re: #732 goddessoftheclassroom

No, I’m not. I do know my genealogy back several hundred years.

Slavery has been throughout all civilizations everywhere. It is possible your ancestors were thralls in Scandinavia (if you came from there), or slaves in ancient Rome or Greece (Aesop was a slave, remember?). There was slavery everywhere, even ancient Israel, where they were all descendants of slaves.

If you are descended from Sacajawea, you are descended from a slave—she was a war captive. My uncle worked with a NW Indian tribe that had had a slave caste up until way late. A woman in the tribe got an advanced degree with the thought she could come back and reform the tribal school and really turned things around. When she came back, she was told she could never hold a top position at the school because her grandfather had been slave caste.

This is why I’m against reparations. We all owe all of us. Even if you can prove your ancestors didn’t hold slaves or weren’t slaves in this country, you can’t prove they didn’t hold them in another, at some time.