Tony Curtis: 1925 - 2010

James C. Collier

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The Great Slavery Debate: Ungrateful Negroes

When it comes to discussing, or even thinking about, slavery, the great taboo of White folks is embodied in the question forever on their minds and almost never on their tongues, “Why are Blacks so ungrateful to be in America, when Africa is the worst place on the globe in terms of health, jobs, government, education, crime, climate, resources, blah, blah, blah?”

They will go on to say, “sure, slavery was bad for your ancestors, but it ended a long time ago”. They will also say that racism may exist, “but it exist in Africa too, and much worse, with one tribe committing genocide on another”. In the days before political correctness, Whites were fond of telling Blacks that they should go back to Africa, if they don’t like it here. The implication was always that however bad Blacks think America is, it is worse in Africa.

Where White people got off track is in thinking and acting like Blacks are immigrants. “Go home”, has always been the retort for the disgruntled immigrant, and some even made the return trip. But the African ancestry that was forced here is mostly like those people who stayed behind in Europe, China, India, etc. – meaning they are not immigrant-minded. So why did Black people stay here? Out of those that could have returned, they stayed mostly out of spite, and certainly not because anyone offered them a shot at the American Dream. This was the grand screw-up of US leadership before, during, and after the Civil War.

Fast-forward - if Black people could ever find a reason to want to be here, because of the relative opportunity, instead of being here to simply piss-off White people, a lot of the problems of the day would disappear. And ditto, if White people could ever accept responsibility for post-slavery abuse, without pretending to handover the keys to the kingdom, or other counter-productive acts of contrition.

The paradox is that Blacks cannot make Whites miserable about the past and what followed, without assuring their own adjacent misery, and Whites cannot make amends by only pretending to consider Blacks capable and deserving of a fair shot. So we are all miserable together down the crapper.

James C. Collier

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#14 Why Are Black Girls So Loud?

I was stopped at a light while headed to work the other day when three high school-aged Black girls stood at the light waiting to cross. I was a few cars back, but noticed that the girls were talking loud. This loudness was very familiar to me, as it was similar to what I experienced visiting the local high school last year. It is also the same decibel level I witness with young ‘urban’ Black girls on BART trains. It is nothing like what I experience with my own daughter. As a note, Black boys can also be loud as well, but I have found that boys/men of all colors/ages tend to regulate themselves based upon the threat their behavior might bring from nearby males. This seems not to be the case with Black females.

As a point of clarification, it is not lost on me that many ethnicities are louder than run-of-the-mill White or Asian folks. I have come to believe this is due to a polychronic communication dynamic that has group members competing simultaneously, via loudness, with each other for conversational air time. But I suspected that this Black girl/Black women loudness thing was somehow a bit more. It felt like these young ladies were purposefully raising the volume because of their surroundings.

Well I was right, and there is quite a bit of literature on the subject (here), much of it by Black social scientists. It seems that loudness is a mechanism of defense, as well as aggression, and just plain making sure that people do not take you for granted. Unfortunately the loudness comes with consequences as well, like the label of intimidating and unattractive.

I confirmed these assertions with a Black female co-worker, who described Black girl loudness as a way of putting everyone within hearing distance on notice that the speaker is not to be ‘messed with’. I am interested if her assessment fits with the perceptions of other Black women, and men as well.

James C. Collier

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Blacks Buy Blue Eye Surgery

Continuing my pandering to Blue-eyed madness, I am compelled to write about idiots/people who pay big money to have blue implants surgically inserted into their eyes. Yep, you heard me, inserted as in carved! I first thought that this could not be true, but after various aging relatives had lenses implanted to remedy cataracts, I thought I better do some homework.

The procedure for quasi-permanently changing the color of one’s eyes involves implanting a colored, optic-neutral, lens behind the cornea and in front of the iris. Knowing a bit about how the eye works (don’t ask how), the first thing I wondered was how this implanted lens would not irritate either the cornea or iris while being held in place to give the owner those factory-fresh baby-blues? It is this potential to obstruct these two parts of the eye that would contribute to damage and the body’s immune response, all resulting in complications of a blinding nature.

