I would much rather see white people educate themselves about the systemic causes rather than take individual responsibility.

I think about this a lot. Imagine you are a white male in like 1813. It’s not as if when you turn 18 you put on your university application “slave owner”. I imagine that for a white male in 1813 it would have started much earlier.

I imagine it would have started when that white male was three or four years old. The ancestors of current white people surely had a problem but it wasn’t necessarily just selling human beings.

It was also the fact that their so called “ancestors they are proud of” probably whipped and bloodied other human beings in front of their own children. It probably wouldn’t have been any different to them than maybe slaughtering a chicken in front of their kids.

Because they literally branded and treated African Americans like cattle. I could see a toddler walking outside with their mother. Their first images would have been to see a black figure among the other animals being whipped or herded.

What I can only glean from all of this is that the people that ran the U.S government and economy at this time were absolutely responsible.

Just as it’s true now that very few of us set the rules of finance as well as the social norms or expectations. It was even more pronounced back then.

Did you know that very few white people could afford to own slaves? That most white people rented them along with the plantations because they could not afford it the way the landowning elite could. Often a few different families went in on a plantation together like a shared investment.

I am not here to justify any of what happened. But what I would like is for people to be willing to really solve this problem and not just in the way we’ve been conditioned to look at it and solve it.

You know that up until pretty recently a lot of white parents and black parents in the U.S would take a belt to their own children? They actually whipped their own children like some conditioned trauma response passed down.

There is a collective trauma present in the psyche of both black and white Americans. There was a status quo of literally widespread violence. Imagine being a white person during this time period and knowing that it was wrong but watching all your neighbors around you act like violent maniacs because it was the law?

I would imagine many white people developed personality disorders just from being born into an environment where trauma was normal from childhood. It was law.

What really needs to be addressed is who instituted slavery. Who ran it at its height. Who were these land owing elite.

We do have books. I believe one of them is known as Edmund’s peerage or something like that. It’s a list of aristocratic families during this time period. Those are the actual white people who should take some responsibility for what their ancestors did. But of course what you will find is that a lot of the people who had the means to actually own slaves back then. Are often very private members of the one percent now. They inherit incredible amounts of money some of which was undoubtedly made during slavery.

It’s also what makes the reporter who asked Mitch McConnell about whether or not black people should receive reparations a very well informed person. Because if you look his ancestors could actually afford to own slaves. Which means he is in fact very much a literal beneficiary of wealth that his family built off the slave trade.

White people in the U.S more than anything need to really make a bold decision to separate themselves from the top 1% in this country. But of course so many of them are obsessed with trying to be them.

I’m not talking about the white people whose parents just made their first million a generation ago or even people whose grandparents made a couple million.

No, these would be people whose great-great grandparents were millionaires. Which then grew into some sort of industry monopoly or business that ended up generating enough money in the early 2000s to pass on a 10+ million inheritance to their child at 18 or 21.

What people have to understand is that a lot of those children are going to Yale and Harvard and then naturally matriculating to the top of government, media, journalism, marketing and business. These great grandchildren of the slave owning elite are running our country. Jeff from Colorado whose grandpa owned a successful sports shop is not really responsible for this or running the country. If anything Jeff from Colorado was lucky enough to not have to deal with racism toward him making his path easier but he is not who all of us in the U.S need to be looking at.

We need to be going through the surnames of Congress and tracing them. We need to be googling the surnames of the giant media donors and investment firms, Wall street etc . I have a very strong feeling we will find many of those surnames linked to the land owning slave owning elite. Then the money can start to be traced. But even if those individual families still have a lot of the money which is how they became the 1%. It would still be the U.S government’s responsibility because they made slavery legal.