[small hijack] I, for one, would be very interested in a thread of this nature, hapaXL. Perhaps you could start one with your very interesting ideas?[/hijack]
Well, on the one hand, I didn’t do any of the terrible things that happaned to minorities. I don’t know when my family came here, but it’s possible none of my anscestors did terrible things.
But on the other hand, as a white male if I stay in America…
I’m not likely to be pulled over for driving a nice car in a nice neighborhood.
I’ll probably never overhear my bosses making racist jokes that attack me and who I am.
I’ll never be asked to give up my culture to fit in.
I won’t have to wonder if politicians are secretly wishing to burn down my house.
And so on.
Even though I haven’t contributed to white power structures, they still exist, and I take benefits from them without even trying. There’s nothing I can do about it, and it doesn’t keep me up at nights. But yes, I feel a little guilty. Not to be PC, or because someone convinced me to. But because my life is made better in innumerable ways by making the lives of minorities worse.
–John
Hey hapaXL…
Um… My Wealth? What wealth? I don’t have any.
But if you’re feeling guilty over being worth so much, email me and I’ll let you pay my utility bills for awhile. 
Hey! I take strong exception to that kind of unfair remark!
…He’s not from Texas.
(Let me add my voice, hapaXL, to those who would be interested in your starting a thread of the nature you describe.)
Um, TexasSpur? I believe slavery in the British Empire was ended in the 1830s. But I COULD be wrong about that.
True, slavery did last a hell of a lot longer in Latin America. But what existed in Europe was mostly serfdom. I believe the last of that went out in the 1860s with Alexander II of Russia.
Guinastasia
slavery in Europe was mostly serfdom until around 1450 when they were trading for African slaves at the tune of around 1000 per year.
After Christopher Columbus discovers America, Europe enslaved Native Americans and shipped them to Europe, however they were not surviving because of disease. They then increased the African slave trade.
Slave trade ended in Britain in 1807, one year prior to America. Slavery ended in Britain in the 1830’s however it lasted until 1880 in Spain.
When I was saying that slavery existed in more years in those countries, I meant the duration from start time to emancipation. Technically, U.S. had slavery for less than 100 years whereas European countries had it for much longer.
It doesn’t matter anyway though. My point is that some people seem to think it was an American invention and only involved blacks being owned by whites. I am saying that no one has been immune from slavery and no race has been above it. All races have been both the slave and the slave owner.
My g-g-g-g-grandfather owned a couple of slaves. Didn’t know about that until a few years ago when my dad was doing some genealogical research (until then, he swore our family never had owned slaves - too dirt poor). In an intellectual way, I’m a little torn over how I feel. After all, nobody checked with me before buying a human being like so much ground round. However, if it hadn’t been for the economic advantages that accrued to slave owners, g-g-g-g-granddad wouldn’t have been as well of as he had been; his daughter wouldn’t have married quite so well; his grandchild might not have had the money to move to north Texas where he met another of my ancestors; and so on and so on. It’s a little paradoxical that I might owe my very existence to an institution that I find abhorrent.
All that being said, I also acknowledge the fact that enslaving Africans, wiping out Indians, and generally being unashamed chicken thieves whenever the chance turned up has less to do with being White (European, whatever) and more to do with being absolutely pig-headed stubborn about surviving and prospering no matter who else suffered. As a species, we’re only just getting to the point where we consider the effects of our actions on others. By our standards today, pretty much everybody was an asshole. That doesn’t necessarily excuse the actions of the dominant culture at that time, but it does provide a little context.
Members of the dominant culture use up and destroy the people and resources around them. If you’re part of a minority culture, you get the short, sharp, pointy end of the stick right in the gut. It’s not a White thing; it’s a human thing. It’s certainly not anything to be proud of, and I’m very glad we’ve got a little perspective on the situation and are trying to improve ourselves.
Man’s inhumanity towards man has nothing to do with race. It is in mans nature to exploit anyone or group so long as he has the resources/power to do so. Any group which hinders man’s insatiable greed is to be destroyed. At one time, there was a race called the Britons who were transported to civilization in Rome to be slaves. These same people also later developed the most extensive empire the world has ever known. Today we exploit mainly on the basis of education and vested wealth.
If you still feel a need to make amends, you can sell all your belongings and help Jimmy Carter build housing for the poor.But keep your money in the bank. You could get mugged.
Did you enslave anyone? PROBABLY NOT!
Did you steal anyones land? PROBABLY NOT!
So, NO, you shouldn’t feel guilty and you don’t owe anyone anything. It has nothing to do with today! What we need to do as a society is move on and stop crying over the past…
Also, the root of the word slave is Slav.
Slav, meaning the Slavic peoples.
My father’s ancestors didn’t come to America until the late 1890s at the earliest. My mother’s family had been here longer (one of her ancestors signed the Texan declaration of independence), but none of them appear to have owned slaves - on the other hand, my great-great-great grandfather was killed fighting for the Union in the Civil War.
