The northern states were just as prejudiced as the south

Everyone always seems to focus on how the south had slavery and treated the African-Americans bad, but no one ever really discusses how badly the freed slaves were treated in the north. There were just as many racists in the north as there were in the south.

 

No one said the North wasn't racist. Heck the U.S. was racially divided up until the 60's. The civil war had a more complex socioeconomic reason. People usually quote the freeing of the slaves because that's what they remember about Abe Lincoln's presidency.

 

Yeah. We only focus on "over coming the bad guy" in history. Not what was actually happening. We see one point of history and it becomes fact. The racist type of person of the past is still quite prominent even with today's standards. The north can say all they want about how it was the one place free slaves could go but in truth they were just as bad.

 

Sometimes we tend to print the legend and it becomes fact. This has happened a lot in history. The famous ride of Paul Revere is one shining example. He is very famous but he only rode for 19 miles...who remembers the man who rode hundreds and delivered the same message at the same time? haha no one..because his name didnt fit into a rhyme easily.
We mostly remember what we were taught in school about the north and south and never thought to do our own research once we could look it up on our own.

 

The worst thing about war is that the winner gets to rewrite the history. Happened quite recently. In Kosovo.

 

It's not that the history is altered or rewritten, the facts can be freely found at multiple resources. It's down to the fact that most of us accept what we learned in school as the whole truth. Most middle school history teachers will not go into detailed lectures about every intricate detail, because a) they don't have enough time b) nobody cares about those things at that age.

 

Everyone knows the north was racist too. Come on, many racists laws existed up until 1960~1970s. Not only against the blacks, but also other races.

Even today, racism runs deep in the United States. It does not help when half the population in the jail are blacks (heck, blacks are more likely to be arrested and jailed under the same circumstances which is the reason behind the uneven prison population).

However back before the civil war, at least the blacks were "free", who were not property of whites in the North.

 

This is a very poor argument, I think. Those who commit crimes should get proper prison terms, regardless of the race. You can't say that the guy is black so the court should set him free.

Check this table.

 

I don't see anything that would indicate that Vash said somebodies crimes should be forgiven because of his race.

The discussion originally started on the theme of the North being prejudiced as well. I'd like to think that our society evolved somewhat during the last 150 years. Is racism still present yes, is it as prominent as it used to be no.
Do I think all this "white guilt" that is going around these days is called for, no. Most people tend to forget that the first black slaves were sold by other black people, slavery in Africa was a pretty flourishing business even before the Europeans arrived.

 

No, that was not what I said.
I took Race and Minority class in the college. Our professor had a Ph.D in this field. He studied it extensively. The fact is many whites do not get charged or even being arrested for the same things some blacks do. That is the primary reason behind why there are so many black in the prison.

@ blindwarrior,
The race issue is on the table when 100% the slaves were black in European and American countries. The Africans in Africa were not targeting any specific race as a source of slavery. It just happened "naturally". It is quite unnatural when an entire country's slave is a single race while they are the minority.

 

Do you have any proof for this? I think that the reverse is true. Police are afraid to arrest people belonging to minorities, since they are afraid of being branded racist.

Again another poor argument. Volume-wise, American Indians were enslaved much more than the Africans.

The slave trade started in 14th century, when Crimean Tatars and Ottoman Turks conducted their slave raids in to Ukraine and Russia. More than 5 million Slavs were forced in to slavery during the 1350-1700 time period. Slave trade also existed in South Asia, even before the first slave trade was conducted in Africa.

And one more thing. Arabs were responsible for more than 90% of the African slave trade. Arabs imprisoned more than 140 million Africans, while the Europeans (primarily the Portuguese and Dutch) were responsible for less than one-tenth of that amount. As recently as the 1950s, Saudi Arabia's slave population was estimated at 450,000.

The difference was that European slave traders allowed their slaves to marry among themselves and to produce children, while the Arabs never allowed that. All the African males who were captured by the Arabs were castrated using primitive techniques and any children born to the captive African women were killed immediately. This was a fatal mistake. Europeans should have never allowed slaves to have children. This is the only reason why the Arabs are now saints in the eyes of the Africans, and the Europeans are considered as "oppressors".

