So I take it I'm supposed to feel guilty for something my ancestors did? Sorry but I don't. Take it as a warning that corps have government tied around their finger and have for centuries, sure I can agree with that. I looked up some other articles by the authors they all seemed to have a heavy handed opinion overlaid over what should be simple reporting, so take this article with a grain of salt.
You're partaking of the spoils of your ancestors, and the material losses they caused can be directly traced to the living citizens of Haiti today. It's not really that much about guilt, but about actual liability.
Too often people take these articles and say "well I didn't do that" "what do I have to do with it" "that happened hundreds of years ago, there's a whole new set of people nowadays". It's not just the actions in the moment, but the fact that actions have an effect over time.
Take for example a country that loses a certain number of men in some battle many years ago. Well some of those men would have gone on to work on the land and have offspring, now no longer. Because of that, there was a hit to birth rates, and food production, which in turn affected nourishment country wide, and a smaller next generation adjusting for growth. Which later in turn affected GDP overall and other certain critical economic factors. The point is that actions don't happen in isolation, one might know this as the butterfly effect.
How does this implicate "the white man that lives in america"? Because of all of this plundering and horrid behavior done on foreign soil and because of the slavery that happened in this country, it was a large contributing factor to bringing us to where we are now. And in the same way that it contributed to our success, it detracted from those oppressed group's success. We now live in a world that whether we like it or not, is founded on these horrible truths, and whether we like it or not there are groups of people, countries even, that are worse off because of that, sometimes significantly so.
This is the foundation for conversations about reparations. What can we do now to balance the playing field, a field that we ourselves didn't throw out of balance, but that we are in the singular position to fix.
