• banneryear1868@lemmy.worldOP
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    1 year ago

    Look where the money goes from these private companies who employ forms of slavery in the global south, and which governments have aided the ability for those entities to operate in those countries. It’s basically US foreign policy the last half century under the guise of fighting communism. The fascist coup’s sponsored under Operation Condor and the like to make sure these countries were accommodating to having their resources extracted for private profits. Pinochet in Chile for instance, his political rival Orlando Letelier was even assassinated by car bomb in Washington DC.

    You’re right about slavery and “indentured servants” too. In the US it was the Dutch trade network that formed the economic basis for using slaves from Africa (“black” didn’t exist as a notion of racial identity initially), in fact white slaves were preferred because they understood the language and culture. It was during this enterprise which notions of white racial superiority really developed, “white” itself originally reserved for a very specific class, and of course an ever-changing definition. It was through this process of racism which our current notion of race developed, with all it’s contradictions and absurdities, to explain and justify the disparities this system inflicted and provide categories of ascriptive difference.