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_contemporary_Africa https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_contemporary_Africa Maybe it's a good thing Americans are so interested in the subject, as everywhere else that legacy, and in the case of modern Africa the reality, is not being confronted. But at the same time I feel like there are risks of seeing it as a uniquely American issue rather than a human one that the majority of the earths population's has had some connection to in the past. The larger narrative about Jim Crow laws and state sanctioned racism in the modern era is still somewhat unique to the US though - at least in the western world. Otherwise this is largely the consequence of America being the dominant media and news engine for the world. It gets the greatest amount of inward reflection regarding their responsibility for the guilt of past human failures.

burkaman 10y ago
I agree, slavery should be documented and confronted everywhere. I do think other countries have museums, which is good. There's a fairly well known one called House of Slaves in Senegal, for example. I'm sure there are many more elsewhere.

michaelbuddy 10y ago

The United States ended slavery. I mean it still exists in some regions of Islam, but we ended it in the West. We should be proud of this part of our history. Many lives were lost during this period. Thank goodness for the Lincoln and the Republicans for ending slavery as well as for voting for civil rights in the 1960s. Democrats were awful. Democrats I think have a lot of underlying shame over this, which is why they often virtue signal to avoid coming to grips with the evils of the Democratic Party.