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[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]

Thank you for this. Can you (or someone) address the question of reliving the trauma daily as an aspect of culture in contrast to others who witnessed similar hatred (not slavery, but see the earlier Japanese poster with living examples of similar legalized discrimination) but who don’t seem to wear it as a badge? Their experience is still very real - see Georgia yesterday. [/quote]

Japanese Americans have talked about it.  It is not forgotten.  [/quote]

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