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this post was submitted on 12 Aug 2024
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I've never been a big supporter of reparations, for several reasons:
It makes it appear that the systemic injustice of hundreds of years can be somehow made up for, tangibly, with a cash payment.
How would you determine who qualifies? To be fair about it, you would get into the same racial profiling that started which whole mess in the first place, having to force people to prove how oppressed their ancestors were in order to gain some benefit.
Some idiots would use any payments as an excuse to declare racism officially over. We paid our debt, after all.
To me, the answer to this is to continue to invest in black communities, making sure that young black people get to start out on an equal playing field with their peers from different backgrounds, and that older black people aren't totally abandoned because they couldn't get that same start. And for the government to recognize that it's totally appropriate to extend this hand to Black folks in particular, in recognition of the fact that those ancestors may not have been given a choice whether or not to come here.
Reparations aren't just a cash payment -- the article lists five different aspects of reparations, and it's very compatible with investing in Black communities. There's debate iover who should be eligible but it's not an unsolvable problem. And sure some people will use it as an excuse to declare racism's over, but the same was true when Obama got elected ... so that's not a reason not to do it!
In terms of support in general, do you support the 1988 decision by the US to pay reparations to Japanese-Americans who had been sent to internment camps?
A $20k check 35+ years later doesn't really seem like it could possibly make up for it. I suppose it's better than nothing.
But it is was a lot easier to single out who to compensate, because there was a lot less time In between and many of those people were still alive. The payments didn't go to all Japanese Americans, but only the ones who were documented as going to those camps or their heirs.
Paying formal restitutions for slavery now, 150+ years after the fact, seems meaningless. I'd much rather see that money go directly to historically black communities. Yes, you could do both, but if you just do one you're not splitting the effort.
It isn't just slavery even if that is the easiest part to focus on. Reparations are also for the systemic racism that followed the end of chattel slavery, including the continued slavery allowed in prisons, Jim Crow laws, redlining, lynchings, and white people burning down black communities with the support of the government in the 1900s. Yes, slavery is the catalyst, but it isn't the whole thing that society owes as reparations.
Also, it doesn't matter what racists say. They already say that discrimination against black people was solved with the civil rights movement and doesn't exist except for DEI initiatives being somehow racist against white people.
Reparations should be a one time payment AND continued reparations as a combination money and other services to lift up black communities which are still commonly targeted by racists.
Well said, thanks!
My worry is that it would create unnecessary racist tensions. People who are in severe poverty would be extremely resentful if they didn't get assistance for not being the right race.
The cycle of poverty is a universal problem that transcends race and I believe it should be solved at the root of the problem which is intergenerational poverty and discrimination. No matter what the cause, nobody should be left behind and especially not for racial reasons.
Also agree that this many years after slavery there is nobody to directly compensate. Is less than 1% black ancestry enough? Do they do DNA tests or would they need to prove they had an ancestor who was a slave? Many don't have family historical records, I know many people who don't even know their grandparents.
What if someone is a billionaire whose family had recently immigrated as a wealthy family from Africa? Are they getting it but a homeless person of every other race gets nothing? It effectively turns into a sort of racial means testing that is divisive and overly complicated.
That's like saying the Holocaust is just a issue of unpaid labor. Rape and abuse for generations is a more appropriate description.
Slavery is literally a crime against humanity. While we can't punish the perpetrators, reparations are actually a good way to apologize. Plus it was literally promised to freed slaves.
Native Americans get sovereign land and no taxes. The Government of Germany literally pays Holocaust victims. The US government can pay descendants of victims of US slavery.