(09-21-2022, 06:20 PM)americus 2.0 Wrote:

(09-21-2022, 04:56 PM)mikesez Wrote: Right, but if we were all under the same government and a majority of us voted to give Marty's family and other similarly situated families money, the government taking your money and my money for that would not be robbery.

The point is- who wants to give Marty's family money? Not anyone who has no dog in that fight. And no one present day has a dog in the fight. But if your family wants to give Marty's family money y'all go right ahead. 

I can show via genealogy that no one in my family owned slaves. Hell, the Germans and Irish were treated quite badly when they came over here; look up Irish slavery. We had to pretend to be something else so we weren't treated harshly and only got away with it because we happened to be white. 

So, yeah, I'm not paying anyone anything because I owe no one.

My genealogy shows the exact same thing.  It's possible that my maternal grandmother's family was in the US prior to the Civil War, but unlikely that they owned any slaves. The rest came after. This whole question is very different in a US context vs. a British context.  In the US the freed slaves all immediately got education and many of them also got land (though many weren't able to hold on to it for long, with the banks, shops, and courts rigged against them after 1876). And their slave owners typically went bankrupt during and after the Civil War. 
One can argue that the white people in the US owe reparations to the black people, but it's not for slavery.  It would be for things like Jim Crow and redlining, that happened afterwards.  And my ancestors were here for that.  So were yours.

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