Open Wide

Open Wide
Showing posts with label reparations. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reparations. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 27, 2007

Thanks to Eric for this link to a BBC slideshow of a ceremony commemorating the 200th anniversary of the end of slavery in the British Empire being interrupted by an activist demanding an actual apology and reparations. Apparently a ceremony in which the Queen lays a wreath at the feet of a statue of a white man is not enough. [The nerve.]

Monday, March 26, 2007

Slavery ended over a hundred years ago. Why can't everybody just move on? Oh, that's right, our government never apologized or tried to make ammends in any kind of meaningful or substantive way for allowing the forced captivity and labor of over half the population in the former attempted confederacy plus few border states. It would be worse if there were fabulously wealthy transnational corporations occupying the best real estate in the middle of our cities that became that way [gained their "starting capital"] partially through the slave trade, while in the shadows of their soaring glass towers, impoverished children and underpaid teachers struggled to learn with old books in cold, leaky, dangerous schools and they didn't do anything to help.