Re: Arkansas GOPer: Slavery was a blessing in disguise for blacks

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

I suppose it has a cross on it?

I mean, of sorts, but using that logic it'd be more a symbol of St Andrew than anybody else...

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Yes, it's well understood to be the country's original sin, even if not always put in quite such negative terms.

Yeah, one would have to look high and low to find a meaningful population of Americans who don't believe Natives were royally cheated and mistreated by European and (later) American settlers. This isn't 1956 anymore. Even the occassional choad who might argue how slavery was ultimately "good" for Africans likely wouldn't stretch that analogy to Native Americans.

The thing is, for us, these were both part of our original sin.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

The thing about natives in the US is that they had already been decimated by smallpox by the time settlements were created. It was easy to see a virgin continent becuase even in the 17th century the colonies did not have a very large native population.

Right. American civilization is built on postapocalyptic ruins, which status can be traced back to European contact, but a lot of it was unintentional (if welcome from the European perspective). This doesn't, of course, excuse the immense moral crimes that the settlement process did entail, any more than shooting somebody magically becomes less bad if they're dying of a heart attack that you somehow caused.