I Would Like to Talk (Civilly) About the Generalization of "White People"

[BmorePat87]

(09-26-2016, 11:46 PM)TheLeonardLeap Wrote: What people conveniently forget is that "white people" have been subject to slavery in the past as well. The Romans took slaves from Britannia (England).

Then later England took slaves from Ireland in mass mostly to get population to work in the West Indies farms. The Irish were the largest source of slavery in the 17th and 18th century, because the British could get them locally and for free/extremely cheap, compared to having to go to Africa and pay larger sums.

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All that aside, I am of Scottish/Irish/German descent and my family never owned slaves. My great-great-great Grandpa's cap-and-ball revolver and battalion flag is on loan to a Civil War museum from where he fought for the Union Army.

So I just laugh at people who put all white people generalized as slave owners and paint themselves as victims despite being many generations removed from any possible slavery. (Though not all US African-American ((huzzah PC terms rather than just saying American)) people are descendants of slavery.)

There was slavery for 80-ish years in the US. There hasn't been slavery for 150-ish years. At the risk of sounding insensitive, it's time to get over it.

Irish slavery was a myth perpetuated by a holocaust denying white supremacist in the 1990's. It existed to discredit the struggles of Black Americans and give an excuse of "well, if we got past it, you can too".

Irish (and Scottish) people were sometimes sent to the colonies as prisoners and forced to do labor like prisoners often do. They were free to live in the colonies after their sentence was up. There were also indentured servants, but these people were not slaves. Almost all freely agreed to their contracts and worked less than a decade. Once done, they were given land and food to live on and grow. More than half of those who immigrated to the colonies were indentured at some point. The condition of indentured servants was not worse than those of slaves, despite what the myth says.

Also, despite slavery ending after the Civil War, there was only a brief period of time when the rights of the vast majority of black Americans were actually enforced. After Reconstruction ended, Jim Crow laws put them down until the 1960's. Most got stuck in sharecropping, which land owners manipulated to get poor, uneducated blacks to be legally bound to work their land for their whole lives. Even after the 60's, we have had to work to end discrimination in housing and hiring.

Most black Americans are only one or two generations removed from a time when they were legally treated like 2nd class citizens and denied access to much of society. Many grew up in that.