This Kurzgesagt video just dropped today on YouTube. It’s about the Polyergus ant.
Poly = many, abundance; erg = work.
Meet Polyergus, the most intense of the slaver ant tribes….
Polyergus has specialized in slavery so much that they have lost their ability to care for themselves. They don’t clean, build nests, care for their brood, or feed themselves. They only exist for raiding.
Slaves make up 80 to 90% of the ants in their colonies, so a few Polyergus and a single queen control thousands of slave ants.
The narrator provides a reminder thought bubble that the creators of the video “are humanizing ants a bit for the story’s sake. Don’t forget, ants are ants and not people.”
So noted….
“When White Women Wanted a Monument to Black ‘Mammies’” (New York Times, February 6, 2020):
The United Daughters of the Confederacy’s most successful attempt at memorializing slavery at the national level happened during the presidency of Woodrow Wilson, who institutionalized segregation in the federal government. In 1914, the organization championed the Confederate Monument at Arlington National Cemetery, which features panels depicting “loyal” slaves and a “mammy” figure with two white children in tow.
[...]
[The civil rights and feminist activist Mary Church] Terrell asked her readers to view enslaved black women as three-dimensional human beings who were psychologically tormented by the prospect of having their children sold. Being forced to care for white children also came at the price of not taking care of their own children.
These [Nazi] leaders understood very well that precisely because the Boers had sunk back to the level of savage tribes they remained their undisputed masters. They were perfectly willing to pay the price, to recede to the level of a race organization, if by doing so they could buy lordship over other “races.”
Slavery’s crime against humanity did not begin when one people defeated and enslaved its enemies (though of course this was bad enough), but when slavery became an institution in which some men were “born” free and others slave, when it was forgotten that it was man who had deprived his fellow-men of freedom, and when the sanction for the crime was attributed to nature.
— Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Thus black people have been the last to be included into the democratic equation. Such participation requires full and equal selfhood; and while American culture provided selfhood to most, it needed some left-over people to degrade so that the majority could rise.
— Joel Kovel, White Racism
The situation here in 1865 was fatal, and fatal because of the attitude of men’s minds rather than because of material loss and disorganization. The human mind, its will and emotions, knew one thing above all others, just as certainly they knew that the sun rose and set; and that was, that a Negro would not work without compulsion, and that slavery was his natural condition.
But these white men were not used to earning their own living. They were used to having Negroes do that for them….
— W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction