Came across an interesting meme today that sparked a bit of controversy and discussion among the UI Family. Many of you ask me my position on the question posed, so I thought it would be great to release my view point.
The Question: Would You Pick Cotton For $100/hr?
If you are interested in joining the Facebook banter on the subject, you can do so here: UI $100 Cotton Picking Question. As I write this, there are over 175 Likes to the post, 125 shares, and over 360 comments and counting….it has only been up for 2 hours.
Now, let’s jump into my reasons I would pick cotton for $100/hr, but first I want you to understand I am well aware of our history, have a strong connection to our culture, and passion for my people. So please, miss me with bullshit because I’m not trying to hear it. Let’s go!
It’s Just a Job
Bottom line, it is a job. It is in the hot sun, but it isn’t the definition of who our people are or even represent the totality of what then endured. It is a back breaking, hard work, high effort job. Period. You have to also realize it is not like our ancestors were here in this country ONLY PICKING COTTON. They were forced to do any and everything under the sun. Cotton picking is just what is shown in your history books. This is why your feelings were hurt when your read the title.
Cotton Picking Isn’t The Devil
Cotton or picking cotton isn’t the devil. The devil lies inside the hearts and minds of those people that would rape our children, beat our mothers, separate families, throw PicNics (Pick A N*gger), hang our ancestors, feast and party around it. Cotton didn’t have anything to do with this. Cotton didn’t make the laws that made your ancestors less than human, create a bogus legal system, empower racist police officers, and uphold industries that made billions of dollars on the backs of our people.
This wasn’t cotton. This was some EVIL, LAZY, DEVILISH PEOPLE, not cotton.
Manual Labor Is An Honorable Living
Most of you saying you wouldn’t pick cotton for $100/hr are probably just afraid of hard, manual labor. There is nothing wrong with manual labor.
Hard work has been part of our experience in this country from the beginning.
Don’t try to run from it.
I Got Bills & Babies To Feed
Bottom line, I got a family and kids to feed. $100/hr would go a LOOOONG way to make sure they are fed well and their future is secure. We are talking about individual savings accounts, college accounts, entrepreneurial funds, everything.
If you slow down and break the numbers down, working an 8 hour day, 40 hours a week yields $4,000/week. I’m not sure what you are doing with your life, business, and job, but there are not very many people earning $16,000/mo. and $192,000/yr.
I can make that work. And all I have to do is some manual labor out in the hot sun. Sign me up today! You can be foolish if you want, but I know I can swing this for a minimum of two years…but can’t imagine why I would quit.
Not Many Opportunities Pay $100/hr.
Not sure where you are from, but there are not many opportunities for people to earn $100/hr. Sure, these opportunities are available to entrepreneurs doing the right thing, doctors, small segments of lawyers, contractors, engineers, scientist, and business executives that have worked their way up the ladder, but for the masses of people these figures are a pipe dream.
Maybe you haven’t noticed minimum wage is $7.75/hr or something like that. Even if you were making $25/hr, you have got to seriously consider a 4 times increase in your wage to sweat in the sun and do some manual labor.
Provides Perspective On What Our Ancestors Endured
I’m the sort of person that like to make the best of any situation and learn something from it. Therefore, if I were to work the cotton fields, I would take it as an opportunity to experience what my ancestors endured on a day to day basis. Obviously, this isn’t the same because I could go home at the end of the day to take a nice shower or bath, eat some great food and enjoy my family. In addition, there would be no threat of whips and death eminent in my everyday existence, but my perspective would be stretched.
As Long As I’m Free, I’m All Good
Straight up, good people, at the end of the day you can go home. What is the big deal? You make a done of money, gain some experience, and go home in a better financial position.
Seriously, are you going condemn everything your ancestors negatively experienced? There were boats involved, will you forever stay off the water. Some were thrown in the ocean? Will you never go swimming again? They were fed scraps of pork, but you eat bacon and ham? Stop it!
