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To have an exploitable, dehumanized underclass? I get that overlaps a bit with stigmatizing them and keeping them down, but that was the core reason they were brought over in the first place: coerced labor. It’s also the central reason for literally the only time a significant chunk of this country rose in rebellion: because they believed that system was under threat, and they were willing to kill hundreds of thousands of people to preserve it. And a big portion of that formerly rebellious chunk then passed and vigorously supported laws designed explicitly to keep that underclass in an excluded and subordinate state long after formal slavery ended.
Sometimes people just do awful things to other people because it materially benefits them, and they and their ancestors build all sorts of moral, cultural, and legal justifications for why it’s okay, actually. I don't see why that's so hard to believe. People have literally been doing some version of this for as long as there have been people.
What exactly is the material benefit to segregating buses?
Anyway, the general thinking here is that I mistrust liberals and progressives. They have a tendency to spin things to make their outgroup look maximally bad and evil. For example, suppose there is a time period in history during which women are not allowed to enter into contracts. If progressives talk about such a time period, they will frame it as an example of the evil patriarchy, led by woman-hating misogynists who just want to keep women down. But of course there is another interpretation, which is that -- perhaps -- society wanted to protect women from being held responsible for their decisions. After all, children cannot enter into (most) contracts but nobody claims this is because society hates children.
I learned about segregation and the civil rights era from progressives and liberals. I was one of those people who was taught that Rosa Parks was just some random nice lady who spontaneously decided to refuse to give up her seat because she'd had enough. Which was a complete lie. Probably I was lied to in other ways as well.
This experience makes me suspect that there was a practical reason to have segregation in busing. A reason which doesn't necessarily justify the practice, but which might ever so slightly undermine the black and white picture (so to speak) presented by progressives and liberals.
So perhaps there was a big problem with black bus riders being disruptive and unruly and harassing white riders. Not that this justifies full on segregation, but I would like to hear both sides of the story.
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Labour in the postbellum south was generally very cheap, with no shortage of poor whites doing the exact same jobs as blacks.
Sure, I won’t argue that cheap labor wasn’t available elsewhere, but that wasn’t the main point by then. The goal was creating an underclass that was systematically excluded and subordinate. The relative social status mattered as much, if not more, than the labor itself. As LBJ put it: “If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” Racial laws enforced both economic exploitation and a social hierarchy that made poor whites' own exploitation acceptable for them, since they could at least take comfort in knowing they're better than the blacks.
Plus, they still found ways to exploit black people to a greater degree than poor whites through disparities in sharecropping, tenant farming, and the legal loopholes that enabled forced labor via vagrancy laws and convict leasing. They got away with what they could, having just lost a war, after all.
That sounds nice, but I don't have the impression that the amount of government pickpocketing has went down since the Civil Rights movement.
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