 

Both the North and the South were racist, but they had a different kinds of racist views on African-Americans. The South clearly made it clear that they saw themselves as superior and went to more extreme depths such as the Ku Klux Klan to prove it. In the North, although slavery was always prohibited, blacks were still the minority and could be treated with discrimination. Yet, blacks had more chances in the North than in the South.

 

@ Vladimir

You want proof? If you just Google them you will find them. It is totally the opposite when someone say police are afraid of arrest blacks. Nope, they love it. What you said was white propaganda. I had a black college professor who was arrested over nothing when he was out of town in a middle class car. There was also a black student in our college who was jailed for six months over some parking tickets and then fishing. Just a few examples to show how easy blacks can be arrested and jailed. Our professor of race of minority (not a black) had detailed statistics on these issues.

Aside the arrest/imprisonment issue, majority of the chemical waste dumping sites in the United States are also near minority areas. Yes, my professor did his Ph.D paper on it.

All the numbers you provided are also not accurate. No idea where you got them from. It sounds like someone try to blame it all on Arabs. There were more than 20 million native Americans in America before Europeans arrived here. Most of the natives were killed, and remaining enslaved. It was not until there is a shortage of slaves due to most native Americans were gone, blacks became the majority in slaves.

You are also conveniently using longer period of slave trade of Arabs comparing to the much shorter but much larger scale slave trade of Europeans.

 

There were KKK chapters in Detroit.

 

There is some truth to what Vladimir wrote. There were indeed Arab slavers in East Africa for a long period before Europeans ventured into the dark interior of the Dark Continent. Indeed, the first European explorers, such as Sir Richard Burton (not the actor, but the writer and linguist) probed East Africa they often consulted with the reports of the Arab slavers. So there was a time when the Slavers were primarily Arabs, especially in the East.

But some time after the discovery of the New World and the Europeans started to colonize the Arabs found they had competition in the Slaver business. While the Arabs demand for slaves remained consistent the European demand for slaves as Labor for the plantations of the New World made dramatic shifts after around 1600. This lasted until the early 1800s when first Denmarck then England banned the international trafficking of African Slaves.

After that the percentage of Europeans Trafficking dropped, and the percentage of Arab Traffic once again grew in relation. But the over-all numbers of Arab slave traffic in reality was rather consistent and stable throughout the period.

Oh, Vladimir, slavery did not start in the 14th century as you stated, nor did it start in Eastern Europe. It is much older than that, perhaps even extending into pre-history. Many cultures around the globe have some period of slave ownership/trafficking.

 

This is not a true statement, that slavery was "always prohibited" in the north. There was slavery in the Northern states as well, just not as much of it and not as late in time.

Slavery started dissipating after the Revolutionary War in both the north and the south... but then built up in the south again when things like the cotton gin's invention happened.

 

Also an argument that the southern aristocracy used against northern industrialists was that the northern system was just as bad as slavery, not that I am rationalizing slavery, yet it was because of the practises of some northern industrialist that child labor laws were enacted.

 

I recently heard a radio interview of a man, the author of a recent book on the Battle/campaign of Gettysburg. He revieled an interesting factoid: During the sweep through Pennsylvania the Army of Northern Virginia swept up some 500 free Blacks for transportation to Virginia for sale into bondage. No further information.

Does this reflect an equality of prejudice?

 

I think you need to look at history a little better. The slave trade was already many thousands of years old by the 14th century. Africa has been selling her children for tens of thousands of years. Joseph (a Jew) was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, and was able to become one of the most powerful men in the history of Egypt. Today you can go to Africa and buy a child from his (or her) parents, and groups such as boko haram routinely kidnap children as slaves.

 

In the early 1970s I was in the Army for awhile. Most of my Southern friends were shocked and somewhat amused by how many Northern whites were extremely racially prejudiced once they met "black" people, often telling us how they thought white Southerners were terrible until they met black people. Most of us had no problem having black friends, as we had most of our lives. Northern prejudice against Southerners continues to this day.