Screening of "Traces of the Trade"

Well over 80+% of White people in the U.S. are descended from immigrant groups who arrived in this country AFTER the slave era: Italians, Irish, Germans, Swedes, Jews, Greeks, and so on. So they have no culpability for the crimes of slavery. Furthermore, very very few northerners were involved in the slave trade, except for a handful of very wealthy families such as Katrina Browne's family. And in the south, a rather small percentage -- well under 10% -- of families owned slaves, as most white southerners even back then were dirt-poor.

Incredibly, MOST of the descendants of slave-owners currently in the United States self-identify now as "Black"! Stats show that 70% of African-Americans in the US are actually mixed race -- i.e. partly white. Most of those white genes come from basically rapes committed by slave-owners in the Antebellum South on their slave women. The babies were invariably never acknowledged by the white fathers, and were raised as slaves by their slave mothers.

Anti-miscenegation laws and Jim Crow laws prevented most intermarriages and inter-racial sex for a hundred years (1865-1965), which means that most of the "mixed blood" in most American blacks came from the pre-Civil War era, where rapes of slave girls was commonplace.

Meanwhile, the white slave-owners would only have a generally small number of legitimate children with their white wives, so as to not break up the inheritance among too many sons. A slave-owner might have 2 legitimate children and 20 illegitimate half-black children begotten when he raped his slaves.

The end result of all these facts presented above is that the modern genetic descendants of slave-owners are overwhelmingly identified now as "blacks" or "African-Americans." Only a tiny percentage of white people alive today in the US are the lineal descendants of actual slave-owners. Most white people are the descendants of later immigrants, northerners, or poor southern whites.

If anybody is to be paying reparations to anybody, then it is the pale-skin (i.e. partly white) blacks (who are the descendants of slave-owners) who should be paying reparations to the dark-skin (i.e. all African) blacks (who are the descendants of slaves).

Yes, the American economy as a whole benefitted from slavery, but innumerable forms of recompense have been paid out over the century and a half since then, from "forty acres and a mule" given to former slaves to the benefits of the Great Society and the modern welfare state.

We are unified as a nation now and should not focus on who our ancestors were or were not. Do we blame the children of murderers for the crimes of their fathers? Of course not. Nor should we blame American society for the crimes of people hundreds of years ago.

Truth is, just about every nation on Earth practiced slavery at one time or another and benefitted from it economically. All the New World (N. + S. America) countries were founded on slave economies; every European nation benefitted from slaves in their colonies; every Arab nation had slaves for centuries, and there were even slaves and serfs and near-slaves in Asia and elsewhere. It's just the history of our species, and it's time to move on. Slavery was a horrible but universal feature of human society from the beginning of recorded history until the 19th century. Thankfully it is a thing of the past (aside from certain places in Africa and the Middle East), and we should move forward with equality, not continue the inequality with "the politics of revenge."