On You-Know-What (That You-Know-Who Did What-For)

"How times change, and not in a good way. In 2013 we are allegedly past race, which means we are past slavery and therefore have no need to look at it at all. That's how the thinking goes, anyway. Psychologists would say such denial makes perfect sense. Since the '70s -- as the racial gap in income and other areas has widened, not narrowed -- we've become so racially averse, to even call yourself 'black' now is a radical act; to invoke slavery merely as a subject of conversation is to risk howls of protest that you are being a victim or playing the race card. All of which means that a hundred a fifty years after the end of slavery, we are still determined not to give it its due, but to forget it,...The entire struggle of black people after the end of the Civil War has been shaped by one long marketing campaign that casts the South as noble, and blacks as undeserving. Can't have one without the other."

“Perhaps they can only do the best they can with the dross they have to work with.  Perhaps the lack of substantial topics and forensic interrogation are products of the absence of principle and passion in political debate.

There is the obsession with retail.  I like a bit of shopping myself but retail trends and their reflection of wider society and their impact on the economy are reported with mind-numbing and repetitive banality.  If I hear more bland stories about ‘cash strapped families shopping around’ I’ll cry.

Why aren’t the world’s best journalists digging underneath these seasonal superficialities?"

"Vermont’s founding family — the Ethan Allen clan — is generally extolled as a collection of freedom fighters embodying the qualities of courage, independence and tolerance that have come to characterize today’s state.

Aspects of that image — the freedom-fighter and tolerance parts, anyway — need revision, according to a new study of slavery in early Vermont by UVM historian Harvey Amani Whitfield."

“During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia. Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder.

…Breeding Irish females with African men went on for several decades and was so widespread that, in 1681, legislation was passed 'forbidding the practice of mating Irish slave women to African slave men for the purpose of producing slaves for sale.' In short, it was stopped only because it interfered with the profits of a large slave transport company."

“Two Charlotte used-vehicle dealerships and their operator charged inflated prices to black customers and offered them 'predatory' terms from 2006 to at least 2011, according to a federal lawsuit filed Monday."