Flipping Ghosts: The Shunned House

Chapter Forty Eight – Manny Returns

I want to expand a bit on the last segment I brought you. First, I would like to speak briefly on a topic that we could spend a great deal more time on than we have here. That is the economic aspect of slavery. There were many excuses made for the "necessity" of slavery. The Negro race was seen as inferior and the White race needed to take care of them. "Thanks, we needed that," how anyone could consider cruelly enforced involuntary servitude as taking care of anyone I'll never know. A corollary to this was the "They're better off as slaves" rationale, since obviously, black people were too incompetent to take provide for themselves. There are many more excuses that were made, but you get the idea.

The real underlying for slavery was a motive as old as economies themselves, which is money. Slave owners could make money hand over fist with free labor, who couldn't, right? Cash crops like cotton, tobacco, and sugar cane were much more profitable when you didn't have to pay the people who tended and harvested those crops.

So, remember the next time you hear an excuse for slavery that doesn't involve slave owners making tons of money, you can call BS on that.

Next, I'd like to continue to place the racism of H. P. Lovecraft in context. Stanford University professor George Fredrickson has done excellent research on racism in the early twentieth century, and I am going to borrow some of his ideas here.

Fredrickson lays out several characteristics of racist societies. We are not going to go into detail on all of them here, but they include things like racist ideology, segregation, banning interracial marriage, and banning the minority from public office. Finally, keeping the minority in poverty is a defining characteristic of a racist society.

By Fredrickson's definition, there were at least three racist societies in the early twentieth century, the United States, Nazi Germany, and South Africa. Now I'm sure there are many US citizens that don't like being lumped in with Nazi Germany and Apartheid South Africa, but if the shoe fits, wear it, as they say.

We here in the US have a short memory when it comes to some things, and Jim Crow laws are one of those things. Jim Crow is a topic that an entire college course could be devoted to, but again, we don't have that kind of time here, but I would urge you to learn more about this important topic if this is new to you. So it turns out that the term Jim Crow stems from an act by a white performer in blackface in the 1830s.

We use the term to refer to laws used to enforce racial segregation in the post civil war south. It encompasses a wide variety of tactics, from poll taxes to public education to the whole concept of separate but equal.

It may make us uncomfortable, but these same kinds of tactics were used in Nazi Germany of the early twentieth century and Apartheid South Africa of the same period but lasted even longer. We are still fighting these kinds of laws and policies and traditions today in the United States.

So, none of this excuses Mr. Lovecraft, but it does demonstrate that he certainly had a lot of company in his views of the time.

Chapter Forty Nine – There's A Fungus Among Us

"Manny, you are most definitely in the right profession. You have turned a potential liability for this show into a learning moment for us all. Thank you so much," said Julia as she finished filming his segment.

"You are very welcome," Manny said. "It's a great opportunity to spread my wings a bit and reach a wider audience than my typical college classes."

"Nice!" replied Julia. "Sadie, you're up next."