The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner, in Requiem for a Nun. Though Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation put an end to legal slavery in the United States, there’s little doubt that slavery’s legacy remains: in school segregation, legal and de facto; in redlining in the postwar era and subprime mortgages in the new millennium; in the correlations between race and wealth.
Are reparations for slavery the answer? On Point Taken this week, OZY co-founder Carlos Watson and his panelists debated the question. Check out the full episode.
If y’all think the past is never dead, then go ahead and live in the past? Us whiteys will build our spaceships and leave this planet. We don’t want racists on board…so stay home.