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>if I wanted to suck up to elite whites I’d embrace teaching kids of color about “white supremacy.”

I completely disagree. White supremacist systems have operated across the globe for a few centuries now, the actual white elites/beneficiaries (not just the group I suspect you dislike), the British Royal family for example, hate the idea of history like the 1619 project being spread to the masses because the affected may find the common thread that weaves through their histories. WS thrives on ignorance and inaction.

When 90% of the planet has a common understanding of white supremacist systems and the vulnerabilities, the fragility of these systems is exposed and the foundation starts to crumble with minor shifts in behavior (especially economic) at the individual level on a mass scale.

TLDR Anyone arguing for less exposure of WS history and the history of racism in general is very suspect.




The 1619 project is a leftist hit piece full of factual inaccuracies. It’s article on capitalism was so egregious that even Jacobin was forced to correct it: https://jacobinmag.com/2019/08/how-slavery-shaped-american-c...

So did WSWS: https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2019/09/06/1619-s06.html

When even self-avowed socialists have to distance themselves from a putatively Marxist attack on American capitalism, that tells you something.

The idea that teaching kids flawed history will bring about some utopian future is suspect. I would deem it none of my business, but as you note, people are now trying to draw Asians into the same retrospective thinking. They talk about how the British stole $42 trillion from India. How does that help? The British are never going to be able to give back that money—they can’t afford to.

Agitating and waiting for some utopian future to come about is just a recipe for countries like India to stay poor. I’m not interested in that.


> people are now trying to draw Asians into the same retrospective thinking. They talk about how the British stole $42 trillion from India. How does that help? The British are never going to be able to give back that money—they can’t afford to.

Oh yes the British bourgeoisie can afford to.

The west can give up it's ridiculous intellectual property regime that kills millions of people and blocks innovation. IP is nothing more than an (artificially scarce) monopoly right on a bit of knowledge. That knowledge belongs to all.


Jacobin's criticisms reek of ignorance, slaves were clearly the engine of the country if you understand how they were also financialized.

US slaves were securitized and used as collateral for loans/leverage/etc (slaves were the first assets to be securitized in America). People around Europe, in countries where slavery was illegal/unpopular, and the rest of the US could invest and profit from the trade without getting blood on their hands directly.

Each slave was approximately the value of a single family home (~1kg of gold) which means the British/Americans were able to "create" the value of 10,000,000 or so single family homes worth of wealth (~$1,171,852,800,000) out of thin air using African men, women, and children's backs before cotton production (which was more valuable than all other exports combined), other labor, and other investment activity is even accounted for. (Note: I'm not even counting the slaves that were domestically produced in this calculation, this is just the number brought across the Atlantic.)

Cotton misdirection is what Jacobin is attempting, they (or their quoted 'experts') lack awareness of the financial ecosystem that operated with slavery at its foundation. The volume of money/gold involved built the first stages of a large % of early US/UK/etc cities and accounted for a much larger % of GDP and US/UK wealth than Jacobin is attempting to claim.

That fact that I need to explain this very recent history to educated US adults is yet another signal that this history is inadequately covered and should be compulsory. There is nothing more American than understanding the foundations of American Capitalism, and its evolution from the slave economy.

Final note: Speaking of India, destroying Indian and Chinese cotton production allowed the US/UK to dominate 2/3rds+ of the global cotton trade, not technical know-how or advanced intelligence... it was mostly torture,murder, and destruction (historical record has many accounts of invaders breaking/cutting off hands of poor Indian/Chinese textile laborers en masse, at the time these workers produced the finest muslin and other textiles in human history).

Ghandi's promotion of textile (yarn/khaadi) production during his protests/boycotts wasn't a fluke/random...




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