Some right-wingers actually think whites did blacks a favor by bringing them

[raccoon]

to the US and enslaving them. I have a right-wing cousin who actually said that. I don't have much to do with him, by the way.

Can anyone explain such convoluted thinking to me? :shrug:

[MrScorpio]

1. The White Man's Burden

That's where you should start

[boobooday]

2. The same mindset that says

Women should be grateful to men, because it was MEN who voted to give them the right to vote.

White/male privilege. It's a point of view. Just like the white student who told me that another, minority pre-med had gotten HIS spot at medical school because of affirmative action. The assumption is that it was his to lose.

[meegbear]

3. How about a list of these "some right-wingers"

[AspenRose]

25. Pat Buchanan is one

I've heard him say as much

If I think of others I'll mention them

[Name removed]

4. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[marmar]

8. Que?

Repetez en anglais, s'il vous plait.

[lunatica]

13. Why are whites suddenly supposed to be coddled?

Mustn't make whites defensive about their historic racism huh?

Why can't we all just get along??????

[YOY]

16. I'm white. I see racism.

I call it when I do too.

If I'm offending other white folks who would say some of the most fucked up shit once they know no minorities are within earshot with the opening words "I'm not a racist but..." then "tough titty" said the kitty.

[tekisui]

18. Oh Noes!! We can't have defensive whites.

:eyes:

We have repressed or oppressed races in this country. It all stems from this nation's history of slavery. The longer we refused to confront that, the longer it will be before we overcome the institutionalized problem of racism.

[AspenRose]

29. We can't have whites being more defensive, now, can we?

Well, clutch my pearls and bless your heart.

:eyes:

[Name removed]

31. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Maru Kitteh]

41. +1

[BoneDaddy]

34. can we have that in English please.

[NOLALady]

35. Do you feel that discussing racism makes whites

defensive? If so, why do you think they become defensive?

[ret5hd]

37. Just be quiet because the whites will be defensive???

:rofl:

[Name removed]

39. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[rvablue]

47. God forbid! Maybe President Obama should have apologized to Congressman Wilson

instead of the other way around! :sarcasm:

[RaleighNCDUer]

56. The point is that if they are defensive, they are WRONG.

The proper response is, 'that is racist crap, and I condemn it'. If someone gets defensive about it, it is because he believes it.

Why would a white person get defensive about his ancestors bringing a black person's ancestors over here unless he actually held racist beliefs in the first place?

People need to be called on their racism.

[cliffordu]

57. WHAT. THE. FUCK. DO. YOU. MEAN???

[Raineyb]

65. Let me get this straight

You expect people to stop calling out racism because it hurts white people's feelings? But the feelings of the people who are victims of racism, well we'll just ignore that? Is that what you're saying?

[Hansel]

71. Self delete

server error caused double post.

[Hansel]

72. Oh please.

I'm white and neither I nor most of the whites I know are defensive about people pointing out the fact that some people are racist. In fact, the only people I know who get defensive are the ones who are racists.

[Captain Hilts]

5. A lot were losers in tribal battles and sold by the winners. Sucked any way you look at it. nt

[Solomon]

74. And they had no idea what kind of slavery they were selling

people into. Slavery in the US was a particularly brutal and repressive kind. Slavery in other societies was not nearly as bad, more akin to just being in the lowest class. I studied slavery in ancient Rome when I was in law school and I was astonished to learn that the word "slavery" is not synomynous with US slavery which was absolutely the worst. Slaves in ancient Rome and other societies had rights, etc. and could earn their freedom.

All slavery is bad, but all slavery was not nearly as bad as US slavery. It was customary among African tribes to take slaves of the losers in a war, but they didn't treat them like they were treated here in America. They had no clue what they were selling people into.


Lastly, since I've jumped in here, the idea that whites did blacks a favor by bringing them here totally overlooks the fact that Africa would have developed differently if masses of it's talented people weren't kidnapped and brought over here. Secondly, it ignores the vast enhancement that Africans made to America's development. There are everyday inventions that people have no clue that blacks invented them. They go their merry way thinking blacks are inferior while enjoying the comforst of refrigerators in their houses, stop lights on the streets, etc, etc.

