Reply to Biden Admin to Remove Statue of William Penn from Philadelphia Park

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I can't imagine how people are so afraid of a statue.[/quote]

There is no reason to celebrate humans who owned other humans.

This shouldn't be a hard concept to understand.[/quote]

There is no reason for you to understand that life in the eighteenth century was fairly brutal and harsh for everyone, be they the 12 year old cabin boy plucked from the whorehouse in London, or the planter dying of syphilis, or his Irish servants also dying of syphilis, or his African slaves. Your complete blindness to any facts, your willingness to erase history doesn't help those dead slaves, or make their descendants' lives better. It's a hollow gesture, performed by someone who is undoubtedly proud their own ancestors weren't there... But also too lazy to check on what their own ancestors were up to. I guarantee, even without knowing you, there was some non consensual stuff going on in your family tree as well.

By dehumanizing slave owners, you're erasing slavery. No one is saying chattal slavery wasn't awful, but in the 18th, in a place like Philadelphia, it was only one of several unjust labor systems, all designed to function in a pre-industrial world with varying regards for the welfare of the people involved. [/quote]

Moreover, Penn led efforts to improve conditions for all workers and ultimately his reforms inspired the Constitution. His state was very much a leader in abolishing slavery and establishing a more just society.

Do you really believe that all white people enjoyed a happy go lucky life way back then? Like the pp explains, the vast majority of people suffered. [/quote]

It's so academically lazy of the PP to dismiss all of this, too. I mean, sure, history becomes a very short topic when all you need to say is, "I'm not going to celebrate slaveowners or colonizers," but that's because you've never studied enough history to understand what those words mean: you've been given a laughably reductive version of our collective past and been told it's fine not to study the parts that might upset you, or not have clear moral lessons that promote the conceit that you're more enlightened than those bad bad people ever were.

It's soviet, for lack of a better term, your version of history. It's designed to give a moral lesson that celebrates you as some kind of enlightened, virtuous person. It's designed to make you feel better about yourself without ever making you lift a finger to address any of the issues in America that continue to be legacies of our past: our segregated neighborhoods and schools, our religious fundamentalism, our tribalism, our insistence on rugged individualism over collective good, and our belief in heroes. [/quote]

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