But even if all my ancestors owned slaves up until slavery was abolished, I would feel no guilt for it. I am not my ancestors. I’d feel no guilt if my parents owned slaves.
Guilt? Forget it.
Responsibility? Yeah. I think so. I’m a fairly low income employee in one of the wealthier regions of one of the wealthiest nations on the planet. I have a little disposable income beyond paying bills.
Which makes me in a very small minority of the planet’s population.
Some (not all) American blacks were systematically kept to the bottom of the economic ladder for over a century after slavery was abolished. Their children are among us now, poor and with less chance at “the American dream” than most. If they don’t deserve a helping hand, who among us does? And if some of them despair of making it, and start using drugs as an escape or look into petty crime as a way out, certainly they’re “to blame” for their decisions, but don’t we deserve a small share of that blame for not giving them a way out? I’ve been poor enough to know just how hard it is to make your way out of being poor, and I’ve never hit the rock-bottom depths that I can see in the poorer areas around here, or around my former home.
Whatever your politics, the idea that you enable people caught in poverty (a disproportionate share of whom are black) to make their way out is a self-funding proposition. Not only are you paying less in jail, prison, and court expenditures and in drug-rehab. program costs, but they become taxpayers shouldering their share of the cost of government and reducing your share proportionately. The specific programs will vary with your political philosophy; the idea that you ought to have them will not. (I can even see how this would fit a libertarian government if one ever got started in a state.)
And I don’t think hapaXL’s rant was a hijack. Nobody said anything about this being limited to the U.S. of A. Most of the world is substantially below our standard of living. You don’t fix that by artificially reducing ours to theirs in some ill-thought-out attempt at balance. You fix it by undertaking specific programs to gradually bring theirs up to ours. Stuff like that bank in India that makes small loans to poor people to enable them to start cottage industries. Like the program my church (denomination and home parish both) is supporting to write off U.S. and U.N. debts owed by Third World nations, who are forced to tax their poor and well-to-do citizens to cover debt service, straining the poor’s already-substandard standard of living and removing the opportunity for the well-to-do to invest in businesses that would employ, and therefore redistribute money to, the poor. Granted that’s pretty rosy-colored thinking, not doing it is doing nothing but gaining us begrudged debt payments and inheriting ill-feeling among other nations.
Most countries are quite able to take care of themselves if given the chance to. Chile used to have a vibrant economy. It could again if intelligent programs, internal and international, enabled it to do so. Probably the same is true for a dozen other countries in the Third World area. And once they get going good, a real trickle-down effect will begin to work to boost their neighbors’ economies.
Starting in the 1600s, my family owned many hundreds of slaves (thousands over the generations) on many plantations in the Carribean, South America, and the southern States. One South American plantation ancestor was so cruel that he was sanctioned by other plantation owners in his area. How cruel? The average lifespan of his slaves was three years after arrival. I find it hard to get my mind around this particular figure.
Do I feel guilty? Yes.
Would I personally make reparations? No. The family fortune dribbled away once slavery was prohibited. Would I support state funded reparations? Yes, if the reparations were community oriented so as to promote economic improvement and social equality, rather than simply a handing out of cash to individuals. (This is moot for me, however, for I have no connection to the countries in which my family had slaves.)
How does the guilt affect me? I tend to think about what people might have gone through both as individuals and as members of cultures. This leave me somewhat more receptive to trying to understand differing opinions. Although I might not agree, at least I step back and try to understand. I don’t know if I would be this way if it were not for an acute awareness and shame of what my family did. Politically, I strongly encourage efforts to bring marginalised individuals up to the same social and economic level which I am so fortunate to enjoy, and I strongly encourage efforts to bring undeveloped and developing nations up to the same level as the country in which I now live.
The only thing you could possibly be justified in feeling guilty about is not doing enough to rid yourself of the legacy that our ancestors left us. I´ll hazard to say that most countries have histories of racism or some sort of ethnic struggles, so this is not a US-specific issue.
What happened, already happened.
We can´t be held responsible for other people actions unless we continue in the path that they have layed out, as many have. I believe we all have a responsibility to raise the next generation as hate-free as we can; because after all, it´s the future we have command over, not the past.
— G. Raven
I think it needs to be noted that in the context of nation building, that IS honest, hard work.
It may not be pretty, but it’s reality.
The weak do not get to run their own countries, and the strong walk all over the weak. The only difference between America and every single other country in the world is that we are currently winning.
Every single country is playing the same game, and they are all playing by the same rules. The leader changes every couple of centuries or so, but no country ever stops competing. If they do, another country will be more than happy to step up and take the lead role.
I do not condone or justify any of the horible actions that ANY country has taken, but I will not feel guilty about it today.
Ever hear of Waco?
You may disagree with others about what happened there, but there are plenty of white people who wonder if the gov’t secretly wishes to burn down their house.
Paranoia has no skin color.
why? What is so disgusting about luxury and free time? Would you rather be poor and starving? I do hope you start a thread so I can give your ideas the lambasting they so richly deserve.