[Captain Hilts]

79. Who's saying whites did blacks a favor bringing them here? Not I.

[napi21]

6. Probably because they think things we so terrible in Africa. n/t

[Schema Thing]

10. that's what their warped thinking is

MY oldest friend came out with this line a couple of years ago. I backed waaaaaay off from the friendship (and felt like doing violence; it's so offensive to me).

[NOLALady]

40. They may have convinced themselves that this was true

to justify enslaving the Africans.

Of course that makes no sense as they also enslaved the natives of North and South America.

[Dont_Bogart_the_Pretzel]

53. No one seems to talk about that... all the slaves were not from Africa.

or slaves are not all from Africa

[ejpoeta]

7. because this is the greatest country on earth!! and who wouldn't want to come here....

even if it is in shackles and as a slave. wonder how these white folks would feel if someone shackled them and sent them somewhere to be a slave and be treated like less than a person.

[jonnyblitz]

9. plus our white ancestors taught them about JEEEESUS.

that alone would be enough for me to hate white people if I were black...:P. but i digress....

[AspenRose]

26. One of my former supervisors said that, after she watched "Amistad."

White and from Mississippi.

:crazy:

[MisterP]

73. and wasn't the kingdom of Kongo largely Christian after 1500?

but it's Catholic, so the fundies wouldn't believe that counts
(and Rome and Angola are so much closer to the edge of the world than the Heartland of the universe)

[CTyankee]

11. I actually heard a black person say this on some radio program on NPR.

What he said was that it was better for him since the African nation his ancestors came from is now in such a mess, he is better off as an American with a higher standard of living and no social turmoil, constant violdence, extreme poverty, etc.

Neato solution to your country's problems: sell yourself into slavery. You are better off in the long run...needless to say :sarcasm:

[pipi_k]

24. I'm sure he's not doing that...

advocating selling oneself into slavery, I mean.

He's merely saying that since his ancestors had been brought here and there was nothing he could do or say to change that, he...and other descendants of slaves...were better off to be here than in some war-torn and poverty-stricken African nation.

I see his attitude as being similar to the one voiced by whites whose ancestors fought in the various wars of the past. There's nothing to be done about their sacrifices, but since those ancestors DID sacrifice, they (the people of today) really ARE the beneficiaries of those sacrifices. Ask them if they'd rather those ancestors hadn't sacrificed and where they might be today, and I would bet none of them would say they'd rather be living in a place where life is way harder than it is in the US.

[CTyankee]

36. He did seem sincere but what I hate about the argument is that it plays right into the hands

of white racists "See, it turned out OK, didn't it?" as if that is a reason to excuse the slave trade. It deflects the issue of slavery's morality in a way that I find smug and infuriating.

I don't disagree with your point. All of us, excepting those who are Native Americans, have ancestors who came here for a better life and mostly under hardship conditions. But they weren't considered human property. So there is a very glaring difference, IMO...

[pipi_k]

48. I see your point too.

But I think in the end that no amount of refutation or reasoning could ever change the minds of that crowd anyway.

We can talk sense till we're blue in the face, and it's all for nothing with them.

It's like a no-win situation.


I think mainly because they either can't, or don't want to, see the finer points and the many gray areas in what that man said about his ancestors.

They're thinking he's saying it was peachy dandy but it wasn't and never can be. It's like they have to somehow justify it to themselves. very sad....

[NOLALady]

42. He knows the African nation that his ancestors came from?

I am so jealous. I've been researching nearly 20 years. I still do not know the nation that my African ancestors originated from.

[CTyankee]

55. I really don't know. I just heard him on an NPR program a while back.

Maybe he was just conjecturing on where I might have been or on the general state of African nations...

[yawnmaster]

70. Have you thought about genetic tests?

but they may be expensive, or not, I don't know...
Interesting though, if one has the resources, they may be able to trace either their paternal or maternal ancestry back a ways.
I think Oprah and Whoopi tried this a few years back.
Of course, it does leave a lot out. You would be only following 2 of 8 great grandparents.

[NOLALady]

77. Definitely.

I'm waiting for them to come down in price. I can't justify spending money for that at this time.

There's family oral history that an ancestor was a Malagass from Madagascar, But, I haven't found any proof of her origin.

