The idea of paying reparations for slavery and our long history of racial violence and discrimination gives many pause, and it fails to win broad public support for a number of reasons.
To me, as an outsider to the US, an even bigger reckoning is coming with reparations for Native Americans.
I live in NZ and even though we had a comparatively milder relationship with our indigenous people, as well as a treaty that never ceded sovereignty, there were still major misdeeds and our indigenous population suffered generations of disenfranchisement, generational poverty and social/family dysfunction because of colonisation. Our govt has been reckoning with this for decades and it still is not completely resolved but we are moving in better, more enlightened directions towards righting some of the more egregious wrongs. Some of this is being done through the teaching of our country's history. The US can STFU about "critical race theory" bullshit - history is alive and well in the oral histories of the indigenous peoples and the evidence is in the bodies that are still being recovered.
The US are 100 years behind where they need to be in this painful examination of who they are as a country. Some never want it examined at all - but things will slowly change.
To me, as an outsider to the US, an even bigger reckoning is coming with reparations for Native Americans.
I live in NZ and even though we had a comparatively milder relationship with our indigenous people, as well as a treaty that never ceded sovereignty, there were still major misdeeds and our indigenous population suffered generations of disenfranchisement, generational poverty and social/family dysfunction because of colonisation. Our govt has been reckoning with this for decades and it still is not completely resolved but we are moving in better, more enlightened directions towards righting some of the more egregious wrongs. Some of this is being done through the teaching of our country's history. The US can STFU about "critical race theory" bullshit - history is alive and well in the oral histories of the indigenous peoples and the evidence is in the bodies that are still being recovered.
The US are 100 years behind where they need to be in this painful examination of who they are as a country. Some never want it examined at all - but things will slowly change.