Thanks.
What you’re describing though are still subjective beliefs and not objective truth. People can believe whatever they want. Like I stated before, I can in my heart believe all I want that the Rams won the 2019 Super Bowl, because I believe that they outplayed the Patriots. That’s my belief and “my truth.” However, the truth is that they weren’t the Super Bowl champions. Or I can believe that because they won NFC, that to me was the Super Bowl so therefore, “my truth” is that they won the Super Bowl. But again, that’s not the truth.
It’s true though that often times our individual beliefs are formed through historical events and what kind of impact they had on society. Like you said, there’s unfortunately still many people who believe in ideologies that historically have objectively left nothing but death and destruction in their wake. Cultures still believe that homosexuals are to be executed and that women are to cover their faces when they go out in public. Heck, all the way up until last year, women weren’t allowed to even drive in Saudi Arabia. However, it’s just a matter of how many people based on objective truth and incontrovertible facts (the amount of persecution, oppression, death, and destruction these ideologies have inflicted) believe that these ideologies are inherently wrong and are therefore to be condemned, and that therefore essentially becomes the standards, virtues, and values that we espouse as an aggregate society.
When it comes to reparations, while I can see them as being somewhat equitable and having good intent, I personally don’t consider that as being “justice” and then calling it a day. Justice is the idea that each person is held accountable for his or her own actions, and that when those actions are reprehensible because they violate the standards, morals and values that we as a collective society have come to espouse, that they alone be held accountable for those actions. If say you go out and commit a mass shooting tomorrow because you found my comments on here to be provoking (I know you won’t, I’m just using as analogy for discussion purposes
), the only one responsible for your actions is you. Forcing/making people now who had nothing to do with the oppression of those people (who the overwhelming majority condemn that kind of oppression on any person) to simply give a historically oppressed group (comprised by the way of many individuals whose generation never knew oppression because we thankfully rose above that and persevered, or who perhaps don’t even have ancestors who were part of those oppressed generations) money or material assets, isn’t justice. I actually consider it a regression because we will never heal and evolve as a society if we just continue to use those historical stains as a cudgel with which to beat others into submission and silence because they don’t possess the right skin color, and therefore, aren’t allowed an opinion on the matter.
All we can do is learn from past mistakes based on what the ramifications of those mistakes were, and use that to help shape our current beliefs, which is that those stains are to not be repeated again. Pretending they never happened because that’s “your truth” would be disastrous because we then have no basis on how we came to espouse the values and virtues that we do today. You can’t start a book on chapter 12 without reading the events of the first 11 chapters first to know how the events in chapter 12 came to fruition.
Or something.