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You must have a pretty racist world view if the first thing that strikes you in a tech story is the skin color of the people involved.
by zeteo 16y ago
You must have a pretty racist world view if the first thing that strikes you in a tech story is the skin color of the people involved.
- samatman 16y agoWell, that's possible. Or, I could be from the Detroit area, and be well familiar with the current racial makeup of the UAW. I've seen a modern GM assembly line. The whiteness of this historical assembly line is... quite striking.
- hugh3 16y agoDetroit wasn't always a "black" city. It's just that almost everyone else has left nowadays. Your average assembly line back then would have been 90% white, since that would have been roughly the racial makeup of America. Henry Ford was actually much more open about hiring black employees than most of his contemporaries: http://apps.detnews.com/apps/history/index.php?id=19 http://apps.detnews.com/apps/history/index.php?id=19 (Jews, on the other hand, were out of luck)
- pchristensen 16y agoThe boom in industrial manufacturing work is what drove a lot of the migration of southern blacks to the Northeast and Midwest. These early Ford plants were at the beginning of that movement.
- zeteo 16y agoThere are so many interesting things in this video. Why would you choose to concentrate on race before anything else? There are some subjects where skin color is a very important dimension of the analysis, such as the political history of the post-Reconstruction US South. And there are other issues, such as the production of the world-changing Ford Model T automobile, where race played at most a very minor role.
- GoodIntentions 16y agoPerhaps he was expecting to see evidence of racism due to Henry Ford's connections with anti-semitism. Google "henry ford racism". If you want a dead tree source, I think Anthony Sutton's "Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler" had references. Been a while since I've read it. Pretty sure it is out of print, but PDFs are online.
- Semiapies 16y agoOr he could be an adult in a multiracial society who isn't cripplingly defensive over issues of race.
- zeteo 16y agoWe are all adults in the same society. Do you think it's possible to look at the history of technology before 1960 without looking at, say, Einstein's skin color?
- Semiapies 16y agoAnd some of us are more absurdly defensive than others. You pick a great example, actually. Skin color is a crucial ethnic divider in the US, but not the only one in the world. A history of technology up to 1960 that carefully avoided mentioning why all those Jewish scientists and engineers up and left Germany for the US would be weird and suspect.
- zeteo 16y agoHave you even read any technological surveys? You'll find plenty of respectable histories of technology that don't even mention that Einstein was Jewish. See http://books.google.com/books?id=XvB1ZcsrDFAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=vaclav+smil+20th+century&source=bl&ots=UeTybwd1Jd&sig=7-VLiilosE1wetFCbYQAl1gsbvU&hl=en&ei=Q761TZ6dNYXu0gGNjKmrCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=7&ved=0CEwQ6AEwBg#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.com/books?id=XvB1ZcsrDFAC&printsec=f... for example. The reason it's not mentioned is very simple: it's not relevant. Just as the skin color of the workers was not relevant to the development of the mass production process.
- Semiapies 16y agoHave you actually tried searching for "Jewish" in that book? It comes up. Nazis, Hitler, anti-Jewish laws, etc. Now, if you want to continue being a whiny, defensive white guy freaked out because someone noticed that an early 20th-century film only had white guys in it, you're going to do so without any further responses from me.