Hey sophandros...

[Attack Dog]

you've made some very interesting points. In the eternal quest for understanding, I have some questions and comments about one of your posts in your thread on the sports board. You wrote:

Re: Re: Is there a Double Standard

I'm going to have to dig up the Dallas Morning News article from yesterday that shows that Dusty Baker is wrong when it comes to what SCIENCE says.

In the course that I took on the History of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade a few years back when I was but a young college lad, we found that it wasn't the weather that brought us here; rather, it was a number of other factors. First of all, the Natives were used, but they weren't resistant to the diseases that whites were immune to because of exposure. Whites were tried as indentured servants, but many stopped coming over when presented with the conditions that they were working in. Also, a white person blended in fine with society and could escape his status by finding a sympathetic household; a Native could find his people and escape there. However, because there had been trade between Africa and Europe for CENTURIES before America was stolen for the first time, Africans had been exposed to and were, for the most part, immune to many of the same diseases that the whites were. Furthermore, they did not look like the plantation owners, etc, so if they escaped or tried to assimilate, it would be quite difficult. If "heat survival" were such an issue, then why did so many African slaves die in the Carribean? The LARGEST number of fatalities came on the Islands, and those areas (in addition to Brazil) were the last places to outlaw slavery--primarily for economic reasons.

The myth of Blacks and Latins being able to take the heat better than other groups is just that, a myth. The sickle shaped cell, which is common among Blacks, hurts us in hot conditions. The military has done studies that show that darker people do not perform better or worse than lighter people in the heat and humidity. Those who perpetuate this myth are instrumental in perpetuating racism. The reason that Blacks tend to live in the South and whites in the North was because of the nature of the economies and the types of labour that they employed, not because Black folks are good with heat. Claims of biological differences between races have been disproved in recent years. However, there are those who wish that we would ignore that to further their own racist agendae.

It's time for us to wake up, people.

1)Where do the races, using the term loosely, come from?
2)I thought Melanin protected those with it from the sun?
3) I thought the indentured servant stage was too expensive, because after completion of the indenture land grants had to be given to the freed men while slavery was for life with no rights nor land.
4) Couldn't it be said that there was a lower level of maintanence in the Carribean than in the Southern Colonies (states)?