BTW, I have a fellow genealogist of German ancestry who found the origin of his African ancestor. He had an fwc ancestor who crossed over a couple of hundred years ago. He only discovered her through research. His parents have a problem with the find, but his kids thinks its "way cool".

[JonQ]

50. I very much doubt he was a slave

Likely he was just arguing that after all is said and done he's better off being born here (as a free citizen) then he would have been if born in africa. And that is a result of slavery.

[RaleighNCDUer]

58. Without understanding that the internicine warfare that was promoted

in order to feed the slave trade was largely responsible for the continuing social turmoil, constant violence and extreme poverty that has plagued Africa for the past 3 centuries. First the Europeans exploited it, then colonized it, then abandoned it, to exploit it again. No wonder there is instability through most of Africa.

[TxRider]

12. Direct comparison of living standards U.S. vs most of Africa

They don't look any deeper than that.

BTW why not just ask your cousin how he/she justifies that belief?

[raccoon]

15. I will if it ever comes up again. Haven't seen him since the last presidential election.

but others besides him think this, if I run into another one I'll ask.

[Raineyb]

66. They never seem to consider that perhaps the continent of Africa may have ended up just as

wealthy as Europe had Europe stayed out of the continent instead of dividing it up as though they owned it, exploiting tribal differences that were there and raping the land of its natural resources including its people.

:shrug:

There's no way to know that black people born in the western hemisphere would not have been as well off had Africa not been colonized and exploited the way it was.

[TxRider]

80. So past european colonialism is the right's fault?

What they say is what they see, now, what is reality and not a hypothetical might have been.

[Burma Jones]

14. I guess Slaves escaped the brutality imposed by Europeans as they divvied up Africa.....

But I don't think that's enough reason to consider slaves lucky bastards.........

I also get this "I understand what we did to the Indians was bad, but you don't hear them complaining like the Blacks" bullshit from what I suppose are your more "thoughtful" Right Wing asswipes......

[unpossibles]

17. I've heard this one too

from my ex-father-in-law, along with gems like how slavery was actually the fault of the black people in Africa, how slaves here weren't treated so badly anyway, and how the civil war had nothing to do with slavery.

But he wasn't racist....

[rurallib]

20. not only brought them to America, but gave them a place to live and work to do

A version I heard recently.

[unpossibles]

28. Yep. And that most were treated well...

And keep in mind, this coming from the people who scream the loudest about Freedom and all that.

I find it interesting that all of these rugged individuals keep saying the same things at right around the same time. On the bright side, once I've heard it once, it makes subsequent attempts to use the same argument pitifully sad and easy to counter. Well, they're easy to counter already because they are usually racist bullshit, but you know what I mean.

[HamdenRice]

19. Originally had was b/c of Christianity: slavery + enternal life > freedom + eternal damnation

There was a lot of this kind of thinking as late as the 1960s. Keep in mind that fundamentalist Christians really believe in heaven and hell. If you have never been saved, you will go to hell, which is much worse than slavery.

So the equation was that even if slavery was bad, at least you got exposed to Christianity and could go to heaven. Those Africans might be free, and even happy, but after their earthly lives, they were doomed to eternal damnation in hell.

As for the "mess" of modern Africa, I'm sure the apologists never note that the many of the problems of Africa can be traced back to the 200 years of war fare promoted by the slave trade itself. If there had never been trans-Atlantic slavery, Africa would not be the poorest continent today.

[Proud Liberal Dem]

21. My mom was telling me that she read a book that made such an *argument*

It seemed to make sense to her. I was so taken aback by the very concept of it, not to mention shocked by the fact that she thought it was a sensible idea, that I really didn't know how to respond. Actually, I still don't. :crazy: If I remember correctly, I believe that she said that it had something to do with the fact that there are so many problems in many African countries right now (i.e. starvation, AIDS, military dictatorships, genocide, etc.) that African-Americans are "better off" living here, which I suppose is true if you only consider the last 30-40 years of OUR history in regards to our treatment of African-Americans but we still actually haven't quite put our racist heritage behind us entirely, particularly in the South where many people there are still itching to "re-fight" the Civil War and believe that historical re-enactments thereof are an art form. My mother also probably doesn't understand that a lot of the problems she mentioned about Africa have actually been caused by, or in some cases, exacerbated by US and European foreign policy interference in that part of the world (and others) for centuries. She (and the people making such asinine arguments) further fail take into consideration the historical effect that removing those Africans- whom later became slaves- had on the continent. Would African society have evolved differently had we not forced a mass relocation of many of their ancestors? Who knows? :shrug: Unfortunately, it's probably not something people whom advance such *arguments* spend a lot of time pondering.

