Should we remove statues of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because they were slave owners? Let's include Andrew Jackson, who signed the Indian Removal Act of 1830.
Remove Washington from the one dollar bill and the current twenty five cent coin. Remove Jefferson from the two dollar bill and the five cent coin. Remove Jackson from the twenty dollar bill. If you are offended by this question, please report me.
It’s a shame that you were already 12 and 17 years old when you first learned of those things. On the other hand, it’s positive that you did learn them at all, because some people have never been either taught about them or informed of them at all.
I wonder if the boy who approached me in school when I was 5 years old and uttered to me the very first racial insult I ever heard in my life was ever educated properly on historical facts that may have changed his attitudes from negative to positive, or if he was raised specifically with those bigoted ideals ingrained in him. He was at least two or theee years older than I was, and for a 5-year-old kindergarten student, all bigger kids seemed older to me, all older kids seemed bigger to me. The insult didn’t even register in my brain immediately, I was 5 and had absolutely no reference for understanding what he meant. When it finally dawned on me later (I don’t know if it was one hour, one day, one week, one month, one year or more), it left an indelible mark in my brain that separates innocent childhood with wariness for my personal safety. Five little words he uttered and made me realize that bad exists.
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I understood that you meant specifically learning about Harriet Tubman at age 12.
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President John F. Kennedy endorsed both the Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba and opening stages of the Vietnam War, is he out also?
President Harry S Truman gave approval for the go-ahead of bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki, yet there is extremely low probability that had Germany not surrendered first, atomic bombs would ever have been used on Caucasians. Delete Truman too?
President William McKinley and military commander/future president Theodore Roosevelt both implemented The Philippine “Insurrection” beginning in 1899, resulting in the deaths of about one million Filipinos. It was also one of the first times the US government used concentration camps to subdue an entire populace.
The list could potentially go on and on.
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It’s difficult to place those atrocities in chronological order and assign any correct timetable of repairing them based on which was worse than another. From the very start of Caucasian presence on a permanent basis in the North American continent, kidnapped people from African countries were dragged along with them. As those same Europeans began the genocide of the Native American people who already populated the land, they were well into enslavement of others.
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No place that is already populated by people is “discovered” when other people show up.
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You may have misunderstood me. I’m not saying that new things or new places are not happened upon all the time. What I’m saying reflects part of what you wrote about colonization. A “conquering” power arrives on the shores of a land to which they have never been before and “claim” it as their own, even though other people already live there. The conquering power then takes over the land, the resources, the people, everything. They claim that they discovered it, which in their justification, makes it theirs, ignoring the fact that it had already been discovered by the original inhabitants, who are then shunted into unimportance.
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This post was edited by Randy D at June 15, 2020 12:29 PM MDT
Randy D 