POLL: Should we apologize to the blacks for enslaving their ancestors?

The Blacks are the worst educated and poorest group in the USA. Many biologists explain this in terms of the legacy of slavery.

If it can be demonstrated that slavery has directly resulted in the socioeconomic plight of the Blacks, then I think that we owe them an apology for slavery.

Is there a link and so should we apologize?

 

I am of the personal view that we need to conduct further studies to establish whether or not the Black's current status is down to slavery or not.

If we find a link, we should apologize and give each Black compensation to the value of 25% of their salary.

 

just as Germany apologized for the Holocaust, we should apologize for slavery.

it was a crime against humanity.

 

slavery, Segregation, red-lining, discrimination in education, discrimination in employment, is responsible for most of their current status.

 

What about the fact that we our bred slaves to be physically strong and nothing else? Could the passed on genes have resulted in an educational and economic underclass?

 

smart slaves weren't castrated. they too reproduced.

 

I only apologize when I have personally wronged somebody.
So, apologize till your heart's content, if that's what you feel is nesecary to help you sleep at night.

As for myself, I've never enslaved anyone, or infringed upon a individual's civil rights. So I have nothing to apologize for.

 

Just the reverse; black people should apologize to the rest of the world for inventing slavery, and pay the rest of us reparations for their legacy.

 

I don't know who the 'we' is, or how this apology would be structured so as to represent the 'we'. I know that if the majority do not sincerely mean it, it is more contentious than healing and that is the danger. I personally have no problem being part of an apology. To this day ,a great deal of our inherited wealth as a nation and a large part of our infrastructure was built by either slave labor or depressed wages secondary to discrimination in the job market for generations. We basically stole value and kept the costs of clearing land, building our roads, our bridges, and our waterways, etc artificially low during our massive national growth spurt. As we moved west, and south and through our colonial period, we killed off the natives and exploited black, Asian and brown labor to keep everything nice and cheap.

 

We should find and label the Africans that sold their fellow Africans into slavery. Then pass the reparations and blame onto them.

 

The Irish bore the main brunt of that, along with later European immigrants after the Civil War, so that would mean we owe reparations to ourselves, mainly, and the Irish and German immigrants. As for the natives, they mostly killed themselves off or perished from disease. They were active players in geo-politics, not hapless hobbit-like victims. the plains tribes were never numerous, and they were killed off by the legacy of policies developed by that great leader Abraham Lincoln, who led the way by sending General Pope into Minnesota to exterminate the Sioux during the Civil War. His generals went on to glory in the West, removing annoyances to the railroads Lincoln and the northern financial barons started the Civil War for in order to subsidize. Asian and brown labor played little part in it, and black labor only significant in the south, which didn't benefit from most of that expansion.

 

I didn't enslave anyone, so I'm not apologizing to anyone.

And I'm certainly not paying reparations to anyone.

 

Chinese labor was a major factor along the west coast urban centers, and in building railroads for the railroad barons. Black labor which moved north and west later to avoid Jim Crow and job losses in the cotton industry and a general depression in the South, was basically used as scab replacement during the early years of the labor movement. Unions fought integration in membership, and the business and monied interests exploited racial tensions to divide the work force, and it was black labor that was the cheap exploitable force.

 

No we should not apologize to the blacks for enslaving their ancestors. The polling statements too narrowly focus the possible responses, probably intentionally by the author. For my self, there is no question that slavery was, is and will always be an atrocity against our fellow human beings. But it still exists today and I have seen no one here exhibit any outrage over that. If we must apologize to the blacks for something that for them no longer exists today in our society, exactly what actions should be demanded for the enslaving of women and children today right here in this country?

 

these people who say sorry, they must pay money to blacks.
otherwise, it is not real sorry, they must pay their own money to blacks.

 

The reason for the existence of the slave trade in the first place, was due to blacks selling other blacks for profit. It is a most literal case of them having no one to blame but themselves.

 

In ancient world slavery was common and not related to race. Also many white guys had enslaved and it had no effect on the socioeconomic condition of their descendants. So there is absolutely no link.

 

Then they need to apologize to themselves, because the transatlantic slave trade BEGAN with them. Whites could never have taken more than a token in terms of numbers without the complicit partnership of other Blacks in the trade.

 

Should blacks apologize for capturing blacks to be sold into slavery?

 

You should look up the demographics of the west coast; Chinese labor wasn't a 'major factor' in anything; they did some temporary crap jobs here and there, for a short stretch of the Intercontinental Railroad, and that only because of labor problems and how cheap they would do work, which doesn't make them critical. Without them the bosses would just have raised wages and improved working conditions and the jobs would still have been done regardless of whether there was a single Chinese within a thousand miles. The same goes for any other minority. The vast bulk of the labor used was European ethnic groups.

While true, it doesn't make them a 'major factor' in anything, other than as strike breakers, They weren't the only, or even the major source of strike breaking labor; that was Eastern Europe and depending on famines and depressions in Europe Irish, German, Polish, Russian, etc., labor. Most large corporations hired agents to scour Europe in search of cheap labor. Andrew Carnegie had full time labor agents in Europe early on. During the Civil War he broke strikes by shipping in foreign labor, and continued that policy till he sold out to Morgan. They all did, with the singular exception of Rockefeller, who paid his employees well and didn't have to resort to labor racketeering.

 

we should also apologize for Jim Crow aka American Apartheid, and bringing in millions of Eastern and Southern Europeans to do the work that could have been done by the freed slaves and their children/grand children.

 

Perhaps the whole world should apologize for slavery. Slavery goes back to almost to the beginning of humans. Almost every empire throughout the world practiced slavery and even minor city states. The age of enlightenment against slavery really didn't begin until around 15-1600AD. Slavery was the norm throughout the world for thousands and thousands of year.

As to abolishing slavery, the United States was about in the middle of all the countries of the world. Slavery continued on into 1900's and it wasn't until 2003 when Niger made slavery a crime and the last country to do so was Mauritania in 2007.

 

Yes. The global anti-slavery movement began in Great Britain in the 18th century. The leaders of countries that grumbled and (*)(*)(*)(*)(*)ed about the anti-slavery platform in the League of Nations in the 1920's were all either Muslim countries or non-white countries.

Since abolition was such a 'white thing', shouldn't the current NAACP and Sharpton along with the BLM 'movement' include striking down the laws outlawing slavery? Obviously supporting the laws against slavery is selling out to Whitey.

 

I don't know who your "we" is. My family came to America in a debtor colony. We were slaves, and were of Scottish descent. Don't cry to me.

 

The question is could they have even done the work in the first place. Criminality has been their history.