Monetary awards from lawsuits only come in two categories - compensatory and punitive.
So which is it they're claiming - do they deserve compensation for the way people 7 generations removed from them were treated? Can they even prove that lineage? I certainly couldn't.
Or is it punitive - to prevent people who have been dead for 150 years from repeating their misdeeds?
Yes, slavery was a very bad thing. It was also the norm for thousands of years. Without slavery, there would have been no Greek culture to sow the seeds of democracy; no Roman culture to civilize Europe and the Middle East; no Egyptian culture to build the pyramids. And no - that still doesn't make it right. I'm not defending it - it was how the world functioned for millennia.
And please don't compare slavery to the Holocaust - wrong as it was, slavery was legal until 1865; what the Nazis did to the Jews and others was genocide - there was no other reason for it other than the annihilation of a people. No commerce; no profit; no food production. Just death.
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"If your ridiculous pants are too loose, you're definitely going to lose them. Tell your two loser friends over there that they're going to lose theirs, too."
It won't hurt your fashion sense, either.
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