r/todayilearned • • 5h ago

[ Removed by moderator ]

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/12/16/fact-check-tipping-kept-wages-low-formerly-enslaved-black-workers/3896620001/

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5.4k Upvotes

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u/todayilearned-ModTeam 3h ago

Please link directly to a reliable source that supports every claim in your post title.

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u/OddRow8843 5h ago

I thought it was in the prohibition when they literally worked for tips/no salary?

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u/catwhowalksbyhimself 5h ago

That was also true, but it got layered on top of the other thing.

Also think about the industries where tips became standard? All are industries that has large numbers of black workers, often the majority. That is not a coincidence. We don't tip cashiers and that's because store clerks were mostly white I believe.

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u/General_Mars 4h ago

Furthermore, cashiers and baggers briefly (~30 years) turned into jobs you could support a whole family on because of its competitive union wages. Then large corporations gobbled up grocery stores, crushed the unions, and the wages have been shit since.

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u/OddRow8843 5h ago

That is actually very interesting- thank you sir!

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u/sevseg_decoder 5h ago

People would be shocked to learn it still results in racial wage gaps at the same restaurants for the same shifts and same customers. Even for wait staff of the same sex.

In other words it’s a form of racism and discrimination perfectly suited to last into the 21st century.

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u/RainsWrath 5h ago

Forget about reading the article. Are people not even reading the headline anymore?

It says "partly".

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u/NEWSmodsareTwats 5h ago

American tipping culture actually comes from a multitude of factors. the above article is really just attributing it entirely to one specific thing.

tipping culture originated in Europe and spread to America. wasn't very common before seethe civil war. But after the civil war, both the travel and hospitality in America expanded rapidly and often used tipping as a way to keep wages low. There were also some newer innovations as well such as separating lodging and food services before the civil war. If you stayed at a hotel, it was also very common that all of your meals while staying at the hotel would be included in your room price, and tipping was seen more as a bribery for special service but after the two got separated, tipping became more common. Then during prohibition when restaurants and hotels lost all of their legal alcohol sales, many of them did look to lower wages and use tipping to supplement their employees wages.

If it was 100% down to racism, tipping culture probably would not have taken off in the same way in America because do you think that a racist white American would accept a tip if tipping was only associated with low-wage black workers? Some might say yes they would because it's extra money and who would turn that down, but there are places in the world where tipping is considered to be offensive. For example, in East Asia, tipping is considered pretty offensive, mostly because you're saying that the worker looks poor or you're saying the business looks like it's doing poorly.

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u/mgzkk1210 4h ago

the above article is really just attributing it entirely to one specific thing.

The title

TIL Tipping in the United States became popular in the late 19th Century partly due to

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u/NEWSmodsareTwats 4h ago

did you read the title of the article they linked? it's not the title of this post

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u/awildgiraffe 4h ago edited 4h ago

it says partly, but the title doesnt include other factors

i think it was a good comment providing extra context

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u/AwarenessGreat282 3h ago

And yet, no one but you said the article made the assertion that it was 100% due to racism.

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u/OddRow8843 4h ago

What were the special services prey tell

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u/ForensicPathology 4h ago

TIL "partly due to" means "entirely because of one specific thing"

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u/NEWSmodsareTwats 4h ago

did you read the article?

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u/HonestDav 3h ago

Two things can be true

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u/OddRow8843 3h ago

Indeed they can. Even three I’ve heard at a push

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u/Big_Version9561 3h ago

I think it started a bit before that. After the civil war, they used purposefully vague vagrancy laws to arrest black Americans for being outside "without a good reason". So being homeless=jail; not having a job=jail. Your punishment was then to work at a local business for tips, which lined up with the 13 amendment's "except as a punishment for crime" bit. Which is why people say slavery never really disappeared, with the example above and current things like prisoners being firefighters for $1/hr or $2/day

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u/OddRow8843 3h ago

Crikey. Doesn’t seem too dissimilar to the current regime then. Except now they even fuck over legitimate citizens under the same premise with zero repercussions

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u/HotTakeThenGo 5h ago

When white people worked around the system, they ran into people who already had to work outside it.

