I don’t separate the English colonies from the United States that way. My ancestors were Americans in 17th century Virginia and Massachusetts. Some of them owned slaves. While I don’t feel guilt, I’m not going to say it doesn’t count and blame the Brits. It was us, a continuing political and social enterprise.
When America separated from England wether to continue slavery was an issue. Prior to the separation from England many colonist opposed slavery. Slavery lasted exactly 80 years after America became independent from England. Painting slavery as a monolithic economic system widely accepted for 400 years is BS. It was the American Quakers that provided Wilberforce with the philosophical and scriptural underpinnings in his fight to end slavery in England. If it was so widely accepted why did the Quakers bother to oppose it? Slavery was not racial. The first legal slave owner in what is now America was Black. Slavery may have been “continuing political and social enterprise “ but it was not well liked, as a matter of fact it was distasteful to an awful lot of Americans, so distasteful we fought our bloodiest war to end it. Along with being political and social slavery was mainly economic!
Both sides of my family were 1669’s settlers out of the Richmond colony to the mid eastern shore of the Chesapeake Bay. They were not immigrants. They were not slaveholders. They were poor families searching for a new life in a new country not yet populated even by earlier settlers. A few nomadic tribes wandered through annually. These were the first people to live on this land permanently. That is the story of America.
OK - then you pay for “400 years of oppression”.
You can’t raid our taxpayers because of something done by a foreign government.