https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-48665802The first congressional hearing in a decade to discuss compensation for the descendants of US slaves has seen heated arguments from both sides.
Some witnesses said reparations would damage the relationship between white and black Americans, while others said it was imperative to achieve justice.
Several Democratic White House hopefuls have taken up the idea of reparations.
But Republican leader Mitch McConnell has made it clear no reparations bill will pass while he controls the Senate.
You don't really even need to go back that far in the US to determine where systemic injustice was done to Africans Americans in the US though - there are plenty of people alive now who were alive when they literally regarded as an underclass of people.What do you think? Personally, I'm against reparations in general. Where do you draw the line? How far do you go back in the timeline?
I realise this is the case for slavery in the US. And if I'm correct, Japanese-Americans did receive reparations for their internment during WW2:You don't really even need to go back that far in the US to determine where systemic injustice was done to Africans Americans in the US though - there are plenty of people alive now who were alive when they literally regarded as an underclass of people.
Those should be a given for any civilised country.Quality education and healthcare for all. That's the best reparation the US (Or any country that abused on cheap labour/slavery) can do.
Nah, feck that. Go all the way back to 1619.You don't really even need to go back that far in the US to determine where systemic injustice was done to Africans Americans in the US though - there are plenty of people alive now who were alive when they literally regarded as an underclass of people.
Probably cause there are a lot of racists and ignorant minded folk around nowadaysAs political idea or movement it's completely a non starter. Basically symbolic but nothing more.
Yeah and that sketch was really hilarious but it has nothing to do with this serious issue.Chappelle predicted this.
Interesting that they used a Locke quote there. He invested in and helped administrate the Carolina Colonies and the slave shipping industry that sent people here.
Obviously can't throw away what he did for the Enlightenment and American Democracy, but a lot of the founders were similarly compromised by standards (both modern and antebellum)Interesting that they used a Locke quote there. He invested in and helped administrate the Carolina Colonies and the slave shipping industry that sent people here.
True, but then suppose abolitionism and civil rights were non-starters at one point too. If you're for something got to push for it to make it palatable.As political idea or movement it's completely a non starter. Basically symbolic but nothing more.
Resentment among whom?Can't come from taxpayer funds as that will create resentment.
I'd suggest the US sell some of their gold reserves to fund it.
Coates is very good, brings up a lot of good points that highlight how stark improving race relations and racial equality can be/is in a country that was basically founded and economically based on profiting from slavery itself.
Anyone not receiving reparations probably. This will cause a massive divide. I think it's a bad idea.Resentment among whom?
Yep but alsoProbably cause there are a lot of racists and ignorant minded folk around nowadays
A Political Dead Letter
Second, and more importantly, Jones’s reparations argument collapses under the weight of its own logic. He notes that while all workers are exploited, “Black people have been robbed specifically and continuously in this country.”
We can all agree that at various historical junctures, the majority of blacks have been a hyper-exploited and submerged part of the working class. Yet, as Jones notes, not all blacks would support reparations nor should all blacks be recipients of redress if it were ever achieved. Also, he suggests that capitalists should pay out reparations, not all whites.
But after parsing out who deserves redress and who doesn’t, and who should pay up, we end up right back where we started — redressing the inequality that exists between classes, a multiracial investor class on one side, and a multiracial laboring class on the other.
We can’t go back in time and address slavery, dispossession, and debt peonage as they were unfolding. By default we are stuck with addressing oppression in our midst, which is descendant from this longer history but actively determined by contemporary processes — foremost being the production and realization of surplus value in our world.
“As Marx argued,” Jones writes, “all profit is theft — if workers were paid the full value of their labor, there would be no profit. Reparations therefore must be targeted at the class of people who benefit from this theft.”
But if class struggle is the fundamental conflict, why then is there a need for the rhetoric of reparative justice? In asking this question I am not “counterpos[ing] the call for reparations to the fight for social-democratic redistributive policies,” as Jones has claimed.
I am merely pointing out that the reparations demand exists largely in the realm of the political imaginary, and that in the concrete world of struggle, social democracy and socialism have a demonstrated history of improving the lives of black and other working-class people around the world, e.g. the democratic right to organize in the workplace, the Scandinavian social-democratic model, the public works programs of the American New Deal, infrastructural development in Nkrumah’s Ghana, Viennese social housing, Cuba’s health care, education and civil defense systems, Chilean nationalization under Salvador Allende, and so forth.
