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Originally posted by swissmiss04
Really what's the point of getting reparations when you know that you didn't earn them, but rather received them as a "handout"? Doesn't that just further degrade? Besides, as a point to the whole slavery thing....they were brought here because they were sold off by their own people. It's not like a bunch of white English and Dutch people invaded villages on the Western coast of Africa and rounded up a few thousand. No! In fact, the more powerful tribal lords would capture whole villages and march them to the coast where they would be sold for money or some means of barter to white slavers.
And besides, right now look at the plight of all the people in Africa. Ebola, AIDS, poverty, hunger, female genital mutilation, rampant war, lack of health care, abnormally short life span, etc. I know things were bad here, but somehow I think today's African American's have it a hell of a lot better than their African counterparts. And things were done to all groups that came in that weren't WASPs, such as Germans, Jews, Irish Catholics, Arabs, Italians, Russians, Japanese, etc. And not all white families owned slaves, so to expect all whites to pay for something that wasn't necessarily done by all whites is in fact, wrong and unfair. And isn't fairness what they're seeking?
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Yes, there were Africans who participated in the slave trade, a fact that is often minimized by pro-reparationists. Many African tribes had slaves from the rival tribes And of course it was not only America that had slaves -- most countries in Europe, the Carribean islands and (I think) even southwest Asian countries had slaves or at least participated in their slave trading in other countries. Still, that doesn't make it OKAY in any way.
Furthermore, many of the problems in Africa can be (directly or indirectly) attributed to the fact that the strongest and healthiest Africans were removed from the country and sent into slavery. I think it would be very interesting to see how Africa would have turned out if slavery had never existed. It would be a whole lot different, I'm sure. Not only would Africa be a lot stronger, but America would be a lot weaker.
As I said before, I think the argument for reparations (at least in their current form, i.e. direct compensation to all African-Americans by all non-African-Americans) is ridiculous -- but there is no way that you can argue that this country doesn't owe quite a bit of its reputation as "the world's only superpower" to the fact that we once had a legal slave trade.