Since your organization seems obsessed with the past sufferings of Blacks at the hands of Whites, I would like to ask you how your organization classifies "White" people. Is it purely by skin color? Or would there be some sort of preliminary genetic testing required before you extort people for more handouts? What if a person is half-White? Do the Western concepts of what justice and liberty are mean ANYTHING at all to you?
One fact your organization seems to deliberately ignore is the simple truth that slavery has existed in Africa since the beginning of time. Europeans didn't start the institution of slavery, they ended it. And since the rapid decolonization of Africa during the twentieth century, the slave trade has once again started in the exact same parts of Western Africa that thrived on that trade over 500 years ago. Considering the fact that Blacks have been given preferential treatment in this country often at the expense of better-qualified Whites in the last 40 years, the question begs, isn't your organization's behavior like that of an ungrateful child who is given every opportunity by his parents, but STILL hasn't gotten their act together?
If anyone OWES anyone, it is Blacks that owe Whites for bringing their ancestors over here from Africa, instructing them in personal hygiene, drastically increasing their life expectancies, and raising their standard of living in every imaginable way. What about the immensely disproportionate rate of Black on White crime? Or do White people not count for your organization, except insofar as they can be intimidated into coughing up billions of hard-earned dollars? VINCENT
Comments
What is a white person? CURE has never agreed on an official definition. But my definition is a person who has the political status of whiteness. It's not a genetic condition, it's a function of how society works.
And part of being white is being privileged, whether or not you want to be, and often in complete ignorance of your privileges. If you have the courage and intellectual honesty to do it, you might take a look at
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~jbloom/problems/Backpack.pdf
Slavery existed all over the known world up until the 1800s, though probably not since the dawn of time. Most Europeans as late as 1500 were essentially slaves of their aristocratic masters. However, chattel slavery, in which the slave was solely an economic good, and the master had no legal obligations to the slave, was a new thing that emerged in the Americas in the 1600s. It was an especially brutal form of slavery, profoundly different from what existed in Africa or in Europe or in Native American societies. Chattel slavery was no more like traditional slavery than trench warfare was like a duel between gentlemen.
As far as Europeans ending slavery, let's not forget the slaves had a lot to do with it. Between the independence of Haiti and the end of the US Civil War, tens of thousands of descendants of Africans fought for their freedom and won it. The Civil War came about because slaves could not be held in the South without cooperation from Northern whites, and the South lost because it no longer had the slave workforce and because ex-slaves joined the army of the North. Sure, there were white abolitionists, and I respect and revere them as role models. But they were always a small minority of whites. African-Americans largely won their own freedom.
Suppose that African-Americans had gotten preferential treatment for the last 40 years, as you suggest. How would this balance the white preferential treatment for more than 400 years?
You talk about what Africans in this country owe white kidnappers. Okay. Suppose you were kidnapped by aliens and taken to a planet where you lived 3 times as long, were never sick, and could never be hungry, but you were never told where you were, or what happened to your loved ones, and you were treated as an inferior, and forced to speak the alien language and practice the alien religion. Would you be grateful? If so, you are the one who has no grasp of justice or liberty.
Black on white crime is quite unusual. That's why it's such a big deal on TV -- that and implicit racism. Think through your own life, and that of white people you know. How many of them were hurt by Black people? As far as white crime towards Blacks, it's very common. It's illegal to discriminate on the basis of race in housing rentals and sales, and it happens many times every day. That's just one of many examples that most folks don't even think of as crime.
But you know my real bottom line? I like reality, not self-deception. Racism keeps white people ignorant. Twisted with self-hatred and guilt, always in denial about our history, we look for a white knight that will tell us we are okay. And every white knight that comes along lies to us. And we end up with a country that lacks decent free health care, that has weak unions, that has a foreign policy of piracy for corporations and death for the rest of us, that is aborting the next generation with toxic chemicals.
You can't protect yourself from the real enemy if you fall for the trick idea that Black people are your enemy. You might as well be Wiley Coyote, because (beep beep) you will get run over every time. You might as well be the Scarecrow, standing there waiting for the Wizard to tell you who to hate, never knowing about the man behind the curtain, and never knowing you do have a brain, because you have never had the courage to use it.
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