Comment on How ‘Zionist’ became a slur on the US left
GBU_28@lemm.ee 1 month agoMy point was gating significant or actionable injustices to only those occurring recently means all sorts of past injustices are de facto tabled by that position. For example, should slavery from the civil war era, or the colonialism of North America still be discussed and addressed? No one alive witnessed that
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 1 month ago
I wasn’t so much talking about what should be addressed, but rather what can be addressed. You can, of course, try to break the cycle of poverty that the descendants of slaves face even today, by things like education scholarships or monetary reparations. But, we’d want to do this regardless of the source of that poverty being slavery, Id imagine, nobody deserves to be born into poverty after all. The relevance of slavery to the discussion there is primarily just as an explanation for why that poverty is so concentrated in African American communities, because if in some alternative universe in which civil war era slavery had never happened but somehow that poverty still existed, we’d still need to do something about it. What you can’t do though is bring relief to the slaves themselves (at least those of that era, modern slaves of course can be, but that’s still within living memory), or punish the people that enslaved them. Not because of any kind of moral argument, but just because those people are dead. Sure, I guess one could argue that this effectively locks in injustice that has occurred long enough ago, but well, that’s just part of the nastiness of things like colonialism, the impact it has on a people is something that simply cannot be truly undone.
GBU_28@lemm.ee 1 month ago