The security of your families future should be paramount. If you had an opportunity to make $100/hr for doing something legal and honorable like manual labor, I would hope you leap at the opportunity…..but hey, I could be wrong. What do you say?
I am Caucasian and I picked cotton for $.03/lb and could only pick 120 lbs/day or $3.60/day. It is not back breaking, tossing bales of hay on a trailer and then from the trailer to the barn loft is more in line with back breaking. It is not that hot since cotton harvesting starts after Labor Day and the weather is milder. Today cotton is harvested by a 4 row mechanical picker with an air conditioned cab and an a single operator picks over 20 bales per day at 1,200 lbs/bale. The efficiency improvement is by my math is 200:1.
Good thing you are white and are not a slave. You got paid actual money for your labor (less than 350 years of it), and you got to decide NOT to work in the heat.
I’ll insert this right here–there was no “decide NOT to work in the heat” at my house. It was pick cotton or go naked to school. And that was working for others AFTER our crops were in–where we worked for “free” by the time we were 8-10 years old. If this caucasian is not crass enough to suppose I know about being a slave, you can refrain from being so crass as to ASSume you have a clue as to what it was like to grow up dirt-poor in the south and what our options were. Sheesh!
Still having our heads in our asses in the 17th century is not working out. The world is moving into the 22nd century and we’re still sitting around reminiscing about steam engines running on coal and mules carrying bales of hay and cotton, when the high tech should be in our hands by now to do that for us. It’s no longer “your house,” it’s ours. So while you are busy longing for a life that is nearly 300 years old, or at least longing for the idea of BEATING SLAVES into doing your work for you … you might want to start thinking about the future instead. Let.The.Cotton.Picking.Go – There are machines to do that now, and we should be teaching children to invent the machines of advancement, not sit around crying about what can never be viable again.
Wow. You lost me with several thoughts and accusations–but I’m sure that is my fault…in your mind anyway. As is everything else.
I’m done and I’m not sure why I thought civil discourse was possible.
Bye.
You’d have to have experienced it in order NOT to be lost. Apparently, you haven’t been through anything like this.
Apparently you are laboring under the misconception that from the Great Depression to the Sixties it was a bright white world of opportunity in the rural south. That is not the case. Poverty is colorblind and cuts to,the core. The truly poor of all races had no choices. Slavery is truly evil no matter,the race or natuonality,or gender of the victims and,i,am honestly sorry,you experiemced it. Oh wait…
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we ARE talking about the United States of America, where Black America has never held slaves nor profited from slavery at any time or point in this nation’s history. We’re talking generational wealth built off the backs of slaves who NEVER got a dime for the efforts, which has nothing to with any other nationality and is not gender-specific. The continuing poverty has a history and your attempt to be in denial about that is duly noted. I am truly sorry you are so unaware of the facts that you think Black people have no cause for concern even in THIS racist day and age.
That which started it (systemic INSTITUTIONALIZED racism) continues to this moment in time, and that is with VERY FEW exceptions. Black people are in the shit they are in now because of this kind of denial and because of being too quick to let someone else control the very narrative we are experiencing ourselves. There will be no “ALL LIVES MATTER” gaslighting ruse today, because we know they don’t all matter and never have, not in THIS country. Those are facts.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/09/15/african-americans-are-the-only-racial-group-in-u-s-still-making-less-than-they-did-in-2000/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.e4141afc6d76
Hell yeah, I cut lawn and do yard work In the hot sun for less . Cotton picking for 100/hr sign me up
Reneegede, your comments are extremely confusing, incorrect, and randomly ignoring what the other commenter is saying while oddly accusing him of things he never said? And strangely saying one thing…. and then the complete opposite, contradictions and misinformation.
Also: “where black America had never held slaves or profited from slavery at any time”
That’s wildly incorrect, many free blacks and wealthy blacks were slave owners, owned many black slaves, ran plantation with black slaves. And they treated their slaves just as bad. A black slave owner was the first to go to court to demand that slaves be treated as “property” and to keep slaves indefinitely, including their offspring (as opposed to paying off a dept or working for a set amount of years to earn freedom or to be a freely working slave for income). Which set a precedent court ruling that altered the way slaves were treated and kept. And that’s just in America. The middle eastern/African trade is a million times worse, longer, and is still currently happening.
