Apology

#1

With states and nations decideing to apologize for there acts in slavery I asked myself is it really wanted or needed? I don't think it is. What apology can you give to a group of people that will heal the wounds and correct the wrongs that have had a lasting affect, even till this day, on those people? That apology wont correct the history books and give credit to people of color who helped pioneer and revolutionize this country. That apology won't give us back Dr. King, who stood a very good chance of making it to 1600 Pennslyviana Ave. That apology in my eyes is a plea deal, a quick way out... If states and nations really wanted to apologize they need to open up county and city records and give back historically and financally-(spell check).

If there can be a holocaust fund there can be a slavery fund..........
HANDS FUCKING DOWN..................................................................

#2

I tend to agree...

For some reason, slavery isn't looked at as being as fucked up as what happened to the Natives or say the Holocaust...And I'd love for someone to explain that to me...

I have no way to tell where my family comes from, aside from where my ancestors got off the boat...As a black man, I would love to know where I was from, my people, my culture...We are a lost race...

But this day and age, give a black kid a scholarship he may not have gotten if he wasn't black, and people come out the woodwork talking mad noise about affirmative action...

Meanwhile, I can't get that picture of Emmit Till outta my head, and the chick that told that lie is still alive...

I agree with this only if its a step to do something about it...Other than that, fuck an apology...

Still waitin' on 40 Acres,
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#3

Man, talk about a moral conundrum - which is worse genocide or slavery? Being descended from Welsh coal miners (i.e. my grandfather), my ancestors didn't really play a direct role in either. I know they benefited from being WASP immigrants after WWII.

I'm currently listening to "Don't Know Much About History", an entertaining book on human history. Slavery was bad, but I think the countries response after abolition was worse. The whole "separate but equal" thing is *much* closer in time and reparations for that would be far more appropriate - not that reparations for Slavery is wrong - it's just the farther it gets from an event, the harder it is to do reparations. The people who end up paying have less and less relationship to the perpetrators.

So maybe all those schools who didn't admit blacks for 100 years should do scholarships. Same for businesses, etc. It's at least a little clearer what event is attempting to be redeemed and how.

#4

That's actually a good idea Adtz...But I hardly think companies will do that, and if they have, I haven't heard about it...Its just that stigma of slavery not being wrong...Certainly hard for me to understand...

#5

Part of the problem is that the way our legal system is structured, it is generally far worse to admit to wrongdoing than to deny, regardless of the obviousness of guilt. I think that is a major moral cancer in the system we have today. If people or organizations could admit guilt, atone and be done with it, then things might work out. But admitting guilt is simply opening oneself up for an endless series of claims. No rational person would put themselves in that position.

And realistically, say Enormous State University, that was segregated until 1960, says, OK, to make up for that we are offering N scholarships for anyone who is descended from someone affected by segregation laws who can prove residency in the state from 1860 - 1960. Once N scholarships are used up, we are done. Would anyone who suffered accept that as sufficient? Would a future descendant, who is perhaps the first in their family to have a chance at school, accept that this reparation in the past makes up for their situation. What do you think?

#6

Well in contrast, you only need a fraction of native american heritage to go to school free...I knew a guy that looked like your typical white guy, but his grandmother or something like that was of native decent...He could prove it...He got a full ride...

As far as I know, we aren't indigenous to this place, you would think we could get by on color alone...

Me and my friends have joked, but the more I think about it would be a devent equivalent, and that would be to give all black people an entire state...Like Mississippi...Divide the land up, and be done with it...Deed off the acres and say fuck it...If we were only promised 40 Acres and a mule, I'd take 20 acres and German Shepard all the same...

#7

I think that was tried wit Liberia in the past...and if history is any guide, you wouldn't get Mississippi, but some part of the Salt Flats. Whatever piece of land is considered the crappiest, anyway.

I think a scholarship fund is absolutely the best idea. Its clear, affordable, improves the life of the person whose doing it. I mean we could just take the money we spend on college athletics and redirect it...

#8

This "reparation" has been itemized you know, with inflation to a total of more than 23 Trillion dollars, figured out to about $563,450.00 per person.

FYI: That is the same weighted average costs of social spending per year, until someone reaches the age of 25.

So, the fact of the matter is, and IT SUCKS, that the government already spends more on social spending than it ever made in the slave trade, or off the plantations, or even off the money it killed my family for.

The problem is that if you consider this, the CITIZENS at the time never voted for the consent of the Slave trade, or the plantations. The reason is simple: Slavery was biblical, and universal. This was one of the biggest reasons for the opposition to the freed black. Rich plantation owners were importing blacks on a 5 slaves to 1 civilian ratio, and used forced breeding to increase their stocks. The minute you make them all "free", the people who were here before the abolition were grossly outnumbered, and they didn't get their forty acres and mule, either!

Hell, most people who were coming here, or got here, never owned slaves and had no interest in it. They wanted to escape their own hell-holes. And most of the slaves who got here were sold by the Portugese or Dutch and were bought from the Africans. They got about $360 dollars a head. Let them give their profits from that sale, for we in the states already exceed the terms of the gains made from the slavery in the U.S.

But to be honest, I look at Africa now, and I swear I would hold a holy day where I thanked my ancestors for their unwilling sacrifice that prevented me from suffering that rotting hell it has become.

The main reason blacks feel this way about slavery is they have been lied to. To this day, certain people and programs try to do good, and only serve to keep the resentment there. Read what Robert E. Lee says about slavery. Read what Daniel Webster said about slavery.

