Just how did these peoples live before they came into contact with Europeans?
For decades now, African American leaders have been calling for a formal United States apology for the American role in the slave trade, with some even demanding reparations. Indian tribes proclaim their tax-exempt status as something they are owed for a legacy of persecution by the United States. Mexican Americans in the southwest United States seek to incorporate this region, including California, into Mexico, or even to set up an independent nation, Aztlan, that will recreate the glories of the Aztec empire, destroyed centuries ago by the imperialistic Spaniards.
That we live in an age of grievance and victimhood is not news. But did these peoples — these Mexican-Americans, these Native Americans, these African-Americans — really lose more than they gained in their confrontation with the West? Were they robbed of nobility, and coarsened? Or did White subjugation force them to shed savagery and barbarousness, and bring them, however unwillingly, into civilized humanity?
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