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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This will be called trolling, but I'm trying to add to the conversation here.  I grew up in CA and remember driving past the former internment camps in the 80s and wondering why they were ever "necessary" because I didn't see how the Asians around me could be harmful.  They were (and continue to be) high achieving and hard working despite this history.  What is it about Black culture still wears slavery as a mark of worthiness and value?  That history only has relevance to an individual if they allow it to have relevance to who they are as a human today.  It is a terrible period in history, but why does it continue to define individuals today in a way that Asians (or Irish, or Jewish or Egyptian or Greek...) don't?[/quote]
It’s only trolling if people answer you thoughtfully and you shut down or mock in return.

The only other treatment of humans in America that rivals the way that Black people were treated in scope and depth is the Native American genocide, and for lots of Native Americans, that’s still an enormous part of their lives, too. But I’ll focus on Black people here.

It wasn’t [i]just[/i] slavery. It was birthright slavery, slavery that people couldn’t get out of. Rarely people could save up to buy their own freedom or get freed via a will, but it wasn’t common. They were prevented from learning to read, they were prevented from worshipping freely. I just watched The Black Church: This is Our Story and in some places they weren’t even allowed to look skyward in prayer, lest they be checking the star position (and it was enforced by whipping). There were no protections for any enslaved person - no break from rape if that’s what the owner wanted, no break from anything, ever. They were used in medical experiments. If you’ve ever had gynecological surgery, thank the hapless Black victims of that doctor who operated on them without anesthesia under the belief that Black people were less than human and didn’t feel pain. Enslaved people literally built much of our nation, and they were [i]definitely[/i] the engine that drove the economy, work for which they got nothing.

And it’s not like it quit with slaves being freed. The Ku Klux Klan terrorized Black people, torturing and murdering them, and it was frequently treated as a pleasant spectacle by white people who picnicked at lynchings - and stole “souvenirs” from the body. They were kept out of school, they were kept out of specific schools, they were kept in virtual slavery with the system of sharecropping. Redlining continued legally for decades. Systemic racism really does keep Black people in lower economic straits even to this day.

I’m not Black. I can read about this issue and understand it from that perspective, but I am not a descendant of slaves. It’s not personal for me. But it is still very much personal for those who are descended from enslaved people. It’s not the past. It’s the present. [/quote]

Black woman here. Excellent post. [/quote]
Thanks. I really did spend the last almost year reading and watching and sitting with it. 
- the White woman you’re replying to. [/quote]

A different black women here and I agree! To expand a little further on your post, African slavery lasted hundreds of years.  The transatlantic slave trade created a system where Africans and their descendants were legally, religiously, and corporately nonPEOPLE, nonHUMAN. In my studies of American history I have not found any other grouping of people to be legally determined as non people. That treatment did not end with the Civil War or Emancipation Proclamation. It has continued on, legally and psychologically until the present day. Generations of black folks have been raised under this system in America. A system that some perpetuate, ignore, or passively embrace. The loss of personhood and familial memories of tribes, native tongues etc cannot be overstated. The people that were legally kidnapped by the government and placed in those camps in California had connection to personhood, tribe, native tongue, culture and were likely able to maintain that after that experience.  400 years later, black people through the transatlantic slave trade have none of that.

I do not understand the comment about wearing slavery as a mark of worthiness and value but why does it define individuals in the way in which travesties do not for Greeks, Japanese people..the answer is in your statement.  The slave trade completely removed the “Greek, Japanese, Irish”  ie: Kenyan, Sudanese from black people. So history starts ...maybe in a geography with a plantation. AncestryDNA maybe can tell you generally where your people may have come from..Subsaharian African, hunter gather region,...but for millions of us, we will never know, Greek, Irish, Japanese. But we do know...slavery.[/quote]
Same person you’re replying to and I will add one thing: my great grandfather killed himself in front of my grandmother and the family basically broke to pieces after that. Orphanages, institutions, international adoptions, forced sterilizations, etc. I know my grandma spent her life doing the best she could, but three generations and a hundred years on, I can still see the marks on my aunts and uncles and even how that trauma was passed to us. That was one series of bad things that happened in one family and no one did it [i]to[/i] them, there was no organized system of violence or oppression that kept them hurting. And so I find the gaslighting of Black people around this issue - “why don’t you get over it, it was a long time ago” to be ghoulish and abhorrent. Even disregarding all the discrimination and terror against Black people since 1865, it’s a [i]really[/i] ridiculous expectation for [i]generations[/i] burnt by repeated trauma and insane violence to just “get over it.” We haven’t even begun to examine it.

Hell we’ve got people defending celebrating the time because “it’s pretty.”[/quote]

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