Better yet, read what Robert E. Lee's man servant wrote of him: http://www.sonofthesouth.net/leefoundat ... 0slave.htm

By 1860 there was record of 50,000 freed slaves living among even more free blacks living in the south. 90,000 black men served in the cofederate army. The best sniper in the Confederacy was a black free man who never lived in slavery, nor was kin to them. What if that man was your ancestor? There were free black men in Blacks were not by proxy slaves. There was a path to freedom in the south for some slaves who had the capacity to enter Western civilization. Others simply regressed to a state where no Laws of Man applied to their sense of being. Africans came from a country where slavery, genocide, excess, tryanny and pleasure were the privelidge of the ruling class.

and some refused the "freedom" they were offered because it was simply something they could not comprehend.

Here, from the New Orleans Daily Delta : "The free colored population love their home, their property, their own slaves and recognize no other country than Louisiana, and are ready to shed their blood for her defense. They have no sympathy for Abolitionism; no love for the North, but they have plenty for Louisiana."

What killed the black identity was the great Depression. That is what made it worse. Whites had to belong to unions. Blacks could not. So, when white workers went on strike to demand payment, black "scabs" were hired which led to resentment, lynching, and even further segregation.

If you believe the "textbook" on slavery, you are going to only be pissed.

Here is a page of the FIRST census of America, page 205 in fact. http://www.westchestergov.com/wcarchive ... html?29,63

Look to "Augustine (Free)". As in NEVER A SLAVE. Total Free "Other Persons" (i.e. not white) = 3.
The main problem with tracking the history of blacks is that most did not have last names. In the european regions, only black freed slaves had last names. Their last name was typically the name of the previous master, as was the case with many european cultures that had slavery.

On that page alone : 19 slaves, 9 free blacks. Three never been slaves.

Who deserves reparation? My family were enslaved and suffered the Depression as well.

#9

I think you've got the idea backwards raum. People don't deserve reparations. Sinners need to do atonement. The organizations and people who did things wrong in the past need to make up for it, hopefully with the incidental effect of helping the people harmed. But it could just as easily be freeing people who are currently enslaved. Undoing past wrongs can not be done directly. All that can be done is admit the wrong and then do something to make the future better in the area in question. True atonement is about redeeming the sinner not the victim. In fact the best case is when the victim helps in the redemption and becomes the empowered and ceases to perpetuate their victim status.

#10

I don't have it backwards, adtz. I just didn't address the whole subject.

I agree if a company can identify where it hurt people, it should endeavor to redeem itself, and repair the dignity and comfort of the people disparaged. However, this would undo the history of man.

What I hate to think is that people have been held down. Over 5,000 free black soldiers are included in the REVOLUTIONARY war rosters of Virginia alone. Over 1400 stood with Washington in Gettysberg. Some were Patriots, and some were just scared; but ALL were free men. That was regularly enforced.

Over 90,000 blacks served in the US Civil War. not all were free.

In all these cases, not one modern descendant of these people? not likely.

I hate that the suffering of any one person is singled out. I know

I won't suffer caucasian guilt, when my family had their skulls bashed in on the stones of their own temples by invaders, and their children were sold into slavery! I won't suffer caucasian guilt when I had family members raped and killed in Africa and sold to Persians. I won't suffer caucasian guilt when I had members of my family locked in their boats and sunk by African-descending pirates who only moved to American soil after the freedom of the abolition of slavery absolved them of their crimes.

The "poor us" mentality is the gateway to communism. There is no "us" in US.

Let a company make its amends. but to be honest, many other companies (especially banks and insurance companies!!!) owe far more that what they profited from "black" slavery alone.

So, let's talk about amends for the children enslaved before child labor laws or the headrights, or the colonial usurptions. Forced breeding of whites and immigrants to produce plantation, factory and mine labor.

Study 17th century colonial America. Go through the documents, on both sides of the Atlantic and you will see that White slavery was a far more extensive operation than Black enslavement, and extended to far more countries. Slavery was learned behavior to the European, and he learned it from his African master.

Look at the plantations of Jamaica, and you will see the inspiration for the plantation of Virginia.

In America, it is explained away around the jargon of the time as "indenturement", but even in that period there was kidnapping of Anglo-Saxons into slavery as well as convict slavery.

Read the following: (Warning racism is used in this quote.)

In 1855, Frederic Law Olmsted, the landscape architect who designed New York's Central Park, was in Alabama on a pleasure trip and saw bales of cotton being thrown from a considerable height into a cargo ship's hold. The men tossing the bales somewhat recklessly into the hold were Negroes, the men in the hold were Irish.

Olmsted inquired about this to a shipworker. "Oh," said the worker, "the niggers are worth too much to be risked here; if the Paddies are knocked overboard or get their backs broke, nobody loses anything."

Before British slavers traveled to Africa's western coast to buy Black slaves from African chieftains, they sold their own White working class kindred ("the surplus poor" as they were known) from the streets and towns of England, into slavery. Tens of thousands of these White slaves were kidnapped children. In fact the very origin of the word kidnapped is kid-nabbed, the stealing of White children for enslavement.

Consider these passages:

"The human cargo, many of whom were still tormented by unhealed wounds, could not all lie down at once without lying on each other. They were never suffered to go on deck. The hatchway was constantly watched by sentinels armed with hangers and blunder busses. In the dungeons below all was darkness, stench, lamentation, disease and death."

"The voyage over often repeated the horrors of the famous 'middle passage' of slavery fame. An average cargo was three hundred, but the shipmaster, for greater profit, would sometimes crowd as many as six hundred into a small vessel...The mortality under such circumstances was tremendous, sometimes more than half...Mittelberger (an eyewitness) says he saw thirty-two children thrown into the ocean during one voyage."

... these are quotes about White slaves captured in Europe and coming to America unwillingly to be ripped apart as they were worked to death.