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Comment by dijit | Hacker News Reader

This is going to be controversial; thus flagged, but I'd like to have an actual conversation about this.

It's my understanding that slavery has very little to do with race, blacklist has nothing to do with black people and "man" is the default term of humanity that comes from a completely different etymology than the word we use to refer to a male person.

I'm generally pretty stubborn but given the amount of traction this is getting, can someone _please_ explain to me the logic here? I'm perfectly willing to change my mind but right now I cannot fathom that these terms were harming people- unless those people were looking for reasons to be harmed.

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Not all slavery is race but the vast majority of US slavery was race-based against black people. Black people don't care about the general history of all slavery, they care that at one point the vast majority of blacks in America were slaves.

Ok, but do you not think that this kind of mental colonialist attitude is a bit problematic?

The world is not the US and does not share your culture, yet you're imposing it on us.

This story is about internal practices at an American company.

This might shed some light on the thinking that motivates this sort of thing:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_race_theory

The simple way that I think of it is how black/white list is constantly reinforcing in your head that black is bad and white is good.

There were eras where slavery had little to do with race (see: the Roman Republic and Empire) but the history of slavery in the last half-millennium had everything to do with race; it is the edifice on which white supremacy was built.

You're not "controversial" for skipping over the blindingly obvious, but we're not allowed to insult people on this forum, so feh!

> but the history of slavery in the last half-millennium had everything to do with race;

Slaves in Russian Empire were freed a few years earlier than slaves in the USA. There were roughly 5 times more slaves in Russia than in USA, and I can pretty confidently say that zero of them were black. Even if you add ~2 million black slaves from Brazil, the number of black slaves would be dwarfed by the white slave population from Russia.

Based on this calculation, I don't think that your thesis about the history of slavery in the last 500 years holds well.

There was also the Barbary Slave Trade, which lasted until the early 19th Century and during which over a million Europeans were removed from Europe during raids and enslaved in North Africa. Not to mention slavery in Africa itself, which goes from pre-history to today. The Atlantic Slave Trade is a stain on the history of the West, but it is by no means unique.

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