Comments at Steve Sailer:
* “Slave running. Slave mastering. Just another case of immigrants doing the jobs that Americans won’t do.”
* You gotta admit that immigrants edging American-born blacks out of the slavery business is pretty funny. Is there nothing these Asians don’t excel at?
* He was the first son in a prominent family. To let him walk would disgrace the family.
This was in a country where upper-class women’s feet were deliberately crippled to serve as a status marker. Kind of like Ivy League brains today.
* “[My mother] cooperated when my siblings and I set out to change Lola’s TNT status. Ronald Reagan’s landmark immigration bill of 1986 made millions of illegal immigrants eligible for amnesty. It was a long process, but Lola became a citizen in October 1998 … ”
How touching! They assuaged their guilt and proved their true love and affection for their slave by getting her a passport just in time to dump her on the US taxpayer. We Americans will gladly support all your used-up, burned-out, destitute ex-slaves once you are finished with them!
I was unaware that “Reagan’s landmark immigration bill” included amnesty for slavemasters as well as illegal aliens, but I might have guessed.
* But then he says the rise of Jeremy Lin changed all that and now things are much better, bedroom wise, for those plucky slave holding Asians!
* A weird and creepy story. Of course, the author crafts his own role as complicit, yet somehow remorseful and even moral, using his culture and upbringing as an explanation of why things were the way they were. Southern whites don’t currently have that social advantage when describing slavery that existed in the South.
But slavery often was/is a much more complex relationship than the social “thinkers” of today want to make it. My guess is that as Africa moves towards it’s peak 4 billion population later this century, slavery within the continent will make a huge comeback. It wasn’t really outlawed in central Africa until about 15 years ago, and still happens frequently, though illegally…which illustrates the complexity. Among those who experience it, being sold into slavery might just be preferable to starving to death, and with 4 billion Africans, there’s gonna be a whole lot of starving to death.
I can just hear the open borders leftist do-gooders of 2087 now, arguing that we shouldn’t be so judgmental of the cultural traditions of the billion or so Africans who want to come to the US…traditions like serfdom and slavery. If it weren’t for the looming tragedy for what remains of the US by that time, the irony would be delicious.
* Every so often there are stories of Asian immigrants to America whose maids are held in near human bondage. Many sex workers in (US) Asian Massage Parlors are thought to be slaves. There have been many stories of wealthy Arabs who come to America with servants who are slaves in everything but name.
VS Naipaul in his 1971 Booker prize winner ‘In A free State” describes an Indian who is brought to DC as the servant of young Indian diplomat. He sleeps in the walk in closet of his master’s apartment. He cooks cleans and does assorted tasks for his master unpaid. In fact he is told that he owes the cost of the plane ticket that brought him to America. When he runs away to be a cook in an Indian restaurant his master tracks him down shocked and hurt that he could be so heartless as to escape.
It’s not just third worlder’s either.
In 19th Century and early 20th century Europe there was a custom wherein a wealthy family would take in a peasant girl to do light housework. By custom the girl would also be sexually available to the young men of the family so that they wouldn’t have to risk going to prostitutes.
* Surprisingly the comments at the Atlantic and elsewhere are critical of Tizon’s behavoir.
What’s surprising is that so many are praising a vile hypocrite for finally taking her to see what remained of her family when she was in her eighties, after a lifetime of condoning her enslavement. Celebrating him for being humane enough to feel kinda sad about the whole thing and for having some writing talent.
One funny one takes him to task for questioning his elderly slave about her sex life. Oh the patriarchy!
Hilarious. Especially in the context of his parents’ actions costing this woman a life of her own and an opportunity to have and raise her own children. And the probability that at least one of the men in his family who’d owned her abused her sexually as well. Not surprising that Tizon wouldn’t care about rubbing salt in the wound, though… His slave’s 2011 obituary reads like the work of a sociopath. The cultural excuse is irrelevant in his case. He said it himself, insisted on it throughout his hypocritical, hate-filled career – he and his siblings were Americans.
* Asian slavery is a benign form of slavery in which slaves become ersatz members of the family and household. The same is true in the continuing traditions of slavery in subSaharan Africa and Haiti … caring for those who cannot care for themselves as it were.
White slavery, on the other hand, was a thing apart. It was an especially vile form of slavery that exploited the slaves to a degree that motivated the Whites themselves to force a violent end to it in the 19th Century. Indeed, the plight of the White-owned slaves was so odious that it continues to justify special social and economic privileges and reparations for their descendants down to the sixth generation.
* This Alex Tizon piece is an example of a genre of PC humblebragging pioneered by the loathesome Belle Waring of Crooked Timber blog, who is always managing to work in ways of simultaneously boasting about her aristocratic South Carolina background while apologizing for being the descendant of slaveowners.
