Am I supposed to apologize for being a white person, and specifically a white man?
Well, some people may think so. They may even think I should pay them simply because I am, and they're not. My answer is "No."
If you press it far enough my answer will be delivered in a way you won't like. That's not a threat, by the way; its a promise that you will not assault me without consequence. Stealing money is an assault. Some think they can do this and wave around guns and other thuggish behavior in various places, like just recently turned deadly in Alabama. If you do any of that you deserve the response you get.
Let me tell you in detail what I won't apologize for, even though I didn't personally create any of it. Other white men, however did, and since group association is considered valid by all the "DIE" folks that works both ways by their rules, and thus I'm taking credit for all of it.
- Mechanized farming. White man did that. Without it you'd be working in a field with your hands, like it or not.
- Electrical power. George Westinghouse and Edison, anyone?
- Electrical lights. Edison again.
- The bicycle, the most thermodynamically efficient means of personal transportation ever invented. Baron Karl von Drais, a white man (German, to be specific) referring to the first verifiable practical example. Many improvements followed until the modern design with a crank and chain drive were figured out -- all by white men, by the way, save one -- a black American who figured out how to make a foldable frame. (The modern derailleur was developed in France around 1900 by.... you know.... yeah.)
- Personal automobiles that an average person can manage to buy. Henry Ford, white man. Yes, there were others, almost all also white men although their products were far too expensive for all but the very wealthy, but he was the one who made it reasonably affordable for an average person -- and that's a fact.
- Flush toilets. Mr. Crapper, to be specific. Yes, that really was his name. He was the first to set up public showrooms for displaying such and also greatly promoted same in people's homes. He also, in 1880, invented the U-trap which was a significant improvement over the existing "S" trap. His nephew improved the original siphon flow-starting method which he patented in 1897 and created the floating ballcock, which is the fill mechanism in tanked toilets.
- The Internet. Almost entirely created by white men at DARPA as a means to make sure our military could communicate in the event of nuclear war. A contingency that (thus far) hasn't been needed.
- BGP. Two white men drew up on a napkin (really) the protocol that underlies all routing decisions on the modern Internet and has since its introduction. Without it you would not have the Internet we know today, period, full stop.
- Space exploration and travel. A huge percentage of the scientists in the United States that made this possible were Germans who were allowed here after WWII and the balance of those through the years of NASA from Mercury forward through Apollo were almost exclusively..... white men. Musk explicitly doesn't count since he hasn't figured out yet that flame is hot and Newton's laws of motion are real -- and thus his recent launch attempt blew pieces of the launch pad all over the place, destroying property (and not just his, which of course if he wants to destroy he's free to.)
- Nuclear power for civilian and military (warship) use. Admiral Rickover was..... a white man. Without him there would have been no such set of systems developed. Enrico Fermi, an Italian white man, was the developer of first Chicago Pile and the foundational individual for both nuclear power and, ultimately, the US nuclear bomb as well.
I can do this for hours. Those who argue "but that's because of oppression by said white men" have a problem with that argument, which is the utter lack of anything more than two stories tall or a single water-going vessel larger than a canoe in certain parts of the world long before white man did anything there and thus could have oppressed anyone. Lest you think I'm just bagging on black people let me be an equal-opportunity slagger of tropes. The rubric that the British empire "enslaved" those in India, for example, is a fraud. British rule in fact ended a thousand years of intermittent famine by putting in place a grain reserve program that paid out grain in bad times in return for labor, something the people living there prior to the allegedly-horrible "Empire" had not done across those thousand years despite knowing that periodic crop failures due to ordinary cycles in climate had always occurred. Where was their "equal or superior" intellect? Crapping in the river they drank from, it would appear.
Yes, there are other cultures that developed similar things -- such as sailing vessels capable of traveling beyond sight of land with reasonable odds of success. The Chinese were one of them. But it is by no means universal and the premise that "there is nothing there that caused any of these different outcomes but oppression" is flat-out crap.
(This is not to say that "white people" always got it right. As just one example the Romans, infamously, used lead for water pipes. Which is in fact safe provided you have mineral content in the water and the water is not acidic, as the minerals it will almost-immediately deposit on the inside surface, form a protective layer and keep you from poisoning yourself. However, they also used said material for vessels that contained acidic beverages and boiled down grape juice --highly acidic -- to make sweetener in lead pots. Did the Romans -- especially upper-class Romans who had much more access to such niceties -- screw themselves? Maybe and if so.... oops.)
