This is the prospective Presidential hopeful admitting the ownership of slaves on behalf of his great great great grandfather. This is worth a read for those liberals who believe in equal rights for all humans and who understand the torment and pain endured by those who went through this ordeal for generations. I sincerely salute such leaders since these are the ones who create the destiny of the country, not the narrow-minded partisan polity. We curse the US for its progress. The US was born from leaders like Beto.
O’Rourke’s family history was first raised with O’Rourke’s campaign by The Guardian. According to The Guardian, the owner of Rose and Eliza lived in Kentucky and also in Kansas territory. In his Medium post, O’Rourke wrote of the generational effects of slavery, lamenting that “misfortune was passed through the generations from Rose and Eliza to their descendants who are alive today.”
“Rose and Eliza were denied their freedom and the benefits that their labor produced; they and their children were then denied their civil rights after the end of Reconstruction; and their descendants endured open terrorism, economic exclusion and racism in the form of Jim Crow, lynchings, convict leasing, voter suppression, redlining, predatory lending, and mass incarceration,” he wrote. “Everything their descendants have accomplished in their lives is despite having all of these odds stacked against them.”
While acknowledging the benefits “from a system that my ancestors built to favor themselves at the expense of others,” O’Rourke wrote, “that only increases the urgency I feel to help change this country so that it works for those who have been locked-out of — or locked-up in — this system.”
India does have equal opportunities. However, the centuries-old Varna System has established the practice deep into our genome. We can survive without realizing the oppression of a class. Enshrining the constitutional reforms with the protection of this lower class was the first corrective step. However, decades of playing politically correct have deprived the true meaning of the benefits of reservation and we have created another creamy layer within those enjoying reservations and ignored a broad swath of society that still is deprived of those advantages for centuries and generations. The malice does not end there, we have simultaneously created a new class of economically disadvantaged folks who were deprived of normal opportunities in the absence of reservations.
Does that mean, we should continue what with the reservations as is or does it mean reservations policies should be modified to 1) bring a wider spectrum of people under the umbrage of reservations 2) avoid creating another legacy of a disadvantaged class of society deprived of advantages despite merit? Visit my blog on https://wp.me/p7XEWW-16j
Beto, a US presidential hopeful, wrote a piece admitting his parental legacy being benefitted from slavery. Ownership of other human beings conferred advantages not just to Andrew Jasper and Frederick Williams, but to Jasper’s and Williams’ descendants as well. They were able to build wealth on the backs and off the sweat of others, wealth that they would then be able to pass down to their children and their children’s children. In some way, and in some form, that advantage would pass through to me and my children.
That those enslaved Americans owned by my ancestors were denied their freedom, denied the ability to amass wealth, denied full civil rights in America after slavery also had long term repercussions for them and their descendants. The way that fortune was passed through the generations from Andrew to me, misfortune was passed through the generations from Rose and Eliza to their descendants who are alive today. Rose and Eliza were denied their freedom and the benefits that their labor produced; they and their children were then denied their civil rights after the end of Reconstruction; and their descendants endured open terrorism, economic exclusion, and racism in the form of Jim Crow, lynchings, convict leasing, voter suppression, redlining, predatory lending, and mass incarceration. Everything their descendants have accomplished in their lives is despite having all of these odds stacked against them.
In the aggregate, slavery, its legacy and the ensuing forms of institutionalized racism have produced an America with stark differences in opportunities and outcomes, depending on race.
Those who fashion themselves as guardians of nation, culture, and religion – Can they own up like Beto?
Citations:
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/14/politics/beto-orourke-slave-owner-descendant/index.html
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/14/beto-orourke-ancestor-owned-slaves-slavery-1415849
mymilieu.org 