Conversely, the reparations demand has been restricted to narrowly defined legal cases, sloganeering, or the lecture circuit. Without an actionable set of proposals to organize around and a popular constituency to advance them, the reparations demand is not a real political demand, but a form of moralism that evokes past injury to address contemporary inequality.
Moreover, it isn’t clear from any of these recent pro-reparations arguments how that political project would address racism more effectively than other historically proven approaches, e.g. effective enforcement of anti-discrimination law, targeted recruitment of blacks and other minorities in the workforce and higher education admissions, and enhanced support for institutions like historically black colleges and universities that have long served as a means of black social mobility.
In the end, Jones (and Coates) settle on the claim that at a bare minimum, another round of the reparations debate will at least have some important, and positive, pedagogical and consciousness-raising effects. According to Jones:
The bottom line is, the very concept of reparations for people of African descent is dangerous to the American ruling class. . . . Grappling with the real legacy of white supremacy would explode the lies America tells about itself (from “meritocracy” myths to “culture of poverty” arguments). And, equally important, a serious debate over reparations would raise dangerous questions about where wealth comes from and about who is owed what in this country.
Jones is right to argue that the Left should continue its war of position against racism and underclass mythology and lay bare the historical and contemporary processes of dispossession and exploitation. But how is this debate over historical injustice more dangerous to the ruling class than the actual power of a broad, multiracial alliance with the capacity to contest the demands that capital makes on living labor and the planet in our own times?
I appreciate the moral power of the reparations claim, but time and again, the demand has proven to be a political dead letter, incapable of ever addressing institutional power in any effective way.
And really interesting piece hereAn Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him
Coates’s argument may reveal the discrete legacies of discrimination in one neighborhood, but it conceals broader dynamics responsible for persistent black inequality and, for that matter, the patterns of residential apartheid in postwar Chicagoland.
In a fairly common sleight of hand, Coates extrapolates the empirical fact of white flight into a sociological explanation that reduces the myriad motivations animating white homeowners to a matter of fear and anti-black racism: “Black people were viewed as a contagion.”
In doing so he neglects the overarching structure of supply-side stimulus during the period — including President Eisenhower’s creation of the federal highway system and the federally subsidized construction of lower-cost housing — and glosses over how federal investments propelled suburbanization after the Second World War, well before urban rioting tore central cities asunder and sparked deep anxieties about the possibility of racial integration.
In contrast, Satter’s more sustained, textured analysis makes clear that white suburbanization grew out of large-scale policy undertaken by the state and the mortgage industry, as well the private decisions of landlords and home buyers. They acted not solely out of racism but also genuine economic insecurity — especially the newly arrived middle class, who still remembered the hardships of the Great Depression.
The Lawndale case powerfully illustrates the predatory behaviors of white property owners, who reaped wide profit margins from vulnerable black renters and ill-informed buyers. But had Coates widened his interpretive lens beyond Chicago’s West Side — which was settled by Southern black migrants after the Second World War — to include the city’s more well-established black South Side, a very different, and in some ways more complicated, set of political alliances and social relations would have troubled his narrative of racial conflict, where all the predators are white and all the prey are black.
In Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis, Preston H. Smith II offers a critical account of postwar housing policy and African-American class politics on Chicago’s South Side. During the same period Satter discusses, the South Side was defined by a more class-diverse black population, and one where the interests of the black professional-managerial elite as landlords, administrators, politicians, shopkeepers, supervisors, and homeowners sometimes coincided with, and at other times grated and clashed with, the demands and needs of black workers, public housing tenants, and the poor.
Smith documents how the horizon of social democracy embodied in progressive New Deal reforms — the ideal that all citizens should have access to housing regardless of their ability to pay — was ultimately eclipsed within black public life by a focus on racial democracy: the guarantee of access and participation in the consumer society in a manner comparable to all others of equal class standing.
Coates’s reparations argument rests in the latter aspiration, demanding racial parity within a market society, rather than the decommodification of housing, education, health care, and other human needs. Coates expresses this very sentiment when he says, “With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage.”
However, he continues, “[a]n unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with the concentration of melanin.”
