poipoipoi-2016:

argumate:

kontextmaschine:

so gold works as an universal trade medium because anyone you trade with knows they are in network with someone who is in a network with someone who wants to do a trade in a way finite national-specific mediums don’t work for

so color works as an organizing principle of society cause even if “race isn’t real”, if you can get any given bunch of illiterate randoms and ask “hey, that guy over there in the medium distance, in low light and regardless of how he’s attired - is he white or black?” and have them all reliably come to the same answer, you can do things with that classification

or to put it another way, they couldn’t successfully implement traditional feudalism in America because indentured servants could just fuck off to the frontier, but if the slaves were a different color,

In fairness, wasn’t there also exciting problems with malaria?  

Yeah, but I’m realizing that that as an impetus for a white->black switch only partially goes to “the same genes that cause Sickle Cell Disease, common in the populations American slaves were drawn from, grant resistance to malaria!”, a lot of it was “for enough reward, shovel them into the Death Zone, we have an endless supply that doesn’t depend on American life being appealing!”