Reparations Will Never Equal Respect - (outstanding argument against Wachovia's decision!)

I’m afraid that I have finally had it with the entire topic of slave reparations and the level of groveling to which corporate America has sunk, and I am closing all Wachovia accounts. Am I a crazy, southern, white supremacist? Hardly. I am, in fact, as northern and schooled in liberal philosophies as they come. I used to play in the tunnels (although they weren’t so much tunnels that connected to anything as they were just large dug out hiding areas) under my grandmother’s house and take great pride that our family in past years had done their part to help smuggle slaves into Canada. I still believe slavery was horrible, and I laud the day it was abolished. Still, I am absolutely against the concept of slave reparations.

Stepping outside of the liberal fog above the Mason Dixon line was not really the turning point for me. After all I, too, came down here with the attitude that blacks had been oppressed and that the southern attitudes about the war were simply bitterness over having lost. I didn’t believe that displaying the Confederate flag was about heritage, and I thought all southerners were in favor of slavery.

Many would say that my change in attitude came only because I moved to the south. That is not the case. If moving to the south made you southern, then I would be able to cook a decent biscuit. No, the turning point came shortly after moving to the south when I found my biological mother. Upon finding her I started to do extensive research on my Irish heritage. Having been raised by French Canadians I was very excited to find out that both biological parents were Irish and had strong ties to Ireland. I began my research post haste and was in for quite a rude awakening as my research took me into “REAL” accounts of history that certainly did not jive with what I had learned in school.

I had never heard of white slavery. I had never heard that the terms “redneck and cracker” were coined to describe the paddy slaves whose fair skin would turn blistering red. I never imagined the day I would read accounts of how the Negro slaves were worth far more than the Irish, Scots, and other assorted whites and were actually treated far better. These are things that you will never find in a history book or if you do, it will be dressed up with fancy terms like indentured servant. You will never find the accounts of white slaves being treated far more poorly than the blacks because the blacks fetched a higher price.

So perhaps that means that the Irish and Scots might be exempt from reparations, but those southerners surely must pay the price, correct? Not so. Many southern mountain folks practically starved because of slavery, and no southerner that I know would welcome its return. Picture today that you walk into a white southern factory and say, “We are bringing back slavery so we won’t be needing your services anymore.” Who can even begin to imagine that there would be hoots and hollers and cheers of joy from all of these white workers who are so often accused of being in favor of slavery??

So should the white factory worker, who labors in 120 degree heat with burns and blisters on his hands pay reparations to the black doctor for keeping him oppressed? For that matter, where is this oppression? I hear much talk of it, but I’ve yet to witness it. When I look at the black communities I see some who are lost, but I also see doctors, lawyers, scholars and athletes. They don’t act the least bit oppressed. They go to church, and they worship and fork over money hand over fist to help the needy. They are out working in their communities to make a change for those who are lost by standing proud and hanging together as opposed to crying victim and demanding a handout for their ancestors’ suffering.

If blacks are due an apology, it should come from the black leaders that have fought so hard to keep them believing they are victims for political gain. I truly believe that men like Jesse Jackson are absolute poison to the very people they claim to champion. Sorry is the white person who cannot feed his or her own, but still believe he is better than the black doctor who has done well for himself and his family simply because of skin color. Sorrier still is the black person who believes he cannot become that doctor because of white oppression while white children are starving on the same street that his children are. Most tragic of all, however, are the black leaders who belittle the accomplishments of blacks with constant drum beating of oppression. These folks do nothing more than encourage racial tension and teach blacks they have no choice but to be poor and desolate. They insult the accomplishments of successful blacks by giving the credit for their tremendous achievements to activists who fight for affirmative action and reparations.

It is ridiculous to think affirmative action is the reason blacks succeed as if they never had to actually do the work or pass the tests or put in the time. The black leaders would have you think that all black doctors, lawyers, scholars, and athletes would not be there were it not for the affirmative action fairy. If there is resounding truth to the talk of oppression that they are feeding the nation, then I think we all should be every bit as oppressed at Jesse Jackson or Oprah Winfrey.

