Can America ever truly pay for its sins?

[The Grand Nudger]

All these media influencers that like to focus on America's evil past should be looked at with suspicion because there are obvious signs they're pushing an agenda and they're not acting in good faith. Ask yourself, why are they focusing on this issue with such ferocity? Do they really want to improve the country or just stir up unnecessary conflict and make Americans hate their own country? What is their track record? Has their "activism" made the country better or worse? I'm not even an American citizen so I have no patriotic stake here, but there is a difference between specific, constructive criticism of one's country and demonization. The talking points these people use are the same I would use... if I was a psychopath and my intention was to destabilize a country and get people to hate each other. If you have a friend with a very unhealthy lifestyle do you slowly try to talk him out of it or do you mock him with things like "haha you're fat, you're ugly, you're dumb, you'll never be anything and you'll die of OD by 35"?

I can clear all of this up for you, as an american.  Yes, yes you would constantly screw with your buddy.  This is the american way. That handled, talking about and being aware of our past doesn't make any of us hate our country.  We're very happy to wave the flag even when - and sometimes especially when- we're up to no good.  

If you cant name a problem, you're probably not going to be able to fix it.  If your reaction to people pointing out the problem is to suggest that they're insurgents weakening the fabric of the country, you're part of the problem.  

Second, I don't agree with the implication that Native Americans had a valid claim to the entire land that is now the USA. Some of it, sure, but most of it was empty land with no government, no infrastructure, no clearly marked border. Why shouldn't it be up for grabs on a first come first served basis? Does it make any sense for a population to have ownership of millions of square miles simply because it is close to it? If I somehow build the first house on let's say Olympus Mons, Mars, do I get to claim ownership of the entire planet? How about half? How about just Olympus Mons? Or is it just the house itself, maybe the immediate surrounding but no more?

You'd be wrong there, the country was well developed when europeans arrived.  The forests and meadows were not natural..not even the amazon is raw wilderness.  Little known but fun fact, the american agricultural machine - wonder of the modern world- is built on the native agro-forestry model that was in place when europeans arrived. A huge number of the early ships across the pond carried no farming tools whatsoever - and alot of the time it wouldn't matter if they had as their tools couldn't work these soils. Some parts were on the cusp of something like our own classical history, with the emergence of city states and nations.  Persistent and active trade networks that stretched from canada to florida to california to south america.  There were native american cities that matched contemporaneous london in population. There's an idea that it was a vast unpopulated wilderness because we wanted it to be, and depopulated it to match our own needs...and much of it remains that way today, amusingly enough. You don't see us allowing the creation of a new country out in the midwest, just because it's a bunch of seemingly empty fields and no big red line drawn on the ground, eh?

Third, everyone involved is dead, there's no wound to heal. The perpetrators are dead, the victims are dead, their direct descendants are likely dead (if we're talking about slavery, all of their direct descendants i.e. sons and daughters are dead, no exception). The people in the US government today are not the people of 1800 or 1900 or even 1950. The descendants of the perpetrators don't owe the descendants of the victims anything, one cannot even accurately determine which people alive today are affected by the injustices of the past and to what extent. Maybe in some hypothetical alternate reality where the US never had slavery or Jim Crow, a poor black dude is a millionaire with an amazing career. But you don't know this, he could still end up exactly the same because wealth, status and knowledge isn't always passed down the line. Sure, you can in theory sue a dead guy's family for damages, but there are limits on that so you don't end up with more injustices. For one thing, if you sue for a 1M$ but the estate is only worth 10k$, you can't get more than 10k out of the family. Are you able to prove precisely which people living alive today directly benefit from slavery? Strong doubt. Many descendants of slaveholders never inherited anything, wealth is actually easily lost over multiple generations.

-but not easily built.  The problem we have today has little to do with past slavery except as prelude for contemporary exploitation and disenfranchisement.  You;re worried about hyypothetical millionaires but the actual problem in mere reality is closer to the ground. The wealth gap is pronounced. It's not that..maybe, a man could be a millionaire today if he wasn;t a slave yesterday. It;s that he doesn;t have a pot to piss in today because he was a slave, then a second class citizen, until living memory (and, perhaps, still is). It's that if he had so much as a shack that shack would be worth something today, distributed as the case may be among all of his descendants...just like everyone else. He didn't, so they don't.

