Virginia apologizes for slavery... why?

[John Kilduff]

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When a corporation spills a bunch of chemicals 60 years ago, the corporation is responsible for cleaning up the mess today.

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Good analogy. And even without it, if a gross injustice remains unaddressed, there is something wrong.

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Many gross injustices can never be redressed, though. Can even a single murder ever be redressed? Of course there is something wrong...but that's life, too.

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I believe the other greatest injustice in US history was our actions toward the American Indian. Both that and slavery need to be much better addressed, as difficult as it is to find appropriate solutions. In fact, it seems near impossible to come up with a way to redress what we did to the American Indian. (Casinos certainly don't do it.)

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I believe that's because there really are no appropriate solutions, just as there is no way to redress even a single murder.

Finally, there are also myriad confounding factors:

-passage of time, randomness, and the fact that those involved are long dead

- the fact that many whites actually worked and fought against slavery

- the fact that some blacks actually profited from slavery ( I don't mean the slaves themselves; certain other blacks)

- that there are many people of mixed ancestry. Is someone who is 50% white and 50% black entitled to receive reparations, or should they pay reparations, or is it a wash? How about someone who is 25% black and 75% white? Do they count as "black" for college admissions, yet receive reparations instead of paying reparations? Or maybe should they pay only half as much reparations as someone else who is all-white?

Should Southerners have to pay more reparations than Northerners?

Should Southern or mid-state whites whose ancestors helped blacks escape the South via the underground railroad get "reparations credits"?

In my view, there are no redressments possible that make any real sense. All that can reasonably be done is acknowledgement of the ills and injustices of the past, and to have equal rights guaranteed by law in the present and future.

By the way, I also should mention that I have a strong quibble with the use of the terms "we" and "our" as they are used throughout this thread. I'm not included in the "we" or the "our", and I don't believe you or anyone else in this thread is included either. You are you, you are not your ancestors (and anyway your ancestors might have been among the whites who helped American blacks rather than hurt them. If your ancestors settled mostly in the North, as mine did, this is not unlikely to be the case).

The issue of the American Indians is a little different, as I think probably more of the country as a whole oppressed the Indians. I sure didn't, though, and I can't believe you did either [img]/images/graemlins/wink.gif[/img] So "we" definitely did not oppress the Indians; people living generations ago did.

It's tragic, and the world was perhaps a more tragic place in those days (if you've ever been to a very, very old cemetery, perhaps you have noticed the winged Death's Heads carved on so many of the tombstones).