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Are you responsible for the crimes of your father?
Specifically, well, I can't see what benefits I received from his crimes that are unusual compared to the next person. To the other, though, my family name isn't going to carry me to the White House.
My counterpoint:
• Your father owns a company that has an office in Liberia. Upon his death you inherit the company. Certainly, you take measures on your conscience to correct the immediate, glaring disparities, but does the fact of his death exempt the company or its executives from making proper amends for the crimes of the past?
Or should the 22nd century Tiassa Dynasty be held accountable?
The inheritor should be expected to at least
return the stolen goods.
Every once in a while, the case of indigenous American tribes comes up. Crimes of the past, stole the land, attempted genocide ... look into the running nightmare that is BIA. The amount of money pilfered from the tribes over time has been pegged as high as a half-trillion dollars. And these are responsibilities the US government sought to undertake when negotiating treaties.
Did your great-great-great grandfather negotiate a bad treaty with a tribe somewhere? Does the current generation still see the effects of that treaty? The theft is still ongoing.
What is the argument for equality? That people afforded equal opportunity and common circumstance should perform similarly if not equally? When in the history of the United States has African-descended skin
ever been afforded equal opportunity and common circumstance?
Take the Emancipation Proclamation, for instance: freeing black slaves was the right thing to do, but it's a shame that it only occurred of necessity. The Proclamation was politically timed, and an effort to crush the southern economy. Sure it got the job done, but black freedom was less important than the federal government's authority over the states.
And there's a symptom I would love to document professionally or whatever. We all endure it sometime in our lives.
• An improvement in circumstance is expected to bring an immediate satisfactory result. The blacks are free, why aren't they as "well-mannered" and "educated" as their former masters? (Oh, gee, could it be the forced illiteracy and the perverse social arrangement imposed upon them?) We've fought and hated blacks with Jim Crow laws and made such a mockery of "separate but equal" that the notion had to go; but why couldn't the blacks, with third-hand textbooks and expected them to create a first-class education. Take an illiterate and throw him into a college class, say three-hundred level history. What? He has the opportunity. He's in college. Why isn't he performing? Is it the dark skin? Because it can't possibly be the poor schooling, discriminatory laws, and racist enforcement of those laws, could it?
• The people at the top seem to wish equality to happen without ever having to give anything to the lower groups. In a vacuum, this is possible, I suppose, but in reality we see constant finagling to further consolidate the wealth and opportunity to fewer hands.
We have enough problems; we need to solve the race issues so we can see other problems clearly. But asking the traditional losers of race issues to simply get over it, put on a smile, and take part and trust the traditional winners and schemers of race issues, which winners have never shown a certain human integrity warranting trust, simply isn't practical.
In fourth grade, I was attacked for my ethnicity, and then punished by the school for being held down and beaten on the grounds that I was involved in a fight. I've never forgotten that, and if I ever meet the teacher responsible for that (Pete Fenton), I might actually forego my pacifism and demand of human dignity so I can drag his fat ass behind a truck for a mile or so. And then I'll ask the courts to lock him up for being involved in a race crime.
Now ... the thing is that I can't possibly allow myself to carry this through the rest of my life. Except for the fact that I see the pattern repeating itself over and over, and if it was wrong when I went through it on such a small scale, I don't see how it's right in the macrocosmic application.
And that's a primary factor in my sympathy to ethnic minorities suffering any degree of oppression. The whole cycle has to be broken completely before the sensitivity goes away. But breaking the cycle demands too much of the folks at the top, so apparently it's better to just keep demanding of the lower groups, exacting a larger toll over a longer period, in exchange for immediate greed.
So says me. Er ....