Jamestown Va. Circa 1619. I would have turned back the first boatload of 20 or so Africans that where brought here to be sold into slavery and made the Southerners pick their own damn cotton. Whole lot better, more prosperous and safer nation if we could go back and find a way to keep the negroes out.
Hey, you people who give Zona a hard time. Do you see this? Do you understand that there are people who think like THIS?
So when people say that blacks should shut up about the slavery and the lynchings and the discrimination because the blacks of today never experienced any of that...
I SAY BULLSHIT!
Because there are people like THIS everywhere, and especially apparent on this board. And black people of today know that. I cannot even begin to imagine the concept of someone HATING me just because I am white. But black people, even black people today, know what that's like.
Teaching moment time. . . .also avoiding having the thread sidetracked into a separate issue here. . . .
What IF that first boatload of slaves had been turned back? Would the ship's captain have just transported them to Canada or Mexico, both still slave owning nations at that time? Or failing to find a buyer, would he just have drowned them or otherwise disposed of them? The life in store for most of those slaves brought to this country was cruel, miserable, unjustifiable. But what if we had prevented it?
The descendants of those slaves would have a huge chance to live in some of the most impoverished nations in the world today, some would be terrorized, tortured, maimed, and threatened by brutal warlords, some would never known anything more than a subsistance state of life. As indefensible and unconscionable as slavery was, most black people in this country who descended from those slaves enjoy a much higher quality of life than they would if somebody hadn't dragged their ancestors over here.
But what if we had made ourselves a white supremacist nation and kept all black people out?
No George Washington Carver.
No Alex Haley.
No Louis Armstrong or Bill Cosby or Denzel Washington or any of the great writers, artists, athletes, and performers who have enriched our lives. No Thurgood Marshall, no Clarence Thomas, no great minds and teachers such as Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, William Raspberry et al.
We would have been the poorer for it. We don't have poor black people, violent black people, corrupt black people because the people are black. We have such things because of a history and legacy and mindset that encourages people to be poor, to be violent, to be corrupt, to hate. And it didn't happen because of slavery. That war was fought and won. It happened because of a shift in concept of our Constitution and what we as a nation were intended to be. And that happened early in the 20th Century.
And that I would very much like to go back and change.
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