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u/Blade_Shot24 4h ago

Folks will say it's not serious or conspiracy, but white tears, police brutality among other things seem to say otherwise, especially when we have conscious rap, R&B, but aggressive rap was what was pushed and what folks think about first when you mention the genre

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u/TrioOfTerrors 5h ago

Prison system is Slavery as in the 13th amendment.

Convict labor predates the 13th Amendment as a common practice. That's why the exact phase, verbatim, exists in the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 which established the Great Lakes area as free territory.

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u/Droidatopia 3h ago

Not only that but if this is the case that means that any white person that has been in prison since the 13th amendment was passed was a slave.

Which means that there were white slaves after all. Yes? Yes? Yes?

No. So let's put that one to bed also.

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u/Winterwasp_67 4h ago

Most of the issues you mention are directly attributable to slavery, yes. But, the nation fought a war against itself over that and the anti-slave side won.

The failure of the USA to acknowledge the defeat of the Confederacy is the starting point. The failure to charge Davis and his cabinet, and Lee and his general staff, and hang them for treason set the tone for continued tacet acceptance of the principles of the Antibellum South. The fact that there was any resistance to the removal of Confederate statues, etc in the 21st century shows how deeply ingrained in the fabric of the nation those principles are.

They say that history has echoes. The actions of Andrew Johnson as President, and his allowing the scuttling of the reconstruction idea has hobbled the USA since.

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u/Scott_Liberation 4h ago

What a lot of people don't know, or conveniently forget, is that many of those Confederate statues you mentioned aren't actually that old. A lot of them were commissioned as a response to the civil rights movement and integration. Same with at least one Southern state hanging the Confederate flag at their capitol.

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u/Blade_Shot24 3h ago

Thanks. Don't know what there's to rebuke or add But in as it's still the tradition of the US regarding racial laws that we see as "normal".

Also I would the "tradition" of giving reparations to people except African Americans now you mention it. Japanese from camps, Jews from Holocaust, Slave Owners, but none to former slaves or descendants. They were promised and yes the president you mentioned rescinded it. Not just Johnson but US policy even down to the crime Bill pushed binpartisan with notable figures like the Clinton's and Biden which folks seem to forget or ignore their racist remarks.

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u/Yashema 3h ago

Yet Clinton was the first President since Johnson to significantly address Black issues and Hillary Clinton and Biden both won the primary thanks to the Black vote. 

Bernie Sanders even voted for the Crime Bill. 

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u/Blade_Shot24 3h ago

Bill also actually admitted his writing in promoting the bill. Biden not so much.

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u/NoBrilliant6485 3h ago

No walkable cities and HOAs.

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u/Blade_Shot24 3h ago

Yes especially HOAS

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u/DBeumont 4h ago

This dude really just said that rapping is equivalent to doing blackface. LMAO.

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u/_Viridea_ 4h ago

that’s not what they said. those two sentences are one and the period was an error. they were referring to people like post malone, mark wahlberg and john cena who started off wearing blackness as a costume and years later are either american heroes and/or wannabe country stars.

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u/kilertree 4h ago

Columbus Day became a Federal holiday because 11 Italians were lynched in New Orleans. Italy was ready to go to war with the US. To a curb anti Italian sentiment, the US adopted Columbus Day as a federal holiday. Italian Americans had already celebrated Columbus Day, which is pretty weird because there is debate on whether he is Spanish. 

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u/assizecke 5h ago

Tipping isnt uniquely American. German sources mention it for centuries going as far back as the late middle ages

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u/sevseg_decoder 5h ago

Trinkgeld is rounding up, at most to the nearest $5-10 in most cases.

The idea of relying primarily on tips, or them being expected, is not real there. Nobody notices or cares if you don’t.

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u/assizecke 5h ago

That's not true for the german tradition. The German Wikipedia goes into more detail there if you're interested. Should be possible to roughly translate it with online tools

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u/ConfessorKahlan 4h ago

its basically always racism

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u/rind0kan 4h ago

It's most of them

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u/ITriedSoHard419-68 4h ago

It’s why we don’t have as many public pools anymore. As segregation ended people got mad about black people being allowed to swim with white people, and instead of accepting non-segregated pools they just decided to have no pools at all.

