[user982]

Someone once tried to make the argument to me that African Americans should feel eternal gratitude toward whites for fighting a war to free them. The fact of the matter is that America is one of the very few countries in history to fight a war to keep slavery.

[scoofy]

This type of reductionist take is unhelpful no matter who is making it. We can have a bunch of free states, with whites and blacks fighting for abolition as far back as the founding, and a bunch of slave states fighting for slavery.

Trying to flatten the situation into one general group vs another cannot explain the complexity of the situation, like the fact that there were black and mixed-race slave owners, or that Delaware fought for the Union Army despite being a slave state.

[fenomas]

A quote I like from Wynton Marsalis: "with race in America it's never just black against white. It's always black and white against white."

[dpkirchner]

And we never actually ended slavery, we just changed the rules on how to enslave people (ie we must imprison them first).