Quote:
Originally Posted by Alan
I'm out of the context here. In Mexico when we think of slavery it does not come with a direct link to color. Even as indigenous people are treated as second-class citizens by so many upper echelons of society today, the link wasn't between them and slavery.
So I have no way of really knowing how an actual American mind works when they associate things to the word slavery.
That said, this doesn't change the fact that this is slavery. Agreeing with the bulk of your last paragraph, shouldn't the error be not to commit fully to calling it slavery rather than to claim that it was slavery?
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The problem arises when white people have exclusive control over the term to address issues that we deem worthy of the word. I mentioned earlier for example that there's an article I was reading (here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...lene-laundries) about how refugee seekers are being incarcerated and while a direct comparison wasn't made, the point of it was to point out Ireland has a horrible history of locking up the unwanted that continues today. Yet read the comments and most are outraged that anyone would ever compare the two and the immigrants should be thankful.
Likewise in America and Canada, while prison labour exploitation, immigrant labour exploitation and human trafficking continue to be a problem and are objectively slavery, we won't call it that. Slavery is something other bad people do, like our ancestors or the Vatican. We don't want to face responsibility to the fact that we allow slavery to continue in our society, so we won't call it that. There's too much guilt associated with the word. We'll call it anything but, because the word has the power like it did in this thread to create anger and outrage against someone outside, the Vatican, Ireland, and we can't unleash that anger at home and at ourselves.
Therefore I think its more than fair that white people be asked to be pretty uncomfortable with words we've racialized and assume power over. I actually wasn't going to say anything in this thread until Versus did, I'm that utterly incapable of analyzing this stuff until someone such as Versus gets the ball rolling. While I intellectually know that words have power, I can't get what words have power and what words don't until someone who is affect by those words tell me, and I really have to defer to his experience as an American man of colour, you know? If it was you, I wouldn't say shit. But I think I and other white people should be very uncomfortable using words we racialize and hold for our own, and probably should back down when challenged on it.