A more vexing issue is with respect to Native Americans. If we hadn’t poisoned, pillaged, massacred, cheated, defrauded and evicted the Indians, there would be no America as it exists today. I suppose Indian casinos are a small way to get back at white bumpkins who spend all their money there.

Do you know that Hillary’s great – great -great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – great – grandfather sold the hemlock used to poison Socrates?

I agree, MichaelF, that Obama may be the perfect grounding rod and end the foolishness once and for all. He exposes the slave-owning and reparations debates as ridiculous.

My great grandparents were Jews from the Russian Empire who escaped all sorts of pogroms and economic deprivation and came to New York around 1910. They were able to find safe haven here, and succeed economically, because America was already, by 1910, a prosperous place. But how did it get to be so prosperous? How did it get to be the “land of opportunity” in 1910?

Partly by the wealth of industrialization and the expansion of capitalism in the late 19th century. But also partly by the large scale trade in exported goods going back to the early 19th century. In 1860, the largest export in this country was slave-picked cotton. Alas, without slave labor, there would never have been a cotton export economy, and the United States would never have been able to reap the wealth of it. Theoretically, the US could have gotten rich on some other mode of export or production, but it didn’t. New York, like the rest of the North, grew rich in part because of textile production that relied on slave-produced cotton.

As a result, my ancestors came to this country to take advantage of a nation made wealthy in large part by slave labor – even though slavery had already been abolished in the US for 45 years and in New York State since 1827. As for today, I wouldn’t have the opportunities I have if not for my great grandparents’ decision to immigrate to New York, a place made welcoming in part because of wealth created just 60 years prior from slave labor.

That’s the argument for reparations, at least. You can make the argument that the connections between slave labor and America’s economic and political power today is so tenuous that nobody today should be responsible – and remember, this is about responsibility not guilt. I am not guilty for littering the sidewalk in front of my house, but it is my responsibility to clean it up if I believe in a clean neighborhood. Anyway, this is how the argument goes. It has nothing to do with you personally owning a slave or having an ancestor who owned slaves. It’s a more collective sense of responsibility: slavery played a major role in making America rich. Should we make whole those who we, as a country, exploited to attain that wealth?

That’s not entirely true Mike. I have been lectured on more than one occasion that, as a White man, I have benefited from slavery despite the fact that my ancestors came long after slavery was abolished. The legacy privileges of slavery are constantly held up as a sin for which I should have to pay. The latest information on Obamas ancestry shows how foolish this concept really is.

As far as the flags, I’m a southerner now but a northerner by birth and for the life of me I don’t understand the South’s attachment to the Confederate symbols. I can only assume that they don’t feel it really represents slavery but rather is just a symbol of their history in general, but I feel that

I think that would suffice, CS. I lived in Alabama for 8 years and I honestly felt, at least back then, that it was a symbol to many people of their resistance to any kind of change-just as there was resistance earlier to segregation. It was like they were thinking, yes we lost the Civil war, yes we had to integrate, but I still have this—they invested personal pride in the Confederacy, and didn’t care if it was hurtful to others because of its history. We all, black and white, need to move beyond our history.

My reasoning for supporting the apologies- is to enable us to move on as a society. Those who honored Rosa Parks by allowing her body to lie in state at the Capitol weren’t responsible for segregation- but allowing her that honor allows us to move beyond it.

But there’s a big difference between making public symbolic gestures to honor civil rights leaders (which I think is very appropriate and needed) and putting the current govt in the position of being the guilty party. Only the guilty can issue an apology. It’s like with ancestors; those who feel guilt over their ancestors being slave owners might feel the need to make a statement in order to make it perfectly clear that they don’t condone that, but they can’t actually apologize for something that they didn’t do. I guess if legislatures were to issue statements along those lines, to positively affirm that the current government condemns the policies of the past, it might be a good thing. I wouldn’t doubt that some of the civil rights legislation already contains that kind of language though.

As far as the flags, I’m a southerner now but a northerner by birth and for the life of me I don’t understand the South’s attachment to the Confederate symbols. I can only assume that they don’t feel it really represents slavery but rather is just a symbol of their history in general, but I feel that since some are offended they ought to give up their attachment to it.

Slavery alone is not responsible for the discord between the races, segregation and painful reminders are as well. States like Georgia, Virginia, and South Carolina have been slow to rid themselves of state symbols like state songs that still refer to slaves and flying the Confederate flag at the statehouse. I see no harm in taking positive steps to redress past wrongs if they allow us to move on, CS. Its a conscious decision to evolve as a society.

But thats not to say that I disagree with apologies by states or institutions that took part in this abomination of human rights.

I do not support the apologies either and the reasoning is the same. There is simply no one left alive today that was responsible for slavery, and just as the individuals alive today are the descendents of such people (they’re not the perpetrators themselves), the state governments are not the same governments that they were then either. In fact it sends exactly the wrong message to put the government in the position of issuing a statement from white America to black America; that’s like admitting that the govt represents the whites and not the blacks (which isn’t true of course).

Senator Obama is a politician from Chicago. The City Council of Chciago has supported race based reparations, in favor of affirmative action, and in favor of proportional representation. The City Council has gone to the point of requiring all city contractors to report on their past connections to slavary.

Maybe all politicians should be forced to report on their family’s connections to slavary, polygamy, and genocide.

Now that’s a big-big-big-big-big-deal isn’t it?

No.