I'm gettin' tired of hearing about this foolishness! Y'all have GOTTEN your 'reparations'! Ya been gettin' 'em for yrs! ADC. Food Stamps. Title 8 housing. Medicare. Head Start. Program after program ad nauseam! Just WHAT kind of "reparations" are you wanting? Ya lookin' for a big check to 'make up' for your ancestor being a slave? Well, that ain't happenin'! Lemme 'splain something to ya!
First of all, I don't owe you anything! I AM NOT responsible for what happened to YOUR ancestors 150 years ago when they may have been slaves. [NOTE: There were many 'free' black ppl living in this country who WERE NOT slaves!] I've never OWNED a slave nor did any of my ancestors (per tracing my family tree)!
What YOU need is a little bit of 'history' on the subject of 'slavery' in the United States!
Contrary to popular belief, the Civil War of the 1860s did not begin over the question of slavery & the abolishment of it. It began as an 'economic' fight between the northern (primarily New England) states & the southern states over cotton. In the beginning southern states did grow cotton, but not on a large scale. Tobacco, rice, sugar were the staples of southern economy with some cotton which they sold to English merchants for their manufacturing of cloth. Northern states also wanted the cotton for cloth manufacturing but little was sold up north because southern farmers could get better prices & make more money selling it to the English. As English demand for cotton grew, less & less was sold north. Northerners were angry! The abolition of slavery didn't become a factor in the Civil War until the northerners "realized" that southerner slave labor was growing the cotton. So, they figured if there weren't any slaves to do the work, less cotton would be grown & sent to England & prices to them would decrease. So--"abolish slavery" solve the problem & save northern manufacturing! This was NOT an altruistic concern for the enslaved people but it did get more support from the the other colonies outside of New England.
By this time Southern planters had seen a need to expand their production, grow more cotton & they needed labor for the back breaking job. At first, they used indentured servants, both African & European but as demands for cotton grew, colonies found African slavery more beneficial and easier to control.
NOTE: The very first 20 enslaved Africans were brought into the British colony of Jamestown VA in 1619 by a privateer who had seized them from a Portuguese slave ship headed for islands in the Caribbean. There were approximately 6.5 million enslaved persons brought to the Americas between the mid-1700s thru 1808 when slave trade was totally abolished & it was illegal to bring slaves onto US shores.
ALSO NOTE: 'Americas' does NOT mean 'American states'. It refers to ALL of the 'Americas' which included ALL of the Caribbean islands as well as Spanish & Portugese held areas of South America.
Civil War broke out between the Union (the North) & the Confederacy (South) in 1861 & continued until 1865, but y'all know all of that. I'm not gonna give a lecture on the Civil War. If you've got questions, go look it up.
By the time the Civil War ended there were approximately 4 million black slaves freed. Then came the three Reconstruction Amendments, the 13th, 14th & 15th Amendments and the "carpetbaggers" who came down from the North to "help" the slaves adjust to freedom. They were scammers, cheats, thieves & interestingly Democrats (keep in mind that Lincoln was a Republican!) who took full advantage of the uneducated blacks more often than not leaving them worse off than they were to begin with! (But that's another story.)
OK. Let's get back to the "reparations" part of this discussion. I will agree that a lot more could have been done to help the freed slaves, should have been done, and wasn't done to help them integrate. Much 'bad blood' & discrimination between Southern whites & their former slaves & it was bad anyway ya look at it. HOWEVER all of this took place 150 yrs ago! I had nothing to do with it nor is there anyone alive who did!
When census was taken back then for the purpose of voting & governmental representation only whites were listed by name. Black slaves were counted & listed by age & sex--no names except in very rare circumstances. NOW. There is no way on GOD's Green Earth that anyone can actually prove without a shadow of a doubt their their ancestor of 150+ yrs ago WAS actually a slave on 'such & so' plantation & owned by 'such and so'! Ever watch the PBS program "Finding Your Roots" with Henry Louis Gates? Rarely can he & his researchers EVER find an actual 'named slave' when working on a person's family tree. I recall one guest (can't remember her name) who thought her ancestors were slaves but it turned out that they were actually "free" blacks from the North! She was really surprised about that!
Yes, there were 4 million slaves freed but during those 150 yrs you personally cannot trace your ancestry back to any *specific one* of them! In the last 150 yrs there have been intermarriages of blacks with Native Americans, whites, Mexicans, persons from all over the world of all ethnic backgrounds. I doubt there really are any pure blooded black people in the USA today! And like mentioned above some black ppl were never slaves. So there is absolutely no way that any black person living today could absolutely with no shadow of doubt prove that their ancestor was a slave! (Side note: FYI Not ALL enslaved people of the south worked in the fields. Many were very highly skilled craftsmen in woodworking, blacksmithing, carpentry, animal husbandry as well as domestic skills.)
So, to wrap this all up all I can say is that if y'all are hell bent on demanding reparations for possible enslaved ancestors, I'd suggest ya go after Portugal & Britain who trafficked 15,000,000 Africans selling them into slavery. About 70% of those went to "the Americas". Ya might wanna also go after the Kingdom of Dahomey located in present day Benin on the coast of Africa.That was a major source of slaves for the Atlantic Slave Trade Then try Mali, Nigeria, Algeria, Cameroon, Chad and the Barbary Coast! They all made slavery in the United States possible. Go get some reparations from them! You're NOT gettin' from me!
We've done all we could to try to make up for what we were responsible for--*refer to the first paragraph*--so time for y'all to get off your butts, go get a job, be responsible for yourself & quit tryin' to get the rest of us to pay you off for stuff we didn't do! Come to think of it--on the other hand--what reparations are due to the Chinese who were brought here to build the western railroads? The Japanese during WWII? The Irish who came here after the potato famin--"Irish & Dogs" need not apply? Or the German refugees who were poorly treated after escaping Europe during WWII? Or any of the other racial & ethnic peoples who found themselves in these United States? Where are their reparations??
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Those are some of the exact words used by Googles censors, aka 'Orwelliancontent police,' in describing many of our controversial stories.Stories later proven to be truthful and light years ahead of the mainstream media. But because we reported those 'inconvenient truths' they're trying to bankrupt ANP.
