I'm sure this silly drivel is about to erupt from the lips of many others, too, who have no idea that it's entirely possible to disagree with their views and remain a thoughtful and fair-minded person.
The subject of race is so tangled up in the USA. For example, Thomas Jefferson once wrote:
Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that His justice cannot sleep forever.
He also said:
Slavery is like holding a wolf by the ears. You can't hold it forever, and dare not let it go.
He was talking about slavery. At the time, he owned slaves, and -- in the same book, if I recall correctly -- concluded that blacks were probably inferior to whites intellectually. But I'm pretty sure he was in love with Sally Hemmings, a slave and his deceased wife's half-sister, actually. Sally was supposed to be very beautiful; she was said to resemble Martha, TJ's wife.
So how mixed-up and self-contradictory do you want to get?
Blacks landed in North America with the first boatloads of white settlers, about 1619. About 120 years later, the Virginia Slave Code was developed -- Virginia still a colony, mind you -- that linked slavery to being black. That is, black slaves were defined as being different from white slaves or indentures. This latter group could be free someday, while if your mother was black, you would always be a slave.
Actually, this wasn't done out of hatred or anything. It was because nobody wanted to work in the Virginia colony. Perhaps the landowners and estate managers held out the promise of freedom to the white indentures in hopes of keeping them in North America as possible settlers when their period of indenture expired.
White indentures were kinda like "rented." Many of them sold seven years of their labor for the fare to the New World. Others were working off debt -- and their debtors sold the debt to someone else. By contrast, blacks were abducted from Africa and were sold outright to planters and others.
And slavery didn't begin with the colonization of North America. The slave trade already had gone on for centuries. It was just that North America represented a good market of buyers. I mean, who in their right mind would volunteer to come to a complete wilderness and slop around growing indigo, hemp, and tobacco for some rich guy in England?
Less than 10% of the slaves taken from Africa were sold in North America. Many more were sold to landowners and other interests in Brazil and other places in South America. They were used largely as miners and had a life expectancy of seven years. At least in the US, black slaves lived longer and were even encouraged to thrive -- if they had kids, their owners had more people to work for them, or to sell.
Slavery is a terrible thing, no matter who suffers it or where. Jefferson, again, noted that he believed the worst evil that came of slavery was its impact on white masters and not what it did to the slaves. 'Course this is very arguable.
At any rate, being in full command of quite a few of the gory details about slavery in the USA, I still don't see a case for reparations for slavery. For one thing, more than half the white population of the USA now is descended from people who didn't come to America until after slavery was abolished. Not really fair to stick them with the debt. Second. a total of 620,000 people died in the Civil War. About 375,000 of them -- more than half -- were Yankees. The net result of their actions was emancipation.
I don't know how much more you can pay in reparations than 375,000 lives.
Third, lots of people will argue that impoverished blacks have received tons of aid already, based upon the condition they were left in as former slaves, and due to the Jim Crow laws, etc. I don't know how that can be paid back.
It's kind of like the USA or the UK suing Germany for reparations after WWI. That was one element that caused WWII.
And I have no idea why disagreeing with the Comrade is at all related to racism, except in the minds of people whom I suspect of being nutcases, anyway.
I mean, do Dowd and Carter assume that all black people hold political opinions and principles that are identical to the Comrade's? That would incredibly racist, wouldn't it? I know some black conservatives personally, and many more by their reputations.
However, blacks do vote probably more than 90% Democrat, which I must admit, I find rather bizarre. At the time of the Civil War, the Democrat Party split into northern and southern organizations that each ran their own candidates. They weren't really on speaking terms. The Republicans ran Abe Lincoln.... and the very fact that a Republican was elected touched off secession. The Republicans, you see, had founded their political party on anti-slavery. Not necessarily abolition, and not always on moral grounds, but still, the Republicans' commitment to at least limiting slavery drove all those nervous slave states into rebellion.
A solid Democrat South following the Civil War and into the early decades of the 20th Century kept blacks pretty much as second-class citizens. But the Republicans didn't do much to correct this situation, either. Tired of fighting, afraid of setting off another civil war, etc., and just plain old indifference.
Right now in northern cities with large black populations, like Chicago, for instance, blacks are often still kept as "dependents" via aid programs like housing projects, welfare, patronage, etc. It's a screwed-up system. It doesn't make people free; it keeps them dependent.
This is why I hate socialism -- it creates a perennial dependent class of slaves. And not necessarily black, either.
So, who's the racist, Mr. Carter? And who's the oppressor? And why?
Actually, I don't think Dowd or Carter or any of the others have really thought things through. I think they're just burdened with a sense of guilt that white people could ever be so nasty as to keep slaves, and they think if they throw other peoples' money at the descendents of slaves, somehow they'll sleep easier. In short, they're intellectually bankrupt and probably morally bankrupt, too. And they're supporting dependency, which is closely akin to slavery. Believe it.
Dowd and Carter might do better to hire a psychiatrist rather than to try to re-make the USA into their own twisted images. I mean, do they really require a class of victims to assure themselves of their moral worth?
That's just sick.
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