The implants, commercially labeled NewColorIris™, are available from a Panamanian eye surgeon, Delray Alberto Khan. It is critical to note that the Khan (ironically pronounced “Con”) cosmetic procedure is not approved anywhere outside of the third-world (where it seems authorities do not care if doctors butcher patients). It also seems that Khan’s patients/victims are fond of having those damn things removed pronto, in an attempt to save their sight. I found one patient who seemed to be happy, for now (here).

Interestingly enough, there is an eye surgeon in Beverly Hills, Kerry K. Assil, who repairs and replaces damaged or congenitally missing (here) irises, presented as medical conditions. Assil’s implants, while potentially changing eye color, also reveal themselves, by not obscuring the entire original iris. However, Dr. Assil’s location in Beverly Hills, is suspicious, as 90210 is also the mecca of the cosmetic surgery industry. It would not surprise me if Assil was padding his account by making blue eyes bluer, on the QT, but this is only conjecture right now.

Caveat Emptor. Let the buyer beware.

Note: A Blue-eyed fellow like the one in the picture had his NewColorIris(tm) implants removed due to complications, and removal only cost him $16,000! (here)

James C. Collier

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The Great Slavery Debate: The Debt of Slavery

It is a recurring theme within American Black culture that White people owe a special debt to Blacks because of slavery. Certain conservatives try to short-circuit this claim by arguing that slavery was not profitable, but even if profitability was arguable (and it is not), some will still claim it as a theft of service. However, since slavery has always been with humanity, we will need to carefully establish the point, exactly, when it became theft, and worthy of damages.

Nowhere in the bible is it written that slavery is an abomination unto the Lord, or anybody else. There is no commandment against it. People were not stoned or crucified for practicing it, unlike stealing, killing, adultery, blasphemy, and a list of other prescribed avoidances. In fact, the bible and the Koran, the two most enduring rulebooks of history, and the basis of our rules of law, make nary a mention of slavery as anything more than an everyday part of life.

Did the tribal rulers of Africa think they were stealing the lives of rival Africans when they captured and traded them to Europeans for gunpowder/weapons, utensils and foodstuffs? I think not. Many Africans might argue that they were actually sparing the lives of their kindred enemies by shipping them off, as the alternative was to simply kill them. So it would seem that slavery broke neither laws nor moral codes, a continent away or here, until those practicing it changed their minds about it. This is no different than our current hot-button items of abortion, or same sex marriage. All is allowed until strictly forbidden.

People who argue for repayment nearly always cite reparations paid to indigenous Americans, Japanese internees, and WWII era Jews, but in those cases (here, here, here), laws (treaties) on the books were expressly broken. It seems that the acts of elevating the Atlantic Slave Trade, and slavery in America, to a cut above all other slavery invokes some special status where societal advancement no longer adheres to linearity. The sooner a proper perspective is in place, the better off we will all be.

Finally, perspective is not an invitation to insult and cruelty - slavery did happen and its association with a struggling group is undeniable. Nearly forty years ago a White high school classmate, Paul Ivancie, stated to me, unapologetically, how cool it would be to have a slave. His stupidity brought me face-to-face with the love/hate conundrum Blacks face in this country. There are still Antebellum Whites like him out there - I just hope that when my kids meet such people those words will roll off their backs better than mine.

James C. Collier

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The Great Slavery Debate: Was Slavery Profitable?

Note: There are many who say that the economics of slavery were not very profitable, Thomas Sowell notably, and I would say they are wrong. However, it is important to distinguish (as I will attempt) between plantation slavery economics and the greater commerce value/impact of the triangular trade.

There are two high schools (Part 1 today), and one graduate school (Part 2 coming), of thought on the degree to which this country owes its fortunes to slavery, and by inference to Black ancestry. It is this notion of who benefited and who is owed, intertwined with current dysfunction, which sits as a big bugaboo to progress.