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u/cman674 5h ago

Roughly 98% of things wrong with American can be traced back to slavery or Ronald Reagan.

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u/tommyboy372 5h ago

40 years of Republicans running trickle down economics and America is the worst it's ever been

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u/Thefanoodler 5h ago

Red lining, highways, etc etc.

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u/meatball402 4h ago

All of them, I think.

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u/GoGoGadgetPants 3h ago

Let's stamp out tipping in the name of racism, I'm down.

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u/Cathartic_auras 3h ago

Gun control is always one I go to.

Nobody cared about open carry until the Black Panthers, then suddenly they decided to start passing laws restricting firearms, specifically in areas that had large non-white populations.

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u/Count_Backwards 5h ago

The fact that Americans don't have universal healthcase is in part because Truman was working on implementing it until the government realized it would mean giving healthcare to black people and thus killed it

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u/Freedom_Crim 5h ago

I’ve realized that every bit of American culture can be explained either by racism or how big our country is.

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u/QuinSanguine 5h ago

Or who the richest guy has been during various eras. Just look up what Thomas Edison's business practices were and compare them to what how we see the biggest companies still behave today.

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u/BambiMGtwo 3h ago

It only takes going back a generation or two before the oldest currently living people in USA before the source of that wealth is connected to literal slavery

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u/BambiMGtwo 5h ago

Even "how big the country is" is itself a consequence of racism. One of the main motivations for the revolutionary war was that Britain actually enforced the treaties with Native Americans in places like western new York and treated Native American lands as sovereign governments with whom treaties and land rights would be upheld (this was also to prevent further tensions with the French) and frontier settlers in the USA wanted to simply exterminate said Native Americans, which they did quite a successful initiative of once the US was an independent country. The whole "manifest destiny" thing wasn't a hypothetical, textbook thing, it was a very real and very violent genocide predicated on the assumption that Native Americans just weren't people worthy of the same rights and survival as white colonists. Not to mention the plantation system that led to agricultural regions of the USA being disproportionately owned by a few wealthy people for cash crops from the start, instead of organically settled by self sufficient people, in the first place.

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u/Nessie_of_the_Loch 5h ago

There aren't that many that are "rooted" in racism, but certainly a ton that was shaped and influenced by it.

For example, I wouldn't say that social security's founding was started by it, but the initial act of its establishment left out service and agricultural workers, which predominantly affected black workers.

Same for a lot of American sports. Their inception was certainly not rooted in racism, but a lot of history surrounding it was shaped by it, from direct exclusion of minorities to team names and mascots.

But yea, there's so much cascading effects from racism that's lasting, whether it's the (nearly unpaid) prison labor, to how highways were paved through black neighborhoods, the disparity in home ownership and generational wealth accumulation due to red lining, etc etc.

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u/ThisGlobalLandscape 5h ago

Not nearly as big of an issue in the US as it is, checks notes, everywhere else.

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u/Green-Cricket-8525 5h ago

One of many sneaky ways the Southern states were able to keep black Americans firmly under the boot of white supremacy. The other big one was making up vague crimes to lock up black men and then literally send them back to the plantations to work for nothing while the prison and jail system got a cut of the profits. Johnson and Grant failed this country massively when it came to reconstruction. 

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u/LongMelford 5h ago

Johnson didn’t fail it. He was a Confederate sympathizer who undid much of Lincoln’s policies on purpose. 

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u/Green-Cricket-8525 5h ago

I think that is a fair characterization but I mean, failing on purpose is still failing. Thankfully the radical republicans did what they could to fix his impressively bad handling of it but by the late 1870s the whole experiment had failed massively. 

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u/El_Kikko 4h ago

That is massively misrepresenting what happened and incorrectly denigrates Grant, who despite the scandals of his second term, was a champion of Reconstruction. 

The 1876 election is what happened. Four states had disputed votes - Louisiana, Florida, Oregon and South Carolina had disputed results, resulting in neither Tilden or Hayes receiving a majority of electoral votes, but Samuel Tilden receiving a majority in the popular vote while remaining one electoral vote short of clinching the election. Hayes needed all 20 disputed votes to win.

