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I truly welcome all views and hope to add the uniqueness in each point to my repetoir yet remaining detached and objective.
Physical bondage was not the only handicap imposed on the African in America during slavery.
The first of the African-American's forefathers arrived in the Americas in 1555 with Sir John Hawkins on a slave ship named "Jesus", according to the Library of Congress.
The mixture of kidnapped and purchased Africans, comprised of conquered nations of people including their royalty, arrived speaking their national dialects, practicing their religons, (much of it Islam), and generally exhibiting all the facets of a culture thousands of years in the developing.
This first generation of slaves had to be "broken" to accept it.
Under penalty of death their languages were disallowed to be spoken. Anyone caught practicing their native religon was put to death. It was made illegal to possess any books or writing utensils or to be taught to read English.
The family unit and bonds were systematically dismantled/destroyed and the women forced into breeding-only with the men, not allowed to marry anymore or raise their offspring they'd become a strange cash-crop regularly sold off in different distant directions across the country.
Constant brutality, bloody mutilation punishments, public executions and ritual rapings became the climate in which the African slave endured life.
These conditions, and worse, persisted for approx. 310 years without a paycheck. After 3 centuries, produced from a once proud people, you have a people stripped of language, culture, religon, their names and the knowledge of their true history or that of others. You have an epedemic of males with no sense of responsibility towards his woman or children or family and illiteracy across the board.
Through discriminatory laws the former slave's condition was perpetuated and maintained as he was considered 2/3 of a human being and that only to enhance the voting power of plantation owners.
Is it immature to study this era? Those times produced the modern African-Americans who haven't shaken off the effects of this cheapening of the value of life and display all the symptoms of one suffering from Post Traumatic Strees Disorder.
That aside, the case for repairing the damage was made by America when she compensated the decendants of the Asian Americans who were interned in Concentration Camps here in America, (in the west), forced from their homes and businesses under paranoid suspicions that they were all possible collaborators with the enemies of America during WWI. The decendents were paid $10,000 each.
The Jews of the Holocaust in Germany are compensated to the tune of millions annually by Germany.
The decimated Native American Indian benefits from programs in place to ensure they have the resources to compete with the modern world. Everything from college tuitions to land.
Also the United States Gov. mandated that every freed slave recieve "40 Acres and a mule" in order to jumpstart their entrance into American Social equality after slavery was abolished. They didn't deliver then, why not an equivalent now?
Others never fogot their sufferings and the world community forces nations to express a conscience when it comes to "crimes against humanity", (which is what the United Nations has deemed the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade).
For whose convienence should they "forgive and forget"? The nation was enriched through free labor. The guilty are long gone but the decendants cannot continue to ignore their responsiblity towards that segment of the population affected by the atrocity.
One thing's for sure, an effective solution will never be reached by exercising "selective amnesia". It's this collective "amnesia" demonstrated by the decendents of the slave masters that continues a climate where atrocities continue under different guises.
"You are affected by 3 generations and you affect 3 generations, and every third generation a major change takes place in the family."
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