I couldn't disagree with you more. And then to make exponentially worse, you have morons who have the nerve to say those minorities have been treated well.

Originally Posted by: DakotaT 

I know we disagree.

1. I don't take credit for the good things my father did, and I don't take the blame for the bad things he did. And I certainly am not going to assume the blame for the evil things people in my ancestry did generations back and I am not going to feel personally responsible for the evil things people a half continent away (regardless of whether they are in my ancestry or not) did a century and a half ago just because I happen to have skin of a particular color.

2. Were slaves treated "well"? No, of course not. By definition, enslaving someone is not treating them well. Were they treated better than most of us were told in grade school and high school history classes, however? Almost certainly. Bob Fogel won a Nobel Prize. He wasn't a moron. What he was, among other things, was someone who put in thousands of hours and who had colleagues and students who each put in thousands more, studying the realities of slavery in America.

And the result of these thousands upon thousands of hours of careful and painstaking research into plantation records, slave markets, slave narratives, an amount of archival research and careful thinking that I am, frankly, bloody amazed at? It's pretty clear that, for most slaveowners, slaves were far too important to their (the slaveowners') prosperity to treat them as badly as we were taught. And, in fact, in some significant ways, northern industrial workers were treated even worse by their employers.

I'd suggest, again, that you read Fogel's Without Consent or Contract. But I know you'd just tell me, again, that you don't have time to read the first "popular audience" volume, must less the additional volumes where he puts the serious empirical details out there.

None of this makes slavery any less evil. Indeed, for me, it made it even worse, because the real problem was not that the plantation masters didn't treat their capital assets well. The problem is that they reduced human beings to capital assets, saying to them, in effect, "You're just another machine like my cotton gin or my plow. You have no more freedom of choice than that cotton gin or my plow."

The primary evil of slavery was not the appropriation of economic wealth from slaves or creating an uneven playing field for their descendants. The primary evil of slavery was the taking of their freedom to make their own decisions and choose the path of their own future.

And freedom once lost cannot be compensated for. It's gone for that person forever. You don't make up for stolen freedom of one person by taking choices away from another generations later. All you do is continue the destruction of freedom.

We need to remember the past. We need to remember what happens to freedom when you reduce a person to his color or his "race". But we don't need to remember it because we need to give back to people now dead what can't ever be given back.

We need to remember that categorizing people by an artificial human category is bad. Period. Because, in the end, race is just a concept human beings have invented to put people into categories that allow them to do bad stuff to other people.

Judging people because of their "race" is bad. Period.

Thinking of race as a basis for decisions is bad. Period.

Using race as a criterion for interaction with another human being is bad. Period.

Using race as a criterion for deciding how to restrict another human being's choices is bad. Period.

Always.

Originally Posted by: Wade 

The primary evil of slavery was taking away their human dignity. The effect of slavery was ill gotten wealth by plantation owners, the compounding effect is the state of blacks living in poverty today. Let's not forget this country kept up it suppression of the blacks until the civil rights movement in the 1960's, and in the red redneck states - it continues.

Originally Posted by: DakotaT