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I respect your decision to be completely and utterly wrong. The progressive movement was the movement of eugenics. We were going to improve the human race throu

• dragonwriter 7y ago
  > I respect your decision to be completely and utterly wrong That’s hilarious but... > The progressive movement was the movement of eugenics. There, again, have been a number of separate “progressive” movements in US history, eugenics was a minority view within one of them. But, while you are wrong here, it's not nearly so flagrantly wrong as: > And no, there was no group of white people saying white people are all great, stick together, etc. That wouldnt happen until the 60's and 70's, after eugenics was taboo. I don't think it ever happened; even white racists don't tend to think white people are all great. But, no, white racists that saw the race they favored as the “white” race did not first show up in the 1960s-1970s, as evidence by the Cornerstone Speech in which Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens laid out his view of the central case for the Confederate cause in 1861: “...Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite ideas; its foundations are laid, its cornerstone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and normal condition. ...”
  • Braggadocious 7y ago
    The progressive era was between the start of the industrial revolution and the start of WWII. >even white racists don't tend to think white people are all great. You are so committed to this modern liberal partisan revisionist historiography that you are willing to admit the narrative doesn't make any sense, and yet equally willing to keep at it. That's commitment. Irish, Italians, russians, and other "inferior" whites were always considered white. "White" has never and will never be the barrier to entry into this country or into the american hierarchy. Looks, charm, stature, sharpness of mind, focus on meaningful pursuits like work, not being too interested in "meaningless pursuits" like art and music. Not being promiscuous, no criminality, no epilepsy, no "feeble-mindedness" or imbecility. This is what race was about. Virginia aristocracy, the Boston Brahmins etc, were spurred on by the leading science and technology of the day, to believe these attributes were genetically inherited and "selected" by nature, which meant they could also be selected with Mendelism. We were not interested in a "white race." Since race was something you could control, we were interested in a "superior american germplasm" a genepool of the best of the best while the rest were sterilized, aborted, deported, or imprisoned in jails, asylums, or reservations. American eugenicists were interested in "building a race." A concept Hitler adopted and was quoted talking about fairly often. Racism was not white vs black. Its nowhere near that simple
    • dragonwriter 7y ago
      > Racism was not white vs black. Racism was and is more complex than just white vs. black, but that wasn't your claim upthread that I have been arguing against. What you claimed previously was that white was not considered a race before the 1920s. It absolutely was, and there are copious prominent invocations of white racial identity in US history prior to that time—as I've shown with the Cornerstone speech—and while racism is more complex than just white vs. black (and ideas of just who is white have evolved), white vs. black has been a key racial divide for the whole history of the country.
      • deleted 7y ago
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      • Braggadocious 7y ago
        Who flags posts they disagree with? If you had a valid argument and were discussing this in good faith, do you think you still would've flagged me? You: >You claimed previously was that white was not considered a race before the 1920s. Me: >White was also not considered a race in the 20's. Again this is a perfect example of you making up facts to serve your narrative. A narrative which doesnt even help you. In the spirit of the OP I was discussing the 1920's. But since I've clearly read more than you on american history prior to the gilded age, I'll explain to you where "white vs black has been a key racial divide" has validity, and where it doesn't. The rhetoric you're referring to of "white vs black" is from the South where all the slave owners were scots-irish, speaking to one another as scots-irish. Second, the south was limited in their exposure to immigrants as all the immigrants went to the north for factory work, or to work as serfs on northern farms where slavery was not used. The south did not like immigrants, or the jews who've had maybe the worst ad campaigns written for them in the Holy Bible. They were also far less educated. While america by the 1860's had the second largest public education system in the world behind germany, the south had almost no public education system. But they did have the Holy Bible. Those southerners that did interact with northerners did not like immigrants. There were constant, what we would call today "terrorist attacks" between the north and south before and after the civil war, most of which happened across the missouri river. Confederates would go up north and light a village on fire. German immigrants from the north would go south and bomb a town. Confederates would go back north and mass murder everyone on a train, etc, etc. Not really any camaraderie among whites to be found there, now is there? The civil war also saw 750,000 men die. Mostly, as you would say, white men, dead at the hands of other white men. The civil war would kick off a major industrial revolution. In the years after, finding work would be difficult, although the population was severely decimated, problems in europe were driving mass immigration to the states. Factory work was difficult to find. Factory owners realized the larger the laborpool, the less they had to pay people, so factories often tried to hire men and women of as many different ages and backgrounds as they could. For reasons that were as racist as they were economic, labor unions were born and would limit an entire industry to one race/nationality or another to restrict the labor pool. Because of this european immigrants assimilated and dressed/spoke like anglo saxons. Unfortunately for chinese and black, they couldn't do that, so they were hit with the worst labor laws restricting where they could work. This is probably the only time you could point where there may have been a "white race." In factory labor unions just trying to get a job, but even then, the managerial class was also white, and if the labor union didnt get what they wanted, they would riot and kill the lot of them. No unity there either. The problem with this narrative is that it also deprives you of learning about carrie buck, the eugenics movement, the reason for American support of the Nazi party, America's many attempts at building a race like the Boston Brahmins, the progressive institutions like the rockefeller foundation and stanford university leading the eugenics charge, Harry Laughlin (university professor of sociology) awarded an honorary Doctorate of Medicine from the University of Heidelberg in Germany by the nazis for masterminding the 1924 immigration act, America's apprehension to enter war in WWII, our mass deportations, our mass sterilization of 70,000 poor in the 1920's and 30's, and potentially 400,000 sterilization of poor americans during the Nixon administration. It also deprives you of learning how eugenics and racism persists today, not along color lines, but along cultural and socioeconomic lines. It deprives you of understanding the grim reality of IQ testing, and why corporation's use of performance metrics are not just racist against black people, they could be racist against you too. It deprives you of understanding where and how the glass ceilings still exist to this day.