How about reparations for whites who have suffered for decades under the racist "affirmative action" programs? This is an injustice not going back a hundred years and several generations, but directly affecting Americans living today.
Or we could (horrors!) tell everyone to stop whining about past injustices and just get on with their lives. But that would be no fun, surely.
There appears to be a mathematical error in the third to last paragraph where the author states "around 1.4 million families owned slaves in a nation of about 31 million people. Based on these rough figures, one could estimate that less than 5 percent of all Americans were part of slave-owning families. " Unfortunately, you can't divide the number of families by the number of people and get a valid answer for the number of people in slaveholding families. A corrected calculation would look something like the population of the United States in 1860 was 31,443,321 people of which 3,953,772 were slaves, netting a non-slave population of about 28.5 million. The average size of an American household in 1860 was about 5.55 people. If 1.4 million families owned slaves there would have been approximately 7.8 million people in those families, assuming that slaveholding families had an average size family. (Which may or may not have been true. There are good arguments for why the slaveholding families might have been larger or smaller than average.) In any case the numbers actually suggest that 27% of the non-slave population were part of families that owned slaves. Simply put it's not less than 5% it slightly greater than 25%.
Thanks for checking this. I think my error came in the number of slave-owning families, which looks to be 385,000. If that seems right to you, that would put the percentage at 7%.
How about reparations for whites who have suffered for decades under the racist "affirmative action" programs? This is an injustice not going back a hundred years and several generations, but directly affecting Americans living today.
Or we could (horrors!) tell everyone to stop whining about past injustices and just get on with their lives. But that would be no fun, surely.
There appears to be a mathematical error in the third to last paragraph where the author states "around 1.4 million families owned slaves in a nation of about 31 million people. Based on these rough figures, one could estimate that less than 5 percent of all Americans were part of slave-owning families. " Unfortunately, you can't divide the number of families by the number of people and get a valid answer for the number of people in slaveholding families. A corrected calculation would look something like the population of the United States in 1860 was 31,443,321 people of which 3,953,772 were slaves, netting a non-slave population of about 28.5 million. The average size of an American household in 1860 was about 5.55 people. If 1.4 million families owned slaves there would have been approximately 7.8 million people in those families, assuming that slaveholding families had an average size family. (Which may or may not have been true. There are good arguments for why the slaveholding families might have been larger or smaller than average.) In any case the numbers actually suggest that 27% of the non-slave population were part of families that owned slaves. Simply put it's not less than 5% it slightly greater than 25%.
Thanks for checking this. I think my error came in the number of slave-owning families, which looks to be 385,000. If that seems right to you, that would put the percentage at 7%.