Letters to the Editor for Thursday, March 24
Hendersonville Times-News
Stolen labor from millions
To the Editor: In a column (March 6,) the writer suggests that the labor of enslaved Africans was not valuable enough to be worthy of reparations. That is wrong.
From the beginning of English colonization, the labor of enslaved Africans was so valuable that every loophole that might have gained anyone freedom was examined and closed.
In 1662, the Virginia House of Burgesses made enslavement hereditary with a law that a child of an enslaved woman became a slave even if the father was an Englishman. In 1667, Virginia lawmakers closed the Christian baptism loophole by passing a law that being a baptized Christian could not free a black person from bondage. Fugitive slave laws closed off every avenue of escape.
Letters to the Editor, Sunday, Feb. 7
Hendersonville Times-News
Tune in The Social Dilemma on Netflix
To the Editor: I strongly urge you to see “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix, if you have not yet seen it. Through interviews with former executives and developers for Google, FaceBook, Twitter, etc., this explains how social media is using subtly insidious methods to manipulate your opinions, moving each of us further right, or further left, and exacerbating political divisions. The Russians did not need to “hack” FaceBook; they merely used the tools that Facebook developed and which are available to their advertisers. We need to be alert to this because we can’t rely on the “fact checking” algorithms in the media; we must be personally vigilant.
Why Georgia isn’t on Obama’s mind
The non-swing states of the United States, where custom, race and redrawn electoral districts mean the outcome of the vote is a certainty, have been dismissed by politicians from both sides by Benoît Bréville
Every morning at six, Russell Stanton, in his forties, gets in his pick-up and drives round the local agricultural businesses in the hope of a day’s work picking peaches, peanuts or corn. On a humid August night, Stanton kept leaving his air-conditioned motel room for a cigarette in the parking lot.
He’s lived in the motel, in Darien, Georgia, for the past three years. “It’s cheaper than renting an apartment. You’ve got electricity, cable, there’s even someone who comes in and cleans the room every day,” he said, smiling at his sister Jenna, who works as the motel chambermaid. She and her husband and children live at the motel in two adjacent rooms, and she works just a couple of hours a day. “The motel does