Thursday the Senate passed a resolution apologizing for slavery. My first reaction is, with all the problems facing this country (health care, take over of companies, terrorists, Gitmo etc) is this a good use of the Senates time? My next reaction may get me in trouble with the PC crowd.
Even though blacks were treated like animals, abused and killed. Even though there is no justification for slavery my question is: Are blacks in the US today better off than those that are still in Africa? Meaning could slavery with all its horrors actually have benefited those blacks that live in this country?
First we have to state that slavery was going on before the US was born and continues today and that only 3% of all slaves were in the US. The last numbers I could find were the average black makes $35000 in the US and $1500 in Africa. The life expectancy is much lower in Africa and AIDS is much higher. US blacks are better educated and healthier than African blacks.
While the atrocities of slavery cannot be justified are there any blacks living in the US today who would want to go back to the poverty of Africa? What does an apology for slavery do for the country? Will the race baiters be satisfied and move on now? I thought this was supposed to be all behind us now that we have a black President. This is not a justification for slavery just a realistic look at where we are today. Perhaps it was a dark time in history that was used to teach us and those families that went through it were given grace and are today better off than if they hadn't.
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Now that the Senate has apologized for slavery, will the nation finally be forgiven for the acts of the southern states? Now that an apology has been given will a THANK YOU from the NAACP be forthcoming to the families of the Northern states, many who fought and died to begin the end of slavery in the United States?
ReplyDeleteSince the United States has apologized to the Native American and the Black Slave, will it continue with the rest of the population that has been downtrodden with the help of the heavy hand of local and federal governments?
Let’s begin with the children if the industrial north that were robbed of their childhood because they were force to work in near slave like conditions of industrial factories. Then we could move on to the to the early coal miners in the West Virginia and Colorado. The mine owners with the government’s help didn’t have to whip and kill the miners to keep them down. The company stores and black lung did it for them. There were still plenty of deaths when the miners tried to unionize. From there go to the meat packing plants in Chicago and elsewhere. If you hurt yourself you were on the street with ten other people willing to take you job at factories where not only the cattle were being killed.
There are more than enough human right violations in the past that might need to be apologized for. Each wave of new immigration brought in a new prejudice and discrimination. There were the Germans-Americans, the Irish-Americans, the Italians-Americans, etc. Most of the different groups melted into the melting pot and moved on with their lives, becoming American of German, Irish or Italian decent. Now that the apology has been offered to the Black Slaves, will they melt into the melting pot and stop calling themselves African-Americans and get on with their lives?
Or is this just the first step towards reparations, which opens a whole new can of worms.