Yes Mas'er!
Mood:
incredulous
Now Playing: "Light my Candle" - Rent Soundtrack
Topic: School Stuff
I know that I shouldn't be so surprised, but I always have hope that people who have made it to Cornell and who are engineers especially would be a little more educated than the rest of the masses you'd meet on a typical day. I know I shouldn't be surprised, but that doesn't keep the shock from occuring.
Today we were in my Engineering Ethics class and the professor is a pretty laid-back guy so we spent the entire hour and ten minutes discussing issues that were vaguely related to the class. The professor's intention was to begin to get us into a certain frame of mind. At one point around the middle of the class the professor raised the question of whether, in today's informational society, it was ethical that the poorer in society don't have easy access to computers and the internet and thus may be at an increased disadvantage compared to their monetary disadvantage. After all, if knowledge is power (as the cliche goes) then if they can't have knowledge they can never have power.
Then my professor raised the touchy question about whether certain groups may be further disadvantaged because their ancestors may have been slaves and thus ill-positioned to begin to acquire wealth. It was an obvious, though covert, reference to blacks in the US. This is not what surprised me. It's a valid question that people have various answers for.
A classmate of mine then proceeded to say that they may have actually been better off slaves because when they were enslaved they at least had food, shelter, and clothes. When they were emancipated they then had to fend for themselves and some of them even went hungry or died from lack of shelter. Although not one person in the class was black, we were all appalled at this statement. Even the professor who hadn't stopped talking the entire hour(he even interjected funny comments while others were speaking) was left speechless.
To continue the discussion he prompted us to please close the door lest people should walk by not having heard the entire conversation and thus lodge complaints.
I'm not sure if the student made his statement simply for shock value or if he truly believed what he said. If he should somehow randomly happen across this blog, perhaps he could explain himself.
I, however, was disgusted. To suggest something like that, even for pure shock value is revolting. Some people actually used to believe that in the slave times. I think sociologists called it something like the paternal view of slavery. However, it ignore such basic realities as to baffle me to think that rational men actually believed it. First of all, while the slaves were fed, it was often quite the basic meal compared to what the owners were eating. With the exception of a few house servants, many of them ate scraps that were barely suitable for farm animals. The clothes that they were provided were not renewed often. In fact, they had to wear them until they litterally fell apart. The housing conditions were so bad that, like the middle ages some two hundred years before that, they were constantly spreading all kinds of diseases around from too many people living in close quarters. And finally,
they were f$cking beat! Not reprimanded nor softly hit, but beat; sometimes until death.
He incessed me so much, and I don't even have a connection to the slavery issue such as race or anything like that. I am mad simply because of the fact that I'm a human and I couldn't imagine subjecting another to that kind of treatment. It is unjustifiable. Even in those days there were some who viewed it as objectionable. While I learned in my more mature AP classes back in HS that not all abolitionists had bleading hearts and that some of them were simply looking out for their own economy and not being replaced by slave labor, I do know that there were some who considered it abominable!
The professor finally ended the particular discussion with a statement that I consider to be very true. The statement of the person sitting next to me was equivalent to saying that "the Jews were better off in the concentration camps because they no longer had to stress about jobs or being fired. All of their jobs were determined for them and they were fed daily." The only reason why the Holocaust tends to stir up more emotion is because America has apologized for the slave owners and downplayed the enormity of things while at the same time, the powerful Jewish community, along with the fact that it happend "over in Europe" have caused us to view that tragedy with more emotional outcry.
A final postscript about my mentioning of a "powerful Jewish community". I know that this sounds like either anti-semitism or the rhetoric that certain radical Muslims use, but allow me to give two examples to prove the point of my professor. 1)In my entire pre-college education I never heard such a big deal about the holocaust until my parents moved into a mostly Jewish neighborhood. 2) While we weren't killing people in the US, I find it strange that we always mentioned the asian internment camps during WWII in passing. I find it very strange that we were also uprooting people from their homes and placing them in camps, robbed of all they owned simply based on race; very similar to a certain mustached man. Yet, throughout my entire schooling we would mention that for a brief second while spending two or more class periods and multiple subjects (english AND history) on the subject of the concentration camps. Again, asians weren't being killed in the US, but I find the difference to be only on the order of one magnitude of difference.
Posted by Eric
at 6:32 PM EST
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