Wealth isn't easily lost, btw, that's a recent blip...and it's amazing how apopolectic the white and delightsome have suddenly become over this issue that has been the state of affairs for non-whites in the country since it's inception. Maybe we should lean in on that, on account of how it's fucking deleterious to the state of a nations people.

There is a reason civilized countries have a statute of limitations because it's simply not productive or practical to hold grudgers for extremely long periods especially over multiple generations where people barely even know members of their own family beyond grandparents. Maybe it's time a statute of limitations was put on injustices done multiple lifetimes ago.

Fourth, it's pretty obvious that the US has changed, a lot of the things mentioned aren't done anymore. There's no slavery, there's no segregation, there's no genocide. People still holding a grudge should get over it. If anyone needs reparations, there is a stronger case for Russia paying reparations to all eastern European countries for spreading communism as this happened even within the lifetime of millennials (I lived 2 years through communism). But I don't know any of my people actively demanding that Russia pay reparations or using Russian communism as an excuse for why they're addicted to drugs or getting into easily avoidable fights with the cops. None of that is an excuse. The same is true for Turkey. Turkey as the Ottoman Empire subjugated eastern Europe for centuries at the height of its power, nobody talks about how Turkey can pay for its sins, nobody tries to excuse their criminal behavior or the failures in their life by saying it's Turkey's fault (and if they did, they would be laughed at), pretty much all criticism of Turkey is related exclusively to the present. It doesn't even get criticism for the Armenian genocide, only criticism because it doesn't admit to it.

So to answer the question "Is there anyway for America to truly confront its past and change for the better or is it just too great a wound to heal?"

Yes, there is, and it's the same answer if it were any other country. Stop doing what you were doing, admit it was wrong, move on. (You should pay reparations if the injustice happened recently, like in the same lifetime, but you shouldn't if it happened long ago and most records were lost.)

America has changed, it isn't doing genocide/slavery/Jim Crow anymore and the consensus is that it was all wrong. Nobody apart from a fringe minority of ridiculous hillbillies supports these things. It's the woke left that isn't letting this issue go and pretending that "white supremacy" is actually a widespread belief.

A majority of white americans accept the five pillars of contemporary white supremacy.  It's such a widespread belief, that one of our two (count em, two) political parties is organized explicitly by it, and will very likely regain control of our government next cycle. The other party is scrambling to make accomodations for those people, trying to bring people who very much are white supremacists into their tent. That's the state of play. Meanwhile, the white supremacists themselves are rigging the vote and capturing local government so that even if they can be beat on the numbers in any location - it won't matter.

Discrimination. The white man is being reverse racism-d
Rights abrogation. The white mans rights and protections are being eroded, his wealth transferred to non whites.
Stigmatization and the denial of pride. The country is being slandered.
Loss of self esteem. The white man is being villainized.
Racial Elimination. The white man is being breed out.

These are not uncommon beliefs. We have posters here who get super pissy when you call them what they are, vehemently deny that they are what they are, all the while insisting that the items mentioned are true. Try out neutral formulations on americans you know. Ultimately, it's why I stopped identifying as a republican, why I stopped voting for repblicans..and, eventually, a huge part of why I stopped voting at all. It became impossible to maintain the fiction that there was any other principle or policy left in the republican party, and only a fool would believe that the dems would do anything other than make accommodations and carveouts for that view. I guess I wouldn't have had a choice in the end, as the purity purges are going through magaland now.

There's no conspiracy on the left to weaken the us by reminding it of it's past and taking issue with it's present. Those people are talking about how it could be improved, and they have no real friends in the institutional politics of this country. That's just something that right wing nutballs babble about. The miscegenated communist plot against white capitalist america, lol. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'll rephrase. Coastal elites vs the heartland. It's all about that neutral phrasing. Point is, that this isn't a real thing, but a talking point spread by those very same disseminators of white supremacist propaganda. Tell you something that might lighten the mood. It's hard to grow up a white supremacist on the beach in the US of A. All of these conflicting signals......

The short version of a long story is that there will never be reparations, of any kind, ever. We're too economically anxious for that. If that's what it means, and must mean, for america to atone for it's past, then the answer is a hard and enduring no. OTOH, so long as american white supremacists are motivated by populist appeals, there's a chance that rising tides can lift all ships. Not a good one - history as indicator...but a chance.