Discussion about this post

User's avatar
A. William Benitez's avatar

I read your ten questions several times and concluded that honest answers could only come from those who acknowledge their responsibility for all the shit that has gone on in the past and continues today. We are here now and dumbass answers like “I didn’t own slaves” or “I wasn’t here then” make you part of a continuing problem. All of those things occurred and continue because we accept them and prove our approval of them by electing boneheads certain to add to the problems.

Here we are preparing to elect another racist rapist. Yes, another one for Thomas Jefferson was a slave owner, racist and rapist. He was chosen instead of a man who was an abolitionist and feminist. Admittedly, he was "elected" after 36 ballots in the House of Representatives. Obviously, this is not a new behavior for us. It was reflected from our beginning and whatever change comes will be difficult for many to swallow.

In some ways, I was lucky. My grandparents were Cuba and Spanish. The Spanish have a poor record related to slavery and Cubans were enslaved for a time. I attended all-white schools and visited many facilities with colored restrooms. I never liked it, but I accepted it. That makes me part of the problem. My luck is that my father was a hardass, a genuine ball buster who no one messed with, and his rage wasn’t reserved for any color. I never heard him use the N word. During my youth, he partnered with a black man who was also in construction. They built many homes together, and they were friends. I don’t mean business convenience friends, but family dinner together friends. Eventually, the partnership broke up, but color was never an issue. Looking back, I realize my father had little concept of race. If you got on his wrong side, there was hell to pay no matter your color.

As a hardass, he naturally raised a hardass and some of the turmoil between us scared some family members and neither of us gave a damn. I went to work with him at age twelve and he was a taskmaster. We had many verbal battles and sometimes work sites cleared because some believed we might come to blows. That never happened, and I learned much from him, but we never discussed anyone’s color or ancestry and those were valuable lessons I still value.

To answer even one of the questions you posed, we need the decency to put race behind us. I would like to believe that’s possible, but as long as we keep celebrating assholes, there’s not much chance.

Expand full comment
ken taylor's avatar

Sorry I can't cross-examine you. I think you proved your case beyond a shadow of a doubt. But sitting in the jury box, I can provide you with my deliberations.

Question One.

Who (white) did not “horrible institution and you did not benefit from it” except the black man who did not need to be enslaved to “benefit” from slavery, seems he was benefiting himself just fine before he was enslaved.

But to your question the white man benefited from slavery whether he “owned” black men or not, and still benefits today by believing in his superiority—kind of an answer to multiple questions.

Question Two.

Reparations? Reparations must require more than money. More than an apology (q1). It seems to me reparations require a complete transformation and abolition of the apartheid state of mind. Seems to be reparations only will occur when the man (maybe all white men) are imprisoned for that state of mind.

Question Three.

When God is invoked, seems to be that that is an invocation of hunting license against others (especially melanic People.)

Question Four..

All men are created differently but should have equal power as individuals within the state. Nothing creates inequality more than the statement “all men are created equal”.And as for the (supposed) author in the Dec. of Independence q.5 answers he knew he was making stuff up he didn’t believe.

Question Five.

The question unasked why did Thomas Jefferson like to have sex with smelly, ugly black woman?’ Or better he did answer it, black women suffer less deeply than white women when they’re raped. Of course they might have tried to hold in their suffering more because if they led out they had suffered, their child might have had his head placed on the chopping block.

Question Six:

Well I can’t answer that question, but the question answers multiple other questions.In fact all of the questions illustrate the point of the post, don’t they.?

Question Seven.

American Exceptionalism means America Alone Is Excepted from being humane to others,

Question Eight.

Been trying to answer the Jew question for a long time. Maybe it was just to get them the hell out of Europe. Another question is that brown and black skinned Sephardic Jews are the majority of the Israeli Jewish population. Why do we never see their pictures, only ever seen white Israelis. But the their lives really don’t matter anymore than Black Lives Matter in America.

Question Nine.

A little unfair. Europeans have never been overly shy about killing each other, but they do unite in multi-national harmony to kill others not European. The real answer might be that to the European NO Lives Matter, but non-European lives matter even less.

Question Ten.

See responses to question three and question seven. Aren’t the chosen ones, after all, the last one picked when choosing sides” The very ones generally left out of the choosing do have a tendency to view their being left out as their being exceptionally special to god because they are exceptionally unspecial in the eyes of their fellow man, and bring about these questions in the first.

So I have a question of my own, how many fields did the slaveowner plow?

I think you answered that in your post “message to a white man.”

Verdict: Guilty on All Charges.

Expand full comment
15 more comments...

No posts