I’m making them in response to an effort to reframe majority-white actions as less awful and more noble than what I believe is warranted.
First, that’s not what the author to whom you were responding was saying; not even close. He was responding to an article which appeared to suggest that Blacks in America have experienced nothing but hardship at the hands of their real and imagined which “masters.” The response merely pointed out that in denigrating the white race as a whole the original author forgot that it was also white people that fought and died to end what they too regarded as a despicable and abhorrent practice. You, in turn, attacked those facts as insignificant and frankly based on very dubious history, suggesting that until, what, invented by “white Christians,” there was no such thing in history as subjugation based on race, which no doubt would come as a surprise to the many races deemed inferior by Romans and, therefore, subject to enslavement.
Second, what “white majority” are you talking about? If you agree that slavers in Africa and slavers in the United States are equally culpable, then you must include them in your unofficial census and in the main, people that could be classified as having a “white” complexion were not in the “majority” then and are not now.
But to use your Greatest Generation analogy, while it turned out that they saved the Jews from concentration camps, they didn’t know about them until our armies got there, so you can’t, after the fact, act like they joined the US army to save the Jews from genocide.
I never said that they did. I said most joined to thwart Nazi and Japanese aggression. The point was counter to your notion that you could dismiss the contribution of “white: union soldiers who, for the most part, fought and died to end the institution of slavery. Any attempt to dull that point is simply forcing history to fit your own narrative.
I was responding to a statement about how great white people are for passing civil rights legislation,….
I think you grossly misunderstood the author. I don’t think that was his point at all. As you like to point out, there is a context and his was an article denigrating “white” people en mass. I think his point was the same I am making here: It is categorically wrong to ascribe to any classification of people the wrongs committed by other people who can similarly be classified. The facts are that a very few people in the United States a long time ago owned or otherwise engaged in slave trading. Some of those few people were Black. Most of those few people were white. Many other people in the United States opposed the institution of slavery. Most of those people were white. Some of those people were Black. Today, except for a very fringe element everyone in the U.S. believes the institution of slavery to be a black mark on the history of mankind in general and, for its co-equal participation, the U.S. in specific. And no one living in the U.S. today was either a slave or an owner of slaves. So why the need to continually reproach white people in America as if they had something to do with it?
Let me also point out that passing legislation is not the same as putting oneself in danger of bodily harm, so your analogy isn’t a great fit.
If you don’t think the civil rights movement had its casualties, both white and black, then you don’t know your history as well as you think you do.
I’ve worked through my white guilt,
Really? What’s that?
Those 43 million white descendents aren’t guilty of writing the law nor of going out and taking that land, but they sure as hell haven’t given it up! They’re still benefiting in a way that black people can’t and never will, so there has to be some accountability for that.
So are you going to fix all the wrongs of the past? What about the Japanese American interment? What about American Indian displacement? What about Chinese in California. And what about you? You state that “I … still benefit from the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.” I don’t think I have but since you seem confident that you have, what and when are you “giv[ing] it up”? I don’t know what you think you’ve obtained as a consequence of slavery, but if you have full faith in what you say, you should “give it up.” Did you?
Also, if you’re going to follow the “legacy” tack, there were lot of Union families that were virtually decimated from the Civil War and the “legacy of [ending]slavery.” I have a temporally distant relative that died at Gettysburg. Now he personally gave everything he had to give and his children grew up fatherless. Who knows how much better it would have been for them and their descendants and their decedents and so on if he had not died. And there were hundreds of thousands of them. What’s your plan for accountability to them?
There is not a wrong that can be committed that does not have its downstream effect. Every murder, every assault, every fraud, every war, every wrong of every kind has a downstream impact. In law, there is a point where “cause in fact” and “legal cause” diverge, based on the proximate nature of both. Moreover, every individual enters this world with baggage of some kind. No matter who you are or where you came from, there always will be someone who had it better and someone who had it worse.
In this country, you have the ability to rise above your baggage; that’s not true everywhere. My son’s father-in-law escaped the Cambodian death squads by stowing away on a freighter and coming to the U.S. to become a successful businessman. My former boss’s parents both survived Auschwitz. His father was reduced to janitor but my former boss became a high-level executive at a fortune 100 company. So when people whine about how bad America used to be and how because of that they cannot succeed generations later, I just don’t buy the concept.
You don’t get to receive stolen goods, benefit from them, refuse to acknowledge it and make amends, and then act like you’re not in some way complicit.
You have a very poor grasp of the concept of “stolen.” I am not familiar with the aspect of the particular Homestead Act to which you refer (I presume you are referring to the Southern Homestead Act of 1866 but it did not have the inheritance limitation you reference, although it was unfairly administered by racist whites). However, these were not lands “owned” by slaves or free Blacks that were then confiscated (as were many white-owned plantations) so the concept of “stolen” is not involved. True, Blacks who otherwise may have been entitled to purchase land under the Act may have been misinformed, tricked, cheated or otherwise prevented from doing so, just as crooked politicians today favor some over others. But that doesn’t mean the land was “stolen” by any rational definition of the word under either civil or common law. Moreover, even an outright theft is subject to a statute of limitations, which, if such law applied, would long have expired.
Essentially, of all the wrongs of the world, whether imposed on a large or small scale, recent or ancient, you have simply decided, for whatever reason, that some “white people” (excluding you, of course) who have done nothing wrong to anyone must disgorge what they have (and give it to whom?) because an ancestor was favored over someone else’s ancestor by a political bureaucrat. (Other notions of law would also come into play, as not all Blacks today can prove ancestry to a slave let alone a free Black person who was unfairly denied the opportunity to purchase land under the Homestead Act). If you want to start reparations for political malfeasance and corruption, you’re going to have a very long list.