[NOLALady]

44. What was her response when you "educated" her

about the history of European exploitation of Africa?

[Proud Liberal Dem]

64. I haven't "educated" her yet

Frankly, this encounter was awhile back and I really didn't know how to respond to her at the time and she hasn't brought it up again so I had actually forgotten about it until it was brought up here. My mom, who is an otherwise a bright and friendly person, is somehow also rather xenophobic and regressive politically for some reason- at least as I've discovered as an adult- and I don't really know how to go about addressing it although I had it out with her a bit about health care reform the last time she came over for dinner and she accepted my offer to borrow Michael Moore's "Sicko", which she said that she was interested in looking at, so maybe there is some hope for her yet. :shrug: Thankfully, I have been more influenced, socially and politically, by my father.

[doc03]

22. Remember Barbara Bush's comment about

the Katrina victims?

[slackmaster]

23. That is lame - They were enslaved before they were brought to the US

In Africa, by other Africans.

K&U for revisionism.

:kick:

[Fuzz]

27. So, the holocaust worked out ok because it lead to Israel becoming a country?

Pretty much the logic right?

[subcomhd]

68. perfect nt

[UTUSN]

30. Here's the source: BecKKK's hero, SKOUSEN, wingnut hallucinator

Whacked BecKKK's whacked hero:
One Willard Cleon Skousen, who worked/retired from the FBI and went on to be investigated by Miss HOOVER's FBI to the tune of 2,000 pages. I've always thought it was brilliant of LIMBOsevic that his main thrust in attempting to make Conservativism respectable when he first started was to ---purposefully, deliberately--- distance himself from the kooks, the BIRCHERs, the Trilateralists, etc. He would cut off all callers who started ranting on these topics. The same way he still cuts off those true followers who slip and let loose their true racist selves---------------INSTEAD of "disguising" themselves.


************QUOTE*********

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2009/09/16/beck_skousen/index.html

Meet the man who changed Glenn Beck's life

Cleon Skousen was a right-wing crank whom even conservatives despised. Then Beck discovered him

By Alexander Zaitchik



.... But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."

As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place. ....

...The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man (and) one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government." ....

...Skousen laid low for much of the '60s. But he reemerged at the end of the decade peddling a new and improved conspiracy that merged left with right: the global capitalist mega-plot of the "dynastic rich." Families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds, Skousen now believed, used left forces -- from Ho Chi Minh to the American civil rights movement -- to serve their own power. ....

"Skousen's personal position," wrote a dismayed Quigley, "seems to me perilously close to the 'exclusive uniformity' which I see in Nazism and in the Radical Right in this country. In fact, his position has echoes of the original Nazi 25-point plan." ....

Skousen may have been too extreme for the Quorum of the Twelve in Salt Lake City, but he soon found rehabilitation on the intellectual margins of Reagan's Washington. In 1980, Skousen was appointed to the newly founded Council for National Policy, a think tank that brought together leading religious conservatives and served as the unofficial brain trust of the new administration. At the Council, Skousen distinguished himself by becoming an early proponent of privatizing Social Security. He also formed relationships with other evangelical church leaders and aligned the LDS church with an increasingly religious GOP. ....

..."The Making of America." Besides bursting with factual errors, Skousen's book characterized African-American children as "pickaninnies" and described American slave owners as the "worst victims" of the slavery system. ....

"The 5,000 Year Leap" is not the only Skousen title to find new life on the 912 circuit. The president of the National Center for Constitutional Studies, Dr. Earl Taylor Jr., is currently touring the country offering daylong seminars to 912 chapters based on Skousen's "Making of America." For $25, participants will receive a bagged lunch and stories about America's religious Founders and their happy slaves. An ad for Taylor's "Making of America" seminar, currently featured on the Web site of the Tampa 912 Project, claims that Skousen's book is "considered a great masterpiece to Constitutional students (and is) the 'granddaddy' of all books on the United States Constitution."

