Where’s their advocation for $450,000 the to be paid for each of those incidents?
Thank you, Walt. All good and valid points.
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You have a valid point that on the African continent, slavery was propagated by and among African peoples, some of whom collaborated with Europeans for financial gain by selling off their own people. However, you state “there would not have been slavery in the United States.”
Slavery existed for thousands of years on several continents and in numerous cultures worldwide, was carried out by various peoples of various ethnicities worldwide long before Europeans went to the African continent to benefit from it. None of these facts absolve anyone of the wrongdoing that he or she did, I do not seek to excuse or sugarcoat any wrong actions of any of them. To focus only on “the African chieftains” does not truly nor fully address whether or not slavery would have become the institution that it became in the United States or in its predecessor, the Thirteen Colonies from 1607. No race of people nor ethnicity of people nor nationality of people nor any other group/sub-group of people is 100% clean of conscious, 100% innocent of bad acts. Let’s not assume that African chieftains are alone in contributing to slavery. The entire entity of European expansion beyond its own lands is rife with examples of craftiness in figuring ways to lord over other Europeans and non-Europeans, such as colonization, religious supremacy, crushing languages and customs, denigrating cultural practices, taking advantage of natural resources, imbalance of commerce and trade, waging warfare, overcoming through advanced technology and firepower, genocide, and of course, enslavement. The Serfs and the Slavs were not on the African continent, yet other Caucasians sought to subjugate them, indentured servitude was a version of slavery, it pitted one Caucasian against another just as much as African chieftains were in cahoots with Caucasians for a few pieces of silver. As such, even without the aid and corruption of African chieftains, the European mindset of overpowerment may have sought other methods to achieve the same goals. White Americans even found slavery so lucrative that they enslaved some Native Americans and other whites.
Even after the vast numbers of slave ships deposited human cargo on North American shores, slavery produced generation after generation of children born on North American soil who were ripped from their parents, that is not specifically nor directly attributed to “African chieftains”. There has to be a point at which the perpetrators of actions and events stop pointing over their shoulders and say their own fiascos are because of previous administrations. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is not the World History Civil Liberties Union. People on an individual level and in large groups disagreed with and struggled against slavery both before and since the inception of the United States as its own country. Their struggle was neither easy nor quickly resolved, because of the forces they faced, the barricades in front of them. It is that portion of history to which I refer on posing this question above. The ACLU does not claim to be the world‘s saviors for all events throughout history, that is why I focused on this particular issue in this particular question. I am not an advocate for reparations to descendants of slavery (I am one of them), yet it’s puzzling that the ACLU sought reparations for people of Japanese descent living in the US and Japanese-Americans who were imprisoned in US concentration camps during World War II, while ignoring tens of millions of people who had been imprisoned in slavery from 1776 to 1865 and beyond.
Slavery very well may have been an ingrained destiny of and for the United States once it became a country. To assume that it would not have happened without African chieftains is a bit shortsighted.
Thank you.
Based on the points you made in your conclusion to Walt’s post above, and I reprint it here:
“I seriously doubt that there is any real way to totally compensate for the wrongs done by the early settlers or even subsequently by groups like the KKK.”
I agree with you fully that there are no real ways to compensate for past acts from over a century ago. I also think that failing to recognize one group that has quite obviously been wronged yet prop up another group is hypocrisy, especially when the former group is only being used for virtue signaling. The per-person dollar figure is also ridiculous, and further evidence of “deep-pocket greed” which the ACLU negotiated and/or proposed as part of its own kickback through its legal department. These remarks are my opinion.
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Thriftymaid 