@Peaceandnamaste the SCOTUS count right now is like 5 conservatives and 4 liberals. Why are you anti racist angels trying to lynch the one black conservative when there’s 4 perfectly white conserves to get rid of?
Your actions and lies never align.. so sayeth Malcolm X
People need to stop treating the American founding fathers as saints. A bunch of slave-driving plantation owners whose ideas about freedom were narrowly restricted to white male landlords.
@CountScrofula Agreed. And I especially hate when people say, "you can’t judge the past by today’s standards !" Slavery as a [b]bad[/b] thing is not a modern concept—the Revolutionary War happened because [b]they[/b] didn’t want to be under someone else’s control; they understood the concept of freedom for [b]themselves[/b]. Plus, there were active abolitionists, and slave "uprisings". What I hear when someone tries to defend slaveowners based on different times is "It’s not [b]their[/b] fault that they didn’t consider people like you human beings." If not, whose fault was it ? Hell, yeah I can judge that—and I do. 🤨
Again, discouraging patriotism, I'm sure you're happy for others to celebrate their countries with all their flaws. We know it's wrong today but we can't try and make people hundreds of years ago see our viewpoints today.
@BlueSkyKing your ancestors owned slaves and killed indigenous people, there should reparations for the enslaved people and the people that were displaced from their land, culture and identity.
@Peaceandnamaste I'm not in favour of reparations for enslavement. All cultures of all races have institutionalized slavery through the centuries. Thank goodness, humans have achieved a level of civilization to know it's wrong, but to expect everyone to pay everyone for ancestors who were enslaved is a fool's game.
Jefferson also started having children by one of those slaves, Sally Hemings. People have tried to revise that as some kind of "love story"—except she was 14 when it started and it’s unlikely that she had a choice. His white descendants at first denied it happened at all, until it was proven that they were sharing DNA with Hemings’ descendants.
@bijouxbroussard All true. 100%. And yet he is still an immensely complicated and important figure. He did lay the philosophical groundwork for the eventual abolition of slavery in the US and wanted to do more at the time than proved possible. He was a complicated and flawed man, but also a great one in many ways.
