There is this ongoing talk about slave reparations. The presentation of such information can be interesting but is sadly more of a complex puzzle full of entanglements.
Generally, reparations are paid by government for unlawful and unjust taking of property. This is done because government is supposed to defend people’s lives and properties from rape, robbery, murder, and fraud. The survivors suffer. In some cases, the survivors have petitioned courts and legislatures for relief.
Slave reparations may sound pleasing but it mostly amounts to a scam of “let us burn down your house and get the insurance money for it’. The largest problem is slavery was an African institution and industry. “Many nations such as the Bono State, Ashanti of present-day Ghana and the Yoruba of present-day Nigeria were involved in slave-trading. Groups such as the Imbangala of Angola and the Nyamwezi of Tanzania would serve as intermediaries or roving bands, waging war on African states to capture people for export as slaves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Africa)."
And to make matters worse, slavery in Africa was often deadly because slavery was a matter of warring tribes taking prisoners of war and enslaving them, and often killing them as human sacrifice. For those slaves lucky enough to be deported on slave ships, they were given a better chance of avoiding a brutal murder. The Americas provided an avenue for less brutal and deadly treatment.
This type of exploitation also took place in British Colonial America. Anthony Johnson was African and sued to maintain slavery over a Black man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Johnson_(colonist) ).
One ignored aspect is the false image of the United States as an all-powerful entity in the 18th and 19th centuries. When the British American Colonies started cooperating, they created a very weak government under the Articles of Confederation in 1777 which was largely a military alliance like NATO. By July 13, 1787, the Northwest Ordinance was passed forbidding slavery. The United States did not become an official government until the Constitution was passed on September 13, 1787, but only started operation in 1789. This means slavery existed in the United States for 76 years. Slavery has not officially existed in the United States for about 158 years when the 13th Amendment of the Constitution passed in 1865. You might think “So what”, and “What is up with the math”? Slavery was in the British American Colonies for at least 170 years. If you want reparations, aim at the proper target.
Another problem, slavery did not have the racial lines or even gender lines many presume. Ann Deas was a Black woman and owned slaves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ann_Deas) There are many others (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Black_slave_owners_in_the_United_States). And Native Americans became slave owners too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_slave_ownership). So who is really responsible for slavery?
Slavery prospered because in many ways it was paternalistic and often prevented interaction with extremely racist Whites. Slaves were well-fed to the point they had better diets compared to poor White people, although this does not mean the diet was fully nutritious. Most certainly Black people have been lynched, attacked, and held back by racism. However, there is this myth of White people treating each other way too kindly and most often conspiring against other races. Let me assure you, this just is not so.
What truly makes a person a racist is the assumption life would be better if another race simply did not exist. Many people, both Black and White fall into this category instead of realizing just how flawed and violent humans can be. The Ku Klux Klan of the Reconstruction Era was very into lynching White people. In Nebraska, the vast majority of lynching victims were White. But such lynchings go back even further and over much more flawed rationals: accusations of witchcraft (https://time.com/4543405/connecticut-witch-trials/). Maybe White people are addicted to lynching no matter whose head gets in the noose.
What holds Black people back is a persistent overlapping labor mentality. This labor mentality defaults to accusing others of exploiting them and taking advantage of them. It is often what supposedly justifies rioting and looting. Until Blacks regularly break out of the labor class and move into accounting, healthcare, and law, this mindset will continue to dominate much of the Black culture. This persistent feeling of being exploited and a victim becomes self-defeating and often is a key source of what holds Blacks back.
A Black man, driving a car, picks up his smartphone, and starts doing a video ranting about Confederate monuments, reparations, and White privilege, and posts it to Facebook.
I would like to sit him down with General Robert E. Lee, who would ask a lot of questions such as:
What is a car?
What is a phone? Why do you call it a smartphone?
What is a camera? What is a video?
What is Facebook?
How do you explain to this Black man, the reparations he is seeking are already in his hand? His failure to understand only feeds resentment and makes him be perceived as a whiner. How do you help him to appreciate where he is at instead of tearing into men who died over a century ago? Giving him reparation money simply will do nothing but pay for a wild party and solves nothing.
This resentment is manufactured and trained into people by those who are seeking to destroy our nation. We've worked very hard as a nation to put slavery and its aftermath of discrimination and prejudice behind us, but this doesn't please the communists working to destroy us.
Historically, slavery has been a fact of life in every nation on the globe, and no ethnic group has been immune, regardless of skin color. The vile curse of slavery has its roots so far back in the past that I am not convinced that anyone could point to one group or another and say with certainty, "But THEY started it!" (not even the Bible tells us that)
The Biblical record in Genesis has Joseph sold as a slave in Egypt, and before that, Hagar taken into Abraham's household as a slave woman, so--slavery was definitely practiced in the Middle East going back at least 5000-6000 years, if not farther. The book of Exodus celebrates how God sets the Hebrews free from slavery in Egypt.
The truth is that, whoever we are, the likelihood that someone in our ancestry was a slave at one time or another is pretty high. We need to stop holding grudges about past wrongs and work together to make our current reality as good as we can make it--or we will surely lose our civilization to the rats gnawing at the roots of the Tree of Liberty.
Well written