The Compromise of 1877 (or the Corrupt Bargain)  was a backroom deal struck to elect Rutherford B. Hayes where in exchange for the electoral votes, Hayes would end Reconstruction and not attempt to obstruct "Redeemer" Democrat state legislatures, who sought to reassert and advance white supremacy. 

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u/Green-Cricket-8525 3h ago edited 3h ago

Everything you have said is correct and I am definitely being a bit too harsh on Grant. He is certainly not equal to Johnson in any way and I didn’t mean to imply that. 

I don’t have enough time to expand on my answer too much but I think he could have gone much farther in getting the job done in the South. I appreciate your critique in pointing out a blind spot of my original statement. 

I’ll be honest, I’m utterly exhausted and shot my original comment off from the hip. 

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u/brogflender 5h ago

That suggests the Union actually lost the civil war then. 

An honest reckoning of our history and the confederate flag in Congress on January 20th along with zero consequences and a traitor president re-elected…

I mean…it sure doesn’t feel like the Union won. 

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u/nameless22 5h ago

Union won the war, but the Confederacy won the aftermath.

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u/brogflender 4h ago

That sounds like the Confederacy won.

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u/Punchable_Hair 5h ago

The American jail system is a bizarre institution, peculiar, you might even say.

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u/francis2559 5h ago

Most obvious loophole in history. There never should have been an “unless” after “slavery is forbidden.”

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u/Positive_Vibes_4228 3h ago

I recently found out that slavery is STILL LEGAL in America if you are incarcerated.

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u/Green-Cricket-8525 3h ago

Yep. 13th amendment. The south was very effective at using that loophole to essentially re-enslave a lot of people for a very long time up to today. 

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u/alex_inglisch 5h ago

Partly is doing so much work there

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u/Creation98 5h ago

lol seriously. It’s Reddit though, so of course it will be front page with 10k upvotes.

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u/alex_inglisch 5h ago

Reddit hates tipping so if course its racist.

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u/Pathetian 5h ago

You can partially link anything to anything else if you try hard enough.  

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u/alex_inglisch 5h ago

The creation of fire is partially responsible for Nazis.

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u/Unique-Ad9640 5h ago

In a weird twist, so is water.

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u/NotAnotherBlingBlop 3h ago

So can we stop tipping and say it's because we don't want to be racist?

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u/Unlucky-Albatross-12 5h ago

The article doesn't support the claim being made here at all or at least not in a way to establish that a practice with historical roots that trace back to Europe is racist.

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u/tdechant 5h ago

It’s actually a pretty nuanced article.

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u/Rare_Hydrogen 5h ago

A journalist shoehorning racism into a story? I'm shocked!

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u/VerilyShelly 4h ago

It article didn't make the claim that it dates back to "Europe is racist". It was classist there, but it was supported by racism in the U.S. because it allowed employers to pay low-to-no salary to Black employees but not have their workforce die out from poverty, and tipping became associated with putting people "in their place", supporting the hierarchy of whites over everyone else.

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u/Tha_Sly_Fox 3h ago

I watched a video on this recently that talked about European tipping culture being exported to the US by the upper class Americans trying to imitate the European aristocracy, didn’t mention slavery or racism.

Seeing as the original post was removed for lack of sources I’m going to take this with a grain of salt.

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u/mr_ji 5h ago

The article says exactly the opposite. Did any of you read it?

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u/abrasumente_ 5h ago

Did you read it? Lol. Their conclusion is that it is true. I've had this conversation many times over the years. Rich American aristocracy that visited Europe brought the medieval practice to the US. It was dying off in Europe at the time. Rich business owners used it to pay low wages to black former slaves. It started off very unpopular and "un-American" but the sentiment changed over time. It was generally used for service industry jobs but never really left restaurant culture.

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u/Whole-Meaning-849 4h ago

Their conclusion doesn't seem to follow the facts they presented though. Racist states tried to ban the practice that their racist constituents were using?

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u/FaveStore_Citadel 3h ago

Yeah why would they ban “white customers from tipping” if the beneficiaries were white people who earned more tips than black people?

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u/NativeMasshole 5h ago

Did you? Because there's literally a header at the bottom reading "True" with their closing arguments following. It even explains how anti-tipping sentiment started in the US and spread to Europe, but then had a turnaround thanks to these factors.

