Michelle Obama: 'It Is Our Responsibility As a Nation' to Remember the Slaves

[Ravi]

Does this include the slaves held by Egypt? How about the British slaves of the Romans? Don't they count? How about slavery TODAY, what's our obligation to those enslaved by muslims?

Big Moo should have another lobster tail, let the butter drip down her chin, it improves her appearance.

The Irish were once enslaved as well. And there were many indentured white slaves in the colonies before African slaves were being used.

By Americans? I don't think so. The Irish were treated badly but they actually came here of their own free will.

I really don't get why y'all can't just admit that slavery was a hugely bad thing without trying to excuse it by comparison.

What's up with that, Sunshine?

 

[tinydancer]

At the time of the Civil War there were almost 4 million slaves. That was 1860. Black slaves were in the country since 1620, a period of over 200 years which would mean tens of millions of black slaves vs the thousands of Irish you claim are somehow the equivalent when you whine...


Whites were slaves too!

Who's whining? I'm discussing history.

And I'm not pitting white vs black vs asian slaves.

And I'm not putting one slave's color above anothers.

And I'm not putting one slave's suffering and horrid existence above anothers.

There was a pitiful equality in their misery.

Again sir. A slave is a slave is a slave.

Very quickly from wiki, I just pulled up these figures.

Slaves imported to American colonies

Date Numbers
1620–1700 21,000
1701–1760 189,000
1761–1770 63,000
1771–1790 56,000
1791–1800 79,000
1801–1810 124,000[8]
1810–1865 51,000
Total 597,000

Of course their numbers grew over the years.

Although the international slave trade was prohibited from 1808, internal slave-trading continued apace, and the slave population would eventually peak at four million before abolition

Slavery in the United States - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Once again, I beg to differ

A slave was not a slave. Your white slaves were indentured servants who sold their labor for seven years in return for passage to America. Once their indenture was over, they were free men who earned a wage. Their children were not sold out from under them and they were not slaves for generations
Indentures suffered under similar conditions to slaves but while slaves were considered no better than animals, whites were still white

Irish slavery is almost lost history. True slavery. Different than the indentured servants.

And I'm not bringing it up to lessen the misery of the African slave.

Not much has been written about Irish slavery in this day and age let alone discussed. This goes to Cromwell and his vile deeds. Basically Cromwell refined King James II and Charles the I's enslavement of the Irish.

I'll stick to what Cromwell did to the Irish just for now. This man truly embodied evil under the cloak of Godliness.

Good read here in this short article. But if you can ever take the time to read White Cargo its an eyeopener. It's a book about how the British sold their own "undesirables" as slaves to the colonies.

The Irish Slave Trade – The Forgotten “White” Slaves
The Slaves That Time Forgot
By John Martin

King James II and Charles I also led a continued effort to enslave the Irish. Britain’s famed Oliver Cromwell furthered this practice of dehumanizing one’s next door neighbor.

The Irish slave trade began when James II sold 30,000 Irish prisoners as slaves to the New World.

His Proclamation of 1625 required Irish political prisoners be sent overseas and sold to English settlers in the West Indies.

By the mid 1600s, the Irish were the main slaves sold to Antigua and Montserrat. At that time, 70% of the total population of Montserrat were Irish slaves.

Ireland quickly became the biggest source of human livestock for English merchants. The majority of the early slaves to the New World were actually white.

From 1641 to 1652, over 500,000 Irish were killed by the English and another 300,000 were sold as slaves.

Ireland’s population fell from about 1,500,000 to 600,000 in one single decade.

Families were ripped apart as the British did not allow Irish dads to take their wives and children with them across the Atlantic.

This led to a helpless population of homeless women and children. Britain’s solution was to auction them off as well.

During the 1650s, over 100,000 Irish children between the ages of 10 and 14 were taken from their parents and sold as slaves in the West Indies, Virginia and New England. In this decade, 52,000 Irish (mostly women and children) were sold to Barbados and Virginia.

Another 30,000 Irish men and women were also transported and sold to the highest bidder.

In 1656, Cromwell ordered that 2000 Irish children be taken to Jamaica and sold as slaves to English settlers.

Many people today will avoid calling the Irish slaves what they truly were: Slaves. They’ll come up with terms like “Indentured Servants” to describe what occurred to the Irish.

However, in most cases from the 17th and 18th centuries, Irish slaves were nothing more than human cattle.

More at link.

The Irish Slave Trade ? The Forgotten ?White? Slaves | Global Research

Here's the book I'm talking about. Good read.

 

[Rozman]

Yes, slavery was 150 years ago. It should not be mentioned

But we should allow founding fathers opinions from 235 years ago determine our agenda

But we should allow founding fathers opinions from 235 years ago determine our agenda

Nah...We should let Barack do whatever Valerie Jarrett and Michelle want.

