An Open Letter to White Privilege

[Gallstones]

This might contain too many facts for some of you to stomach.

[Gallstones]

^^^Listening to this, particularly to the summation, I suspect Mr Molyneux has libertarian leanings.

[Pappa]

WHEN EUROPEANS WERE SLAVES: RESEARCH SUGGESTS WHITE SLAVERY WAS MUCH MORE COMMON THAN PREVIOUSLY BELIEVED

“One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as given is that slavery was always racial in nature – that only blacks have been slaves. But that is not true,” Davis said. “We cannot think of slavery as something that only white people did to black people.”

During the time period [Robert] Davis [professor of history at Ohio State University] studied, it was religion and ethnicity, as much as race, that determined who became slaves.
...
Although hundreds of thousands of Christian slaves were taken from Mediterranean countries, Davis noted, the effects of Muslim slave raids was felt much further away: it appears, for example, that through most of the 17th century the English lost at least 400 sailors a year to the slavers.

Even Americans were not immune. For example, one American slave reported that 130 other American seamen had been enslaved by the Algerians in the Mediterranean and Atlantic just between 1785 and 1793.
...
The enslavement of Europeans doesn’t fit the general theme of European world conquest and colonialism that is central to scholarship on the early modern era, he said. Many of the countries that were victims of slavery, such as France and Spain, would later conquer and colonize the areas of North Africa where their citizens were once held as slaves. Maybe because of this history, Western scholars have thought of the Europeans primarily as “evil colonialists” and not as the victims they sometimes were, Davis said.

Davis said another reason that Mediterranean slavery has been ignored or minimized has been that there have not been good estimates of the total number of people enslaved. People of the time – both Europeans and the Barbary Coast slave owners – did not keep detailed, trustworthy records of the number of slaves. In contrast, there are extensive records that document the number of Africans brought to the Americas as slaves.
...
The result is that between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly 1 million and quite possibly as many as 1.25 million white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.
...
While African slaves did grueling labor on sugar and cotton plantations in the Americas, European Christian slaves were often worked just as hard and as lethally – in quarries, in heavy construction, and above all rowing the corsair galleys themselves.

None of this is news. Any good book on slavery will give the same information about European slavery.

[Brian Peacock]

Indeed.

[Gallstones]

Raven-Symoné: "I'm Tired of Being Labeled"

I’m tired of being labeled. I’m an American. I’m not an African-American; I’m an American,” she said.

Raven continued: “I mean, I don’t know where my roots go to. I don’t know how far back they go…I don’t know what country in Africa I’m from, but I do know that my roots are in Louisiana. I’m an American. And that’s a colorless person.”

Winfrey then warned the entertainer that she would “get a lot of flak for saying you’re not African-American.”

“I want you to say what you really mean by that,” the host pressed.

“What I really mean by that is I’m an American. That’s what I really mean,” Raven replied. “I have darker skin. I have a nice, interesting grade of hair. I connect with caucasian. I connect with Asian. I connect with black. I connect with Indian. I connect with each culture.”

[pErvinalia]

Black on the outside, white in the middle. I don't know what fruit or lolly that is..

[pErvinalia]

Maybe a licorice all-sort...

[JimC]

I'm white on the outside and a nasty, gooey pink on the inside...

[pErvinalia]

I'm a watermelon. Green on the outside, red in the middle. Watch out Seth, I'm coming for you!

[Gallstones]

She's not that dark. I know Italian Americans who look a lot like her.

[rainbow]

She's not that dark. I know Italian Americans who look a lot like her.

Especially in New Jersey.

I believe it's spray-on.

[epepke]

She's not that dark. I know Italian Americans who look a lot like her.

Especially in New Jersey.

I believe it's spray-on.

She looks computer-generated.

[Gallstones]

[rainbow]

Some white people are quite entertaining in a quaint sort of way, but you wouldn't necessarily want to invite them home to meet your daughter.

[cronus]

Whether it be powder or bone.......we're all white in the end. (now some nerd here is gonna argue a point, feel it in my scorched bones...)