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Can’t watch the video now but I’m black and I only see it as a good consequence of a great evil. However glad I am at being an American through in no way decreases the evil of slavery.

I met a 15yo kid whos parents met as a result of 9/11. She wouldn’t be here without it but it doesn’t excuse the evil that happened that day.

I don’t know who Jerrod is, but unless he has checked his genetics on 23andme or ancestry, he wouldn’t have existed. Almost no one here is “purely African” if their ancestors were brought here as slaves. There was a lot more mixing than people think. We’ve had our adopted child tested and she has every race known to mankind.

As as for the 9/11 thing, yeah. If Hitler hadn’t been trying to exterminate my family, I sure wouldn’t exist either, but it wasn’t a good thing he did.

Well put. May as well say it was great that Britain allowed a couple million Irish to starve to death since it compelled a million others to risk death at sea to come to America. And how about the Jews getting their homeland back following their families' extermination in Europe? Somehow I doubt the Exodus arrivals would have considered that a fair trade off.

We can't do anything about and aren't responsible for slavery back in the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries, but how about we face up to it still going on wherever Islam holds sway?

My parents never would have met without WWII (from different countries, different continents). Doesn’t make WWII any less horrendous that there are millions of such “positive” stories. I’ve often wondered about how to regard owing my very existence (and the existence of millions of others) to something so horrible. Just the strange byways of history and genealogy....

“Can’t watch the video now but I’m black and I only see it as a good consequence of a great evil. However glad I am at being an American through in no way decreases the evil of slavery.

I met a 15yo kid whos parents met as a result of 9/11. She wouldn’t be here without it but it doesn’t excuse the evil that happened that day.”

Ditto to that - there is NEVER an excuse for evil. But, many times, some good comes from that evil.

One of my uncles worked for the Dept. of Agriculture until his recent retirement. One of his black co-workers, with whom he was very friendly, once remarked (after seeing a bunch of people get off of the plane from Nigeria, with all kinds of disgusting food that had to be seized and destroyed), “I’ll kill you if you say anything to anyone else here, but after looking at these people and what they eat, I’m glad that my ancestors were slaves.”

I, myself, am Jewish. I recognize that without the Holocaust having occurred, there would not have been an Israel. There are also lots of children and grandchildren of survivors who met during or after the war, and they would never have existed but for what their parents or grandparents went through.

Again, there is no excuse for evil - none, EVER - but some good does usually come from it.

Yep, all of owe happenstance to being here, to our parents meeting in the first place.

My parents met in part due to upheavals and movements of peoples stemming from World War II.

They were not from the same hometown, and met in a different state than they were born and raised in.

All of us can find similar situations in our own families.

All of us of European extraction can thank God that our ancestors got on the boat to come to America. To paraphrase Muhammad Ali, he thanked God that his granddaddy got on the boat even though it was a slave ship.

Reminds me, I once read a Dear Abby column, in which an embarrassed woman wrote in, and said she met her boyfriend at the Rodney King riots. And she was embarrassed to tell people how they met.

Everyone has a story.