Forgive me if I don't make much sense today, I've gotten 4 hours sleep in the past 48 hours and have been up since 10 pm last night.

There's very few homeschooled kids in Canada since the government gives a lot of funding to public schooling. I'm not sure how you have it in the US (is there free public schooling?) but that implies that there aren't many ultra Christian conservatives either (even our conservative party is slightly right wing, they're mostly centrist in alignment). I think the reason is the us grants too much power to state officials, each state is practically its own country with its own set of laws and education standards. I don't know how the state officials would react if they were told that they had to emplace a standard that schools had to run themselves by, but it would probably eliminate racial inequality in teaching students about American history.


I know, but the way I see it is although my great grandfather ws a German soldier in WWII, should I have to feel responsible for the holocaust? I know it was bad and what was done as criminal, but i wasnt there, so understanding this is the most I can do. Modern day Americans shouldn't feel responsible for slavery in the same sense, I don't think many people of our generation really care anymore, the conservatives trying to wash out black history are old and after they die, the new generation of apathetic Americans wont care about what happened. I do see what you're saying though, they're not being taught a full version of history, so this stoic new generation won't understand that it was wrong (correct me if I'm going off track with this).

That depends: did you profit off of those war crimes?

Many of the American families that profited the most from our past institutions never had to give those fortunes up; and later used them to the benefit of their successive generations & to continue to keep their hold over the top of the societal hierarchy. Sure, some lost their fortunes from the war or in other ways over the 145-ish years since but there are families & corporations that can still attribute some of their fortunes to either slavery or segregation.

This is not necessarily old-history here either. Have you ever read Native Son? It's about a black man who lived in Chicago during/right after the great migration, who ends up murdering two people, befriending some communists, and then executed for his crimes. Only the first half of the book is worth reading. His first victim was a girl from a rich white Chicago family that made their wealth by being slum land lords with their rental properties in the black district [where property was worthless but kept by white land owners; who refused to take care of them and charged their black tenants absurd sky-high rents]. This is still living memory here, taking place in the 1940s. I am not sure if you could consider the girl's family "1-percenters" to use today's terms, but they surely would have been top 15-percenters and the families like them [which did truly exist] can surely still attribute some of their social standing to these abuses.

I know my family continued to reap the financial benefits of slavery until the great depression [which destroyed that branch's financial standing completely], and I still have relatives that are old enough to have experienced that change.

I was wondering: on the posts in which a person specifically stated that their "Happy N Day" comment was not intended to be "racial", is it possible to them that it isn't?

I mean, if a (for example) younger person listens to hour after hour of nigga-this and nigga shot a mafu&*er music, and folks refer to each other as "mah nigga" etc...maybe the N word is some word that doesn't have the same meaning it does to a slightly older person.

Maybe they're full of crap, too, and the N word is always a racial thing and always will be. If that's the case, then nobody should get to say it or write it. Otherwise, maybe it will become something included in common speech, which as Lenny Bruce tried to tell us is the key to breaking away how offensive a word is. Just repeat it and repeat it until it's only a word and has no more meaning.

Yah, they are. Those imbeciles wouldn't even know who Lenny Bruce was. If Lenny Bruce was alive today, he'd kick their asses -- and be genuinely funny about it.

I get what you're saying: Scene from the movie Lenny, where Dustin Hoffman in the role of Lenny Bruce uses the "n" word and other ethnic slurs to make a point. (Don't click if you don't want to hear.)

But, honestly, if the "n" word were to become obsolete, I think the people who made those postings would just come up with some other way to express their hate. I saw that enough of them also included the words "dead" and "monkey" in their postings.

It's people's minds that need changing -- not just their words.

-- Nephele

Didn't notice your reply.

Nope, he was in the Wehrmacht, but I'm sure in some way or another all Germans profited initially, but after the allies came, they lost 10x what they earned, he was a soldier and didn't have any strong education, so after the war, he lost his home, almost all his family, not to mention coming over experienced a lot of discrimination as a German (funny, even white people get discriminated against sometimes).


Almost all money comes from exploitation. The people at nike have their products made in a sweatshop in china, where workers get no rights, and barely a 1/10th of a percent of whatever it is they made. I'm starting to wonder some legitimate ways to make money these days, every way seems to exploit somebody in one way or another.