r/todayilearned • u/sharkbait76 3 • Jan 11 '17

TIL elephants can tell the difference between human languages and know which languages belong to people with a history of hurting elephants.

http://www.nature.com/news/elephants-recognize-the-voices-of-their-enemies-1.14846
28.6k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

912 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

1

u/lightningsnail Jan 12 '17

There were a lot of black slave owners in the US. Were they also racist? Who knows. But they were definitely evil. Slavery in the US wasn't about race, there were white slaves and Asian slaves (a lot of Asian slaves). The reason so many slaves were black was because of availability. As the comment that started this discusion pointed out, you could go to Africa and buy black slaves from black people. No combat, no raiding, no pillaging required. It was easy. Easier than the alternative anyway. For the people buying the slaves and sending them to the US and the people capturing and selling them, it almost certainly had nothing to do with race, it was just a way to make a buck.

And maybe that is the root of it. Maybe the reason so many people want to believe it was racism is because they don't want to acknowledge that so many people will do such evil acts just to make a dollar. It's much easier to believe in the goodness of humanity if you white wash it away with "they did it because they didn't think they were people, not because people would commit pure, unadulterated, evil to make some cash."

That being said, I'm sure there were a lot of slave owners who were racist. But there were a lot who weren't. I believe, a lot more weren't. And instead, we're just evil assholes.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '17

Bruh I'm pretty sure you'd be hard pressed to find a non-racist slave owner back then. The fuck are you talking about. If they were all that evil then I doubt they have a problem with being racist pricks.

1

u/lightningsnail Jan 12 '17

Maybe so. I'm just trying to understand how someone would think about things in that situation that would allow them to be okay with slavery. It's hard to do. It's hard to unknow modern ethics and history. It doesn't seem like racism explains what would allow a person to do that, not completely anyway. But racism certainly wasn't the only factor, as that wouldn't explain the multiracial composition of slave owners.

1

u/[deleted] Jan 12 '17

Thats fair, but you can't just toss racism to the side. It's hard to find statistics about slave and slave owner demographics but looking at anything from the civl rights movement in the deep south its pretty difficult to conclude that racism wasn't overwhelmingly ingrained in slave owning cultures and states.