Coates’s demand for collective black recompense rests on the morally powerful but historically specious view of universally felt racial injury. His claims reference the denial of black citizenship during slavery and disenfranchisement under the Jim Crow regime, but show little appreciation for the situated class experiences of blacks as freepersons and slaves, antebellum urban artisans and plantation laborers, Reconstruction politicians and indebted, landless farmers — experiences which were consequential not only in material terms, but also in shaping different black political allegiances and aspirations.
Chattel slavery and legal racial segregation were historical phenomena that were maintained through contingent political alliances and ultimately defeated as those power arrangements were no longer morally defensible or economically justified. Coates’s writing uses history selectively as a means of leveraging racial redress in the present, but such work fails as historical interpretation and as political intervention because of his reluctance to confront the complex political and economic dimensions of the past and our own times.
Like the Cold War liberals who viewed class conflict as a resolved question, and proceeded to proffer technocratic solutions to the conditions facing the urban black and brown poor — Head Start, health care, job training, etc. — Coates’s essay unfolds neatly within the parameters of market liberalism.
It chastises the bad behavior of white citizens, neighborhood associations, and mortgage brokers, and the segregative housing patterns they sustained, while neglecting instances of black “plunder” and the full spectrum of political questions animating black life during the period, such as labor rights, wage floors, and how the massive surplus value that is socially produced by all workers might be more justly distributed.
What, then, would reparations within the current arrangements and class structure of late capitalism mean for African Americans, especially the black working class, in substantive terms?
Even if the most ideal scenario played out, in which a robust national conversation took place, an investigatory committee of the sort Coates has proposed was convened, and some tangible and generous form of reparations was legislated (e.g. Randall Robinson’s national trust), this would all have little long term bearing on inequality if the overarching processes of capital accumulation persisted without any social-democratic modification.
Also, who would administer this new national trust? The black professional-managerial class? What would be the democratic basis for their legitimacy to make redistributive decisions on behalf of the black population? And most importantly, why should this process of reconciliation or the creation of an administered trust to oversee black economic development take priority over the many other immediate needs and demands that are emerging organically from various black popular constituencies?
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/02/ta-nehisi-coates-case-for-reparations-bernie-sanders-racism/
I'm not sure how possible reparations are under capitalism.In honor of his string of excellent essays over the past several years and out of special respect for what many have called his best work to date, I went out and bought a hardcopy of The Atlantic at my local Whole Foods. I bought a chai latte at my area Starbucks, and I posted up to read, in full, Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations.” [1]
Ok. As a synthesis of housing discrimination, property-based white supremacy, and family history, Coates is on fire, as usual. Without question, the historical profession has likely had no better evangelist that Ta-Nehisi Coates, certainly in the last three years and perhaps ever. The essay demonstrates his trademark chronological range. As an actual case for reparations, though, I found myself strangely unsatisfied.
Coates is at his best, I think, in his discussion of Clyde Ross moving from Clarkesdale to Chicago and in his deep contextualizing of Ross’s activism with the Contract Buyers’ League. Coates remains practically unparalleled in his ability to ground structural problems in lived experience. His expansive history of white kleptocracy totally kills. His history of reparations from the late 18th century to the present, and his invocation of John Conyers’s House Resolution 40 (which the esteemed Representative has introduced in vain at every session of Congress for the last 25 years) pummels any notion that reparations should be considered a wacky proposition. [2]
All this said, the piece felt like it went off the rails a bit by the end. Coates powerfully contends that, in terms of reparations, “What I’m talking about is more than past injustices – more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe.” (“Hell yeah!” I thought. “Hush money” hits ‘em especially hard). “What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to a spiritual renewal.” Wait, what? A “spiritual renewal”? Who exactly needs renewal? And, while were on it, we can’t possibly expect “a reckoning” through a House Resolution in Congress, can we? The United. States. Congress?
Coates then moved quickly into a discussion of reparations to Israel that felt both strangely out of place and, for him, at least, uncharacteristically predictable in the context of American racial politics (Blacks vs. Jews). His argument suggests, largely by implication, that, when it comes to reparations, we should think about investing within the legal confines of the nation state, as if state building isn’t always racially inflected. The billions of dollars given to the State of Israel by West Germany and the countless individual claims awarded to Holocaust survivors did not bring about “spiritual renewal” – not for all Israelis, certainly not for Palestinians or, more recently, not for African migrants currently suffering in that part of the world. By simply funneling funds into a project based, like every nation, on exclusion and segregation, reparations to Israel helped underwrite new forms of discrimination and brutality.
