The founding fathers were slave owners

longhaircountryboy
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Join Date: Aug 2004
Location: missouri

 

Not liberal enough it would seem. Much like today. The financial system comes first individual rights are secondary at best.

Where I wouldn't want to see the constituion undermined. I would like to see it strengthened. I find it bizarre that we have elected 3 democrats from states who had they ratified the ERA it would be a constitutional amendment. Carter, Clinton and Obama had they guided their states to ratification could have led us to an Equal Rights nation.

Equal Rights Amendment passed in 1972 forgotten by most. Why? Why don't we ask every candidate where they stand on the ERA? Doesn't matter anymore?

"Section 1. Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.
Section 2. The Congress shall have the power to enforce, by appropriate legislation, the provisions of this article.
Section 3. This amendment shall take effect two years after the date of ratification."

http://www.equalrightsamendment.org/overview.htm

Not much in it I can see that is controversial. Why haven't we ratified it?

 

I'd like to know what issues those are that we have today that they didn't? The fact that they were men means more to me than all the churchifying crap anyone can speil as far as their gods go. They actually lived lives and knew toil.

 

You pretty well summed up the eight years of Bush/Cheney. Hopefully we will survive it.

 

If that were true then we wouldn't be ostrasizing fat and poor people, but we are. We pass judgement on individuals for making individual choices, like wearing seat belts, smogging your vehicle, using child safety seats, smoking legal tobacco...etc. We are all about oppression if we think it profitable.

 

His statement was: "I know it's an old belief no longer relevant today that humans prefer freedom to oppression."

We like our freedom, but we often fail to grant it to others who are "different." And, often, our freedom collides with the freedom of others. One has a right to smoke, yet another has a right to clean air. I have a right to not put my child in a car seat, yet my child has a "right to life."

Everything is not a black and white issue.

.

 

I agree you’re not racist just ignorant


Hotwater

 

Has the thread topic changed from slavery to racism?

 

For some, but we can ignore their rubbish and continue on the slavery/significance founding fathers ones that were going so well.

 

So are we pretending that there aren't almost always direct parallels between slavery and racism?

 

Hm, I guess I'll address this one (bored in class)

There are definite parallels between ethnocentrism and slavery, yes. It is ethnocentrism that made most slaves black in America. It is ethnocentrism that got those slaves sold by other tribes in Africa. It is ethnocentrism that allowed for such cruelty against the primarily Chinese railroad workers.

But slavery is not about ethnocentrism. Ethnocentrism is a catalyst for it, an excuse for it, the most important aspect of slavery to focus on is general human rights - so that no one can be treated so inhumanely -for whatever reason.

G-bay comes to mind. Parts of the Patriot Act come to mind.




Also, slavery should not be such a large focus of the history of prejudicial treatment of black Americans.

Jim Crow laws, segregation laws, etc were happening for a long long long time after slavery.

 

In fact there are documented cases of slavery in the deep south as late as 1909 (forty-six years after the signing of the emancipation proclamation) and Mississippi in 1968 wasn’t exactly fun-in-the-sun for anyone except the KKK


H

 

I wonder if slavery is as prominent a subject for discussion in areas where it was more prevalent than in the U.S.? Anyone know?

 

Well the only other country that had slavery for as long and on the same scale as the US in the western hemisphere was Brazil, so they'd be the ones to ask. The impact of slavery was not as severe anywhere else though, both in the fact of the civil war we had to fight over it and the long lasting both cultural and following the end of reconstruction, institutional racism that lasted in former slave areas. Remember lynchings were a common thing up to the 1940's

 

And how might we, as a Nation and a people of all races, benefit from this historic knowledge. Essentially it has been condensed into a white versus black malady in the U.S. Although many blacks in the U.S. may be descendants of slaves, it is also true that many whites in the U.S. are not descendants of slave owners. Having relatives who were killed by Germans and Japanese in WW II, I don't look at Germans or Japanese with ill feelings, although I might do so to an individual who intended to do me harm.
Wasn't it Martin Luther King who said "Judge a man not by the color of his skin, but by the content of his character"?

 

There is undeniably a rift that exists between blacks and whites in america.

I believe it stems from the fact that there was no reconciliation between blacks and whites at the end of the civil war. There was no apology for decades of slavery and hardship and no reparations, only laws which restricted voting rights, employment, and opportunities.

Whites believe by sacrificing themselves in the civil war it was payment enough, but the northern army wasn’t out to free the slaves but only to bring the southern states back into the fold


Hotwater

 

I think Thomas Sowell puts the history of slavery and how it is exploited today in perspective in the article he wrote entitled "Filtering History". Not only that, but he's written some excellent books on economics as well.

 

Great another Uncle Tom



Hotwater

 

Should I expected any other response? Does being Black eliminate one from making choices without first asking what choice they must make? Instead of giving Blacks the right to vote perhaps it would have been sufficient to have just ascertained that they were accurately counted in each census and the appropriate number added to the Democrat candidates total in each election, thereby eliminating the inherent inability of the many who were unable to think appropriately relative to their race?

 

Yes but this doesn't work unless everyone is doing it. The problem is a very large part of our population was alive in the 1960's to face down water hoses and dogs on civil right marches, and to have been old enough to vote in 1968 when George Wallace won 6 states on basically the sole platform of segregation, and the election of Obama just brought a lot of these themes back to the surface.