What Tom Cotton's 'necessary evil' comment says about America

[Yo_Mama_Been_Loggin]

Sometimes the culture wars are a distraction from the problems facing America. Sometimes they illuminate the underlying causes of those problems. Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) has offered an example of the latter phenomenon.

Last week, Cotton introduced a bill to prohibit federal funds from being used in schools to teach "The 1619 Project," which posits that slavery was embedded in the country's very foundation. Over the weekend, the senator explained his thinking to the Arkansas Democrat, a newspaper in his home state: "We have to study the history of slavery and its role and impact on the development of our country because otherwise we can't understand our country," Cotton conceded. But, he added: "As the Founding Fathers said, it was the necessary evil upon which the union was built, but the union was built in a way, as Lincoln said, to put slavery on the course to its ultimate extinction."

It is breathtaking in the year 2020 to hear a United States senator use the term "necessary evil" to describe slavery. But it is important to note that Cotton's comments came in a context: Millions of Americans are waiting on Congress to pass another economic relief package, lest they lose their homes and ability to feed their families. But Senate Republicans haven't taken action yet — in part because some of them worry that unemployment benefits are too generous.

There is a direct link between Cotton's comments and this execrable present state of affairs.

Let us back up, first, and examine what he said more closely. Rather ominously, Cotton's comments echoed America's original enslavers, who justified themselves by saying slavery was needed to build the south's economy — and to maintain white supremacy. Cotton, however, seemed to argue on Sunday that he meant only to refer to the Founders' views that the actual process of making a union — that is, bringing the states together under the Constitution to form the United States — required northern states to compromise in order to bring southern slave states into the fold. (Twitter pundits spent Sunday parsing Cotton's grammar to understand his statement.)

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https://www.yahoo.com/news/tom-cottons-necessary-evil-says-095308965.html

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1. It should be necessary then to compensate the victims of that necessary evil.

Fair is fair since the country benefited and became the richest nation in the world, off the backs of millions of enslaved people who had their dawn-to-dusk, six-days-a-week labor stolen for 250 years with nothing to ever pass down to their descendants.

And people wonder why African American household networth is a tenth that of white ones. It's of course often shunted off as black people being lazy.

This time of racial reckoning may clear up some of those racist presumptions, and maybe even offer opportunities to communities of color that weren't available before.