Glad to know there was no racial message in the minds of Glenn Beck’s followers this week…
Here’s a picture of a guy at Glenn Beck’s Rally last week, which we’re told had nothing to do with race or anything really except “faith…”
Which raises the obvious questions:
Hey jackass:
1. What does this have to do with the rally you were attending?
2. What does this have to do with anything?
3. Why can’t you spell Mauritania?
Clearly the answer to question 3 is easy: for the same reason he probably spells America “Amurka”
But as for questions 1 and 2, well, that’s a bit more complicated. I’d say it’s because deep down, this is how lots of white folks deal with (or rather, refuse to deal with) racism and white supremacy in this country: by deflecting attention onto other crimes, committed by other people, in other lands. Which is about as mature as saying to your mother when you were 11, and broke a window playing ball, “But Billy did it too!” Momma didn’t care about Billy, Skeeter. And Mauritania doesn’t relieve the U.S. of dealing with the legacy of our crimes…
Nice try though.
I wonder how the surfing is in “Mauitania.” What a nimrod!
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Actually, Haiti has an issue with Child Slavery. They are domestic servants sold by their parents. The are called ‘restavecs’ (literally meaning “stay with”). You can see an article here:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6451267.stm
This guy is just a seething racist. That is not as important as the right-wing noise machine that tries to use fake stories designed to make white people fear black people (Van Jones, ACORN, Shirley Sherrod, etc).
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I agree with the sentiment of your comments in this post and I applaud your work. I take some issue with the quip about Haiti, though.
Have you heard of restavecs? It is estimated by Free the Slaves that 1 in 10 children in Haiti is living in slavery under this system. The book Restavec by Jean Robert Cadet gives a moving first-person account of what it is like to live as one of these domestic child slaves in Haiti.
Free the Slaves has an interactive map on their website showing where the estimated 27,000,000 modern day slaves are located around the globe: http://www.freetheslaves.net/Page.aspx?pid=375
I was introduced to the work of Free the Slaves through Kevin Bales’ book, Disposable People, in a seminar on modern slavery when I was an undergraduate and have remained very interested in the cause. I highly recommend reading Dr. Bales book and Jean Robert Cadet’s – both are truly eye-opening.
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Tim Reply:
September 4th, 2010 at 8:39 am
thank you for this info Emily, I was not aware of it!
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Frederic Christie Reply:
September 6th, 2010 at 12:29 am
By that reasoning, though, Europe, Russia and America ALSO own slaves, because sex slavery and other types of human trafficking go on.
The point is that slavery isn’t legal there any more than here.
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Its one thing to own slaves….its quite another to enslave people based on the color of their skin and continue to oppress anyone who resembles the race of the slaves for hundreds of years. This is why I hate when people say “blacks sold their own people into slavery”….first because it wasn’t “their people” there was no concept of “Pan-Africanism” or universal brotherhood based on blackness until European colonization and exploitation forced Africans to band together along color lines. Back then, it was all about tribes, your only allegiance was to your tribe and the opposing black tribe from the next village was just as much an outsider as the European man offering money for your slaves. Secondly, those slaves the Africans sold them were prisoners of war….not the victims of acts motivated by the perceived inferiority of their skin color. Apparently, that’s too difficult for some people to differentiate.
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I agree that his shirt is both inane and unnecessary, but I must say that there is a slavery-like system in Haiti. Restavaks live pretty terrible lives.
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Tim – you unwisely missed the point.
Blacks owning blacks as slave is not racist
- it simply is oppressive.
All the other projections you invent a deflection away from our crimes (Scars as Beck pointed out, Scars we must learn from), white supremacy in reality is the Democrats century plus long crime that they are deflecting to conservatives rather then owning as their past sin.
If you want to cash in on that check of equal justice then it is time to reject the collectivist notions that lump people in groups by attributes that they have no control over. Racism is necessarily a part of collectivist thinking.
Reject collectivism, Rights are individual attributes.
Your rights, My rights and every one elses are not because they are part of any group but because we are human.
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If you really think there are no slaves in Haiti, then you are very naive and do not know the real facts about reality.
http://www.theworld.org/2010/02/01/haitis-child-slaves/
Haiti’s child slaves
http://dissidentvoice.org/2010/02/child-slavery-in-haiti/
Child Slavery in Haiti
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/6451267.stm
Haiti’s hidden ‘child slaves’
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I’m trying to figure out whether these are the people who are made the face of the movement for entertainment purposes, or if this really is the collective intelligence of the tea party movement.
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Chris Moss Reply:
September 18th, 2010 at 11:43 am
Tom,
What’s your point?
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Amazing; They want to change labour laws so the lowest paid workers in America and in sweat shops around the world are economic slaves to American based multinational corporations backed and supported by teabaggers yet they complain about black slave owners doing the same thing ?
I wonder if Sarah Palin had been governor of Alabama in the 60′s if she would have embraced integration or called out the national guard ?
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There are slaves in Haiti. Families sell their children to others thinking they are going to have a better life working for someone else but are treated horribly. It is an almost inevitable consequence of the absolute poverty and lack of infrastructure that has plagued that country for years. It is not a black or white issue it is a socioeconomic issue. Where the rich and poor are the most segregated you are more likely to find this kind of behavior.
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Betsy Reply:
September 5th, 2010 at 3:13 am
But we (white USA) have been instrumental in the systematic oppression of that country. Which I do not think would have been possible to do if its people were white.
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Does anyone honestly believe this guy in the picture cares anything about enslaved children in Haiti—or enslaved children anywhere for that matter?
Present-day slavery is a global phenomenon—even in the US—so why is this guy only focused on black people owning slaves?
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Agreed. But what I find disturbing is that to dismiss people like him is to not get anywhere on the matter. I don’t know what to do about it but I have an idea that my wish for people like that to not vote — not exist, to be honest — is both impractical and unhelpful.
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