Slave reparations are ridiculous. Slavery was a bad thing that happened to everyone from the black slaves to the white slaves to the southern folks starving in the mountains. Perhaps the Irish and the Scots should sue for reparations because their ancestors were slaves. Perhaps reparations would be appropriate for the descendants of poor southerners who could not feed their children and could not find paying work in a market where slavery was legal. Perhaps the African slave traders who sold their own people should be held every bit as accountable as the wealthy Americans who bought them. Shall we start a witch-hunt in the U.S. to find blacks who are descendants of known slave traders and hit their wallets as well?

Forcing descendants to pay reparations for the sins of the past is a dangerous, slippery slope, because you will never be able to separate the accountable from the innocent. Wachovia will not be paying out any reparations with monies earned from this Irish person’s business. Rather than mistakenly dismiss me as a racist I would also call out to all blacks who bank with Wachovia to take into account that these reparations that Wachovia is taking responsibility for will be paid with money it earned from YOU!

I ask you, if I come upon a black doctor, should I slip him a buck or two to make up for his oppression or pay him the respect he’s due for his accomplishments? Reparations will never equal respect.

If you want to make people angry, lie to them. If you want to make them absolutely livid, then tell 'em the truth.

Citing the official US Census of 1830, there were 3,775 free blacks who owned 12,740 black slaves. Furthermore, the story outlines the history of slavery here, and the first slave owner, the Father of American slavery, was Mr Anthony Johnson, of Northampton, Virginia. His slave was John Casor, the first slave for life. Both were black Africans. The story is very readable, and outlines cases of free black women owning their husbands, free black parents selling their children into slavery to white owners, and absentee free black slave owners, who leased their slaves to plantation owners.
-"Selling Poor Steven", American Heritage Magazine, Feb/Mar 1993 (Vol. 441) p 90

Of course, a full telling of Black History would not be complete without a telling of the origin of slavery in the Virginia colony:
Virginia, Guide to The Old Dominion, WPA Writers' Program, Oxford University Press, NY, 1940, p. 378

"In 1650 there were only 300 negroes in Virginia, about one percent of the population. They weren't slaves any more than the approximately 4,000 white indentured servants working out their loans for passage money to Virginia, and who were granted 50 acres each when freed from their indentures, so they could raise their own tobacco.

Slavery was established in 1654 when Anthony Johnson, Northampton County, convinced the court that he was entitled to the lifetime services of John Casor, a negro. This was the first judicial approval of life servitude, except as punishment for a crime.

But who was Anthony Johnson, winner of this epoch-making decision? Anthony Johnson was a negro himself, one of the original 20 brought to Jamestown (1619) and 'sold' to the colonists. By 1623 he had earned his freedom and by 1651, was prosperous enough to import five 'servants' of his own, for which he received a grant of 250 acres as 'headrights.'

Anthony Johnson ought to be in a 'Book of Firsts.' As the most ambitious of the first 20, he could have been the first negro to set foot on Virginia soil. He was Virginia's first free negro and first to establish a negro community, first negro landowner, first negro slave owner and as the first, white or black, to secure slave status for a servant, he was actually the founder of slavery in Virginia. A remarkable man." http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/secret/famous/johnson.html

I found the reference, out of Michael A. Hoffman II's "They Were White and They Were Slaves: The Untold History of the Enslavement of Whites in Early America" : Joseph Cinque was himself a slave trader, selling his fellow blacks into this horror after he himself was set free by a US court.

Amistad producer Debbie Allen calls this destabilizing fact a "rumor." She'd better. If the thinking public, black and white, discover that "noble" Cinque later sold his own people in the very manner he condemned, then there will be a second mutiny, this time against Spielberg and his shameless hoaxing.

Here is Samuel Eliot Morrison, one of the most distinguished of American historians, writing in his "Oxford History of the American People,"
(New York: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1965), p. 520:

"The most famous case involving slavery, until eclipsed by Dred Scott's, was that of the Amistad in 1839. She was a Spanish slave ship carrying 53 newly imported Negroes who were being moved from Havana to another Cuban port. Under the leadership of an upstanding Negro named Cinqué, they mutinied and killed captain and crew. Then, ignorant of navigation, they had to rely on a white man whom they had spared to sail the ship.

