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Comment by zentiggr | Hacker News Reader

I think Baldwin and so many others have a very strong point, and the ideal picture of America is too enticing for many.

The blunt reality is that the country I've grown up in was facilitated by bloodshed and presumed superiority. Every step of the founding and growth of "America" was paid for by the blood of others.

There's no easy way for a lot of people to accept that their entire existence comes from a horribly tainted history.

What I realized over my formative years is that no one is exempt, and everyone has the choice to try to make life better.

And a lot of people still fall in that category of "It is hard to convince someone of facts when their identity depends on ignoring those facts."

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> The blunt reality is that the country I've grown up in was facilitated by bloodshed and presumed superiority. Every step of the founding and growth of "America" was paid for by the blood of others.

That's true of every country. I agree we should not try to hide it; these are indeed historical facts, and historical facts should be recognized, not hidden. But we should also not imply that America is somehow different in this respect from other countries. It isn't.

That was certainly not my intent; we can generalize to say that basically every political entity ever has taken from others in order to grow. By violent means or occasionally by less violent, that is the human condition.

I think the idea that your people/ancestors/country is uniquely horrible is itself a kind of bizarre and twisted sublimated notion of superiority.

Human history all over the world is rife with genocides, slavery, torture, forced expulsions, institutionalized discrimination and hateful treatment of minorities, and notions of ethnic supremacy. America isn't the slightest bit special in that regard. Every nation on Earth is built on the blood of somebody, and most of them aren't wallowing in guilt over it, nor should they. It's the normal human condition.

I also don't think it's productive. People are not amenable to the idea that they should share guilt for crimes that happened before they were born - the moral sentiment that crimes pass down through blood is mostly extinct, so that line of argument tends to alienate people. Further, it places the past in an anachronistic lens of modern morality - in today's moral universe, every single person of the past was wicked. So what's the point of harping on it? None of us would be here without them, nor would today's moral universe even exist, so people are necessarily going to feel some gratitude for those that came before, so again, you're alienating people who might otherwise be sympathetic.

If you want change, just make the argument for that change and look forward, not back.

While crimes do not pass by blood, wealth does. This is the argument for some kind of reparations.

I don't think that's a winning argument. Many (perhaps most) people will be able to show that they did not benefit from any inherited wealth. Many people (including black people!) did not have ancestors in America at the time. For example, under this argument, would Obama be entitled to reparations, given his mother was white and his father an international student from Kenya? Should people have to prove they had enslaved ancestors? What if a black person's ancestors were themselves slaveowners?

It seems much simpler and more honest to say: black people face systemic racism today and therefore we're going to pay each person identifying as black $x every y or at one time. This way you only have to win two arguments: that systemic racism exists, and that people deserve reparations because of it. You don't have to put people on the defensive about their ancestors and whether or not they should feel guilty and in some way personally responsible for reparations, nor do you have to worry about people proving they had ancestors personally affected by slavery or racism.

This will be pretty divisive by itself - a few people don't believe systemic racism is a meaningful concept, or will argue it applies to other groups as well, including white people, and special treatment of any group of people solely because their race will never be very popular. But your approach is extremely divisive and polarizing: putting people on notice that it's their fault and they benefited from this system (whether they did or not, and most people will be quite convinced they did not, and some of them will be right) is about as polarizing as you can get. I don't see any advantage to it. It will foster extremism on both sides.

Of course, reparations could not be on the basis of race. Many white people too have very low generational wealth. Race is not the only privilege. I think doing reparations in the form of a wealth tax and possibly inheritance tax combined with strong social programs focused on underserved communities would be functionally identical to reparations in reducing generational wealth inequities while also fixing other problems and not causing the issues you described.

It's actually worse. Since humanities is essentially controlled by Anglo-Saxon nations, all the former brutally suppressed colonies are also given native histories which reflect those that are just as brutal. This has changed to an extent over the years (notably with Native Americans), but is still canonical as far as India is concerned.

Is there really any argument that once resources became strained anywhere on Earth at any time humans existed they fought for control of them violently? What is the alternative narrative?

I feel like Native Americans were either disparate or were pretty similar to other groups of humans if the area was populous.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabanaki_Confederacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztec_warfare

There are multiple violent narratives as well. The colonial narrative never ceases the violence. The fascist narrative tuns techniques of colonial domination inward to use on its own people.

"Given" native histories? Are you asserting that the historical evidence about these societies is fabricated?

One easy trick is to simply not identify with dead people at all. America's founders were strangers to me. If they're terrible, that's on them, not me.

That seems overly simplistic. You are part of the society that America's founders engineered. You don't have to feel "guilty" for being born where you were, but you do have responsibility to help change the status quo if you believe the current status quo is the result of immoral policies of the past.

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