Africans Should Be Ashamed for Having Sold Their Fellows into Slavery
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There was already a precedent for slave trade in the region prior to European colonialism. Europeans may have paid better, and it seems likely their demand led to a consequent increase in supply. But to implicitly suggest that African rulers were just victims of European wealth seems a bit simplistic, given the preceding history of slavery in the region. 1
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Did you just awaken from a long sleep? Like....oh that has lasted for a few hundred years? LOL. Because..........Africa has been internally warring and killing and enslaving each other forever. Since Moby Dick was a minnow. They enslaved far far more than the American South ever did prior to our own civil war. This is one reason I have never felt any guilt tto blacks here. About what they wine my ancestors did to theirs. I tell you hem I don't give a shit. That they need to look at their own country's history. Oh of my favorite writers.....KIPLING....said those savages like in Africa and India needed the white man...mainly the Brits...to control them. To save them from themselves. He called this the white man's burden. After hearing of these recent atrocities in the new country of the Sudan.....I cannot help but feel that KIPLING may have had a point. 2
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How about everyone recognizes that no one is responsible for history? No one needs to pay reparations for what happened in the slave trade, white or black (save for human traffickers, and even then only the slavery they themselves participate in). Because everyone that participated in it IS DEAD. The argument for reparations is frequently conflated with the white guilt narrative you are critiquing, but the actual rationale behind them is somewhat different and a bit more defensible. The contention is that the legacy of slavery and segregation created an entire class of people set at distinct socio-economic disadvantage, and that reparations are a means of setting the scales of opportunity even again. All that being said, I don't support reparations. I'm skeptical that they would effect much change, and I think it creates a feasibility issue as well as compounding the marginalization of other oppressed peoples who would not receive reparations but whose socio-economic position is just as consequential to a legacy of oppression. I think the better solution is deliberate and intentional socio-economic reform policy, but the details seem tangential... 1
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I'm glad that everybody is at least displaying a bit of common sense this time. I have to say, yes, I agree that it is useless to complain about the crimes that our ancestors did. We condemn the Bible extremely thoroughly when the Bible dictates in the old testament about how children should be punished for the sins of their parents. I think we should also condemn people who complain about acts that have been committed hundreds of years ago. Why should America be ashamed for people in the past who sold black people in slavery. I'm not racist, but geese, America is the innovative and advanced nation it is because of all the natives being sold into slavery under control, but America is also a great nation because there was an end to the slave trade happening. We can't regret the past, we just have to accept it for what it has done for us, good or bad. America would be entirely different today if we never sold native blacks into slavery, nor would it have been the same if it hadn't stopped either. All good things must come to an end. 1
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Slavery has been around since before written history. As you conquered the weaker or less advanced militarily you kept the people that you don't kill as slaves. It's was the accepted way of the world. Now we don't know how to deal with the human spoils of war. If you don't kill them then you have to reconquer them or keep them as prisoners and support them. As the US government knows it's a lose, lose situation. 1
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Slavery has been around since before written history. As you conquered the weaker or less advanced militarily you kept the people that you don't kill as slaves. This form of slavery - that practiced by the people of the classical age - feels far more legitimate to me. Slave raids and abducting people who are merely trying to go about their lives does not. During the Children's Crusade some 20,000 children (if, indeed, such ever happened) were admitted onto boats to be taken to the Holy Land. Instead, the boat-owners brought them elsewhere and sold them as slaves. Defeat in battle seems legitimate for the time (that was how soldiers were payed for a time, dividing the spoils of war which oftentimes was largely composed of slaves); abduction is never legitimate. On the one hand that's indeed true because anyone who sells another living human into slavery should be ashamed. But on the other hand every region has its politics and wars and I'm sure sometimes they were eliminating their local enemies. That doesn't make it right. But I'm saying there may have been more motivations than just money. 1
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