The Atlantic Slave Trade was a profitable component of triangular commerce of that day, but by itself not world changing. In fact, slavery has often been the spoil of a society that was good at something else, mainly war. Having other people to do your loathsome work has been a luxury for the already rich. The Atlantic Slave Trade was a final burst where pure labor was of pivotal importance to a more sophisticated system of commerce, mostly involving sugar and Europe’s sweet tooth for its by-products.

In the labor-starved Americas, slavery is what made the triangular system happen, on the front end. Thereby, it deserves a disproportion of the credit for the very profitable distilled-spirits and textiles on the back end. On the other hand, while plantation slavery made those owners rich, those same owners were not directly responsible for this country’s economic fortune. The overhead required to administer slaves within a system of zero incentive, was high. As a sidebar, had slaves been able to work in parallel to purchase their freedom, the US might have avoided a devastating war with itself.

The Wall Street banks and insurance companies in the north were a different story than the plantations. The slave trade business gave this country a critical foundation in establishing the commerce and banking infrastructure that world leadership would require. The names of those companies and their impact are undeniable – JP Morgan, Chase, Lehman Bros., Aetna, New York Life, to name a few.

So, in answer to whether slavery was profitable, the answer is both no and yes, but much more yes – as it was the lubricant for the most profitable European commerce transactions of the day. This is true even though American plantations were inefficient in their brutal waste and high overhead cost.

Up Next: Part 2 (Graduate School). Just because slavery was profitable does not mean that slaves, or their ancestors, have a rightful claim. The details and context of the day, both legal and ethical, must be applied.

James C. Collier

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Ernest Withers, Civil Rights Photographer and FBI Informant

Members of the Civil Rights community in general, and familiar Blacks in particularly, are reeling on their heels from the revelation that noted civil rights photographer Ernest Withers, who died in 2007 at the age of 85, doubled as an informant to the FBI against the Civil Rights Movement, and its assassinated leader, Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

A Memphis Tennessee newspaper, The Commercial Appeal, broke the story on September 12, after researching evidence that indicated Withers collaborated with the FBI, including J. Edgar Hoover, for years. It was an FBI error in redacting information on informants that led the paper to Withers’ identity and the information he provided the government about the inner-workings of the movement, all in exchange for money.

Now, some will want to paint Withers as a patriot, but all I see at this moment is a betrayer. No amount of good that his photography did will ever undo the damage then and now, of now knowing he worked for people who actively sought to deny citizen rights to a whole group of people, his people. Withers was invited into confidential and private meetings, because people trusted him and believed the record of those events to be important.

This is a sad revelation, which only deepens the stains of progress, through all of the kicking and screaming.

James C. Collier

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The Great Slavery Debate: Origins

Considering that most Americans cannot name all fifty states, or find S. Dakota on a map, it would not surprise me at all that those same folks think that slavery was invented, or re-invented, in the colonies now making up these United States. Unfortunately, what most Americans know of slavery was passed down from people who saw Alex Hailey’s fictionalized Roots mini-series. There is much more to slavery than this, as it has been going on for thousands of years.

Slavery began when hunter-gathering ended, some say about 11,000 years ago. Once agriculture advances produced more food than people in certain areas could eat, people began enslaving others, as they could afford to keep their captives fed. Before that, they simply killed their enemies without a blink. To help our perspective, during the 1,000 or so years of the Roman Empire, 100 million people in an around the Mediterranean area were enslaved.

The lives of slaves have rarely been ‘good’, as some would describe. Throughout time, slaves have been property not people. Their treatment, and very existence, has always been at the whim of their owners. This means they could be killed, assaulted, neglected, or simply worked to death, without repercussions. In most cases slave women bore offspring into slavery, both replenishing and growing the ranks.

