Slavery
Obama headline on CNN: Capacity for cruelty still exists.
Uhhhh. No shit.
Re - apologizing for slavery. I don't think slavery needs to be swept under the rug...it's an important thing to know about our history as a nation. But I also don't feel like I need to apologize for it since I've never owned a slave or profited from slavery or in anyway endorsed slavery. Although, I did intern. Maybe the government should apologize to interns.
3 comments:
How do you know?
The reason I ask is that my great aunt did a lot of research into my family history and one of the many things she found was a will that included two slaves. So my family did profit from enslaving other people in the past and that advantage, in whatever small way, must have had some kind of trickledown effect through history. In just the same way that being kidnapped from your country and systematically seperated from your family and denied your history and language has got to have some kind of trickledown effect if that's your family history.
I'm not saying that I personally enslaved people and have to apologize for that, but I can see how Western culture (Portugal, England and particularly the USA) has had major economic benefits from a system that has dehumanized a significant segment of the world's population.
Walking around with your hands up, saying, "Hey, wasn't me." is a bullshit response. Of course it wasn't you, you were born too late.
Comparing interning to slavery is just crass.
Well, for one - half my family is from China and I think they were poor peasants. And the other half of my family is Quaker who were opposed to slavery dating back to the 17th century. So I think I'm pretty safe.
Plus, no great wealth has trickled down to me, anyway, so even if they were slave owners, I haven't seen any of it.
Comparing slavery to interning is crass, but also funny if you don't feel guilty about slavery, which i don't.
As for western nations benefiting from slavery economically, i'm going to go ahead and call bullshit on that one. There were a lot of countries - and still are countries - where slavery is legal or practiced. And yet we don't claim they have benefited economically from slavery. Sudan is one. North Korea is another. Many middle eastern states (if you can call them that) practiced slavery up to 1900. Slaves were used in Asia and India and yet we don't cite those countries economic growth or lack thereof due to slavery.
The logic you are using is flawed. You are taking an end result - Western wealth - and looking backwards and citing a very specific practice by the US, ie slavery, as one reason for that wealth. But you can't demonstrate a causation - nor even attempt to think about it critically...why for instance was the Slave South so much poorer than the "Free" North.
It bothers me that you would make such an obviously problematic argument - it suggests a world view predisposed to viewing US wealth as illegitimately gained and cherry picking examples to substantiate the world view - whether or not such examples are true. A very dangerous way to look at things, if you ask me.
Plus, the reason the US is rich is simple - Europe was destroyed after WW2 and we were the most developed nation with our infrastructure in tact. That - coupled with rule of law and respect for property rights - is why the US flourished. We didn't get rich off slavery.
by your own argument you ought to be able to guestimate how much money you personally received from your families slaves and take that amount and give it to michelle obama or another descendant of slavery.
and i'm not trying to be an asshole, but if you seriously believe what you say, what prevents you from doing precisely this?
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