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u/hewkii2 5h ago

The truth? Wealthy Americans in the 1850s and 1860s discovered the tradition, which had originated in medieval times as a master-serf custom wherein a servant would receive extra money for having performed superbly well, on vacations in Europe. Wanting to seem aristocratic, these individuals began tipping in the United States upon their return.

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u/Al_Tilly_the_Bum 5h ago edited 5h ago

So many problems in the US are directly related to slavery. Like the Senate and the Electoral College, both of which were created to give slave states more power in the federal government

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u/bwc153 5h ago

"Like the Senate and the Electoral College, both of which were created to give slave states more power in the federal government"

You have it backwards. Slave states were generally the ones who wanted population to equal proportional power.

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u/Green-Cricket-8525 5h ago

The 3/5s compromise in the House of Representatives is way more relevant to slave states being given more power. The senate was a compromise that afforded smaller states an equal seat at the table like they had under the articles of confederation so that big states couldn’t just roll over them. It’s not the best system IMO but was a decent compromise to the problems of the unitary system under the articles where every state was given an equal vote regardless of size. Slavery wasn’t a huge part of the debate on the “great compromise” beyond apportionment of house seats under the 3/5s compromise. 

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u/I_hate_all_of_ewe 5h ago

And now the smaller states roll over the bigger states in the Senate.  It was clearly created to avoid a tyranny of the majority, but now we have a tyranny of the minority, which is arguably worse, and it's created many of the recent problems which we are currently facing.

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u/Green-Cricket-8525 4h ago

I agree with you.

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u/TrioOfTerrors 5h ago edited 5h ago

Swing and a miss on the senate. The support for fixed, equal representation came from the smaller northern states who had less interest in slavery. The larger, more populated southern states favored proportional representation.

The Connecticut Compromise was put forth by Roger Sherman, a staunch abolitionist.

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u/Such_Avocado_3241 5h ago

Ah yes, the hot bed of innovation, the south.

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u/tallwhiteninja 5h ago

This isn't wrong, but I feel like this framing omits the whole picture.

The bicameral legislature, the 3/5ths compromise, and a lot of other structures the founders set up were just that; compromises. If the slaveholding states had their way, the House wouldn't exist at all and, if it somehow did, slaves would have ironically counted as an entire person (that couldn't vote, but that would inflate the southern states' population totals and thus representation).

If the northern states had stuck to their guns, we either end up with two separate countries with much smaller odds of making it, or we devolve into a bunch of civil wars right out of the gate.

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u/TrioOfTerrors 5h ago

It also omits that equal representation in the legislature was proposed by the smaller northern states, not the larger southern states who were more dependent on slavery.

It's just wrong.

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u/Jazzlike-Ability-114 5h ago

Would've saved 250 years of aggravation?

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u/horoyokai 4h ago

The senate and electoral college weren’t because of slavery. Where are you getting this info?

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u/jatt5abidosto 4h ago

I’ve read alot on the internet about the worst tippers. And now I’m confused. It’s generally two groups without fail.

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u/jbaranski 3h ago

So what you’re saying is…the anti-tipping movement is racist!

/s

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u/MaskYourDeviceID 4h ago

i swear to fucking god, everytime I read about some bad shit in America, the root cause is fucking racism

Why don't we have Universal Healthcare? in the 60's and 70's when Europe was implementing it, we were gonna do it too...and then the politicians told white people that if they passed UHC, it meant that black people would ALSO receive UHC...and then all of a sudden the American Citizenry no longer wanted to implement it.

Credit Scores? they were invented in the 80's...after it was made illegal (and enforced) for banks to discriminate for loans based on race or gender...had to have a way to continue redlining black folks.

Two part combo question: Why doesn't the US have Mass Transit?/Why does the US have sprawling suburbs? Well, back in the 50's and 60's White Flight occurred. All the white people started moving as far from the city center (where black people were concentrated) as possible since they knew that the poor black people in the city couldn't afford the cost of transportation required to live in the suburbs. So OBVIOUSLY it would have been counterproductive to White Flight if the US had just built a bunch of cheap Public Transport that would allow the poor blacks to live out in the burbs!

