• Shinhoshi@lemmygrad.ml
    ·
    1 year ago

    America itself didn’t benefit from slavery.

    My point is perhaps best expressed as follows:

    Nations are not communities and never have been. The history of any country, presented as the history of a family, conceals fierce conflicts of interest (sometimes exploding, most often repressed) between conquerors and conquered, masters and slaves, capitalists and workers, dominators and dominated in race and sex.

    — Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (1980)

    When you frame your arguments in this nationalist way, you’re concealing these conflicts of interest. It would be clearer if you frame it in a way that specifies exactly who you mean.