Alienated America

[CJD]

(03-06-2019, 08:59 AM)Wyche Wrote: People were shot over wanting safe working conditions and decent pay during the strikes, all the way into the 1970s.  There's a lot more to the story than that, and it's actually very interesting if you're into history. Forced to live in company housing and buy from the company stores, most miners wound up essentially working for room and board, and little else, and the companies got all of that money too. I don't want to seem to be diminishing what happened before the Emancipation Proclamation, but this was essentially legalized slavery in a sense.  Not to mention that the native landowners were ignorant to the value of their land when the coal barons showed up and ripped them off for their mineral rights. It's akin to the European settlers buying native lands for beads. 

Once the industrialists to the north got what they wanted out of the ground, they've abandoned these communities and left them with little from the boom days but debt, pollution, and dwindling opportunity. These people fueled the Industrial Revolution and the WWII war machine, and have largely been left to wallow in poverty and ridicule.

I just threw the Scots-Irish in because you mentioned white folks hadn't seen any oppression or the like. For some odd reason, there was a lot of prejudice and hate towards that group.

I didn't know that. That's tragic. What allowed the coal people to treat them like that? I can't believe they didn't break some sort of law or regulation. Or was it just that the laws had not caught up to their tactics at that time?

As for the Scots and Irish, the point I was making was mostly that whites, as a race, were not oppressed for any significant period of time. Not necessarily that any group of people who were white had never been oppressed. The Irish were oppressed by other whites, so it'd be difficult for white people to claim that oppression as a race related thing. It's more of a heritage based thing (white face like in White Chicks is not heritage specific after all).