Quote:
Originally posted by BuDDaH
Well, since it seems to be getting personal, let's flip the script:
Let me put you and your next ten generations into indentured servitude, tell you that you are 5/8th of a whole person, give you no rights, give you a pitchfork and make you pick cotton in the sun or any hard work without pay, make you sleep in shitty conditions. (Even back then, pigs and horses lived better and were worth more than slaves..) You couldn't live in these conditions, you are too pampered even now.
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In that case, you couldn't live in those conditions either.
Let's change your example a bit to make it more analogous to what's going on today. Instead of you enslaving me and my next ten generations, let's say that some people who are not at all in your ancestry but who happen to be the same skin color as you enslaved the white people for 10 generations. Roughly 140 years ago, black people stopped enslaving white people. Now tell me. Is it your fault? Should I blame YOU for that?
See, it's really stupid to require today's white people to pay for/ attone for / be blamed for slavery. None of us had slaves. None of our parents or grandparents had them either. For many of us, myself included, our families didn't even migrate to the USA until well AFTER slavery had ended.
No one's saying that slavery didn't suck. We ARE saying that we didn't do it. Holding the son responsible for the sins of the father is bad enough, but holding the son responsible for the sins of the great-great-great-great-great grandfather is abhorent. It's even worse to hold a guy responsible for slavery simply because he's white, even if none of his family ever had anything to do with slavery. By the way, that's not only stupid, it's also racist.
Like I said. We can either spend eternity wallowing in the horrible, but distant, past OR we can move on and try to build a society that actually works rather than one in which its people spend their existanct fighting over which color is more evil.