Please stop taking HN threads further into flamewar.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

But the United States didn't enslave his ancestors. England did, and the US inherited it, but made several provisions to end the practice quickly (Congress passed a law as soon as it was able to end the slave trade, and then fought a war that cost many American lives to end it for good). For all of American history, most people did not own slaves.

And before someone says 'well they benefited from it'... well we benefit from cheap, abusive labor practices in China and other Asian countries so get off your high horse. Benefiting does not imply acceptance.

This is a weird bit of historical revisionism. The US slave trade was abolished in 1807, which was not the earliest such a law could have been passed. 1776 was. England ended the slave trade the same year (and slavery had clearly been on the way out since 1772, when the first ruling about slavery being illegal in the British isles was made). This ruling may have contributed to the interest in declaring independence from Britain among wealthy US slaveholders, like for example George Washington.

England then abolished slavery in the entire British Colonies in 1833, the US took another 30 years to free southern slaves via the Emancipation Proclamation, and another 2 years beyond that to enact the 13th amendment.

> For all of American history, most people did not own slaves.

This is irrelevant. The powerful and influential did. The people who had control over the government for the most part did. Think I'm lying? More than 3/4 of the signers of the declaration of independence were slaveholders[0].

[0]: https://twitter.com/arlenparsa/status/1168192825848213510

> England did, and the US inherited it

I think this is bollocks. In 1775 the slave owners were British subjects. By 1800 they were US citizens, but they were the same people. They didn't change, their citizenship changed.

The better argument is, they're all dead now. All of the slave owners and all of the slaves are dead. Their children are dead. Their children's children are dead. It has been seven generations.

More than that, the large majority of the current day US population are descended from immigrants who came to the US after the abolition of slavery, and even the large majority of those present during the civil war didn't own slaves. Are we to blame a family who immigrated from Poland during WWII?

The dead are responsible for what the dead have done. We are responsible for what we do.

You’re upset that he focused on the ones who were oppressed rather than the ones who were oppressing? Many Black people have white ancestors but ask how much of that was really consensual and how those children were treated.

> Many Black people have white ancestors but ask how much of that was really consensual

Doesn't this imply a problem with the whole "sins of the father" thing? Otherwise all of those people would have to be condemned as the offspring of a rapist.

Those are separate concepts: we should not condemn children for their parent’s crimes but that doesn’t mean that we should forget that those crimes happened.

In this case it’s especially important because those children were treated very differently from their siblings: a slave owner’s fully white children had full status in society and lived in relative luxury but those borne by slaves inherited their mother’s status. Apologists try to claim that some relationships were consensual but it’s hard to reconcile that with the treatment of any resulting children.

> we should not condemn children for their parent’s crimes but that doesn’t mean that we should forget that those crimes happened.

But then what do you propose to do about it? All of those people are dead. We can't bring them back to life and punish them.

> In this case it’s especially important because those children were treated very differently from their siblings

It was no doubt a very important distinction to the children. I wouldn't want to have to argue it was a very important distinction to modern day descendants seven generations later when that ancestor represents less than 1% of their ancestors from that many generations ago.

And the usual argument is to want to assign guilt if you benefited from a bad thing one of your ancestors did. But having existence is a pretty huge benefit, which makes that argument taste quite sour.

It’s not always 7 generations ago - there was a guy living here until a couple years back whose father was born in slavery - and it didn’t end instantly with the Civil War, or the demise of Jim Crow, or the Civil Rights movement — things like redlining ran into the 1970s and police violence and job discrimination never really stopped. White people can say it ended in the civil war era but there are plenty of people who know they still have to spend time thinking about risks their white peers do not.

He's so oppressed he has like 100x more money than the average white person, while contributing nothing to society. Maybe some whites living in trailer parks should pay him reparations for all his suffering, while he collects checks from Nike.

Are you suggesting that Colin Kaepernick's mother was raped?

No, but previous ancestors. Rape of the enslaved was very common. The difference in skin tone between Africans and the majority of African-Americans is not because of something in the water.