It seems we’re stuck in yet another moment when nationalism (perhaps even racial nationalism) muddles our ability to see capitalism. The kinds of predations that snuffed out the life chances of so many black Americans were acts of racism within a society structured on white supremacy, of that Coates leaves no doubt. Yet we should not be surprised that such acts, within such a society, end up being widely practiced by African Americans against African Americans in the name of black upward mobility, property ownership, and self-determination.
It seems that, even in the twentieth century, we cannot fully escape the old trope of Africans ostensibly “selling their own people;” it’s a claim that has long vexed the reparations debate. Rather than embrace denial or quibble about how many black slumlords could fit on the head of a pin (albeit a “Colored Only” pin), such realities invite us to think structurally, and to consider how the very dynamics of real estate in America ensured broad black hardship even at the hands of colored people’s supposed race mates. Beryl Satter’s tour de force Family Properties (a Coates favorite), did not just blow open the conversation on the evils of contract selling. It explained how Martin Luther King’s difficulties in organizing tenants in Chicago in 1966 ran principally into resistance from black real estate interests. A collection of property owning ministers and lawyers – Chicago’s civil rights establishment – did not want their tenants riled up, asking for better housing code enforcement and lower rents. Across the country, black landlords, even when they enjoyed pristine reputations as community leaders, were often among the most effective weapons against African American housing reform and progressive black politics more generally. As Race Men and Women and as property owners under a segregated system, black landlords used the politics of racial nationalism to leave many black people vulnerable to all kinds of exploitation.
Coates perhaps did not spend much time talking about such moments because, to be fair, not many urban historians do. Indeed, African history, for a variety of reasons, tends to be further along on questions of land ownership, racism, and the intra-racial class politics that – once “over there” – we more easily call colonialism. Work from the historian Elisabeth Colson going back to 1950s, for instance, explains how colonial officials used strategies of indirect rule and cobbled-together notions of customary law to anoint chiefs and set aside land to govern. These were lands, not unlike black American ghettos, within which black subjects could safely hash out difficult processes of becoming subjects under white rule. [3] In studies of water rights and cattle herding in Botswana (Pauline Peters, Dividing the Commons, 1994); land development and statecraft in Zimbabwe (Jocelyn Alexander, The Unsettled Land, 2006), or fishing rights on waters between Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (David Gordon, Nachituti’s Gift, 2006), one finds so-called chiefs doing the damndest things. They make explicit endorsements of segregation. They consolidate their authority through narratives of ancestral connection to the land. They deliberately displace poor and working folk in interest of self-aggrandizement and in the name of technical development.
Each of these moves has analogues in how black elites attempted to govern in the Jim Crow and post-Jim Crow United States. In 1956, with the Montgomery Bus Boycott having become national news, black property owners fought to keep a lid on the political status quo, not because they were “Uncle Toms” in the abstract, but because their livelihoods depended on their ability to preserve the racial peace. A group of black landlords in Miami, Florida, for instance, issued the following edict in the wake of Montgomery: “1: Join no boycott movement. 2) Obey state laws regarding segregation until they are changed. 3) Support all legal moves by Negro organizations to end segregation.” [4]
The Wealth Creation seminars Wells Fargo used to prey on black Baltimoreans in 2010, the point on which Coates closes his piece, represents an echo of this political tradition. For various levels of financial compensation, black ministers and civil rights luminaries, such as Al Sharpton and Tavis Smiley, drew black people into church sanctuaries where many poor families drank down poisonous loan terms. Wells Fargo received much negative press for practicing what was later termed “reverse redlining.” However it made its public relation problems largely disappear by donating millions of dollars to the national NAACP, its former prosecutor.
I submit that such examples strengthen rather than weaken the case for reparations, because they invite you to question and ultimately change the rules of how we profit from poverty and racism, how we rely on segregation.