"He stealthily steered north, the Amistad was picked up off Long Island by a United States warship, taken into New Haven, and with her cargo placed in charge of the federal marshal. Then what a legal hassle! Spain demanded that the slaves be given up to be tried for piracy, and President Van Buren attempted to do so but did not quite dare.

"Lewis Tappan and Roger Sherman Baldwin, a Connecticut abolitionist, undertook to free them by legal process, and the case was appealed to the Supreme Court. John Quincy Adams, persuaded to act as their attorney, argued that the Negroes be freed, on the ground that the slave trade was illegal both by American and Spanish law, and that mankind had a natural right to freedom.

"The court with a majority of Southerners, was so impressed by the old statesman's eloquence that it ordered Cinqué and the other Negroes set free, and they were returned to Africa. The ironic epilogue is that Cinqué, once home, set himself up as a slave trader."
(End quotation from historian Samuel Eliot Morrison)

BLACK SLAVEOWNERS
http://americancivilwar.com/authors/black_slaveowners.htm

Child slavery today in West Africa?
http://gbgm-umc.org/nwo/99ja/child.html

Slavery throughout historyhttp://www.freetheslaves.net/slavery_today/slavery.html

"To pursue the concept of racial entitlement--even for the most admirable and benign of purposes--is to reinforce and preserve for future mischief the way of thinking that produced race slavery, race privilege and race hatred. In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American."
--Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia

"The democracy will cease to exist when you take it away from those who are willing to work and give it to those who would not."
Thomas Jefferson

Perhaps the group that had the strongest vested interest in seeing the South victorious were the black slaveowners. In 1830 approximately 1,556 black slaveowners in the deep South owned 7,188 slaves. About 25% of all free blacks owned slaves. A few of these were men who purchased their family members to protect or free them, but most were people who saw slavery as the best way to economic wealth and independence for themselves. The American dream in the antebellum South was just as powerful for free blacks as whites and it included the use of slaves for self-improvement. They bought and sold slaves for profit and exploited their labor just like their white counterparts.

Richard Rollins

After their capture one group of white Virginia slave owners and Afro-Virginians were asked if they would take the oath of allegiance to the United States in exchange for their freedom. One free negro indignantly replied: "I can't take no such oaf as dat. I'm a secesh nigger." A slave from this same group, upon learning that his master had refused, proudly exclaimed, "I can't take no oath dat Massa won't take." A second slave agreed: "I ain't going out here on no dishonorable terms." On another occasion a captured Virginia planter took the oath, but slave remained faithful to the Confederacy and refused. This slave returned to Virginia by a flag of truce boat and expressed disgust at his owner's disloyalty: "Massa had no principles." Confederate prisoners of war paid tribute to the loyalty, ingenuity, and diligence of "kind-hearted" blacks who attended to their needs and considered them fellow Southerners.

Ervin L. Jordan, Jr.

A History of the South

Fourth Edition, Alfred A. Knopf 1947, 1953, 1963, 1972

by Francis Butler Simkins and Charles Pierce Roland

P. 125-126

BEGIN QUOTE: Abolitionist assertions that the bondsmen were frequently inadequately clothed, underfed, and driven to death are economically unreasonable. Masters wished to preserve the health and life of their slaves because a sick Negro was a liability and a dead Negro was worth nothing. A rough plenty prevailed on the average plantation. “The best preventive of theft is plenty of pork,” was the advice of a Virginian.

Slaves probably fared as well in the enjoyment of the necessities of life as did most of the free laborers of the country. One of the most respected of all Northern critics of slavery, Frederick Law Olmsted, wrote that the Southern bondsmen lived in quarters quite as adequate as those of most mill or mine workers elsewhere, and that the slaves were perhaps the best fed “proletarian class” in the world. He also testified that they worked less than did free laborers.