That guy is just talking about his experience being a Caucasian cotton picker in poverty in the Deep South. Making similar work and wages as slaves in the 1700-mid 1800s. And your randomly mentioning “all lives matter” and accusing the commenter doesn’t believe in racism? That he wants us to pick cotton, wants people to be beaten, and doesn’t like technology?? How in the world did you get that from his comments? He literally just said he picked cotton and made a certain wage…..that was it. You literally sound like your on drugs…..it makes no sense…
He also echoed the very factual sentiment that CLASSISM is extremely relevant. That when your wealthy, racism is seemingly escaped, no matter the race. But when your extremely impoverished, racial privilege is not given, regardless of the race. Which is true, it’s called classism.
You need glasses or something…. and to actually do historical research before you state something incorrect, confidently, as if it’s a fact.
Just because our community is black doesn’t mean we can throw out our important past history and facts bc it doesn’t suit our current political environment and agenda, that makes us look bad and gets us nowhere. stop being biased af. That guys comment was more about agriculture and the economy than race, by a long shot.
Apparently, you need a big dose of comprehension classes. I heard all I needed to hear and responded appropriately. You try doing the same. I don’t need to research what I experienced for myself. Your “history” is MY life story.
Also, there were no “many” Black slavers, there were less than a tea cup thimble full and even THEY were ‘niggers’ to the ruling white class, or did you NOT get the memo on how wealth – something held by a small MINORITY of Black people at any time in American history even now – does not excuse nor exclude you from the racism. Back then, even a rich nigger was socially beneath a piece of ‘po white trash’.
I must say “thank you.” I kept trying because, unfortunately, I sometimes fall into the trap of “well if I could just be clearer or explain myself better…” then good sense and logic will prevail–though my head tells me it isn’t true.
In my work I have an opportunity to really “get to know” people of all races/cultures/etc because I work with them closely during a death-crisis (normally a sudden-death.)
In spending time with (and hearing the stories of this diverse group of people) I have found that there were, at one time anyway, more similarities than differences between very poor whites and blacks in the Depression-era/post-Depression-era rural south–the time and place I grew up. We ate the same foods, worked the same jobs, and had similar struggles. That was NOT to say there wasn’t another layer in some places based on race, but our experiences were very similar where I grew up.
All the weirdness in this thread has muddied the water, but I think my original purpose in answering was to highlight similarities we may share/may have shared and the connection that COULD come from that. Boy did that thought get slapped back into my face.
Where I grew up life was HARD and HARD doesn’t respect any race.
Well, unfortunately for you – hard does respect race, but all that tells me that is you never really experienced racism in America and don’t know a thing about it. NOTHING.
You don’t know anything about how Black people had to sit on the backs of buses when I was growing up, BEHIND POOR WHITES just for being the unauthorized color, and you also don’t have any knowledge about how Black people had to go to court to fight for the RIGHT to be treated the same as poor whites. Welfare wasn’t made for us, it was made to profit poor whites at our expense when they no longer had “cracker” jobs to attend to on plantations. Even POVERTY ended up being a court battle for us in order for us to sit down at the tables we had already prepared for the children of white people. So, no that “hard doesn’t respect any race” is a damned lie.
Yes, the hell hard does respect RACE. Always did, still does now.
Honestly, I dont get where the hell the first comment tried to get at. If you pick cotton and it isn’t “hard” try to pick about 300 pounds of cotton a day, with extreme heat and with someone watching over you and beating you if you stop for even a second. DO NOT forget that children and women were treated terribly and women were raped also. And PLEASE do not forget that you did not get to go have a great filling dinner after lol… you had to go eat leftovers from animals no one wanted. DO you like chitterlings? Pig feet? TOes? tongue? ok so please dont with me…..
you know what i do want to start… i want to undestand your point of view