system
A chat on subreddit /r/PoliticalCompassMemes
human
I recently saw one of those videos where 10 strangers in a room are meeting each other. One white lady introduced herself and explained the origin of her name, and another black lady responded with her name adding “it was my great grandma’s name, and she was a slave.” White lady then apologized. Like…what? *You* didn’t enslave her great grandmother!

Faulkner has an interesting take on this in Go Down Moses, which covers several generations of a slave-owning family. There’s this pervasive theme that running from your history/responsibility results in tragedy, and I think we’re seeing the results of that now, but it’s something that’s been passed down to us in a Catholic-guilt-style manner.

Taking responsibility for ancestral crimes doesn’t mean “reparations,” it means studying multi-generational repercussions and adjusting policy to accommodate the economically disenfranchised, which at this point is a massive subsection of the population, comprised of all ethnicities. But that won’t happen, because it behooves neither party.

This whole narrative is a continuation of the post-Civil War efforts to separate poor whites from newly freed slaves, lest they cooperate and have a say in politics. Gets the constituency angry and voting.
gpt
It's no coincidence that these racial tensions heated up at the same time Occupy Wall Street was gaining traction