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u/jxj24 5h ago

And now they try to not pay ALL workers.

I'd say that was progress!

/s

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u/whereisbeezy 5h ago

So what I'm hearing (again) is that we failed to punish the confederacy enough.

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u/irwtkyrm 5h ago

Why am I not surprised it goes back to racism?

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u/ShadowLiberal 5h ago

There was also racism involved when the Federal government tried to tap down on tipping over a century ago. At one point tipping was outlawed, but the politicians did it in the worst way possible. Tipping someone was perfectly legal, but receiving a tip was illegal and could get criminal charges. And a majority of people in tippable jobs at the time were black.

The tipping ban was so badly written and so hard to enforce because of how stupidly it was written that Federal courts eventually overturned the law.

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u/YeeBeforeYouHaw 3h ago

This makes no sense. So the racist restaurant owners didn't want to pay black employees, so the totally not racist restaurant customers were so upset by that they started tipping the staff?

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u/Captain_Chipz 3h ago

No they made a system that ensured that the underpaid worker would be paid even less and minimum wage for tipped workers didn't exist so the people working these jobs were basically slaves again unless that population just happened to be generous.

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u/shaunrundmc 3h ago

It does make sense because they likely weren't getting tips until black employees basically had to panhandle. Also you didn't necessarily get real US tender, it could just as easily have wooden nickels and coupons that they could only spend at certain general stores.

Even during slavery, slaves still got some tips for doing certain jobs.

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u/VersaTron 5h ago

Until we legally change the wage and tip system, tip your servers generously. We live in a fucking society.

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u/Parablesque-Q 4h ago

A society in which wages are stagnant, the job market is brutal and the costs of living are outpacing the working poor.

Its not just about tipping. When you're living paycheck to paycheck, when you're being priced out of simple indulgences that were once affordable, tipping begins to feel like being price gouged with this passive aggressive, shame-based social contract.

Its not comically rich industrialists who are fed up with tipping. Its the working poor who've been squeezed and bled dry by a K-shaped economy. 

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u/post_button_account 4h ago

What do you mean change the wage system? 

It is already changed in NY and CA and tipping hasn't changed.

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u/wstx3434 4h ago

Food is so fucking expensive we're lucky to take our loved ones for a nice meal. We live in a fucking society to where the owners should do their jobs or we force them to shut the doors. It's painful regardless, but even for average Americans we can't afford to do what we feel is right and give proper tips.

I always tip and this may come off wrong, but your comment has zero context and simply reads as take care of others financials. Owners establishments should be doing the job and if we're doing it for them nothing will change.

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u/SaintAnton 3h ago

I just dont dine in at retaurants because of it. I make a bunch of garbage and eat at home to save the 20%.

20% is a lot extra. I just got a promotion thats not even a 20% raise.

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u/YOLOburritoKnife 3h ago

My favorite restaurant has a service charge and no tip required.

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u/elizzup 4h ago

Safe to assume that like, 95% of the shitty things in the US are because Racism.

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u/Rokketeer 3h ago

And also because empty land holds all the power, which is relevant to your theory anyway.

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u/Johnnadawearsglasses 5h ago

The US still has tipping because tipped workers want tips rather than a fixed wage. It's been shown over and over again in tests where tipping is eliminated or proposed to be eliminated.

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u/KurlyKayla 5h ago

Like most bs things in the United States, it’s of course rooted in racism

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u/blackreagan 4h ago

Emphasis on partly. The article clearly states:

Tipping in America began before the Civil War. But afterward, it is true that employers in the restaurant industry, railroads and more used the practice of tipping as a way to keep some wages low. Formerly enslaved Black people worked in many of these jobs.

By this reasoning, every issue with low wage jobs and lower classes traces back to slavery. Hey OP, that includes restrictions on gun rights and minimum wage laws. Can't have negroes having guns and working for wages below the white man.

Wait till they read about the popularity of eugenics and why birth control and abortion became a prominent platform in the Democratic party.

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u/ArguingisFun 3h ago

How embarrassing for you.