Incomplete statistics reveal that the slaves averaged somewhat higher sickness and death rates per thousand than did Southern whites as a whole. But the slaves were from all indications as healthy and long-lived as white common laborers in the United States before the Civil War. It was general knowledge at the time in Louisiana that the slaves were better off in these respects than were the thousands of Irish immigrant laborers engaged in clearing land and digging drainage canals on the sugar plantations.

The planters were reluctant to commit their expensive chattels to this dangerous work, but preferred to hire free laborers, whose loss by death, sickness, or injury cost nothing. A careful study of the figures on a group of 875 plantation slaves whose records are preserved indicates their average life expectancy at the time of birth to have been longer than that of the general population of such cities as New York, Boston, and Philadelphia during the same period. An authority on urban slavery concludes that the medical care, health, and welfare of slaves in Southern cities were superior to the care, health, and welfare of the free Negroes; and the outstanding work on the life of Negroes in the North at this time shows that they fared no better in such matters than did free blacks in the land of slavery. END QUOTE

Booker T. Washington. It’s worthwhile quoting.

“There is (a) class of colored people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their (the black people’s) wrongs – partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs . . .”
Booker goes on to say: “There is a certain class of race problem-solvers who don’t want the patient to get well, because as long as the disease holds out, they have not only an easy means of making a living, but also an easy medium through which to make themselves prominent before the public."

Read about Child Sex Slaves!!

Tennessee in June 1861 became the first in the South to legislate the use of free black soldiers. The governor was authorized to enroll those between the ages of fifteen and fifty, to be paid $18 a month and the same rations and clothing as white soldiers; the black men appeared in two black regiments in Memphis by September.
Black Confederates and Afro-Yankees in Civil War Virginia, Ervin L. Jordan, Jr., (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1995) pp. 218-219

The last thing the UN is trying to do is reduce slavery throughout the world!

There are more slaves today than were seized from Africa in four centuries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The modern commerce in humans rivals illegal drug trafficking in its global reach and in the destruction of lives.

I have always been mystified by racial grievance mongers who pontificate on the glorious Nirvana that their lives would be had they only been left in Mother Africa, notwithstanding the general quality of life there. Since most American blacks have some measure of Caucasian genealogical ancestry, and since slavery was the transmission belt that enabled the mixing of their black and white ancestor's gene pools,(whether by rape,semi voluntary or voluntary associations) than what they are really saying is that they and their decendents would rather not exist.

I acknowledge the kidnapping and suffering of my African ancestors, and the resultant decades of slavery, oppresion, and discrimination that amounted to a monstrous crime for them. But the result was me and my family living in a nation that provides the most liberty and opportunity for any African descended people on earth. I am profoundly grateful to be here. I welcome the opportunity for any clarifcation of the historical record, and should that clarification reveal more evidence of the often bestial nature of the American institution of slavery, than we should unflinchingly face and acknowledge it. The historical record should be properly contextualized, and honestly examined without any attempt to inflate the crime beyond the actual truth of the injustice. The endless racial navel gazing, racial identity posturing, and puffed up grievance mongering should be rejected for the PC irrelevance that it is.

The main reason that I am not entitled to slavery reperations is because I was NOT ENSLAVED. I grew up in an era in which I remember all of the visible (literally) signs of Jim Crow when I visited relatives in the south in the early 60's. I experienced numerous physical racial attacks as my newly acquired Souh side Chicago neighborhood underwent racial intergration. I experienced some minor racial discrimination at other times and places. The United States today is NO LONGER THE NATION THAT ONCE OFFICIALLY DISCRIMINATED AGAINST IT'S CITIZENS, unless you wish to consider "Racial Preferences" for preferred minorities, Which is racism in the guise of cultural Marxism. None of that changes the fact that I am blessed to be a citizen of the greatest nation in the history of mankind, with a higher standard of living, opportunity and liberty than any other.

Sometimes it seems as though the race industry merchants and class action lawyers would divide us into warring ethnic enclaves with mortar pits in the streets sniping at each other ala the Balkans, all of them seeking racial spoils with government help. This is nothing more than a cultural Marxist wealth redistribution scheme.

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