Geez....This might be the dumbest thing I have ever seen here.
Just blow off the constitution...
Rush is right on the money.
He called it a long time ago.
Libs want to totally trash the Constitution.

 

[rightwinger]

Yes, slavery was 150 years ago. It should not be mentioned

But we should allow founding fathers opinions from 235 years ago determine our agenda

But we should allow founding fathers opinions from 235 years ago determine our agenda

Nah...We should let Barack do whatever Valerie Jarrett and Michelle want.

Geez....This might be the dumbest thing I have ever seen here.
Just blow off the constitution...
Rush is right on the money.
He called it a long time ago.
Libs want to totally trash the Constitution.

The Constitution provides a framework for our government that has lasted 200 years. To try to assume that it contains the breadth of how a modern society is permitted to operate is ludicrous
The scope of the Constitutions control over today's society is covered in Article 1

 

[Vandalshandle]

The liberals are not trying to trash the Consitution. In fact, the American Civil Liberties Union, which defnds the Bill of Rights in law courts across the nation is considered an ultra liberal organization, and is universally dispised by the Right. What the Left want to trash is Rush.

 

[Circe]

Slavery was wrong.......Disagree?

It's an interesting question.

Slavery has existed forever and still exists all over the world. Apparently it's part of the human condition, like war. Is war "wrong"? It's part of our species; there has never been a time it didn't happen, and never will be such a time. We do a lot of things that some people want to call wrong, but people just go on doing them, century after century.

War, slavery, rape, domestic abuse, robbery, embezzlement, buggery of children, torture, capital punishment....

Apparently all that and more is natural to humans.

I'm more interested in why the blacks let themselves be enslaved. Women for prostitution and blacks of both sexes for various work are currently the most enslaved populations. It must be because blacks are weaker, as women are. We know how it worked, that Gold Coast chieftains brought male slaves (mostly) in coffles, lines of completely naked men with their hands bound in a sort of wooden shoulder yoke, to the castle on the coast where they were embarked. The chieftains sold them for guns and gunpowder, mostly, and a few bolts of cloth. It was mostly guns and gunpowder and shot, however. Then they would go make war with these "modern"weapons and thus get more slaves to sell and so on.

Sounds to me like a black problem. Maybe they just shouldn't have sold each other to the white slavers. Nobody sold whites to blacks, never have, after all, except for white slavery of women as ever, of course, but that was and is still mostly to Arabs.

Maybe the blacks just shouldn't let themselves be enslaved!! Whites don't, we fight it tooth and nail. It's like the 6-million-dead-Jews problem. At some point, one starts to wonder, well, why didn't they fight back? Why just walk onto the cattle cars, you know?? Darn. At some point people need to stop getting on the slave ships, stop climbing into the cattle cars!!! You've got to fight for yourself.

I don't think it's very useful to call situations natural to the human race "wrong." The important thing is to keep from getting killed by them. Don't just lie down in front of the steamroller. Don't cooperate with the people trying to destroy you.

 

[Circe]

I'm saying it's not useful to say what other people do is "wrong."

What is useful is to say, No one will EVER make a slave of me! and mean it. No one will EVER get me kidnapped into a car, not going to happen, not alive. No one will get me to cooperate with their destroying me.

Seems to me if a people are so poor-spirited they just have to be slaves whenever somebody tells them to, that's really their responsibility. They should quit whining and pull up their socks.

 

[Kondor3]

Slavery was wrong.......Disagree?

It's an interesting question.

You're right. It's an interesting question. One worth answering with a simple Agree or Disagree. C'mon. Take a stand. Be counted.

 

[Circe]

Slavery was wrong.......Disagree?

It's an interesting question.

You're right. It's an interesting question. One worth answering with a simple Agree or Disagree. C'mon. Take a stand. Be counted.

Slavery was an untenable business model............will that work for you? [

I know too much, I've read too much from the sugar plantations in the Caribbean. It wasn't a simple situation, and you want a simple answer, but you can't have one.

The model was truly untenable because the blacks would not work. They still won't, in Africa or here. Here we hire Mexicans instead for lowerclass unskilled jobs; in Africa the Chinese are bringing in their own people for mining and so on; they can't get the people to work in any sense that more civilized peoples consider any sort of reasonable work ethic. Look at the continual rioting and strikes in the South African mining industry. They never had Western work habits and they never had Western sex habits, and no concept of honesty, and they constantly killed livestock just to cause trouble or express resentment, jabbing sticks into cows and horses and such.

