🚀 go-pugleaf

"Bob LeChevalier" <lojbab@lojban.org> wrote in message

 > How do you know that I am white?

You will probably find my answer more objectional than anything else I have
said as yet. In this discussion, as well as in a previous lengthy discussion
on education, you provided coherent arguments that were passionate and
thoughtful (though I believe, wrong) without a word of pofanity. Good
grammar, spelling, and sentence structure. You're white, all right. No doubt
about it.

>
> >So you think America owes its prosperity to blacks.
>
> Did I say that?  Nope.  I said that American was NOT built solely by
> white men.

Are we splitting hairs here? America was not built "solely" - as in 100% -
by white men, and I doubt anyone would claim it was. But the white male
contribution so overwhelmingly surpasses the combined total of everyone else
that the statement is essentially, if not totally, true.

>
> >Bob, that is amazing. If
> >blacks are such a benefit, Africa would be an economic powerhouse.
>
> Why would that necessarily follow.  Africa is not the United States.
> Different continent, different climate, different resources, a lack of
> investment by those with money.  A lack of good natural transportation
> in the time before modern transportation

None of which slowed down the white colonialists.
Now we're heading for the most tiresome of arguments. The state of blacks is
America is all the white man's fault. The state of blacks in Africa is also
the white man's fault. If we turn our attention to Haiti, black failure and
misery is the white man's fault.

> Perhaps it is because the old habits of the white supremacists did not
> fade away after the end of slavery, and THEY kept the economy from
> recovering.  They also kept the blacks down by failing to provide them
> equal educational services.

Perhaps. Perhaps not. Are you saying the white Southern leaders would choose
poverty for themselves and their families out of spite, just to make sure
blacks were denied opportunity?

This "equal education" argument works for me, too. We agree that whites have
an obligation to educate their young. Apparently you think they need to
educate blacks, too. Why don't blacks educate their own kids? You could say
that recently freed and mostly uneducated slaves were denied the opportunity
to learn education skills, and I would agree, except that the same argument
is being used today.

> >Do you believe it was impossible for estate
> >owners to run their property without slaves,
>
> Probably.  There was a labor shortage of people willing to work the
> back-breaking work needed to produce cotton.

Yet the industrialized North managed without slavery. How strange.

> That is why they first
> imported slaves.  If the had had to pay workers, the wages would have
> been high because of the shortage.  If they had had to pay their
> slaves, and if they could not sell them, they would have gone
> bankrupt.  Indeed that was WHY the South was unwilling to abandon
> slavery, and part of the reason it did not recovery quickly from the
> Civil War.

I do not agree. The fact that the South utilized slavery does not prove it
was the only or best alternative. Radical changes always come slowly. With
this argument, any system can be justified: we use it, and it seems to work,
therefore it's the best we can do.

>so therefore there were no non-slave holding property owners?
>
> Of course they were.  Poorer than dirt, their descendants are now the
> "poor white trash" that one read about.

I think we're not talking about the same thing. You seem to think I am
comparing Southern slaveowners to Southern non-slaveowners, but I am
comparing Southern slavery to Northern non-slavery.

> >> The wealthy white Northerners used their ill-gotten wealth to build
> >> industry (incidentally, often by industrial espionage against the
> >> British), whereas the South did not have the resources, and kept their
> >> wealth in land like the aristocrats of Europe.  Yankee ingenuity also
> >> included Yankee cutthroatedness.

Let's see if I get this:

Northerners used slavery to acquire wealth, then eliminated slavery when it
no longer suited them. Then they took the proceeds and built the economic
foundation of our country.

So financial centers of New York and Boston, the mills and factories of New
Enlgand and the Midwest - these existed only because of slavery. Is that it?

>
> Am I ashamed of my country?  Not hardly.  I'm PROUD of my country -
> all of it *including* the minorities

Including minorities? So far your praise has been exclusively for
minorities. Are you proud of anything whites have done?

who have as much right as I do to
> its wealth (maybe more, because the ancestors of most blacks were here
> for 300+ years, whereas my ancestors came here 100-150 years ago).

With that logic, you have more right to the wealth of this country than any
recent immigrant. But I'll bet that's not what you meant.

Here's a revolutionary idea. None of us have the "right" to the wealth of
the country. We only have the right to earn it.

It's the redistribution of that wealth that creates anger. The fact is that
blacks as a group take so much more out than they put in. As a group,
whatever they contribute is far offset by what they cost.

Once, most of us thought like you. In our egalitarian youth, with our state
indoctrination still fresh in our young minds, we agreed that we had to make
up for the sins of the past. And we have made up for it. The transfer of
wealth of white to black since Johnson's Great Society is roughly equal to
amount of reparations being discussed these days.

But it hasn't worked. Every black inequity is at least as bad is it was in
the 50's, and some are far worse. We say it's high time blacks shouldered
their own responsibilities like any other American and stop trying to blame
anything and everything else for their failures. You appear to be saying
that we've done virtually nothing, and in fact all black suffering is the
fault of whites.

Here is your quandary, which I have yet to see anyone from your side
address:

1) Whites throughout the world must create or at least          finance a
modern society for blacks. It is unacceptable     to expect them to create
it themselves, even if the             know-how is provided for them.
2) Blacks, as a group, are equal to whites in every way.

Mark