cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/6682912
My dad was a white slave, Kentucky Republican tells NAACP
When the reporter persisted, Decker explained that her father—a preacher born around 1933, according to the Courier Journal, or 68 years after slavery was outlawed—was “born into poverty” and worked for free with his family on the property they lived on. (It’s unclear whether the adults were paid, though the Courier Journal notes that it sounds more like “Decker’s father was forced by his parents to do chores” and that the family were tenant farmers.)
“My dad had to do chores when he was growing up 😭😭” - KY State Rep. Jennifer Decker
Sounds like a share cropper and victim of wage slave capitalism.
Dummy
Sounds like the run-of-the-mill child labour you see across the US (I consistently did this for my dad till probably about 17).
Not to forget the other type, which is migrant children working in factories illegally.
I’d also like to add that slavery was never outlawed in the US, and is still used to this day.
It was…
…EXCEPT…
When the exception makes the rule lol.
Admitting that you think poor people are slaves isn’t the flex you think it is you feckless bag of hair.
Yeah, because growing up poor and being a slave are the same. WTF is wrong with these people?
It’s simply Abrahamic mental illness.
All 3 of them
I initially read this as “Alabrahamic”. Couple the mental illness with the desire to show boat and decieve, like “Alakazam! Jesus Saves y’allTM!”
There’s wage slavery, there’s debtor’s prison, there’s sharecropping, and then there’s chattel slavery.
When ‘slavery’ is brought up in American politics we almost exclusively mean the latter.
Absolute clown 🤡
The situation she was referring to was indentured servitude.
It’s true that there were a significant number of white (European) indentured servants/slaves in the Americas during the first centuries of colonization:
From Barbados to Virginia, colonists long preferred English or Irish indentured servants as their main source of field labor; during most of the seventeenth century they showed few scruples about reducing their less fortunate countrymen to a status little different from chattel slaves – a degradation that was being carried out in a more extreme and far more extensive way with respect to the peasantry in contemporary Russia. The prevalence and suffering of white slaves, serfs and indentured servants in the early modern period suggests that there was nothing inevitable about limiting plantation slavery to people of African origin.
Between 50 and 67 percent of white immigrants to the American colonies, from the 1630s and American Revolution, had traveled under indenture.
However, by the 1900s white slavery really only persisted in the form of sexual trafficking of women, which ultimately led to the passing of the Mann Act in 1910. It’s also likely that the idea of an organized slave trade at this time was hyperbolic:
While prostitution was widespread, contemporary studies by local vice commissions indicate that it was “overwhelmingly locally organized without any large business structure, and willingly engaged in by the prostitutes.”
To claim that her father was a “slave” in the 1930s is a serious misappropriation of the term.
I’ll argue to anyone that every Vietnam and Korean War draftee was a slave, or at least as much a slave as serfdom was.
As bad as chattel slavery, no, but forced into dangerous labor for the profit of an uncaring oligarchy by threats of violence, yes.
We should have never gotten rid of the draft and we should have increased the odds of the rich and the leaders if this country being drafted to the front line positions. It would be a great way to make sure we don’t take part in useless wars.
Rich people don’t get drafted
‘I ain’t no senators son…i ain’t no fortunate one’
I’d agree with this as long as it was a draft for general federal service, not necessarily military. We could draft into the park service, NOAA, NIST, the forestry service, BLM, heck I bet we could even figure out how to use draftees in DoE. I don’t see any problem with a few years of required federal service for all citizens, and there are lots of options.
If it were me I’d rather be forced to do field labor than be forced to fight a war.
Vietnam was pretty fucking bad.
Sid Meier’s Colonization taught me this!
I’ve never heard a black person say “My father was a slave”, because it’s fucking 2024, what the hell?
I have.
Too many unaware of how prison labor works, it seems.
Equating forced labor, prison labor, indentured servitude, and poverty to chattel slavery is ignorance at best and serves white supremacy by minimizing the the Atlantic Slave Trade. If you get confused, just ask: Is someone legally allowed to sell my child?
🤡
Karl Marx agrees.
STFU Karl.
But Kaaaaarrrrrl! I just love snacking on human faces!
So what is the term of the child of an indentured servant?
It’s right there in the question: child of an indentured servant
What exactly is a dirt farm?