Employers need a workforce that has a similar enough culture that they can expect the kind of work they would do themselves, but that didn't happen with blacks. And they would run off, all the time. They wouldn't rebel violently much --- that only happened in Haiti because the French let the proportion of whites go so low (under 1 to 30) during the French Revolution and they lost the whole island and 25% of France's imports. But they would run off and just hide out and live at a subsistence level, and after they were freed, they refused to work for wages. A lot of whites thought wages would solve the problem, but the ex-slaves just weren't interested. They liked living at a subsistence level: that's what nobody from Europe could understand. They preferred that to wage labor and improving their circumstances. They were okay with being poor. So much for sugar production; the world substantially changed to sugar beets, which were raised in Canada and northern Europe where the white workforce was willing to work and produce the sugar from beets instead of cane.

However, consider how successful the black population spread has been, so how can we say slavery was bad for blacks, if everything is in aid of genetic reproduction? They took over all that Caribbean real estate, incredibly valuable warm, beautiful islands whites would like to have for ourselves, but can't live on at all, dirt floors and violence everywhere. They spread all over South America; they could never have spread their genetics so widely without slavery. I see that there is more than one way for a population to succeed reproductively. One way is to become rich and prosperous and invent lots of stuff and value every child and so on, which is what we did; another way is to just reproduce wildly, a child every year, and if they die, they die, but the population grows fast. Very poor, but lots of them. That's what a lot of the world settles for, and that's the strategy that allowed black slaves to heavily populate so much of this hemisphere and really take over a lot of it.

Feeling sorry for blacks is misplaced sympathy. There are more of them than there are of us, and their higher reproduction means they may well overtake us in numbers even in this country, like the Muslims are doing.

 

[Vandalshandle]

"Feeling sorry for blacks is misplaced sympathy. There are more of them than there are of us, and their higher reproduction means they may well overtake us in numbers even in this country, like the Muslims are doing. "

This is very similar reasoning that Hitler rationalized, when he explained that the balance of population was shifting from an Aryan Europe, to a Jew populated Europe, because every day 5,000 more good German Aryans fell during WW2; so it was his responsibility to the world of the future to reduce the population of undesirable races, including Jews and Gypsies, so that the racial composition of the survivors would not shift to those races.

I find your statement, above, to be without merit, from a humanitarian point of view. You seem to have put aside all ethical and moral issues regarding slavery, and boiled it down to a statistical sociological perspective. It is equivalent to telling Native Americans that they were economically expendable, which justified genocide, and that they really should be grateful that we allowed some of them to remain.

 

[Kondor3]

It's an interesting question.

You're right. It's an interesting question. One worth answering with a simple Agree or Disagree. C'mon. Take a stand. Be counted.

Slavery was an untenable business model............will that work for you? ...you want a simple answer, but you can't have one..."

No, it won't work for me, but I cannot compel you to shed your businessman's veneer and qualifiers and caveats and pleadings of complexity long enough to take a personal moral stand and to share that with your colleagues. Disappointing, but I'll get over it.

 

[Godboy]

Michele Obama is right. I had completely forgotten it ever happened. Remind me again... were black people the slaves, or the slave owners? Its one of those obscure historical references, so im not sure.

 

[rightwinger]

Slavery was wrong.......Disagree?

It's an interesting question.

Slavery has existed forever and still exists all over the world. Apparently it's part of the human condition, like war. Is war "wrong"? It's part of our species; there has never been a time it didn't happen, and never will be such a time. We do a lot of things that some people want to call wrong, but people just go on doing them, century after century.

War, slavery, rape, domestic abuse, robbery, embezzlement, buggery of children, torture, capital punishment....

Apparently all that and more is natural to humans.

I'm more interested in why the blacks let themselves be enslaved. Women for prostitution and blacks of both sexes for various work are currently the most enslaved populations. It must be because blacks are weaker, as women are. We know how it worked, that Gold Coast chieftains brought male slaves (mostly) in coffles, lines of completely naked men with their hands bound in a sort of wooden shoulder yoke, to the castle on the coast where they were embarked. The chieftains sold them for guns and gunpowder, mostly, and a few bolts of cloth. It was mostly guns and gunpowder and shot, however. Then they would go make war with these "modern"weapons and thus get more slaves to sell and so on.

Sounds to me like a black problem. Maybe they just shouldn't have sold each other to the white slavers. Nobody sold whites to blacks, never have, after all, except for white slavery of women as ever, of course, but that was and is still mostly to Arabs.

Maybe the blacks just shouldn't let themselves be enslaved!! Whites don't, we fight it tooth and nail. It's like the 6-million-dead-Jews problem. At some point, one starts to wonder, well, why didn't they fight back? Why just walk onto the cattle cars, you know?? Darn. At some point people need to stop getting on the slave ships, stop climbing into the cattle cars!!! You've got to fight for yourself.

I don't think it's very useful to call situations natural to the human race "wrong." The important thing is to keep from getting killed by them. Don't just lie down in front of the steamroller. Don't cooperate with the people trying to destroy you.

