On Dec 5, 2005, at 12:19, Carol Adkinson wrote:
She pursed her lips, and 'hmmm-ed' a bit, and when I asked her why she
wanted
to know, she said that she had hoped that the workers were not black
because
the slaves were black and did all the work.
I am still not sure whether she was taking political correctness to
extremes,
whether she was being humorous (?)
My bet would be like Betty Ann's (welcome back to chat, BA. I'll adjust
your joke-list membership in a minute) - a PC fa-nut-ic, taking a
(basically decent) principle to absurd lengths. And fanatics have no
sense of humour, either individually or as a group... *Especially* as a
group <g>
It may be an apocryphal story, but I've been told that, at an early
point of 'puter explosion, some "spell-checks" were also "PC-checks";
some replaced *every* "black" with "Afro-American", coming up with text
absurdities such as "Afro-American ink"...
she did stop me in my tracks, and made me
wonder if I ought to think carefully about what colour and shape my
worker and
passive bobbins are in future.
Cheese, Louise... Surely, you have more commonsense than worry about a
nut? She'd have found something to carp on no matter what colour or
shape (whips, anyone?) your bobbins were... Brown ones - Latinos,
Native Indians - aren't any better than black ones as "workers", if
you're gonna push the idea to the extreme edge.
Come to think of it... There's *no* PC-safe solution :)
If all your bobbins (passives and workers) are black: "of course, you
want all your work done by the downtrodden, without dirtying your
fingers"
If your passives are light wood and workers are black: "you put all the
work load onto the downtrodden, with the whites living the life of
Riley"
If your passives are black and your workers are white: "sure, keep the
blacks passive and voiceless, with the single white lording over them"
If your pillow is dressed in a mix of white, black and brown bobbins:
"you pretend to be without prejudices, but I notice that some -- the
whites -- have a lighter job than others"
Given a true fanatic, it's hard to win an argument. Given a true
fanatic with a modicum of brains (a rare occurence, but happens), it's
almost impossible to win...
I'd store it as one of those priceless experiences, to dine out on for
years (have some of my own, mostly collected from the citizenship
application form. Unfortunatley, very few Americans find them funny,
though Europeans invariably do <g>)...
On Dec 5, 2005, at 12:52, suzy wrote:
although i have not researched lace so
thouroghly that i would know for sure, but i have never seen an article
where lace was made by the slaves or maids. it was the aristocrats who
were only allowed to make lace for a while. the poor were not allowed
to make lace at all.
Um... Suz, I think you got the wrong tiger by the tail... The sumptuary
laws (in Europe) forbade anyone but aristocracy to *wear* the lace;
anyone was allowed to *make* it and, indeed, the poor often did - it
was one way of relieving poverty.
As for slaves making lace... There's very little record that they did,
but neither is there any record to the contrary; there was very little
lace made in US at the time, period. The domestic slaves did things
like mending and sewing and some embroidery (how likely is it that the
lady of the house embroidered all the "big ticket" items like testers,
bed-covers, etc?). There's no reason why a domestic slave with skill
for textiles might not have been taught lacemaking, if the owner could
teach it.
A skilled slave was worth more in a re-sale value than a field-hand
(it's the same today; college-educated folk earn, in general, about
twice as much as highschool drop-outs, according to the
business/economy sections of NYTimes), so it was in the owner's
interest to push such education (even discounting the immediate profit
in the form of what such slave would produce for the owner's use). On
the slave's side, having a skill was a way to eke out a slightly higher
standing as well as a slightly less onerous lot in life, so they would
not have objected to being trained...
My husband has some furniture which had been slave-made on the
plantation his ancestors used to hold. It's known as "Uncle Alexander's
table (chairs, bed, etc), made by Jimmy". The Jimmy in question was a
highly-prized slave, because he could carve wood into beautiful shapes.
But, when he could carve no longer, he wasn't sold off into a more
physically demanding servitude; he stayed at the estate, teaching other
slaves.
--
Tamara P Duvall http://t-n-lace.net/
Lexington, Virginia, USA (Formerly of Warsaw, Poland)
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