Why are white people scared of black people's rage at Mike Brown's death? (Jeez!)

The Manchester Guardian ^ | August 20, 2014 | Rebecca Carroll

[Verginius Rufus]

In 1614 the colonists in Jamestown got together and created a system of white supremacy. There weren’t any black people in Virginia at the time...they were just being proactive.

[kearnyirish2]

Sure; in the 1780s (after the Revolution) the US had legalized slavery until the Civil War (80 years later). This country committed nothing in Jamestown; that’s all on England...

[blueplum]

that’s a really good point. Thanks, Kearnyirish2

[Verginius Rufus]

In 1614 almost all countries had slavery (or at least "unfree" conditions like serfdom). Today only some of the Muslim countries still have slavery. The only reason slavery in the US past is an issue today is because of the racial angle.

At the time the English colonists began to import slaves into North America, the Spanish had been importing Africans to the New World for over 100 years, and white Europeans were regularly being enslaved by Turks. And that's ignoring how the English were treating the Irish.

[kearnyirish2]

You’re welcome; they’ve been given a pass on “400 years” for too long...

[kearnyirish2]

Sure, but don’t dare try to take away the “preferred victim” status of American blacks.

We should always use the 80 years figure to put it in the proper historical perspective; every day there are fewer and fewer people alive that ever saw a “whites-only” water fountain or had to ride the back of a bus (both of which were detestable but corrected). Let that legacy die with them and the whites that did that stuff; I wasn’t around back then, and frankly am tired of having it batted around as an excuse for non-assimilation. In fact, blacks in the 1950s, while subjected to such degrading policies, were much more assimilated than they are today.