(05-08-2022, 09:06 PM)p_rushing Wrote:

(05-08-2022, 08:01 PM)mikesez Wrote: Is it bad to be aware of our slaveholding and colonial past, a past we do not share with Europe?

(05-08-2022, 08:29 PM)mikesez Wrote: European countries were the colonizers, not the colonized.
And you have to go back about 1800 years to the middle Roman Empire to find slavery in Europe. American history is a bit different.

There was always slaves. It doesn't matter what country, every one  has always sold or forced the conquered lands into slavery. African tribes were selling their neighboring tribes instead of killing them or using them as their own slaves.

Europe was also benefiting from the slave trade to America. Do you think the boats all came from Africa or America? Did the boats sail themselves? Europe was getting slaves or using them. Sure they didn't have a need for them like the large land owners in America did but don't claim like Europe moved past its slave history long ago.

That also doesn't affect anything today. The only thing you could claim is that the slave owners had a little more money than if they would have had to pay wages. They probably would have just passed the extra cost on to consumers though so it wouldn't have effected anything in the long run.

The one thing that is a fact is that democrats destroyed the black community and their black owned businesses since desegregation. Black people had no choice but to shop at black owned businesses and the businesses should still exist today. I'm not sure why most of them disappeared around the same time the black family and community also were destroyed.

What could it be that happened that setup a perpetual cycle that keeps people in poverty? You want to talk about CRT, let's call out things that happened in the last 100 years before we start going back hundreds of years saying it causes what is happening today.

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Sure they benefitted from slavery.  A lot of the plantation owners in the Caribbean only stayed a few years, then went back to Europe to enjoy the wealth they accumulated.
And regular Europeans got cheap sugar and coffee out of the deal.
That doesn't mean it changed the basic structure of their society, though. The French Revolution touched on slavery in Haiti, but 99% of the French Revolution had nothing to do with slavery.  Slavery had nothing at all to with the 1848 revolutions.  Then when the Europeans start colonizing Africa, a lot of it is justified as them trying to end African-on-African slavery, but again, their ill-gotten gains in that area did not really change their societies.  It changed Africa drastically.  But it didn't change Europe much.
What you say about America could use a little more critical thinking.  Then end of segregation has hurt things like HBCUs and Black-owned restaurants and corner stores, but, segregation didn't just happen.  And Black people didn't ask for segregation.  It was a harm inflicted on them by government, which continues to have impacts on generational wealth and all sorts of other metrics.
I absolutely agree welfare is often a poverty trap, rather than a lift out of poverty, and I agree that's something we can work on.  We are working with an employee of my wife, who has gotten some welfare recently, but also got a raise last year.  We are finding out that this raise is actually hurting her.  She used to qualify for a subsidized apartment, now she doesn't.  Her kids used to qualify for Chip, now they don't.  The increased rent and health insurance mean she was better off not getting a raise. How messed up is that?
Let's work on that and stop race-baiting each other, shall we?

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