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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I understand that asking this question invites all kinds of criticism. I am asking sincerely. Help me understand why wearing pretty dresses to a party is racist?

Thank you. [/quote]

Because we (Americans) are still living with the fallout from that era. Your neighbors, your kids friends’ parents, your coworker you have coffee with - all these people’s lives (and yours) have been shaped by the “ideals” of that time. You cannot separate the pretty dresses and the parties from what the plantation was all about. It is not just a historical artifact. It affects the wounds in our country today.

If you wanted to romanticize medieval Europe or the Japanese empire or the Scottish-English wars, have at. Those periods shaped history (like all periods do) but not as viscerally for your fellow countrymen and women as the antebellum south does.  To fetishize that period is to say that you ignore or don’t care about it’s effects on people around you today. Which makes you seem clueless and racist. [/quote]

As a previous poster explained, antebellum South was not the first point in history where there was slavery.  Yet you do not seem to share the vitriol for those periods -- Greek and Roman coming to mind.  And Egyptian - we all know slaves built the Sphyinx and pyramids, but I bet you'd love to go visit them.  Those, arguably, shaped the entire course of history since, including wealth collection and the use of humans to do that.  The remains of those societies are held preciously preserved in publicly funded museums. Why THIS period and THESE costumes?  [/quote]

DP. There's plenty of reasons to differentiate ancient slavery with the slavery of the South. Ancient slavery has essentially no impact on modern American life, but the legacy of American slavery lasted at least through the Civil Rights movement which is well within the lifetime of people who are still alive. There's no vaguely influential contemporary movement to downplay the horrors of ancient slavery, like the Lost Cause era Southern historians did. Different things get treated different quelle surprise.

I mostly want to ask why y'all always talk about the pyramids? They weren't built by slaves. We've excavated the places where the pyramids workers lived and were buried, we can tell what they ate, how they lived, etc. and they weren't slaves. Find another talking point which has a better historical basis than Cecil B. DeMille.[/quote]

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