It happened Trumps record low Black unemployment has got D's cheer-leading slavery
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“.@WhipClyburn dismisses the record low black unemployment rate: "I’m saying that the African-American unemployment is not the lowest it has ever been unless you count slavery. We were fully employed during slavery." https://t.co/avMkpS6A9J”
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I will start off by saying this: Slavery is an objectively bad system. You don't even need to bring morals or human rights or Andrew Ryan or chimp skulls into it - when you put people in charge who have no accountability for results or to the people they are in charge of, the universal result over time is stagnation until the equilibrium is disrupted, usually by external factors. See: Japan until the restoration.
But when discussing US southern slavery, something key is usually overlooked:
Slavery in the southern US existed not to wring every ounce of work out of the enslaved from birth til death, it existed to basically warehouse agricultural workers at the lowest possible cost until they were needed during high activity times.
Harvest time takes an incredible amount of manpower. In the Soviet Union, they would send army units to farms to provide additional labor to bring in harvests. The first full moon after the equinox is called a "Harvest Moon" because
ancient man was always a weeb
your ass was up all night, using the light of the full moon to bring in more of your harvest.
The southern propaganda of "the idle negro", even during the time of slavery, didn't come out of no where. It came about because for a good portion of the year, there no or minimal work farm work for slaves to be doing. Or to put more targeted point on it:
Think about every movie you've seen about slavery. Think about how much of the movie was about cotton harvesting. Then think about this: what portion of the calendar year in the southern US is cotton ACTUALLY being harvested? (the answer might shock you! African American Studies majors hate him!)
The rest of the year, with the exemption of planting, the only work required of slaves was about the same amount of work required by free-men (which is to say 'back breaking' by modern standards) to live: chopping wood, hauling water, etc. But I say 'about' because depending on their owner, they might be required to pick up the slack of the main house.
But again, this is not say life was at the same standards- a house servant might stay in servants quarters, but the field hands lived in the cheapest possible dwellings, and were given fairly minimal food of the least expensive kinds that could be obtained. There is a reason you don't see beef dishes in traditional Soul Food cooking.
So when people compare the Mexican migrants/H-2A visa programs to slavery, they are sort of correct - though not in the way they mean to be - where the decreased costs of transportation have made it possible for temporarily needed agricultural workers to be brought to the fields/orchards on demand with no need to be responsible for them the rest of the year.
Again, this slavery not a good system - morally or objectively - and the Southern US system had a especially heinous characteristics (Heritary, slaves generally forbidden from owning any property, generally no opportunity for personal or lineage advancement, breeding/lack of control of location, etc) But when you compare this with the Brazilian system or sections of the Ottoman system, where the goal was to extract every ounce of work from the slave before they died, there were worse places to be a
slave manditory worker.
Anyway TL;DR
I already made the joke about Democrats being in charge when black unemployment was at 0%
