Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) says that the United States invented slavery, a notion that has been debunked by historians for centuries. Alex Blumberg explains why this is nonsense, and why we don t need to apologize for slavery.
00:01:05.080Democrat Senator Tim Kaine proved yesterday that millennials are not the only ones who've never read a history book.
00:01:11.600When he stood on the floor of the Senate to denounce America's invention of slavery, here's what he had to say.
00:01:19.040We need to ban racial and religious profiling.
00:01:23.660We need to hold police officers and police departments accountable for violent, reckless behavior.
00:01:30.360We need to promote better training and professional accreditation of police departments.
00:01:35.920Madam President, why do we demand that universities maintain accreditation and receive federal funds, but make no such demand of law enforcement agencies?
00:01:48.620And we need to do much more within the criminal justice system, but also within all of our systems,
00:01:54.420to dismantle the structures of racism that our federal, state, and local governments carefully erected and maintained over centuries.
00:02:03.120We know a little bit about this in Virginia.
00:02:04.760The first African Americans into the English colonies came to Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619.
00:03:32.060The most generous possible interpretation of this seemingly incoherent remark is that the United States created slavery in the United States.
00:03:51.340So this would be true, of course, in a certain way.
00:03:54.320But by the same logic, you could say that the United States created the wheel and irrigation and agriculture and Chinese food, right?
00:04:03.020In that none of these things existed in the United States before the United States existed.
00:04:08.320In other words, the United States created its own version of all these things in a certain way, you might say.
00:04:15.940That would be an accurate statement, but also weirdly redundant and unnecessary.
00:04:21.340And when it comes to the good stuff, like, you know, irrigation and the wheel and other innovations,
00:04:27.820you would never hear someone like Tim Cain try to give us credit for inventing those things.
00:14:17.200China had slavery for 3,000 years before it was officially abolished,
00:14:22.340and that didn't happen until the 20th century.
00:14:23.900And unofficially, it goes on to this very day in China, and in many other parts of the world, in fact.
00:14:31.940This, again, does not lessen the brutality of American slavery,
00:14:35.380doesn't mitigate the evil of the institution,
00:14:37.100but it does go to show that the exclusive focus on slavery in America
00:14:43.160and the insistence that white Americans have inherited unique guilt because of it is simply wrong.
00:14:49.260And I think that, you know, we have talked so much about the legacy of slavery in this country and the legacy of racism by white people in this country.
00:15:03.080I mean, this is a conversation we've had over and over again, and we will continue to have.
00:15:06.880But I just think at a certain point, once we've established that there were a lot of racist, terrible white people,
00:15:15.040and they owned slaves, and it was awful, and, you know, I think everybody agrees with that.
00:15:20.260And we're going to continue to have that conversation.
00:15:21.740I'm not even saying we should stop having that conversation.
00:15:23.460But at a certain point, can we introduce the other civilizations on Earth?
00:15:30.320I mean, are we allowed to ever bring that up?
00:15:34.920If there ever comes a time, you know, when we are ready to have a mature, nuanced discussion of slavery
00:15:40.840and of racism and of their legacies in the modern day,
00:15:44.640which I think would be a very worthwhile conversation to have, and I would be eager to participate in it.
00:15:49.800You know, after all, we can't understand where we are.
00:15:51.700We can't understand where we're going until we know where we've been, right?