Colin Kaepernick, on Twitter:
> "Black ppl have been dehumanized, brutalized, criminalized + terrorized by America for centuries, & are expected to join your commemoration of “independence”, while you enslaved our ancestors. We reject your celebration of white supremacy & look forward to liberation for all. "
Point of clarification: by "our ancestors" he's referring exclusively to his African-descended ancestors, not his European-descended ones.
And before someone says 'well they benefited from it'... well we benefit from cheap, abusive labor practices in China and other Asian countries so get off your high horse. Benefiting does not imply acceptance.
England then abolished slavery in the entire British Colonies in 1833, the US took another 30 years to free southern slaves via the Emancipation Proclamation, and another 2 years beyond that to enact the 13th amendment.
> For all of American history, most people did not own slaves.
This is irrelevant. The powerful and influential did. The people who had control over the government for the most part did. Think I'm lying? More than 3/4 of the signers of the declaration of independence were slaveholders[0].
[0]: https://twitter.com/arlenparsa/status/1168192825848213510
I think this is bollocks. In 1775 the slave owners were British subjects. By 1800 they were US citizens, but they were the same people. They didn't change, their citizenship changed.
The better argument is, they're all dead now. All of the slave owners and all of the slaves are dead. Their children are dead. Their children's children are dead. It has been seven generations.
More than that, the large majority of the current day US population are descended from immigrants who came to the US after the abolition of slavery, and even the large majority of those present during the civil war didn't own slaves. Are we to blame a family who immigrated from Poland during WWII?
The dead are responsible for what the dead have done. We are responsible for what we do.
Doesn't this imply a problem with the whole "sins of the father" thing? Otherwise all of those people would have to be condemned as the offspring of a rapist.
In this case it’s especially important because those children were treated very differently from their siblings: a slave owner’s fully white children had full status in society and lived in relative luxury but those borne by slaves inherited their mother’s status. Apologists try to claim that some relationships were consensual but it’s hard to reconcile that with the treatment of any resulting children.
But then what do you propose to do about it? All of those people are dead. We can't bring them back to life and punish them.
> In this case it’s especially important because those children were treated very differently from their siblings
It was no doubt a very important distinction to the children. I wouldn't want to have to argue it was a very important distinction to modern day descendants seven generations later when that ancestor represents less than 1% of their ancestors from that many generations ago.
And the usual argument is to want to assign guilt if you benefited from a bad thing one of your ancestors did. But having existence is a pretty huge benefit, which makes that argument taste quite sour.