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Fair critique. Honestly just wanted to play the other side especially when you said Japanese could legitimately tear down FDR statues.
Had a drink or two last night and and I do lose some nuance then. Sure I can’t say nothing wrong happened. But there’s also obviously something that was going on in America that slavery wasn’t that bad. I guess I don’t like agreeing with the left that America is some rotten and evil place and the worst thing America did created a thriving community.
100% guarantee if it happened to my people I would take the same view. I’m autistic enough and lacking in social desirability bias to get there.
Also I don’t think comparing to Latvians or Poles with Russian figures is fair. They suffered genocide which American slavery didn’t. And there’s no argument those communities are better off. Even cultural genocide didn’t happen as during the institution of slavery and after they ended up creating a globally recognized culture. One could argue the second most globally influential culture behind the broader American culture.
As an occasional drunk-poster myself, I can sympathize. I usually lose a lot of nuance when I'm drunk.
Regarding the Latvian/Pole comparison, the thing is yes they suffered genocide to some degree, but I doubt that the number of people who were killed by the USSR's political repressions in those places is statistically very different as a percentage from the number of blacks who died in various ways as a result of slavery (overworked, killed while trying to escape, etc.).
The USSR also did not destroy Latvian and Polish culture any more significantly than American slavery destroyed the culture of the slaves, when you look at it from the slaves' perspective. Yes, the practice of slavery did not destroy the African cultures that the slaves were originally from, but from the perspective of the enslaved subset, it was a near-total cultural erasure.
As brutal as the USSR was, it is not like pre-USSR Latvian and Polish cultures got destroyed.
Black American culture is thriving in many ways, and is certainly globally recognized, but I think this is because black Americans' most popular cultural products, such as athletic performance and music, are ones in which black Americans as a group are just better at creating really popular things than Poles and Latvians are, and also have the benefit of using English, one of the world's most widely known languages, and having access to the US' pop media marketing and distribution machine, the strongest in world history. Sure, there is no globally famous Polish version of Michael Jackson or Michael Jordan, but I don't think this is caused by what the USSR did to Poland.
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