2 days Ago
Assemblyman Reggie Jones-Sawyer wants the state of California to apologize for slavery, despite the fact that, as he writes, California was never a slave state. It’s not the first time I’ve heard this sort of insanity – like California city councils that open their meetings not with the Pledge of Allegiance but with an apology for living on “stolen” Native American land. These speakers have no intention of leaving the land, and less interest in returning what they say is stolen.
It just makes them feel good to say a thing that costs them nothing. So even though it won’t cost me money to apologize for slavery, I won’t do it – and I’m black. Jones-Sawyer cited a “painful legacy of slavery.
” What are you talking about? There is literally no such thing. My parents emigrated to the United States from the West Indies in 1967, one year before both Dr. Martin Luther King and presidential candidate Robert F.
Kennedy were assassinated. Even though the Civil Rights Act of 1964 outlawed segregation in America, it still existed in parts of the South into the end of the 1960s. But let’s be clear, despite that evil, my parents came here, like so many other immigrants, because the opportunities were still superior to the places they’d.
They settled in Brooklyn, New York. My father worked as a taxi driver. In the 1970s, that was more dangerous than being a cop.
My mother started her career working in hospitals and would become a nurse. Soon, my parents were able to b.