More to the point they reveal the potential dangers of starting, as Coates does, with a discussion of states and structures, and then ending with a vague sense of “reckoning” or “spiritual renewal”. Coates’s fast-moving, hard-hitting case for reparations spends pages and pages detailing “plunder,” “theft,” “exploitation,” “piracy” and the like, all carried out with the assistance of or freedom from the rule of law. Given that history, the answer for starting a widely corrective move against white supremacy can’t possibly begin with tweaking Israel’s state-making project, can it? Does racial justice really require a congressional study as the kick-off for a Truth and Reconciliation Commission (American Style), the functional equivalent of President Bill Clinton’s National Conversation on Race? [5]
You remember that Clinton-era experiment don’t you? In the late 1990s, President Clinton convened a panel of experts to conduct a dialogue on “the problem of race in America.” Not racism, mind you – race. Racism pertains to questions of power, but in addressing “race,” the committee was charged with remedying what was essentially interracial miscommunication. Partly through the magic of their multiculturalism, a decorated panel of three whites, two black Americans, one Asian American and one Mexican American helped initiate some 1,400 conversations involving more than 18,000 people in churches, schools, and town halls in 36 states. The group, which included the eminent historian John Hope Franklin and the labor leader Linda Chavez-Thompson, also marshaled a nation of academic experts to provide structure for these “community dialogues” in hopes of motivating “people to work toward change.”
It was hard to tell what kind of change folks were after. The committee itself stood divided over whether African Americans truly experienced exceptional hardship. They debated whether policing people’s racial language was more important that trying to restart the legislative push and mass movements of the 1960s. John Hope Franklin remained among the committee’s most frustrated members. He blamed the indifference of the national media for the group’s relative ineffectiveness. “The Board’s visibility depended on the willingness of the media to render it visible,” he later professed. [6]
Clearly, visibility has not been a problem for Coates. And it light of the prominence of his voice in print, on the web, and increasingly on cable – ever trumpeting, thankfully, the country’s racial history – perhaps we should consider the Franklin Commission as a prologue to our hoped for “spiritual renewal.” Just perhaps, in light of the Clinton administration’s actual policy record, we should consider how federally funded research on racial healing leaves government bodies unable to redress actual racial inequality. There was, you may recall, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, which expanded the death penalty, eliminated federal grants for inmate education, and offered millions in new grants for states to build new prisons. Then there was the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act, which Clinton proudly proclaimed in 1996 as “break[ing] the cycle of dependency that has existed for millions and millions of our fellow citizens, exiling them from the world of work.” [7] Under that particular reform, poor people enjoyed a maximum of five years of government aid.
Black people and poor people had hardly left the world of work, of course. Black employment, a year before Clinton signed welfare reform into law, had steadily been falling – to half of the near 20% unemployment rate that had ballooned during the Reagan Era, in fact. Continued economic growth promised to (and did) drop it even further. [8] What Clinton’s omnibus crime bill and “welfare to work” program did was funnel increasing numbers of African Americans and working poor people into the criminal justice system. The expansion of the carceral dragnet and the concurrent shrinking of the social safety net drove up incarcerations rates by nearly 25% during Clinton’s time in the White House, with African Americans accounting for a major slice of that increase. Eventually, private prisons became yet another growth industry in the booming economy of the 1990s.
To be clear, Ta-Nehisi Coates is the furthest thing from Bill Clinton. He’s far more courageous and eloquent on questions of white supremacy and is in no position to write or implement policy. There remains, however, a tendency among critics like Coates, presidents like Clinton, and even urban historians like myself to propose modest solutions within established government structures in order to reach the widest possible audience. These are solutions that, at base, preserve the integrity of the Constitution (as currently written) and that rely on persuasion and appeals to the hearts and minds of Americans and immigrants alike, especially when it comes to addressing the condition of black people.
For Coates, Representative Conyers’s HR 40 is the starting point for the new reparations movement. It’s a proposal to spend $8,000,000 to study the impact of segregation and slavery. But as shown in Coates’s own essay – a mere sampling of the scholarship of American racism and exploitation – we at least know enough to get the ball rolling on this reparations thing already. We also know enough to question additional attempts to substitute expert consultation and elite-run committees for more forceful attacks on segregation, lynch law, and mass incarceration.
