The entire economic structure of the American south prior to the civil war was predicated on the systemic kidnapping, sale, export, cultural suppression, forced labor, rape, and human bondage of people with dark skin by people with light skin.
Of course, slavery wasn't invented by the American south. It's been an institution across civilizations since before recorded history. In all likelihood, some of those slaves were okay -- certainly robbed of dignity and freedom, but more like servants who just didn't have the option to leave and look for different jobs -- while others genuinely were raped, beaten, etc.
If you want to look at JUST American history, I think our treatment of the American Indians was worse than our treatment of African slaves. Remember the thing about giving the Indians blankets that were infected with smallpox? I'd say handing over an item that YOU KNOW will cause another human being to die a painful death is worse than owning a slave and treating him humanely -- though expecting him to work without wages -- for his whole life.
I think that pretending that the society and land you live in just exists with no input from you, taking and taking until you're in a relatively comfortable position in life, then complaining about taxes has got to be up there with slavery.
Yeah, I think we all owe it to society to "give back". That isn't a universal truth on this website.
What about the way the native american indians were treated?
I think US society is more concerned about the treatment of blacks. The confederate flag is viewed as a symbol of the past with all the negative connotations that go with it. Perhaps a symbol that should be abandoned and left in the past, as is the national socialists swastika.
This is a good question. Both are bad. But I think the mistreatment of Native Americans is viewed as being long in the past.
I think the conquering of the lands that make up the US was viewed more as a one-time war. And war is viewed as a much more moral undertaking than slavery. And since that time there has been some formal recognition of the native tribes by the government. There are reservations for tribes, and tribes are given sovereignty. It's also much easier for a Native American to blend into white culture. Overall, the discrimination has been much, much less.
On the other hand, Africans were brought here for the explicit purpose of slavery. The slavery was incredibly brutal and dehumanizing. And it took place over the course of about 200 years. And then after the slavery, blacks have been continually discriminated against and taken an advantage of. So we're talking about ~350 years of mistreatment that continues today. After slavery there was sharecropping (like slavery but using economics and lack of education instead of whips and chains). Then Jim Crow. And now the criminal justice system. For about the last 300 years or so, segregation was legal and widespread. Now it's more of an economic and institutional racism that keeps blacks at a disadvantage. And it's not something they can escape easily by pretending to be white.
Both groups were badly mistreated, and neither has completely "rebounded":
Indian tribes have been given some rights that don't extend to other Americans. They have the right to govern themselves on their reservations, for example. They have rights over Indian children; a friend of mine adopted a child who was part Indian, and she couldn't finalize the adoption until X number of tribal chiefs approved it. But their schools are horrible, which means their children aren't growing up and finding their ways into good jobs. Their alcoholism rates are awful.
On the other hand, blacks don't have anything resembling reservation /tribal rights -- probably because they were never "organized" into groups in the same way that Indians were. What I see in high school is that black kids from middle/upper class families seem to achieve at rates similar to those of their white counterparts -- they make good grades, go on to college, they have great futures ahead of them ... but where I live that's maybe 25% of the total black population. The black kids who
don't have family support and who don't see the point in education tend to behave badly, and if they graduate it's with a GPA that won't get them into college. They get chance after chance after chance -- but their background doesn't allow them to recognize that education is the key to their future. At this point, you can't blame that on slavery; it's their families who hold them back.
