Should Congress apologize to the whites for freeing the slaves?

Question

Blacks are 6% of the population, but about 50% of the jail population. If you call this racist, why isn't the other argument about reparations for slavery racist? If all whites were against Slavery, blacks would still be slaves. What about the whites who were anti-slavery, don't they get credit?

Arabian, if some anti-slavery whites helped to start to put an end to slavery, then all whites weren't pro-slavery, were they? Some whites helped!

Answer 1

I guess I just don't get it!! Does ANYONE really believe that all these calls for apologies for things that happened hundreds of years ago matter?? Why do we continue to beat ourselves up and call for inane apologies instead of concentrating on the present and future with a determination to make life better for everyone??

Chow!!

Answer 2

While it is true that the prison population is disproportionally minority (in California for example, there are more African-Americans in prison than are in college) but this is not to say that slavery and whites can be used as a similar argument. It's a bit like comparing, as is often suggested, apples to oranges, and the comparison cannot be made.

Yes, it is true that many white opposed slavery from the very foundations of the United States. It is also true that hundreds of thousands of them died to free the slaves (as Lincoln articulated the war justification) and it is also true, oh yes, that some free blacks in the South owned slaves as well as whites (although this is a very small number, yes it did exist) still, the idea that blacks should pay whites for their troubles is not a very good argument.

As they suggest, goodness is its own reward and it should be considered as the correct thing to do for anyone to free the bonds of the captive. It is a critical Christians responsibility, Islam doesn't allow slavery of its own people, and virtually every other religion is opposed to it as well.

Slaves should have been freed because they should never have been kept to begin with, and the people of Africa and Europe and America should be ashamed of the part that they played in the slave trade. It's all of us in it together.

Answer 3

Are you retarded? Whites did not fight the Civil War to free blacks, but to determine economic strongholds in territories. The ONLY reason blacks were emancipated was because one half of the country got its *** kicked by the other and then had the only people in their region supplying commodified labor freed out of spite. The real racism comes after emancipation when white people had to compete with their former "property" and got sore about it. They then enacted laws to screw them over rather than ship them back to Africa. A white perosn who was anti-slavery, for the record DOES NOT MEAN they were pro-Black! Here's a question for you about racism: Since no new Africans could be imported from Africa after March 25, 1807 when the TransAtlanic Slave Trade was abolished AND the majority of enslaved Africans born after this time were fathered by white slaveowners, slavedrivers and overseers, who gets the credit for raping all of those Black women? Try reading a book with as much passion as you produce for asking unrealistic questions.

Answer 4

Your statement: (If all whites were against Slavery, blacks would still be slaves) is false. Some anti-slavery whites succeeded in putting an end to slavery. If ALL whites were against slavery too, that would have been even better, and would have saved the nation a lot of turmoil and bloodshed. Please rephrase your statement and clarify your question.

Answer 5

From a UK perspective, I find all this apologising for what happened 100s of years ago quite distasteful. My ancestors, I know, were poor peasant, agricultural labourers. I doubt if those of them who lived in the 18th century could sign their names, let alone influence the slave trade. 18th century Britain was an oligarchy. Most people didn't have a say in what went on. Your question, slightly absurd as it is, does serve to show up the bigger absurdity of all this apologising which, quite frankly, is totally meaningless. What's done is done.