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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Seems to me some of the posters here are living in the past.

Now here's the real history lesson - prior to the Jim Crow laws, DC was truly segregated, and was 60 to 70 percent white.  By the 1970s and 1980s, that reversed to being over 70% AA.  But now, a few decades later, it's back to under 50% AA.

In the last several decades, there has been a steady influx of non-AA residents coming in, and some AA have moved to surrounding communities.  Ask the typical non-AA where he or she is from and you will find that most of them are not from around here.  Most are likely to be from all walks of life, from every part of the US, as well as from Europe, Asia and Latin America.  But that's not unique to non-AA - my office is majority AA but on learning where they come from you are more likely to hear something like  NYC, Jacksonville, North Carolina, Chicago, Trinidad, Massachusetts or Ghana than you will hear DC.

A lot has changed in these recent decades, yet [b]there is that small segment of people with multi-generational history in the city and a culture of victimhood[/b], who are still stuck in the past, some of [b]whom will gladly paint all non-AA with the brush of whatever historic and institutional racism and segregation of DC[/b], even though most non-AA in DC are strangers both to DC and to each other and do not have that history.

It's invalid, irrelevant and inappropriate.[/quote]

Gee, I wonder where this came from? Historically and culturally, the worst thing people of color did was give Europeans the benefit of the doubt. Not entirely "invalid, irrelevant or inappropriate."
[/quote]

This^^^[/quote]

Sure, blame the Europeans for everything.  But the fact is, Africans practiced slavery and exploitation on each other way back into history (Africans were selling slaves to Europeans) and it even continues to this day in some parts of Africa with African-on-African exploitation and human trafficking in Somalia, subsaharan Africa and elsewhere.  [b]But again, are you going to stay stuck in memes of the past and of elsewhere,  or are you going to get with the HERE AND NOW?[[/b]/quote]

I challenge you to research the state of the African slave trade and the state of the Transatlantic slave trade. Do a compare and contrast and you will see that few things in history compared to the brutality of slavery in the Americas, physically, mentally, emotionally, and culturally.
And what is your excuse for the state of the First Nation in this country, or the indigenous of Australia, hell, native people worldwide. The past has not been dealt with in so many ways and until it is there will always be hard feelings. Instead of having open and honest conversations about the reality of european history the excuse is always "well, africans did it first..." it is lame and a copout. "HERE AND NOW" would not be what it is if history had not played out the way it did. To pretend that the wounds of our past have no bearing on our present is ridiculous. I imagine you would have us all forgive and forget, only to exploit again in some other way.[/quote]

Seems there is a lot of presumption about who inflicted what wounds, who exploited whom, or if there even is anything to be forgiven, excused, et cetera where it comes to a great many.  The "typical" white person in America in the 1700s and 1800s did not own slaves and could not afford them, it was more typically the wealthy landed gentry and particularly those with plantations or other large enterprises that owned slaves.  Add to that the many white immigrants from Europe who came to America well after the abolition of slavery in America, whose families likewise did not own slaves.  Likewise, there were many cases where whites in America were likewise exploited, sold into servitude, subjected to harsh conditions and mistreatment, i.e. indentured servants, not to mention European whites whose families went through a thousand years of years of abject poverty, exploitation and serfdom going back into ancient times.  It's not correct or appropriate to run wild with assumptions and so broadly paint all white people with the collective blame and guilt of being the exploiters and the bringers of all the world's ills and evils.[/quote]

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