[Peace-discuss] Kyle Ammons' remarks after Passage of UrbanaSanctuary City

[C. G. Estabrook]

Ammons, like may other Americans, has been misled into thinking that 
slavery in America was a matter of race relations (black people and 
white people) rather than capitalism (owners and workers).

"Probably a majority of American historians think of slavery in the 
United States as primarily a system of race relations — as though the 
chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather 
than the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco. One historian 
has gone so far as to call slavery ‘the ultimate segregator’. He does 
not ask why Europeans seeking the ‘ultimate’ method of segregating 
Africans would go to the trouble and expense of transporting them across 
the ocean for that purpose, when they could have achieved the same end 
so much more simply by leaving the Africans in Africa.

"No one dreams of analyzing the struggle of the English against the 
Irish as a problem in race relations, even though the rationale that the 
English developed for suppressing the ‘barbarous’ Irish later served 
nearly word for word as a rationale for suppressing Africans and 
indigenous American Indians. Nor does anyone dream of analyzing serfdom 
in Russia as primarily a problem of race relations, even though the 
Russian nobility invented fictions of their innate, natural superiority 
over the serfs as preposterous as any devised by American racists." [B. 
J. Fields]

See now "How Race Is Conjured: The fiction of race hides the real source 
of racism and inequity in America today," by Barbara J. Fields & Karen 
E. Fields, Jacobin 6.29.15

This misleading - sometimes innocent but often not - protects capitalism 
from criticism by directing that criticism to racial prejudice (which 
itself should be distinguished from racism properly speaking, which is a 
matter of law, as in apartheid South Africa or Israel). Racism existed 
in the Virginia of my youth, but the laws were changed (see the current 
film “Loving”). Racial prejudice still exists there - but racism as a 
legal structure doesn’t.

--CGE


On 2016-12-24 16:41, Mildred O'brien wrote:
> I don't know if other people attending the Urbana City Council meeting
> after the passage of the Urbana Sanctuary City Ordinance were
> listening and offended as I was by remarks of Council person Ammons
> who lectured "descendants of immigrants" who (supposedly) enslaved his
> ancestors but now petitioned on behalf of undocumented immigrants.  I
> was astonished by such language at the time but thought perhaps I had
> not heard what I thought I heard.  Today on WEFT I heard a replay of
> the Council proceedings of December 19 after the passage of the
> Ordinance which confirmed my recollection of his words, which blamed
> [white] immigrants in general for  enslaving his people.
> 
> It is not been historically established that more than 10 - 15% of
> Colonials were responsible for the importation and exploitation of
> slave labor.  Realistically, servitude of black or white enforced
> labor was not economically feasible for the majority of landless
> immigrants to America who were destitute or themselves enslaved
> (Caucasians for 7 to 10 years or more, Africans for life) but was
> restricted to wealthy Europeans primarily from England. My own
> paternal ancestor immigrant was kidnapped from Ireland in 1698 at
> twelve years of age and transplanted to work for a wealthy Englishman
> in tobacco fields of Maryland until the age of 21.
> 
> It is not helpful for contemporary descendants of perceived past
> aggrievances to tar people of good intentions with presumably
> inherited guilt for which they had no responsibility, but to work in
> harmony to prevent repetition of transgressions.
> 
> Midge O'Brien