BackInTex wrote: ↑Wed Nov 17, 2021 5:40 am
No one in my direct gemology lines owned slaves. Even if they did, it’s not on me.
You think your a bad person (you agree with the teachings). I don’t think I’m a bad person (I don’t agree with the teachings).
Nobody is teaching that white people should feel individual guilt because people in the south owned slaves 150 years ago or longer. Your ancestors may not have owned slaves, but if you grew up in the South as I did and went to school in the 1960s, you got a whitewashed view of history that treated the "War Between the States" as the culmination of many economic issues between north and south, just one of which happened to be slavery, which was wrong primarily because it gave the south a source of free labor that wasn't available to the north.
I never heard of the Tulsa Massacre until I was an adult. I heard plenty about the Alamo and the Battle of the Little Big Horn (which made Custer sound like a heroic tragic warrior).
And you and your ancestors may not have owned slaves, but you have been the beneficiary of a police and legal system that views white people more leniently, more creditworthy, more worthy of being hired or promoted, and less threatening than black people.
Do you think George Floyd would be dead if he was white? Do you think Ahmaud Arberry would be dead if he was white? Do you think that Kyle Rittenhouse would have been allowed to get anywhere near the protests if he had been black?
The purpose of teaching about the history of race in America isn't to make white people feel bad about themselves (although some claim that anything that portrays whites as anything less than angelic makes them feel bad), but to give them a balanced view of what really happened and not a fairy tale. It's also to increase awareness of the disparities that exist in this country. Black people don't need this; they get the talk from their parents as soon as they are old enough to understand who the police are.