The most recent example of mass slavery, and the dominant experience in the Americas (including the USA) has been of black slaves with white slave masters. But if you look at the history of slavery, a different picture emerges – many of the slaves caught up in the Atlantic slave trade were enslaved and sold by black kings.
And there were white slaves too – Vikings made an industry out of taking slaves. Even the very word slave supposedly has origins in the defeat and enslavement of Slavic peoples.
Let us scratch the surface of those slave masters, slave traders, and those who enslave people and we find bad people. Those who fought against slavery were good people. There are also those who accept the prevailing conditions of their society and we can label these as neutral people.
If we judge people on their behaviour, we have good, bad, and neutral people (in their attitude towards slavery) and we don’t have any “but cases” (such as the British West Africa squadron or Mary Faber) to confuse things.
Doesn’t this make more sense than to use the colour of the dead stuff that keeps the squishy bits on the inside?
One of the strangest things that comes up in discussions of metrification, is that US traditional units (“feet”, “inches”, etc.) are referred to as Imperial units.
They’re not the same.
Correctly speaking Imperial units began with the British Weights and Measures Act of 1824 which essentially rolled up all previous legislation, repealed it, and set up a full set of standards for weights and measures. This was obviously after the US declared independence so had no effect over there.
The US units were based on traditional English units which were chiefly defined by the Exchequer Standards or the Winchester Standards (technically there were several standards that could be called “Winchester” dating back to Alfred the Great). That is an oversimplification – various “laws” (the earliest ones were simple pronouncements of the monarch) covering weights and measures are within every single century from the 10th century onwards.
The differences between US traditional units and Imperial units are subtle, but significant in the area of volume – Imperial units of volume don’t distinguish between “wet” and “dry”. A US wet pint is 473mL, a US dry pint is 550mL, and an Imperial pint is 563mL.
So the old saying “a pint’s a pound the world around,” is complete nonsense.
To throw more petrol (or gas) on the fire, both US traditional units and Imperial units are defined by legislation in terms of metric units, so as defined today, neither are proper units of measurement.
A fair few videos are popping up at the moment responding to a description of the Bamber Bridge incident. This post is mostly adding a few points from the British perspective.
US military authorities insisted that local British authorities impose a colour bar
The British pubs co-operated and stuck up signs saying “Black troops only” – which is obviously not what the US authorities wanted.
Well of course they did – under what kind of authority do the ‘US military authorities’ have to impose a colour bar? They are after all nothing more than guests in the country, so of course British pub owners would interpret it “perversely”.
It is nice to think that this is an indication that the British of the time weren’t racist. Wrong of course – Bamber Bridge is just a couple of hours away from Hartlepool where according to legend a ship-wrecked monkey was hanged for being a French spy. The British regarded themselves as better than anyone else (so just like everybody else then), but the presence of non-whites was very low especially in a small town without a port.
And besides, the British were told to be nice to visiting US troops and nobody mentioned that it wasn’t supposed to apply to non-white US troops. And of course there is sympathy for the underdog.
What Happened Afterwards?
At least the videos I’ve seen neglect to mention what happened after the incident. Except to say that many of the black troops were court-martialed.
But what also happened was that the general in charge (Ira Eaker) placed most of the blame on the white officers and MPs, merged the unit with other trucking units, and purged the new unit of racist and inexperienced officers. Which is supposed to have improved things considerably for black troops.
British Racism?
It is easy to assume that the British attitude during the incident means that the British aren’t racist. The fact is that black people were relatively rare in Britain during WWII and were most likely concentrated in the great port cities rather than a small village in rural Lancashire.
Immigration of black British from the colonies was strongly encouraged after the war, and with their arrival racism reared its ugly head. I would argue that the racism in Britain against black people was never quite as bad as in the USA, but I’m white, so what the hell do I know?
I use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. I do this to improve browsing experience and to show (non-) personalised ads. Consenting to these technologies will allow me to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