Like so much declaimed by W. Cleon Skousen and his 21st century acolyte Glenn Beck, this last statement is fantasy. But it is also a profitable and popular one. In coming to terms with a movement that has an ever more tenuous relationship with accepted fact, we relearn that perennial lesson grasped even by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Fantasies can have serious consequences.

*************UNQUOTE************

[NOLALady]

32. Did you ask him to explain his reasoning?

Does he believe in Manifest Destiny?

[BoneDaddy]

33. I have heard Pat Buchanan

say something similar. Basically he said that blacks in this country should be grateful for the gift of Christianity. Can't make this shit up.

[NOLALady]

46. Someone should remind Pat Buchanan

that three of Africa's sons were Popes. It seems Christianity had visited the continent before the slave trade.

[RaleighNCDUer]

59. That can't be right -

all Africans were naked savages living in grass huts in the jungle. Don't you know anything?

Of course today, they've progressed to wearing pants and carrying AKs - but they are still savages living in grass huts in the jungle.

(Pat Buchanan's reply)

[tjwash]

38. Righties think insurance co's are doing them favors by trying to kill health reform.

They also think that corporations are doing them favors by actively busting up unions, and they think that by sending other peoples children overseas to die in filthy oil wars in the middle-east, that they are somehow keeping us safe, and not lining the pockets of the uber-rich.

That thought your RW cousin has is just a symptom...the entire diseased thought process that they have rolls merrily along.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

43. I think South Park threw in a line to that effect in one of their episodes.

Something about how if it wasn't for tobacco, slaves wouldn't have been brought to America and therefore they wouldn't have their black friends to play with.

I have absolutely no idea if it was meant to be a serious line or satire, though.

[Romulox]

45. "Collective praise" is the logical correllary to "collective guilt"

I think that a lot of people choke on a knot in their own pretzel of logic on this subject...in other words, many points double back on themselves.

I reject the concept of "collective responsibility" outright while fully acknowledging the existence of racism. It's possible.

[pipi_k]

51. On collective guilt...

I don't know about other people, but there were quite a few years where I suffered from a form of it, when I found out that there were black families with my maiden name. Not knowing much of my family genealogy at the time, I felt awful that perhaps ancestors of mine had owned slaves who, upon being freed, took the names of their masters (my family).

I walked around with a heavy heart and much guilt that wasn't even mine.

since then I learned that at least 95% of my family made its way down from Canada in the 1800s, where they had been living since (in some cases) the 1500s. Some of them intermarried with the First Nation people there. From all accounts, the relationships between my ancestors and a couple of the native tribes were amiable and beneficial to both sides.

So apparently, what happened was that some of my very distant relatives, ousted by the English, fled Acadia and other nearby areas...some of them went to Montreal...some went south to Louisiana, etc. And it was they who likely owned slaves who took their names after they were freed.

I'm no longer wracked by a false sense of guilt over something I didn't even do. Oh, and another point...some years back I had a Jewish boss who asked if my (second marriage) name was French. Yes, I said...he then proceeded to launch into a tirade about how the French sided with the Nazis during WWII, etc., and I felt like shit until his wife stopped him.

What he didn't know...and neither did I at the time...was that even THAT French name had been in Canada for a long time before WWII and didn't side with France in whatever happened. Plus it wasn't even my real birth name.

So much pain...so much suspicion...so much guilt...

[RaleighNCDUer]

60. I don't understand how one can internalize and individualize collective

guilt.

We - as a nation - did some terrible things. I - as an individual - had nothing to do with them. My very distant ancestors, on one branch of the family tree, MIGHT have been slave owners but I feel no responsibility about THEM. I cannot take it personally. I DO feel the nation has a responsibility to face up to its past.

We can only be guilty in the collective, not as individuals, UNLESS as individuals you try to excuse what our ancestors did.

OTOH, people who join organizations that celebrate the crimes of their ancestors - THEY can have all the collective disapprobation we can heap on them.

[pipi_k]

67. Well, it actually started when I was a child

I grew up in an alcoholic family and internalized everything that happened.

When you hear time after time during arguments, your name mentioned, or just the general "the kids", you start to feel like everything that happens is your fault.

