Wait, you were serious?
lain:
In a way it makes sense. I mean, unless you were naturally skeptical and curious the chances are you were fed broad stroke, Eurocentric history lessons that largely left out significant in-culture contributions of minorities and relegated other contributions to near foot note status.
Could be because of opportunity, or sheer numbers, or any number of reasons.
Like that. The assumption that it's an unquestionable fact, that all we have to understand is why it is a fact.
But if you felt objectively compelled to think of world accomplishments in racial terms and weren't rooted in the histories of the latest victor, so to speak, you might come away thinking of whites as a people largely adept at integrating and improving the ideas of others, of building successfully upon them as much as anything else, finding their feet when the opportunities that skill afforded would pay real dividends in power. Take gun powder, an invention of the Chinese people that Europeans used to deadly effect, cementing their militarily fueled rise to power in the civilization game.
Law, the foundation of meaningful civilization, begins with Hammurabi's code. Mathematics, science, medicine, irrigation, music, writing, novels, paper, ink, the compass all found their origin elsewhere. The fact is that civilization itself begins and flourishes without white Europeans. Not that any number of noteworthy advancements weren't born in the cradle of Western civilization, but it's really one great story among many. Those of us who were born into it should understand that much of its success is found in the natural tide of history. When the West was rising it was in a position to pull together a number of developing and great ideas and use them to anchor its own rise in a way that was going to safeguard a degree of longevity and success. Luck of the draw, to some extent. You conquer most of the known world you get most of what it knows to make use of. In the day of the West, that has been some draw.
Apparently you do. And apparently you are disgusted with whites that had black slaves.
You certainly bring up color every time you talk about slavery.
Why not just say slaves and slaves owners instead of blacks and whites if you see all people as just people
This is sort of a non-issue though, when you think about it. Race is artificial and a goofy way to view people, but it's a perfectly legitimate way to view the way people have viewed people and its impact.
Or, once upon a time in the South (and elsewhere, but we made it a near art form) people were viewed, discussed, and their rights or social status was impacted by their "blood", by which was meant the interracial heritage. You can speak about it and to it and its impact without sharing the values and intellectual distortions that marked it..
Do you need one on Africa before there even was a deep south?
Or any part of the world for that matter.
You'll be hard pressed to find a history of any color that did not enslave other humans.
True enough. One of the things that makes us different is that we threw off the horror of that practice as a young nation, a nation that understood how much of its vitality, wealth and power had been forged on the anvil of slavery. It made us approach it differently even as the institutionalized mindset that made it possible threw obstacles in the path of meaningful address at every point of consideration...so even though we knew better, we allowed portions of the evil to exist beyond the fact of slavery, impacting generations of black children, their rights and opportunities, allowed a mindset to develop in any number of ways, so that it wasn't that long ago the thought of a black quarterback was unthinkable. Not illegal, of course, but seriously (it went).
So we're nearer to the harm, both ugly root and profit of slavery and the palpable denial of right and consequential harm that followed it, even as a matter of law, within the living memory of much of our compact, nearer than the examples those who don't like that reality tend to bring up. That everyone did it and we can't address (or don't seek to) the wrong is no real answer to the immediacy of what our compact did and how it profited by it. And if we cite the plight of our distant ancestors in equally distant times it's not objectively the same thing, not of the same moment as the sons of those alive who were denied some essential part of their humanity.
Why is it that only the white masters of black slaves in the deep south are so horrible to you?
I'm pretty sure he'd be as vocally opposed to the race riots in the north and elsewhere. It's easier to see and address it in the South, because we had the bloodiest hands in.