When the Europeans came to the New World, they did indeed bring many notions of superiority with them. They needed to think this way on order to justify what they were and how they lived. When they first arrived in the New World, they were greeted as friends. They were hospitably taken in and shown everything about the native's way of life. While there were no cities and universities and churches and merchants and shit like the white man was used to, there was also a society where there was no war all the time, where man helped his fellow man, there was no great rush for material wealth and greed, disease wasn't rampant the people functioned as a cohesive unit with no real squabbling or rivalries to speak of. Many of the Europeans saw this and began to question their own way of life. They wondered whether it was really better to live under the laws of Jesus and the Church and all that shit, whether money was really the center of everything, basically questioning their entire way of life.They could question it al they wanted to, but it was still going to follow them everywhere they went, including the New World. Exploring the oceans in those days was like exploring space is today, a very complicated and expensive proposition. The native people didn't really know what money was in the eyes of these new people, but they did know what shit like gold and silver were, they had plenty of that handy. They used it for different things than the Europeans did, but when they showed them that gold and shit, that's when the fate of the natives was sealed. The leaders of these expeditions were deep in debt to some rich fucker or another for the bread to be able to go and explore and end up here in the first place. That gold and silver was the way to give them what they wanted the most, not international recognition for discovering a new world, but material wealth and profit. So the Europeans started to take that gold and silver and anything else that the natives had that they felt that they could put a monetary value on. Many in the exploring parties objected to this, saying there was no real reason to act like this towards people that had befriended them. The leaders had to come up with a rationale, so they went to the racial one. They argues that they were the superior race because they were the ones that came over here to make contact with these people, not the other way around, and besides, these people don't know God or jesus or what monetary value is anyway. They use their gold for ceremonial purposes as it is. They had no cities or Pigs or laws, so they must be inferior, and therefore, the white man must show them the error of their ways, just like Jesus told him to do. So that sort of shit was used to make the white man seem superior to these natives and that gave him the right to do as he wished with them as he was superior to them according to his philosophy. Thusly, New World racism was born.
The original way to go about accruing all the wealth of the natives was to enslave them through force and make them do the shit for you, because they knew where everything was anyway. This worked for awhile, until the diseases that the Europeans brought with them from their overcrowded, unsanitary cities began to take their toll upon the natives. It wasn't force or brutal labor or any weapon that decimated the natives, it was the European's diseases that they had no resistance to that really did them in. The Europeans managed to get a lot of loot back to the old country with the natives, though. So much so that the businessman had a problem. He never wanted this gravy train ( or boats) to stop because it was enriching him so. But he was losing all of his labor over there. The sailors weren't about to go and do the dangerous shit that they made the slaves do, besides, they couldn't do it anyway, because they were such fuckin' dorks to begin with. So what was Mr. Businessman to do? Well, the answer laid on the other side of that ocean. Since the explorers to the New World brought back so much wealth, there were dudes clamoring to get in on the act and discover somewhere, anywhere. Some of them set sail in a different direction and found equatorial Africa. This was just too much of a different fuckin' world, however. The material shit that they found over in the New World was really hard to come by in Africa, since it was such an inhospitable place, what with the jungles and the wild weather and the crazy animals and bugs and diseases and shit, that the explorers needed something else to strike it rich here and pay off their debts. So they jumped on that racial theory that was used so successfully before, and went and used the people of Africa as their material shit. They brought them to the New World to do what the natives could no longer do, because they were all dead or dying. That's how slavery of Africans got started in the New World.
At first, America wasn't in on this. This was because the people that settled America came mostly from the United Kingdom, and the UK was way late in the slavery sweepstakes, for their explorers didn't start discovering shit until the game was well underway, because the rich of Britian didn't think that exploration was worth shit until they saw their neighbors in other countries getting way fuckin' rich off of it. So they came to North America and tried their hand at it further north than their counterparts did. They did strike it rich by getting into virgin territory however. They started out by using the natives as their slaves and getting rich off of them, but then those same diseases began to take their toll again. Then, fate intervened. There was a hurricane out in the Atlantic Ocean, and that fucked with the routes of all ships in the ocean, including slave ships. There was a Portugese slave ship en route from Africa to Brazil when they ran into the hurricane. They were forced to seek shelter in the nearest port, which happened to be on the southern part of the Eastern seaboard of America. The merchants there wanted to know what the fuck this ship was all about, and they were told. They didn't just let that ship stay in the port out of the goodness of their hearts however. They wanted some of the goods as payment, and the goods were Africans. So some of the Africans stayed behind in the United States when the ship went on to Brazil after the storm, and the Americans had discovered the use of Africans as their slaves, and the tradition of American slavery was born.
A terrible tradition it was, too. Lives were lost and destroyed in pursuit of it. It was something that the nascent United States used for its own selfish reasons. The end of it came only when the northern part of America became more industrialized with factories and all that shit becoming the main part of the economy, even as the South was still a rural agrarian society, where slave labor was much more useful than in the industrialized North. The industrialization was the way of the future, so that way won out over the agrarian one. So slavery was "officially" abolished in America in 1865, when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. Now, all these years later, there is a movent going to have these reparations paid. The issue is that it is supposed to compensate for the pain and suffering of long ago in a small way. The entire argument here is based on the premise that slavery was fueled primarily by racism. If you look at these examples that I enumerated earlier, you will see that racism was not the primary focus of slavery at all, that money and materialistic wealth was. The racism came in as a justification of using such inhumane means to accrue that money and material wealth. The fact that the Africans were black was secondary. It was they way in which they lived that made them so valuable as slaves. The fact that they could tolerate disease better than the New Worlders because they lived in such a harsh and difficult climate was a very big factor in this.The simple fact that they did not have any firearms of any kind, and therefore were not at all able to overpower the Europeans and their desires was the deciding factor. If the Africans had possessed firearms and cannons and shit like the Europeans did and would have been able to give them a fair fight, the outcome would have been drastically different. If the Africans had been white men that lived in a similar climate and in a similar fashion, they would have been overpowered and used as slaves just as fast by these explorers. The people that were in favor of slavery were that way because of slavery's economic benefits, particularly to them. They were not racial zealots all full of hatred, they were money zealots all full of greed instead. Slavery was economic to them, not racial at all. As long as they profited out of it, they didn't give a fuck what race the slaves were.
I feel that many of those that are calling for reparations are trying to do the same thing now. Most of them are African-American politicians that are doing this because they're politicians, not because of their race. They smell money, not just for them, but for those that vote for them, and that gives them the power that all politicians crave, no matter what their race. Money and power were the things that the slaveowners were after in the past, and these politicians are after the same thing, and they shall use any means to get it, just as the others did, and that includes the issue of slavery. It would be far better to use their time and resources to stamp out slavery in America as it exists today, with illegal immigrants working at dangerous jobs for mere subsistance, just as the slaves did. Mr. Businessman will bring this tradition back as much as he can if you let him. If he doesn't do it in America, he does it in another country and brings the finished product to America, and the profits too. If you keep on trying to make reparations for the distant past by trying to bring it into the present, you are letting Mr. Businessman go about bringing back the same injustices that he used in that past era, this time with a nice smiley face on it. That is where I feel the emphasis should be, on not repeating the mistakes of the past instead of wallowing in the past instead, for that blinds you to the present.