Trump attacks protections for immigrants from ‘s***hole’ countries

[Dill]

(01-31-2018, 10:19 PM)BmorePat87 Wrote: but they didn't enslave themselves. There was no pan African identity in the 1600's. Statements like "Didn’t the African people sell off their own people" and " many African countries did to their own citizens"  are just wrong and the point they're trying to make are flawed because they depend on the faulty premise that a society committed atrocities against its own people. Warring tribes would enslave their defeated enemies. Those that supplied the vast majority of slaves to Europeans were the West African Kingdoms that rose by marrying off their daughters to Europeans, getting armed by these slavers, and enslaved people from the inland areas. Beyond the occasional criminal, societies weren't enslaving their own.

Well Bpat you are free to use social concepts, such as tribes and nations to mark one society from another.

But others of us are free to make RACE a maker of "society."  (Not for Europeans because that would be silly. Europeans are from different nations.)  Anyway, with race as the basis for defining groups, you could treat subsaharan Africa like one "society" with all black folks.

Then if the Ghanese sell Tuareg to Malians, they are indeed selling "their own people."

Imagine some poor Tuareg sitting in a Malian slave pen, unable to understand their language, religion or customs. He might be thinking--"My gosh--what kind of people enslave themselves? Why do the Malians treat their own people this way?? I may not be a citizen of Mali, but I am sure as hell a citizen of Africa!! Says so in my passport!" 

Anyway, if we define Americans by one race, then maybe they never sold their own people either.  Africans did that.

So when we fought the Civil War, we were undoing all that damage Africans did to their own people. That is a good thing. Let's stop blaming Americans, who would never sell their own, for the sins of Africans, who obviously did sell their own.