South Africa parliament votes to seize white owned land

[Dill]

(03-09-2018, 01:41 PM)StLucieBengal Wrote: So do you feel you personally benefit from slavery here in the US?  Do You owe your current wealth, career, and status to slavery?  

The reality is no one can go back in time and change things.   Our lives are what we make out of them.   It certainly sucks for anyone who got dealt a bad deal.   But over history bad deals have been dealt across the bird at one time or another.

There are other questions that need to be settled before anyone has a prayer of reasonably deciding whether we, in the 21st century, still benefit from 19th century slavery.

And the first might be: Do ANY of us now, in the 21st century, benefit from the actions of 19th-century Americans across the board--the land which they acquired, the railroads they laid, the wars they fought, the divisions of labor they settled upon, the investments they chose to make, the institutions (like land grant universities) they founded, the technology they developed and applied?  

If the answer to that question is "No. I owe my current wealth, career and status solely to my own 'choices,'"  then we must examine whether that is really possible.  E.g., if you got a degree from a university you could afford because it was public, and that degree helped you "create wealth," would you say the "choice" of our forefathers to provide citizens with that option played no role in your "wealth creation"? We could multiply examples with your investments or private business, etc.

If the answer is "Yes, most everything I have really achieved would be impossible without the already existing, above described civilization whose benefits I have inherited and make good use of," then we have made a useful step toward answering the question of whether any of us still benefits from slavery.

And this is not off topic. How the ANC views the question of land distribution in South Africa is directly related to how they view inherited political arrangements, and the continuing right of white farmers to benefit from that unequal inheritance.  Determining how those original arrangements were arrived at is not simply "blaming."  And for the record, past wrongs can be righted, at least partially. But first they have to be recognized.