Uh, being oppressed in another country during a war for 6 years in another country on the other side of the planet.
vs.
Being subjected to 400 years of systematic rape, torture, forced servitude (which continued after slavery ended, see Debt Peonage).
You see, I'll admit that Nazi Germany was bad and wrong. I'm proud my dad fought to put an end to it (and a bit embarrassed about my distant cousins who enabled it.)
You talk to a German today about the Holocaust, they simply can't stop apologizing for it.
Compared to Americans, where we still put up statues to the slave rapists and fly the Confederate Flags proudly.
Now imagine if you had to walk past statues of Hitler every day and saw people proudly flying swastikas.
View attachment 796060
(Amazing how the hate groups fly these together.)
It is as if people cannot acknowledge that both were terrible and culturally defining atrocities and must pit one against tbe other.
It is also easy to forget that the legacy of the American race based system of slavery did not end with abolition. After a short period of an incredible rise in economic revival, building of communities, businesses, arts, elections into public offices, it was completely crushed when the government caved to the racist demands of former slave states who subsequently instituted Jim Crowe, laws designed to criminalize and target the Black community, government approved violence and destruction of property and livelihoods on the Black community, and Jim Crowe…seperate but “equal”. There are people
alive today who were born and lived through Jim Crowe and the horrific race based violence of the Civil Rights era.
This is all part of slavery and its legacy. It is a legacy for an entire community that was generations and centuries in the making and it isn’t going to “disappear” or be”fixed” in
just a couple of generations.
Culture and community aren’t created out of nothing, they are built over a long period of time and shaped by events unique to each one.
There is no question that the Jewish community and its culture of adaptation while maintaining its identity has been shaped by its diaspora, a legacy of persecution and the culmination of that in the Holocaust.
In this country, there SHOULD be no question that the African-American community has been shaped by events I listed above yet the expectation here is that they should dump their unique AMERICAN culture, assimilate into the cultural expectations of the dominant “White” culture, even to what they name their children, and change a cultural legacy built over centuries.
In this country, Jews did not suffer the degree persecution they did in other countries. They could walk in the street and be a white person and no one would know. Not so with a Black person.
I think Affirmative Action, as a program of quotas, is due to sunset. It has done what it could accomplish in opening doors.
I think what is left is going to be more difficult because the issues less easy to quantify. But if education is the key to success, and diversity in both college and the workplace increases opportunities and success for individual and in producing better leaders and “movers and shakers” for tomorrow, I’m all for including race, ethnicity , first generation status, and underrepresented groups in the selection process. Otherwise we are just going to see a widening and hardening of the wealth gap, and less and less economic mobility. The world today is not tbe world of 50 years ago.
