For instance, look at the Supreme Court case Holder v. Alabama and how it changed the Voting Rights Act, there is a direct line to slavery and the racism that fueled it. At this very moment States are using this ruling to reinstate laws that disenfranchise black voters who suffered after the fall of Reconstruction.
Atonement and repentance are also accurate, because too many of us believe that once the Civil War was over all Americans were equal, this is just not the case. Discrimination on the level of American slavery compounds and effects us to this day. Most black Americans still live in the South, Southern schools are more integrated than Norther n schools because Brown v. BoE was more heavily enforced there. Certain counties in the South needed to get sign off from the Department of Justice to change their voting laws because they were found to be continuing their long history of discrimination against black people, a white nationalist shot up a Walmart partly because despite the fact that racially infused murder has been a Hallmark of our nation for hundreds of years -- we still don't take it seriously enough to fund counter efforts.
Perhaps I'm blinded, but almost every social story in America today is connected back to the effects of slavery and racism.
Whose original sin? I moved to the United States in 1986 from another continent. Not one of my ancestors was in any way involved with US chattel slavery. Because I have fair skin, do I bear this original sin? Does every person in America with fair skin whose ancestors moved to the US after the US Civil War also bear this original sin?
I'm not saying that something wrong didn't happen, but it's not useful or productive to state that there is an "original sin" that all people living in the US with fair skin are responsible for when the overwhelming majority of those with fair skin moved to this country from the very end of the 19th century onwards.
No one who eats meat can hold a moral position higher than the butcher, even if they don't work in the slaughterhouse.
Good place to be able to get a small farm and run it with a middle class background and means.
What does climate change denialism have to do with slavery? How about gay marriage activists? Gender fluidity?
It sounds like you're spending too much time in an echo chamber. I suggest you step outside for a bit to see other burning social issues.
The weird thing about the Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_upon_a_Hill#Use_in_United...) is that the "use in United States politics" section only lists sources from 1961. I can remember the sermon showing up in my history books in the '70s; it surely didn't disappear for 300 years.
define this. Those metaphors certainly do "frame" things, but what criteria is being used to make determination if that framing is "proper"? My view is that it frames thing in a loaded biased way that presupposes the solution, which is atonement. There is a clear and unambiguous bias towards the solution you've already decided upon by using that framing. Basically, you've worked from the solution backwards towards the framing that will convince others to arrive at your chosen solution.
Although providing a great line for The West Wing, I would say America's treatment of the indigenous people is America's original sin.
For example Trump's favourite president is Andrew Jackson with the stain of trail of tears: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson#Indian_removal_...
This is what humans do.
I'm aware of god awful amounts of present-day adverse impact upon the black community, among others. What I'm not quite understanding is that slavery is the cause as opposed to myriad racist policies or otherwise dysfuntional systems between 1865 and now.
They're simply different things, slavery doesn't imply racism though the US system was almost entirely on racial lines.
Either way there's a broken situation that needs fixed.
However, Western slavery required racism to justify it (they are less intelligent, they are genetically engineered for labor, they feel less pain, etc.) that racism has led to various laws that hold back people to this day and have been used to justify terrible policies, such as poll taxes, redlining, contract leasing, school segregation, medical discrimination, etc.
Fundamentally the two biggest policies I'd like to see enacted to benefit ALL Americans is full enfranchisement and desegregation of schools. It's my belief, possibly naive, that these are root cause issues and would fix a lot of the artificial inequality we see today.
I suppose my confusion or perhaps contention would be that it isn't slavery that is America's original sign but rather racism, or perhaps more generically "discrimination" as the definition of "white" is rather fluid over history itself.
> full enfranchisement
Would that be in the sense of removing barriers to voting (simply showing up) or re-enfranchisement of felony convicts? I wrestle with the former, security vs. incidental exclusion. The latter I'm fully in support of, though I don't know about voting while serving time but that is rather driven by a fear of some kind of "voting your way out."
> desegregation of schools.
In what sense? We do not have explicit segregation in schooling and haven't for decades, but people seem to group together along socio-economic lines which furthers the problem.
I know that education is a severe problem, my home state has a "Corridor of Shame"[0] such that entire counties are just academic dumpster fires. I don't know that desegregation would help so much as simply adequately funding and reforming our dysfunctional schools. Unfortunately I don't know how to do that in am appropriate matter, when you run into children who don't care about academics from families that don't care about academics.
In terms of full enfranchisement I mean simply showing up, I live in Oregon which has vote by mail and it's wonderful. I first voted in 2012 (NYC) and had to wait outside online for hours to do so, I lived in a low income neighborhood at the time and many folks left the line to go to work because they could not deal with the cold.
I believe voting in a right that should not be taken away for almost any reason (perhaps treason), it's difficult for me to promote removing voting rights for felons with the understanding that our criminal justice system has disproportionately affected others, so a blanket policy remains my default position.
Desegregation is a tougher cookie, but fundamentally I believe it is up to us to understand the factors that cause it and work to remove them. Because desegregation is a multi variable issue it requires looking at housing policy, transportation, zoning, criminal justice and others.
This episode of This American Life makes a pretty compelling argument to me: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/562/the-problem-we-all-live...
> Western slavery required racism to justify...
That's not really congruous with history. Firstly, American slavery took on a uniquely racial tone about 50 or so years into Anglo colonization. At the outset slaves were legally treated identically to indentured servitude; to gloss over some obviously tortured history: at some point though it became onerous to track ownership and simply more convenient to identify someone as a slave by the color of their skin.
"At the outset of [Black Africans in Renaissance Europe], Kate Lowe defines the editors’ key question: how were the main stereotypes concerning black people established in this period? She provides several examples relating to the main set of prejudices: the African was generally identified as a naked person who would mutilate his/her face and body with scarification, piercings, and tattoos; he/she would be considered as carefree and characterized by immoderate laughter, unaware of his/her condition, lazy and sexually promiscuous, physically strong, a good musician or dancer. Lowe recognizes the existence of noble or ennobled black men in European courts, but she stresses the role of black people as a necessary counter-image in the construction of European whiteness and ‘civilization’ (a notion coined in the eighteenth century). This is a necessary starting point, although some of the chapters develop a more nuanced vision of race relations in this period."
(https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/619)
It may not be possible to read too much into the legal change between temporary indenture and permanent slavery.
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/18/podcasts/the-daily/busing...
The myth that it was failed was in my brain, and I was in a school district in KY in the 70's that was one of the early places to start it.
That busing was too effect appears to be the case (the thesis of the podcast), and that's why it was stopped.