This country wasn't built for persons of color. Keyword: FOR

[YoungDemCA]

As opposed to BY. This is an important distinction. One short word is replaced with another short word, and the meaning immediately becomes the polar opposite.

Who built the White House and the Capitol building again?

Whose brutally, cruelly, and horrifically exploited unpaid slave labor was the very FOUNDATION of the economy and society ("way of life&quot of the Southern United States even before they were States - not to mention, much of the rest of the country, and indirectly, the entire country?

Who contributed so much - one might argue, the lion's share - to the development of the popular culture of the United States?

And who, to this day, still hasn't been compensated for everything they've done for this country, everything they've literally sacrificed under what can only be described as conditions that are appallingly destructive to the body and the spirit - yet in spite of this, have achieved (and continue to achieve) utterly astounding things under those very conditions (conditions that again, continue in this day and age)?

This country wasn't built for persons of color. But in oh so many ways, it was built BY persons of color. Never forget that truth. No one can tell you otherwise - and if they do, they're bullshitting in the worst way possible.

[brush]

1. Spot on. If the principle of compounding were in effect on the hundreds of years of dawn-to-dusk...

unpaid labor of the hundreds of thousands of enslaved human beings during the years of slavery, the entire US Treasury could not pay it. Don't even talk about the following Jim Crow/sharecropper years and institutionalize racism that exist to this day that deprives people of color of fair compensation.

Yet a call for reparations of modest proposals like college tuition, small business grants, job training, community centers and the like (no individual checks cut mind you), is met with stone cold silence and outright refusal.

And then many have the gall to wonder why black family wealth is one tenth of that of white families who've had centuries of wealth passed down from generation to generation, even if it's just modest home or a piece of jewelry or a small sum of cash. That's better than the nothing the formerly enslaved people got after slavery was ended.

They started with nothing after the Emancipation Proclamation and made their way in a hostile country.

The promised 40 acres and a mule never materialized.

It must be especially infuriating to the racists that many of us still rose despite the obstacles that still continue to be thrown in out paths.