Subjugation vs. Exploitation: Fear and Guilt

A black slave in South Carolina stands up and talks to the other slaves about learning to read.

A woman in puritan New England demonstrates cunning.

A woman in Saudi Arabia wants to tuck back her veil and drive a car.

A labor contract manufacturer begins to make their own brand on a third shift from reused parts.

An Indian woman elopes to marry outside her caste, erasing the dowry negotiations of her parents.

sub·ju·ga·tion

  [suhb-juh-gey-shuhn] noun

the act, fact, or process of subjugating,  or bringing under control; enslavement: The subjugation of the American Indians happened across the country.

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This is about the cultural cognition of risk, leveraged by a combination of quasi-religious faith and societal leveraging of a zero-sum concept of "exploitation", to subjugate groups for financial reasons.

Defining E-Waste Racism: Part III Caste Irons

I'm on vacation and so I'm not interrupted, as I normally am.   That's good and bad.

Before posting the next part of my Marlow-inspired (I've just finished Joseph Conrad's 1902 work "Heart of Darkness") rant on the people who illogically criminalize contact between rich and poor, I thought I'd post this link to a morning story on Romeo and Juliet -in India.

As the USA celebrates the Loving v.Virginia interracial marriage, which was an imprisonable offense during my lifetime (and an annual theme of this blog), the growth of cities and expansion of information (parents and local society no longer control all the ideas of heaven, hell, and society) has led to inter-caste marriages in India.

BBC Reports on "A Hideaway for India's Rebel Couples", and interviews a woman who married a childhood friend - a barber from a lower caste - and the threats from her family to get a gun and shoot him dead.

I'm thinking there has to be some Stephen Pinker brain evolution behind the fear of intermingling.  But just as used computers sold Egypt made it stronger (democratically, by weakening the sick and weakened ruling class), diverse genetics make our species stronger.

Finding a case where marrying a lower caste turned out badly... that was the main enforcement in Virginia prior to the Loving marriage... threats of how badly in might turn out.   That's the tactic trying to keep companies like mine from negotiating terms for the sale of capacitor-plague boards, which can have the tiny caps replaced by a smart kid with a soldering iron.