I may have already heard this on #onhere, but the way people are trying to spin some workers refusing to return to low wage jobs reminds me of slave owners calling enslaved Africans lazy.
When the law can’t compel behavior, resort to propaganda, whether in 1821 or 2021.
If I would hazard a guess (maybe some historians know), the language & laws re. labor in the US today wouldn’t be so business friendly if not for the language & laws to control enslaved Black labor.
Everyone is denied a proper safety net bc it’s all attributed to “laziness.”
I can’t think of another industrial country like this.
The ones that could even somewhat compare (Australia and Canada) are also settler-colonial nations that had to fashion some “other” to expand the capital of its elite settler populations.
A fantastic summary from @schwarz illustrating that the line from the the US colonial era to today—during which elites have protected their capital by sensationalizing labor shortages— is unbroken.
I’ve been trying not to wade into this much bc I hate being reactive to foolishness, but it’s annoying as hell being a Black woman lawyer taught by a number of preeminent Critical Race Theory pioneers and see it butchered like this, from every end of the ideological spectrum.
Critical Race Theory is a form of legal scholarship that responded to a pervasive ideology that the law/legal decisions were colorblind. This should not be controversial in 2021.
Other fields then applied certain CRT tenants to their studies.
Critical Race Theory is not “diversity & inclusion” programs. It’s not even primarily about mandating an accurate reframing of history (though it can include that).
Its founders are legal scholars who felt it necessary to apply a racial lens to understanding US laws.
Latin America is a textbook case in how the whole “let’s just all have mixed, ambiguous babies to end racism teehee” is absolutely wrong.
It doesn’t end white supremacy. In some ways, it strengthens it.
Well what are those ways? Glad you asked:
- By purporting to be racially mixed without addressing beliefs in white superiority, a hierarchy based on skin color emerged in Latin America, with darker skinned Latin Americans still on the bottom socioeconomically
- While the simple classifications of white or Black were minimized, it just created even more classifications! So you'll have categories based on skin color/features, instead of "race"
I went to Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse on the last day of its union drive. There are details about the working conditions that are striking up close, before you even enter (THREAD)
Full-time workers told me they have 10-hour shifts & just two 30 min breaks. In the hot Alabama sun (it said 68 degrees but I swear it felt 10 degrees hotter) that means many workers I saw only have time to sit in their car, turn the engine/AC on & run up their gas
It could just be because of current events, but the warehouse has a Bessemer police officer stationed at the entrance, another who patrols the parking lot, and a private guard who walks around the lot looking for goofy parking violations. Capitalism & policing go hand in hand