It is also a fact that it was black people -- specifically black tribal chiefs -- who sold the blacks in Africa into slavery, including but certainly not limited those who were shipped to America. Not that doing so was or is a uniquely black thing; selling your fellow man into slavery, in your own culture, is very much an common theme among humans. But the premise that "white boys went down to Africa and enslaved them all" is flat-out bullshit. Prior to modern medicine the average European who showed up in sub-Saharan Africa had a life expectancy of about a month due to various indigenous pestilence and disease that said person had no resistance to.
Never mind that there are many nations that practice slavery today. Not a hundred years ago, not 200, not 1,000. Right here, right now. Among them are North Korea, Afghanistan, Cambodia, Nigeria, the Congo and China. May I remind you that without both the Congo and China you wouldn't have a single lithium-battery powered anything, so before you scream at me about slavery go get up and look in the mirror -- that is, assuming you have a cellphone or anything else containing one of those in it.
Don't give me any bullshit about all the "wonderful" indigenous people in America we ruined. Yes, some of the indigenous people here were indeed peaceful and industrious. But other tribes were murderous bastards who engaged in all manner of armed conquest and the slaughter of everyone not-them, including children, and that's also a fact so spare me how we were all "white devils" and they were all as pure as newly-fallen snow. Its nowhere near that simple and anyone who gives a crap beyond parroting bullshit knows it.
Who are the worst offenders with regard to exploiting slave labor today? That ought to be obvious: It's all the screaming Karens with electric vehicles and their huge lithium battery packs along with the makers of same and their enablers in governments, exactly zero of which would exist but for slaves in the here and now. Real ones, and not even adults -- the worst of it in the Congo is the black kids who are forced to mine cobalt for an equivalent of one dollar a day. And by the way, both the slaves (children) and the owners of said slaves are..... wait for it...... black.
Indeed our own government wildly incentivizes actual slavery in those nations by arguing we should buy more of said electric cars and giving people tax credits to do so. Your local virtue-signaling "public charging station" at this place or that in fact enables slavery. Oh, and the leftists in our government along with all those "diverse" EPA officials and such?
They're all for it -- right here, right now.
All of the administrations on both sides of the aisle and every member of Congress over the last two decades in fact supports and gives license to actual slavery in the modern world -- and that's also a FACT.
The "grievance industry" on top of all of this is a scam, a fraud, and to the extent its practiced in the United States a violation of the 14th Amendment never mind the blanket prohibition on corruption of blood found in the Constitution itself. Any attempt to demand "reparations" is per-se unconstitutional as such a demand is in fact "corruption of blood" -- that is, a demand to levy a penalty on those not involved for the alleged or even actual sins of their forefathers. Abstracting that back to the general fund of a state or the federal government does not change the essential character of the act.
Leaving aside the fact that such were not at the time crimes and ex-post facto laws are also unconstitutional the infirmity of these sorts of claims is clear. That California seems to think they can do this violates the Constitution as well since the 14th Amendment incorporates all Constitutional protections against the States and makes unlawful any attempt to circumvent those protections.
I will not apologize for those who came before me and happened to be white, nor will I apologize for the color of my skin -- ever. Those white men are the reason we have a civilization today. They are why you have running, clean water, sewer systems, electrical power, personal transportation beyond your two feet (covered wagons, the bicycle, motor car and more), modern agriculture starting with the steel plow, movable type and countless other things that, absent said progress you would be attempting to snare rabbits and squirrels with a reed for food, risking dysentery with every drink of water and crapping in a field.
If you want to see what sort of "contribution" those who we are supposed to revere wish to make to our "society" one need only look at the feral creatures who destroyed vehicles and shot each other in downtown ChitCongo this last weekend. The mayor-elect's response to this is to warn that we shouldn't "vilify" feral, arguably-rabid animals. Maybe that's because he is one too? I remind you I ran a company out of offices less than two blocks from there in the 1990s and this sort of animal behavior, unchecked by the police, would have led me to close the place down and leave immediately because the only other sane response to this sort of feral, violent behavior is exactly what you would do with a snarling, violent dog.
Were there ignoble things imposed on people in the past? You bet. But white men had no monopoly on that through history -- and still don't. Indeed today most of the slavers are black or Chinese.
Do I owe anyone anything for what someone six generations removed from me might have done?
No, period, and it is time for people of good character irrespective of their race to put that stake in the ground and be willing to defend it irrespective of how and via what means that might become necessary.
Will I listen or accede to any of this crap so long as we continue to allow trade with literal slave nations such as China and the Congo because its convenient for our particular desires, including all those black people who right here, right now and today are using a cell phone that only exists because some black kid is a slave in the Congo and mined the cobalt in that battery?
Absolutely not and anyone arguing otherwise can fuck off.