Yes and Jews had only themselves to blame against Hitler

Classic blame the victim

 

[mudwhistle]

Slavery has had nothing to do with race. Ever.

Slavery has always been about labor thru the centuries.

Nope...all slavery is the same. Derp! Keep repeating that so you don't have to consider the differences.

being held against your will and forced to work for those holding you for no pay is just as bad if you are a White Jew in Egypt or a black man in America.

Should I continue to look at Egyptians as "former" slave owners?

Obama is good buddies with those Egyptian slavers The Muslim Brotherhood.

Sort of hypocritical, don't you think?

 

[squeeze berry]

Slavery is the best thing that ever happened to the Africans...otherwise they would still be Africans, living in huts like obabbles brother...

Imagine if they had been paid the same wages as white settlers

how much were white settlers paid?

 

[Lonestar_logic]

Michele Obama is right. I had completely forgotten it ever happened. Remind me again... were black people the slaves, or the slave owners? Its one of those obscure historical references, so im not sure.

Actually there were blacks slaves and well as white slaves, black slave owners as well as white slave owners.

 

[rightwinger]

Slavery is the best thing that ever happened to the Africans...otherwise they would still be Africans, living in huts like obabbles brother...

Imagine if they had been paid the same wages as white settlers

how much were white settlers paid?

Free land, getting to keep the fruits of their labor

 

[katsteve2012]

May 23, 2013, By Susan Jones @ Michelle Obama: 'It Is Our Responsibility As a Nation' to Remember the Slaves | CNS News


Oh come on! Gimme a break Moochelle. It's been over a hundred years and nobody alive is responsible for it. You and your husband simply cannot stop playing the race card, can you?

What in the world is controversial about her statement?? I disagree vehemently with the direction her husband is taking our country, but slavery is a perfect example of how laws can be unjust. We shouldn't forget it, and we shouldn't forget its victims.

two things wrong:

1. Shes black
2. She mentioned slavery while black

And there is a third thing wrong. There are quite a few here who did not REALLY read the whole article, just the title of the article.

After reading the article several times, what I have come away with is the opinion that an innocuous statement about "20 slaves who worked in the white house behind the scenes being a part of the history of it, and they have stories also"

Nowhere, did The First Lady, "get on a soapbox" about the institution of slavery, and nowhere, was she critical of America. She simply stated that "the stories of the slaves who worked there should not be forgotten".

Not even remotely close to referring to "all slaves".

Instead, what this has been turned into is a gaggle of hyper-critical Obama haters took an opportunity to take some cheap shots at Mrs. Obama, and blow something insignificant way out of proportion.

The mere mention of 20 slaves turns into a "we don't want to hear about slavery" whinefest.

Unbelievable. Some folks need to grow up.

 

[Pheonixops]

May 23, 2013, By Susan Jones @ Michelle Obama: 'It Is Our Responsibility As a Nation' to Remember the Slaves | CNS News

First Lady Michelle Obama joins children learning about the Emancipation Proclamation at historic Decatur House in Washington, D.C., on May 22, 2013. (AP Photo)

(CNSNews.com) - In remarks at the historic Decatur House in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, first lady Michelle Obama remembered the 20 slaves who toiled at the mansion around the corner from the White House, where "some of our nation's foremost leaders" lived and hosted parties.

The stories of those slaves "too often get lost," Mrs. Obama said.

Oh come on! Gimme a break Moochelle. It's been over a hundred years and nobody alive is responsible for it. You and your husband simply cannot stop playing the race card, can you?

What's wrong with what she said? It's a historical fact and it shouldn't be swept under the rug and "sanitized". The things that some people get upset about are are pretty funny!

 

[longknife]

May 23, 2013, By Susan Jones @ Michelle Obama: 'It Is Our Responsibility As a Nation' to Remember the Slaves | CNS News

First Lady Michelle Obama joins children learning about the Emancipation Proclamation at historic Decatur House in Washington, D.C., on May 22, 2013. (AP Photo)

(CNSNews.com) - In remarks at the historic Decatur House in Washington, D.C., on Wednesday, first lady Michelle Obama remembered the 20 slaves who toiled at the mansion around the corner from the White House, where "some of our nation's foremost leaders" lived and hosted parties.

The stories of those slaves "too often get lost," Mrs. Obama said.

Oh come on! Gimme a break Moochelle. It's been over a hundred years and nobody alive is responsible for it. You and your husband simply cannot stop playing the race card, can you?

What's wrong with what she said? It's a historical fact and it shouldn't be swept under the rug and "sanitized". The things that some people are are pretty funny!

IMHO, all she was doing is acting upon the sermons she heard for 20 years from Reverend Wright. All Whites are guilty for slavery and should pay for it.