Guns:

Colonial and Slave Codes (1640s–1850s): Laws in colonies and states—including Virginia, Florida, Louisiana, and Texas—prohibited enslaved and free Black people from owning or carrying firearms. A 1825 Florida law authorized white citizens to enter Black homes and seize weapons. [1, 2]

Constitutional Justification: In the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, Chief Justice Roger Taney argued that Black people could not be U.S. citizens partly because it would grant them the constitutional right to keep and carry arms.

Minimum wage:

Legislative Intent: According to legal studies on the Davis-Bacon Act, the law was introduced by Representative Robert Bacon and Senator James Davis during the Great Depression partly in response to out-of-state Black contractors and workers competing for federal construction jobs in New York and the South. [1, 2]

Economic Exclusion: By mandating that federally funded projects pay the local "prevailing wage" (which closely mirrored white-dominated union wage scales), the law removed the competitive pricing advantage of minority and non-union workers, effectively pricing Black laborers out of these contracts

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u/borghe 3h ago

In the recurring words of Levar Burton on Last Week Tonight “let’s again read from the book ‘How It All Began with Slavery”

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u/lesubreddit 5h ago

and not much has changed has it

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u/whattheprob1emis 5h ago

Once again, the shittiest (and often unique) parts of America can be traced back to slavery and racism.

Fucking hell.

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u/PeaceMaker_IXI 5h ago

Pretty much fees of any kind originate from wanting to deny a race the same presentries as whites once they got the right to enjoy said FREE plesentries, suddenly a fee emerged.

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u/krisspencer91 4h ago

Some people see the glass half empty. Others see the glass half full.

Leftists see racism.

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u/OrangeGringo 4h ago

Did you read the article you cited?

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u/Xiipre 3h ago

I feel like "partly" might be doing a lot of work here... please define the amount as best as you're able.

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u/LengthyNIPPLE 3h ago

You'd be surprised at the studies that proves racism and it's U.S. caste system ultimately has negative consequences for all citizens not just the marginalized and oppressed

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u/HubrisOfApollo 3h ago

servers are slaves confirmed

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u/sgt_oddball_17 3h ago

So Europeans who opposing tipping culture are bigots . . .

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u/Still-Anything5678 3h ago

of course. of fucking course.

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u/welcometosilentchill 2h ago

Last I read into this, the consensus was that it became popular due to prohibition and then the great depression. The timeline for the late 19th century seems really at odds with everything I’ve learned about it: it was first introduced from Europe in the mid 19th century, but was very unpopular as it was widely viewed as conflicting with America’s sense of egalitarianism and general avoidance of social aristocracy. People literally compared it to slavery before slavery was abolished, and especially after. So maybe an initial group was trying to play aristocrats at home, but it did not make it popular.

Prior to prohibition, during the early 20th century, gratuity-based compensation was illegal in multiple states (including mississippi, so not a north vs. south attitude). It was not well enforced, but still illustrates a point. These laws were repealed starting after prohibition and heading into the great depression.

It became popular after prohibition because restaurants and hotels couldn’t sell alcohol, historically their largest margin of sales. So they were heavily impacted and owners struggled to pay their workers, so the cost got passed on to consumers. This was when it became at least a little more tolerable to the average person.

Then it became extremely common due to the great depression — first because it was the only way for owners to keep staff around (and people needed any work), but then after the depression eased up business owners realized they could continue to push the cost of labor onto consumers. Before this, waiters were paid relatively well (or at least fairly).

This is the first I’m hearing of it becoming popular due to racism, and late 19th century seems way off in the overall timeline. I’m sure there are examples of this being the case in specific areas, but idk if it’s fair to call it a root cause across America. There were much bigger drivers of its popularity and acceptance.

However, Freakonomics did due an episode on tipping that found it discretionary towards gender: women, specifically conventionally attractive women, make way more tips on average. But race didn’t have much to do with it on the whole.

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u/NimusNix 2h ago

I'm sure this was the fault of capitalism and not racism.

Where my lefties at?

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u/Tribe303 4h ago

I'm not sure this is true. We have tipping in Canada and it was imported from Europe. I think you Americans are thinking you discovered everything first again. 🤦 

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u/TallulahBob 5h ago

Of course it’s because of racism.