First, it is asinine to think that life is a zero-sum game and that if A has wealth, he must have stolen it from B. B could be the victim of his own kleptocratic government, or be unlucky enough to live where there is little economic opportunity.
Now I don’t excuse America’s political mischief-making. In the past we have toppled governments at the behest of American companies (Jacopo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 and Muhammed Mossadegh in Iran in 1952 come to mind), and we are definitely to blame for harming Caribbean banana farmers and sugar growers today.
On the other hand, people in India and China, for example, are poor mostly because of their own, homegrown incompetent governments. India blocks foreign trade to protect corrupt and inefficient native industries which soak Indians with artificially-inflated prices that would come down if they competed with foreign companies. China 's dirigiste regime stifles private enterprise and keeps most big companies in the hands of the PLA and its cronies.
Knee-jerk lefty “America is evil” rhetoric is not useful to any discussion of economic injustice. Remember, foreigners can be bastards, too.
I agree completely. I acknowledge that I’m fortunate to be born to American parents and born an American citizen. I acknowledge that, while I’m nowhere even approaching rich or even “comfortably well-off”, I’m still better off than a lot of people even here in the US. To that end, I help people when I can, and am thankful for what I have.
But do I feel guilty? None whatsoever.
By the way, I’ll see your NOFX and raise you a Minor Threat:
here i was, ready to be trampled upon in the usual manner for stating radical views, and i read today not attacks, but actual requests to start new threads with my ideas. one guy even pretty much agreed with me! what’s going on? does this mean i’ve struck a chord somehow? i’m thinking about how to present this in a thread, but it might need to marinate for a couple of days.
i’ll admit, there was a lot of assumptions involved in this statement. i was saying that i make a relatively small amount of money for a college graduate, but my life is really easy and i have everything i want. in relative (worldly) terms, i am rich beyond my wildest dreams. i guess i’m really disgusted by the fact that people make many times more than me and still feel like they are struggling; that American life is so skewed that we can think our lives are hard if we have to drive an old car instead of an SUV. i don’t think luxury and free time are wrong–i just want us to truly appreciate how much we have. how many hours a week would we have to work if we really only cared about food, shelter and clothing that we wore long enough to get holes in?
this is the statement i have big problems with. it is absolutely asinine to believe that life is a zero-sum game, something which i don’t believe i stated. but what is the most asinine belief of all time is the idea that wealth is infinite. somebody else stated that we should gradually bring up the rest of the world to our standard of living.
WHAT?! our standard of living is absolutely non-renewable! if even the people of China and India consumed like Americans, the environment would soon be destroyed.
I never said that if you’re rich, you have to have stolen. I’m saying Americans are rich and much of it is stolen. Please don’t twist it around to make me look stupid.
Only Americans can reduce the act of overthrowing other country’s sovereign governments as “mischief-making.” Talk about understatement. Talk about Newspeak.
why don’t they just open up their countries to foreign investment so the multinational corporations can steal all their wealth? their way is so…inefficient. perhaps they should follow the lead of Brazil. better yet, why don’t they do some innocuous “mischief-making” and overthrow some governments, install puppet regimes, and allow their corporations to ravage those countries? it would certainly help to reduce poverty…
this is always my favorite accusation. my views are “knee-jerk,” despite the fact that i read constantly, listen to alternative radio, and devote years of thought to refining my ideas and theories. i suppose it’s more thoughtful and insightful to buy the myth of the American dream that we have crammed down our throats.
our way of life has serious consequences for the entire world. maybe we shouldn’t care about how or why we do it. maybe the important part is making a change. but i think that until that day, we should feel guilty that we allow it to continue.
Methinks you need to spend more time worrying about yourself, and less time worrying abotu others.
I disagree. They do not have what we have because of their overly restrictive regulations.
When you try to throw around the term “non-renewable,” you ignore progress, inventions and change. Who says that the materials we use today will be the materials we use tomorrow? Who says we will always be using the same fuel sources?
If you want to make a difference then I suggest you start helping people in all your spare time. Lobbying to control the entire world (which is what you are advocating) is a counter-productive effort if you are trying to raise the standard of living in other countries.
And the difference is…? You’re still making a wild assumption. I don’t know about you, but I work for a living.
I didn’t steal a damn thing.
Foreign investment increases wealth. for heaven’s sake, America has heavy foreign investment; Is our wealth being stolen? Increased competition makes domestic industries hurt in the short-term, but it makes them competitive in the long-term. In the 1970s, American car manufacturers turned out big, overpriced gas guzzlers. Japan started importing energy-efficient compact cars. Initially, US car sales suffered, but the increased competition made our car companies produce better cars with benefits to the consumer.
what alternative radio offers besides non-stop RATM is beyond me. you may have a lot of theories, but have you actually checked out conditions in other countries? I have. I lived in Asia during the 90s, I’ve been to India and China, among other places. I’ve seen how people live, what products they buy, and I know what I’m talking about from actual experience.
Enough hijacking. Let’s continue this discussion in a new thread.