Immediately after World War II, in an effort to protect the country’s fledgling reputation as the global defender of democracy, President Harry Truman convened his Committee on Civil Rights, the nation’s first. The committee was chaired by Charles Wilson, the chief executive officer at General Electric. Wilson, in one of his first acts as America’s ranking civil rights officer, started dismantling wartime rent controls, attacking the incomes of America’s poor tenants. Rather than pursue allegations of black veterans terrorized by white vigilantes or investigate other hate crimes, Wilson tasked local civil rights boards in the South with investigating “just what civil liberties and constitutionally guaranteed rights are knowingly and deliberately denied that minority group of U. S. citizens…landlords who are subjected to ‘rent control’” [my emphasis]. In the eyes of General Electric’s CEO, landlords represented a minority whose complaints were “concrete, direct and easily ascertainable,” unlike “a very large proportion of the complaints of other un-named minorities [which seem] largely imaginary, visionary, abstract, and unfounded.” [9] One can safely presume Wilson is talking about African Americans there, given the results. Truman’s civil rights commission did little to empower black renters and even less to protect black labor. It did nothing to regulate discrimination by white businesses. And it made no effort at all to challenge the abiding standard of “separate but equal.”
By the 1960s, protest and remarkable personal sacrifices by countless thousands had changed the legislative environment for civil rights. Nevertheless, the constancy of having to work through established government channels seemed to slow the onset of greater racial literacy about various sources of racial inequality. In response to the apparent “urban crisis” of the late 1960s, the Kerner Commission offered one of the most far-reaching indictments of white America ever given. As the commission’s most cited line rings out, “What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” Yet, even in making such a compelling charge, the Kerner Commission refused to implicate the federal government as one of the chief enablers of housing segregation and chronic black poverty.
Clinton’s National Conversation Race developed under a similar impulse, trying to keep the government out of the crosshairs in an effort to reach the widest possible audience. For Coates, the government clearly remains front and center, but beyond an admonition to approve Conyers’s resolution for further study, there’s actually nothing else, at least nothing right now, for the government to do.
I do not mean downplay the importance of education, information, and reasoned debate. Is there, as Coates points out, a general white denial about this country’s indebtedness to slavery and segregation? No doubt. Should we continue to bring that history to the fore? With our dying breath. As an historian, I’ve given my adult life to that proposition. But I quarrel with the notion that some vague sense of renewal and reckoning is what we need, even if it’s driven by $8,000,000 in new research in the humanities and social sciences.
Oh yeah if this hearing is the first step to a more concrete vision of what reparations could be then great.True, but then suppose abolitionism and civil rights were non-starters at one point too. If you're for something got to push for it to make it palatable.
People who have only recently become US citizens for example. Non-resident aliens who pay US taxes could be another group that may struggle to understand their responsibility for funding reparations.Resentment among whom?
And it's not only slavery. It's stuff like Reconstruction and Jim Crow and barring blacks from benefiting from the New Deal or the housing benefits received after WW2.Coates is very good, brings up a lot of good points that highlight how stark improving race relations and racial equality can be/is in a country that was basically founded and economically based on profiting from slavery itself.
That's not true. Source: someone who isn't Japanese, and also isn't mad that Japanese Americans received reparations for internmentAnyone not receiving reparations probably. This will cause a massive divide. I think it's a bad idea.
We're talking about benefits owed the descendants of African slaves by the United States government, who sanctioned and profited from their enslavement and subsequent disenfranchisement. So away with the whataboutism.It's a bit of a grey area tbh. Most races have been enslaved at some point if you go back far enough, albeit the African slave trade was within recent history. How do you decide who is eligible and who isn't, and why?
They form a small percentage of US citizens, and I think it's conjecture to assume that newly formed citizens as a bloc will vigorously oppose reparations to those harmed by the country they came to join.People who have only recently become US citizens for example. Non-resident aliens who pay US taxes could be another group that may struggle to understand their responsibility for funding reparations.
Interestingly enough the best way to go about it might just be to give economically vulnerable african americans tax relief for a few years.Can't come from taxpayer funds as that will create resentment.
I'd suggest the US sell some of their gold reserves to fund it.
All African Americans, that are descendants of slaves (ruling out recent implants from Africa and the Caribbean), should be eligible for said benefits. Not just economically vulnerable ones. As far as I am aware, you couldn't opt out of Jim Crow once you hit the 1952 equivalent of $120,000 per annum (someone feel free to correct me if I'm wrong here and such waivers did exist)Interestingly enough the best way to go about it might just be to give economically vulnerable african americans tax relief for a few years.