Then there was school. I personally was a very quiet child. When some of the noisier or more daring kids acted up/out, some of my teachers would punish the entire class. By this time the guilt was so ingrained in me that I was sure that I had done something....something to deserve the punishment along with everyone else.

so one day in sixth grade it was the end of the day and the class was raring to get out of school and was somewhat noisy and boisterous. The teacher made everyone sit down and then called out each kid one by one and gave permission to leave. The kid put his/her chair upside down on the desk and left. I sat there, quiet as a mouse, waiting for the teacher to call my name but she didn't. She never saw me for at least a full half hour or 45 minutes as she did her end of day stuff, then she noticed I was still there, crying silently and wondering what I had done wrong.

She drove me home and explained to my parents what had happened.

Seems like such a little thing, but it really stuck with me for years.

false guilt... :(

[JonQ]

75. Being born with guilt

the sins of the father and all that rubbish, is very much a religious idea. No one can be blamed for the actions of their ancestors. Nobody has family history completely without blemish and if they do it's because someone chose not to remember uncle adolph (or whoever).

Feel guilt for what you've done, and perhaps what you failed to prevent from happening, but not for stuff that occurred prior to your birth, that's just insane.

[NOLALady]

61. Not all ex slaves took their master's surname.

The myth of the “master’s name”

http://www.examiner.com/examiner/x-8873-African-American-Genealogy-Examiner~y2009m5d14-The-myth-of-the-masters-name

There is a strong possibility that many of the black families who share your surname are the descendants of the slave owners. Sometimes they are descendants of friends of the slave owners. Here in Louisiana there's a lot of "shared ancestry".

I see no reason to feel guilt about ancestors who owned slaves. When I first learned about ancestors who owned slaves, I did not feel guilt. I felt ashamed and sad that I was descended from cruel and ignorant ancestors. A product of their times was never a good argument for me. Everyone knows the difference between right and wrong. They made a choice.

I could understand guilt by someone who perpetuated racism. I could understand guilt by someone who witnessed racism and would not speak up because they benefited from the racism. But there is no reason to feel guilt about the choices of one's ancestors.

BTW, I have a French-Canadian line that made it's way to the Ste. Genvieve/Kaskaskia area (c 1700) before they found their way to Louisiana. My French-Canadian ancestor had two "wives" concurrently, a French woman and a half French fwc. He had ten children with both of them. Hubby is also a product of a French-Canadian line. Some of our lines were intermarrying long before they made their way to Louisiana.

[pipi_k]

69. Yep, I found that out too.

I've since relieved myself of a whole lot of that guilt.

and one of the interesting things I learned while doing French Canadian ancestry was that yes, they did pretty much intermarry. In fact, only a couple of years ago I found out that one branch of my family has the same name as my second husband's was. I never knew it but we could have been distant cousins or something...sort of a weird feeling.

anyway, some of the French Canadian surnames I can think of without looking them up:

DeGray (Degre'), Auclair, Mongeau, Boucher, Labrecque, Lafleur, Roussel, Guertin, Langlois, Roy, LeCamus. And a ton more, some lines going back to 15th - 16th Century France.

Maybe you and your hubby and I have some common ancestors! :)

[NOLALady]

78. I will send you an IM.

[NOLALady]

49. I have to wonder if they also believe they did a favor

for the Natives by stealing their land, enslaving them, committing genocide and finally placing them on those "nice" reservations.

[pipi_k]

52. I once lived with a man who was from the rez in Montreal

he told me some stories of the place.

It wasn't pretty.

But it was probably a whole lot better in some ways than what the Native Americans (of the US) had, and still have.

:(

[TxRider]

54. Not that I have ever heard.

[Berry Cool]

62. I loved how Lionel Jefferson put it to Archie Bunker on TV when he expressed a similar sentiment.

Something like, "Yeah, you're right, you did do us a favor bringing us to America. We didn't even have to pay for the trip. You guys just came right over and got us!" :sarcasm:

[Liberal In Texas]

63. I first heard this as a kid in the late 50s.

It's been around a long time and is still disgusting.

[RagAss]

76. Those go beyond fighting words.....way beyond.

[Saphire]

81. so i guess the Irish famine was a GOOD thing.....after all, it caused ME to be here.