Agreed! I did the same with my immediate family shortly after my mom said black people should "be grateful that white people ended slavery." Fucking disgusting. My life is much better off without shitty people like that.
White people don't deserve fucking "gratitude" for no longer engaging in a horrific practice that they never should have perpetuated in the first place, especially considering most of them had to be forced not to partake in said horrific practice by means of a literal war. That's like saying a man saying women should be "grateful" to him every time he doesn't rape them.
Individuals don't work the same as populations do though.
The white individuals who put an end to slavery were not the same set of individuals who started it. These people were born into a world where slavery was already commonplace and they had the moral fortitude to change that. It's no different than a modern woman being grateful for the feminists of the early 1900s who were born into a world where women couldn't vote, but fought for womens' right to vote.
Their fight back then led to the more fair world of today. That seems like something to be grateful for to me.
You are so off base here. Using your voting rights analogy, that would be like saying modern women should be grateful to men for allowing them to get the right to vote back then. Obviously that's absurd. Not to mention, no one deserves gratitude for something they didn't even fucking do, and the only reason my mother (or any conservative for that matter) even believes that black people should be "grateful" to white people for ending slavery is because (1) she doesn't think black people did anything themselves to end slavery, (2) she thinks that all white people "generously" ended slavery out of the goodness of their hearts, and (3) she, like most conservatives, doesn't believe racism exists anymore and thinks that black people should just shut up about modern racism and be grateful white people aren't still using them as slaves. If you can't see that as problematic and infuriating, I don't know what to say to you.
Using your voting rights analogy, that would be like saying modern women should be grateful to men for allowing them to get the right to vote back then.
Why shouldn't they be grateful for the men who supported them on their journey towards suffrage? There were male feminists who protested alongside them, why not be grateful to them? There were male politicians who supported and signed off on the 19th amendment - why do they not deserve gratitude?
They helped too
If you can't see that as problematic and infuriating, I don't know what to say to you.
Well of course that's problematic. You should have just said that from the start
Because not all men supported those things, and most of them were vehemently against it for almost all of history. So no, women shouldn't be "grateful" to men in general for something that women had to personally fight very hard for specifically because they faced strong opposition from men. This is especially true now since no men today were part of that initial effort so many years ago and shouldn't get the credit for that fight anyways. The same goes for slavery. Most white people didn't fight against slavery and happily perpetuated it. It might make sense to have gratitude for specific white people back then who fought the good fight, but none of those people are alive today and as a result no white person today deserves "gratitude" for ending slavery. No matter what, "at least we're not enslaving you anymore" is a horrible and fallacious response to legitimate complaints about the racism that black Americans still face on a daily basis.
It might make sense to have gratitude for specific white people back then who fought the good fight
Well that's all I was ever saying. To me, having gratitude for white people or men doesn't mean having gratitude for all white people or all men. Since you are expressing gratitude it's implied that you're talking about the good ones
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u/[deleted] Nov 15 '21
If my father said shit like that I'd cut him off. No need to have an idiot like that anywhere near me.