Opinion | Reparations and statutes of limitations: We have to live life moving forward WashTimesOpEd
The belief that action by prosecutors or others who may have cause for redress against those who are alleged to have committed an illegal act must take place in a specified time period goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks.
Other than in some communist countries, crimes that “reach beyond the grave” are not prosecuted for good reason. That the sins of the father should not be vested upon the son is a belief that most civilized societies have practiced for thousands of years. At the beginning of the Civil War, there were less than four million slaves and 31 million White Americans, of whom only a tiny minority were slaveholders. Currently, there are about 335 million Americans, of which 45 million identity as Black, 250 million are White, and the rest identify as Asian, American Indian, or some mixture of races.
Slavery was the world norm from well before antiquity up to about 300 years ago. It had been practiced everywhere — China, India, Africa, Europe, and among American Indians. The Portuguese began the practice of bringing Black Africans as slaves to their new, far-flung colonies, including Brazil. For the most part, it was African slaveholders that sold their slaves to White Europeans. No one was pure in this seedy business.
When George Washington was a young man, slavery was the world norm — and like almost all in his and previous generations, he accepted it. We know from his own letters that he, like many of his contemporaries, changed his view and, by the end of his life, was focusing on both freeing his own slaves and ending the institution, which he increasingly viewed as morally wrong and economically destructive.
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