Re: dogma protests
erespess@nji.com
Sat, 04 Dec 1999 01:43:19 -0500
>First off, I believe some clarification is in order. People are presuming
>that two messages spliced together are my one message. Let me explain:
>
>I (Wes) wrote this...
> >> suppose they can call white >people whatever they like.
> >
>I (Wes) DID NOT write this...
> >> Nobody even knows if they're related to the slaves or not. They don't
> >> care. They want us to pay them back for stuff that we aren't responsible
> >> for, and they didn't go through..
First, let me apologize to you Wes. I put two different posts
together and did not cite specifically where they came from. I was
aware that they were not written by the same person but I was
careless in not noting that in my reply.
> I (Wes) do believe that some of the African Americans in America are
>descended from slaves. Where else might they come from? There's an entire
>world out there. But for the most part, I do not contest the fact that many
>black people in America are possible slave descendents.
Let me try to explain where I am coming from here. Of course there
is an entire world that people can come from. I was born and raised
in North Carolina, where the vast majority of black people are
descended from slaves. When I read the second post that I quoted
from and replied to, I (probably mistakenly) assumed that the writer
(Dan) was saying that, as a group, black people do not know if they
came from slaves or not. I have certainly heard crazier things than
this from the people I grew up around, so I did not question the
validity of my reading as I should have.
If Dan in fact meant that no individual black people actually know if
their ancestors were slaves, then I still disagree, albeit less
violently. We are not talking about that long ago. Again, where I
grew up, people not only knew if they had slave ancestors or not,
they also knew who the masters were. They knew where their family
members were buried. These things are a matter of public record.
One friend of mine and I actually realized, and I mean this quite
literally, that my ancestors "owned" his ancestors. We still have
the same last name.
> > And another thought, why do you (whoever you are) assume that you are
> > talking to only white people on this list?
> >
> I do not assume that I am talking to only white people on this list. I
>know that there are people from all over the planet that subscribe to this
>list and I would be a fool to consider them all white.
Again, Wes, I was referring to the other poster. Not you. This also
was based on my reading of his post. When Dan referred to "they", I
took that to mean "as opposed to we" - himself and those to whom he
was writing. If this reading was inaccurate, then I apologize to Dan
as well.
Elizabeth