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Maybe that's the problem. Many people have some misconceptions about slavery and narrow understandings of it. Things like African's role in the slave trade needs to be better clarified for example. The North's role in once having slaves and financing southern slavery needs to be touched on more. The enslavement of Blacks by other free Blacks and Native-Americans needs to be touched on more. Once more of slavery's misconceptions are cleared up then this would expand how people view slavery.
Too many still view slavery as a southern thing.
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Now, New York was involved, in many ways, with the South, but, most importantly, economically. I mean, New York really provided much of the capital that made the plantation economy in the South possible. It not only bought the cotton. It loaned money for the growing of cotton. It handled the foreign distribution of cotton. It was very much involved in cotton -- in the cotton production.
I don't think America is haunted by slavery.
Its the aftermath that still haunts America,esp Jim Crow laws. I'm sure black Americans would be on almost equal income levels with whites had they been allowed to participate economically and socially in 1865.
Slavery was horribly handled in the United States. It was used as a platform to destroy an entire region of the country, its wealth, its pride, and culture. The practice should have never existed on this continent, but it still remains a poorly understood economic and social order that people understand through popular media like the Roots miniseries, or more recent movies like Django Unchained. It was established by the aristocracy and priesthood of the old world (the Moors in Spain had a little to do with it since Arabs were practicing slavery long before) and dumped on to the new. In short, it was a medieval and ancient relic that helped make a region of the USA prosperous, and that region was in turn punished for it.
Of course the robber barons followed shortly thereafter, followed by the debt-creating Fed, the overseas sweatshops, and a bunch of other greed-based practices akin to slavery. Maybe the current elite is keeping the remembrance alive to make us overlook their current practices.
Even to this day, the emotions run very deep. The pain is very real.
And the socio-economic disparities remain.
This is not just the case in the United States--but also in such Latin American countries as Brazil and the Dominican Republic.
Why is this so? Why does slavery still haunt us?
And how can we move forward as a nation?
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I'm not haunted by it (and I am America). Doesn't slow me down. I have better, more important things to think about.
Life is too short to worry about things other people did.
Now, if I was in the news business or had an incentive to propagate US slavery history or if I was a politician looking for votes in a key sector, then I might continue to broadcast it.
I don't think it is slavery so much as the mindset that somehow a group of people was less than other humans. In a lot of ways, this thinking is still prevalent today but not expressed due to political correctness. I can't speak for African Americans since I am white, but I see LOTS of instances where racism is still alive and well.
The people who rant loudest and longest about the legacy of slavery are often the same people who are the most eager to harness the power of bigger government for income redistribution and similar fantasies; that, in itself, is another mutation of slavery, and one with even greater destructive potential.
people have to understand the facts about slavery.
1. american didnt invent it slavery has been around for thousands of years
2. even africans enslaved other africans long before the europeans came to africa
3. most of africans were sent to the caribbeans and south america not the us.
4. many countries had far more slaves that the us had, england alone had ten times as much.
5. some of the biggest traders in the african slave trade were african kings would trade his fellow citizens for gifts from the european and arab traders.
this all doesnt excuse america from having slaves but we were just a small cog in a very big wheel.
One wonders if the Civil War might have been mitigated, forestalled, or avoided if Taylor had served his term, and possibly a second --- as compared to the three indecisive personalities who actually followed.
I think it's because it is hard to imagine that something so horrible existed so recently and within a country that was founded on equality.
Kind of like how the holocaust is hard to imagine taking place among people as civilized as the Germans.
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