Slavery has always been profitable and the foundation of commerce for all societies. Slavery commerce was often the aim/outcome of going to war, where entire societies were enslaved and sold as spoils. It is estimated that 25 to 50% of the world’s population has been enslaved at some time in history. So, the millions of slaves captured and delivered during the Atlantic Slave Trade hold no distinction other than the distance they were transported, and timing with the moral question of acceptability.

The taboo nature of slavery history has fostered a level of ignorance, all the way around, that hinders placing it in proper perspective.

James C. Collier

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Anti-Rape Condom From South Africa

I heard about this South African device during the FIFA World Cup, this past summer. Some people are quick to point out that the device does not actually prevent rape, rather it ‘shreds’ the penis of the attacker, creating a disincentive. Most of the articles I have read are simply reprints of the inventors’ press release, but the discussion (here) presents a better debate of the issues and context. It is important to note that rape and HIV infections in S. Africa are rampant, and the highest in the world.

World-wide Rape Statistics per capita (here).

Food for thought.

James C. Collier

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The Great Slavery Debate: The Footing

The second most challenging aspect of a slavery discussion is not getting blasted out of the saddle, with your point-of-view still in the holster. Unless your words are something like, ‘slavery in America was the pinnacle of man’s inhumanity to man’, you barely stand a chance. This is because today’s discussion is most often against today’s morality, rather than the progress of that time. Of course, to say that America’s slavery was not the worst is nothing close to saying that it was anything less than bad. All slavery was/is bad for the enslaved, as well as the society.

The only relative comparison I will make is that the Atlantic slave trade objectively delivered more slaves from Africa to South America (over 5,000,000) than to the North (500,000), and by all accounts, those delivered to the south suffered a much higher mortality. Their life spans were short, only one to five years, due to the grueling work, mistreatment, and harsh conditions on plantations, in mines, and elsewhere. South American slave owners expected to get no more than a few years of hard labor from a slave, and they went about fulfilling this prophecy. The work was 7 days/week, 18 hours/day, no women, no children, bad food, no care, and no mercy.

The most challenging aspect of a slavery discussion is the notion that current Black plight, with respect to crime, unwed parenting, drug abuse et al, is somehow a function of the ‘slavery-at-it’s-worst’ label attached to the American colonies (British and French). I have yet to find a description of slavery, anywhere, or at anytime, that tracks to the dysfunction within today’s Black community. So, I think it must derive from another source. FYI, my authority on slavery is a book entitled, Slavery: A World History, by Milton Meltzer.

My objective, in this series, is not to deny or discount the negative impacts of slavery, then or now, nor is it to absolve its practitioners or their beneficiaries. I will discuss this later. Rather for now, I will say that dispassionate research indicates that current Black plight is not located at the intersection of the two, nor are any solutions. In its proper proportion, slavery informs us in critical ways. When taken out of proportion, it mostly blocks our view and advancement.

James C. Collier

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The Great Slavery Debate – An Introduction

Perhaps the most recurring historical truism of America is the need for Americans to move past slavery. Mind you, move past does not mean ‘get over it’, in the snide way some people admonish. At the front of the line of the many who need to move on are Black people. In therapeutic lingo, this means squarely facing the past then letting it go, so as not to impede the future.

This weekend I had a spirited debate with some family members, including my 19 year old daughter and her boyfriend. The young Black man, from Atlanta, was the most adamant contender that ‘our slavery’ was worst than previous instances, although he offered no specific difference, other than the distance that slaves were transported.

Others in the debate gave examples of the brutality of slavery in the South, from beatings, murders, assaults, to the wrenching apart of loved ones. My offering, that these treatments were within the range of treatments of slaves throughout human history, fell on deaf ears. Nope, the contention remained that ‘ours was worst and this is why Black people are so messed up today’.

Over the coming weeks/months, I will take a look at some questions about North American slavery, against the context of today. Why did it happen? Who benefited the most/least? Why did the founders adopt it, and then fight about it. Who was Jim Crow? What is the social and economic legacy? How has slavery history affected modern-day immigration? What lessons were learned/not learned?

If this weekend was any indicator, it might be kind of interesting.

James C. Collier

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