If two people rob a bank, the 1st robber isn’t less guilty just because there was also a 2nd robber.
That’s true, but you seem to exonerate the first robber, the African slave “sellers” and other robber combinations, including Blacks owning slaves (as did people of most other races. I agree there is culpability sufficient to go around, but the real culpability lies with the people of whatever race, color or nationality that engaged in the practice, not just some of them.
A lot of white people also fought for the North, some as Abolitionists but many others either to hold the Union together or simply because they were drafted.
Your attempt to denigrate the motivation for the Civil War and, thereby, the ultimate sacrifice made by hundreds of thousands of individuals (most of whom were white) reflects more your willingness to rewrite history in order to preserve your narrative. You could make the same observation about virtually every human conflict since the beginning of time. No doubt there were some who were part of the “Greatest Generation” who didn’t want to be in the armed forces or who were there for reason other than to thwart Nazi or Japanese aggression. But taken as a whole, those were the reasons that the U.S. went to war and the reason most of the soldiers fought. So too with the Civil War. While no doubt there were some who didn’t want to fight at all, it is simply a corruption of historical fact to say that slavery was not at the heart of the dispute between the North and South.
[In response to facts reflecting white leadership in abolishing slavery] “[Y]ou don’t get credit for doing the very baseline of human decency after centuries of atrocities.”
By this rationale, if a black man intercedes in and prevents a crime being perpetrated by another black person, even at his own peril, he should not be heralded as a hero or even a good citizen since he shares a genetic pigment similarity and, therefore, is responsible for all crimes committed by “his kind.” So too, if a man prevents a rape of a woman by another man, even at the risk of his own life, he is due no thanks or even recognition since, after all, he shares a similar chromosome and with it responsibility for all crimes committed by “his kind.”
The mistake you make is in thinking that these people who stood up to and put an end to slavery were somehow responsible for it in the first place, simply because the other persons that engaged in it (even as you acknowledge, centuries before they were born) shared some genetic similarity. Do you not see what utter racist nonsense that is? How far are you from identifying some other characteristic and use that as a basis for blameworthiness. Isn’t that exactly what the Holocaust was about? Germans blaming other Germans for all of their problems simply because those other Germans were Jews?
You think that you’re progressive in your thinking, but just the opposite is true. Your way of thinking has existed for eons: classify a segment of society based on a racial or other classifiable characteristics as somehow responsible for what you regard as a wrong, regardless of whether the target of your blame actually had anything to do with your perceived problem, and then advocate, propagandize and later don a symbol of your self-righteousness as you drag the offending persons into the street to receive your brand of justice. There are plenty of examples of your type of “person” throughout history and, like all disagreeable human attributes, none are isolated to a particular race, nationality or genetic classification.