I was trying to avoid giving you the answer you wanted to hear, mate. It's logical that any living taxpayer may feel aggrieved at assuming fiscal responsibility for the sins of governments that existed long before they were born.They form a small percentage of US citizens, and I think it's conjecture to assume that newly formed citizens as a bloc will vigorously oppose reparations to those harmed by the country they came to join.
Many white citizens will oppose this (like Mitch) but the reason is clear there, they still haven't got over the Civil War
Cheers.@Sweet Square reading through those 3 blocks of text, will respond soon/later
And such selfish attitudes should be called out as racist. I get what you're saying, and I know there are a lot of people who'll feel aggrieved at the notion that someone else than them will get a leg up they feel is "undeserved". That's selfish at the very least. And in a lot of cases that emotion will be racially tinged. They should be called out as such.I was trying to avoid giving you the answer you wanted to hear, mate. It's logical that any living taxpayer may feel aggrieved at assuming fiscal responsibility for the sins of governments that existed long before they were born.
This is why I suggested using older US government wealth to fund reparations. @Wednesday at Stoke came up with a good idea, too. The US government may want to sell real estate to help fund the idea. Placing the burden on taxpayers now and in the future would cause resentment.
Resentment will certainly be racist in some cases but I'd say it would be less about people getting an undeserved leg up and more to do with culpability. Using tax revenue to fund reparations implies that everyone is guilty when not many living people would be implicated beyond a reasonable doubt.And such selfish attitudes should be called out as racist. I get what you're saying, and I know there are a lot of people who'll feel aggrieved at the notion that someone else than them will get a leg up they feel is "undeserved". That's selfish at the very least. And in a lot of cases that emotion will be racially tinged. They should be called out as such.
I'm totally fine with gutting the defense budget or selling any family silver or raising taxes on the rich to deal with this. As long as the aggrieved get their just dues.
Why is that racist?And such selfish attitudes should be called out as racist. I get what you're saying, and I know there are a lot of people who'll feel aggrieved at the notion that someone else than them will get a leg up they feel is "undeserved". That's selfish at the very least. And in a lot of cases that emotion will be racially tinged. They should be called out as such.
I'm totally fine with gutting the defense budget or selling any family silver or raising taxes on the rich to deal with this. As long as the aggrieved get their just dues.
Nah, I still don't think it's a good idea.We're talking about benefits owed the descendants of African slaves by the United States government, who sanctioned and profited from their enslavement and subsequent disenfranchisement. So away with the whataboutism.
Determining who is eligible is a bit tricky so let's start with all those who have identified as black in the last 10 years, filter out blacks who aren't descendants of American slaves (like myself) and then go from there, it's not rocket science
That's not how society works. I don't bristle when tax revenues I pay into, are used to pay for food stamps, subsidies for farmers or some other benefit i don't use.Resentment will certainly be racist in some cases but I'd say it would be less about people getting an undeserved leg up and more to do with culpability. Using tax revenue to fund reparations implies that everyone is guilty when not many living people would be implicated beyond a reasonable doubt.
The government, on the other hand, is guilty. As such it is fair that they use existing wealth to cover their obligations.
OkNah, I still don't think it's a good idea.
Why is actively advocating against restorative justice targeted specifically towards African Americans racist? Good question.Why is that racist?
You think taxpayers have a problem with reparations solely because they'd go to African-Americans? As in, they'd react differently if it went to other minorities?That's not how society works. I don't bristle when tax revenues I pay into, are used to pay for food stamps, subsidies for farmers or some other benefit i don't use.
Ok
Why is actively advocating against restorative justice targeted specifically towards African Americans racist? Good question.
Reparations are a punishment not a social program. There's a big difference.That's not how society works. I don't bristle when tax revenues I pay into, are used to pay for food stamps, subsidies for farmers or some other benefit i don't use.
I mean, you just about nailed it right here. The US government is entirely culpable for what happened. What gives the government the right to download their fiscal responsibility for this onto taxpayers who have little to no culpability?We're talking about benefits owed the descendants of African slaves by the United States government, who sanctioned and profited from their enslavement and subsequent disenfranchisement.
They would probably oppose reparations owed to Native Americans or Hispanic Americans as well. So I guess I can modify my statement to say they would hold racist attitudes towards African Americans and other minorities.You think ordinary taxpayers have a problem with reparations solely because they'd go to African-Americans? As in, they'd react differently if it went to other minorities?
