Consult a historian
In another part of the forest –
A couple of things. One, picking cotton is not a synonym for slavery. Sharecroppers picked cotton; laborers picked cotton. Warnock wasn’t saying his mother was a slave, he was saying she was poor, and had to do hard painful (the bolls tear up your hands) work to make a meager living.
Two, no, slavery did not end in America 157 years ago. Slavery was reinstated in the South (without being called that) after Reconstruction was terminated. Jim Crow laws were passed that made it a crime for black people to be unemployed, along with a bunch of other trivialities that didn’t apply to white people. Guess what the sentence was! Picking cotton! Or harvesting turpentine in the pine forests, which was also miserable lethal work. Cotton growers “leased” prisoners, and if the prisoners died of overwork and starvation and filth, there were always plenty more.
Three, what kind of miserable spiteful reactionary shit is that?
And even among poor whites, share cropping also was very hard, painful, and not well paid. Much of the Great Depression hit share croppers in Oklahoma so hard they became the migrants known as “Okies”.
I often suspect that these well off white people think (1) everyone else has the same opportunities they had, but their superior work, intellect, genes, etc gave them the success most of them actually achieved through being well off and white; and (2) that lives in the early 20th century mimicked our current lives very closely.
Ignorance. And seemingly adding words (like “slave”) to a tweet that didn’t have them.
Absolutely. Share cropping was and is a horrible system. There were some structural arrangements that made it worse for black people, like the underfunded schools that meant it was easier to cheat them on the accounting and the Jim Crow laws that made it a crime to reject any job offer (yes really), but it was still shit for anyone who had to do it.
Read a commentary on another blog, I believe, that pointed out how the elites ALWAYS game the system. He focused on how due to the Black Plague, peasants and low level artisans were suddenly in very short supply :( And they thought they thus had more rights. So vagrancy laws, Enclosure, harsh criminal laws, and the joys of being shipped to penal colonies made sure the lower orders kept in their place.
And for the record, slavery is allowed even today when it’s imposed on persons convicted of a crime.
Brian M, yes – a labor shortage = higher wages, so naturally the bosses passed laws making it a crime to demand higher wages.
Having recently finished a biography of Johnny Cash, who grew up poor in the Arkansas delta, and as a boy he picked cotton and had the scars on his hands for life. Cash never forgot his roots either.
“King of your mum” – oh, a common internet douchebag.
Very, but people take him seriously.
Apparently James Lindsay’s favourite insult: