“The way we are taught this in school, Lincoln “freed the slaves,” and then the nearly four million people who the day before had been treated as property suddenly enjoyed the privileges of being Americans like everyone else. We are not prodded to contemplate what it means to achieve freedom without a home to live in, without food to eat, a bed to sleep on, clothes for your children or money to buy any of it. Narratives collected of formerly enslaved people during the Federal Writers’ Project of the 1930s reveal the horrors of massive starvation, of “liberated” black people seeking shelter in burned-out buildings and scrounging for food in decaying fields before eventually succumbing to the heartbreak of returning to bend over in the fields of their former enslavers, as sharecroppers, just so they would not die. “With the advent of emancipation,” writes the historian Keri Leigh Merritt, “blacks became the only race in the U.S. ever to start out, as an entire people, with close to zero capital.””
‘It Is Time for Reparations’
via Instapaper
We have been lied to. History lessons in school are made to reflect the winner and taught with an agenda to maintain the statues quo of whiteness. Reading this tonight has been a minor history lesson and filled in gaps in the story we were never taught.
It it enraging to see our country once again exploit anyone who wasn’t a white European. Not surprising but enraging. This country was built on the backs, literally, of slave labor. People who toiled for idle whites to generate vast wealth in their name. Meanwhile earning nothing for themselves or to pass to their children.
The US Government has a debt to pay.
“To this day, the only Americans who have ever received government restitution for slavery were white enslavers in Washington, D.C., who were compensated for their loss of human property.”