This seems like an absolutely indispensable technology for achieving reparations. Most black Americans have ancestors who (slavery) worked a lot of unpaid hours. Having clear metrics on how many slaves there were is a step towards having a well founded number for what the cost of reparations should be.
There are some places in the US which have started, but they're just kind of pulling numbers out of a hat and I don't see that being scalable. But reparations should be paid, if for nothing else, at least for the unpaid hours.
Next we need to figure out who profited the most from slaves and where that money is today.
You do realize that every civilization that has ever existed has both enslaved others and been enslaved in the past, right? Where do your reparations end? Are you going to forcefully take money from me because African Americans were enslaved generations ago, but then forcefully have money taken from them for the other Africans and other races they themselves enslaved in Africa before that? Where does it end?
Do you honestly think that forcefully stealing money from someone at the threat of imprisonment if they don't pay is really going to fly? Do you think putting a gun to my head and taking money from me really makes sense when my ancestors emigrated here only a couple generations ago? How do you foresee this working? How do you foresee this helping anything?
Of course my language is extreme, but that's what taxes and similar payments are. It's backed by the force of the government and if I don't pay, eventually someone with a gun will come to put me in prison, and if I refuse, that gun will be pointed at me.
Well.. slaves comes from slavs how have been sold by Tatars. Here in my Slavic country we even have some classical books that write about slavery of our people
I know they don't teach real history in school or in the media anymore and you have an entirely skewed perception of history at this point, but it's the truth. Or course the word "every" is probably too much, because there's been exceptions. Just pick any random country/civilization and google "history of slavery in X". For example England, Ireland, Turkey, any country you enter, you'll find a history of it.
Warning; while there really was slavery in Ireland at one time (indeed Dublin was one of the biggest markets in Europe before the Normans suppressed it in the 12th century), if you Google for this you are likely to get a good bit of nonsense. Decent summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_slaves_myth
Obviously GP's claim is a dumb one, because all you have to do is say "Here is one counter example, you're wrong". But looking at that page makes it very clear that slavery is a big part of most of world history.
Slavery was and is a traditional human activity, and has been for thousands of years.
The Koran, written in the 7th century, glorifies slavery.
The Nazis had tens of millions of slaves. (The French Resistance became active only after Sokel began enslaving all able-bodied French citizens, men and women.)
After the EU border-free crossings started, UK business owners had slave camps for Poles. That was only 10-20 years ago.
So before you go all SJW on HN, at least learn what you're talking about. The US is not uniquely evil because we had slaves. What is unique is that we had a civil war to free them, and that's lost in the SJW narrative.
I'm also curious how far back these reparations are supposed to go, and where exactly the responsibility is supposed to lie. Should the people who 'employed' the slaves be responsible, or should the people who enslaved and sold them also be considered at fault?
If the second, then note a lot of slaves were initially captured and sold to white slavers by their own kind. [1]
Well, doing something like this right would obviously be a big discussion.
But IMO, if we can figure out how much time/money was stolen and who benefitted the most from it, we can start to have some idea of what's fair.
I'm a big fan of UBI as well, and it'd make a lot of sense to have the ancestors of slaves be the first to get onto UBI. But, obviously, this is a group decision and should be based off logic and records; not feelings.
I want to know the principles involved, and the logic behind them, before we talk about calculating backpay. Those should be stated and defended successfully before anything else.
For example, there's examples (IIRC) of former slaves owning slaves themselves; how is that addressed? What moral principles are in play, which can be logically applied to figure out if such a person's progeny receive reparations?
> I'm a big fan of UBI as well, and it'd make a lot of sense to have the ancestors* of slaves be the first to get onto UBI. But, obviously, this is a group decision and should be based off logic and records; not feelings.
*descendants
The same issues that make UBI a bad idea will probably preclude the individual payment approach to reparations
> I'm also curious how far back these reparations are supposed to go, and where exactly the responsibility is supposed to lie. Should the people who 'employed' the slaves be responsible, or should the people who enslaved and sold them also be considered at fault?
All those people are dead. The only entities left to sue are legal entities that aren't natural persons.
> If the second, then note a lot of slaves were initially captured and sold to white slavers by their own kind.
Then governments, corporations, etc. in Africa and Europe can be held to the same standard.
The following is all just an opinion, and obviously this type of subject is a discussion. Doubly so because I'm white.
I don't think anyone should pay any more than they benefitted from slavery.
The average person has no ancestors who owned slaves, and the only benefits they got were things like cheaper goods and services. Added up over a lifetime, it's probably not a lot.
But some people come from ancestors who made a LOT of money off slavery, and the benefits of that have been passed down to them one way or another.
So I think different people should be in different brackets based off how much they benefitted from slavery, and those brackets should be proportion of wealth tax over 20-30 years. Not so much to bankrupt anyone, but enough to pay the off the debt.
Also, I think it should be treated as the alpha version of UBI. Basically, the ancestors of slaves should be the first to get on the list for UBI because they're kind of opposites of each-other.
This is a logical fallacy (though a popular one). An idea is either good or bad. The traits of the person speaking the idea are irrelevant, and do not make a good idea bad, or a bad idea good.
Further, an idea doesn't become more or less "subject to discussion" as a result of the race of the person speaking it.
We should probably also consider charging the Europeans that made vast wealth shipping slaves, and the Africans that profited from capturing and selling their countrymen.
Charging the individual Europeans / middle eastern people involved, or the nations?
In the latter case, we can probably start collecting our reparations for the Barbary slave trades from the Arabs, and probably even make money! (Reparation arbitrage).
I accept petrol or petrodollars. Check my bio for the paypal link.
> The average person has no ancestors who owned slaves, and the only benefits they got were things like cheaper goods and services. Added up over a lifetime, it's probably not a lot.
The average person benefitted from compound accumulation of capital. After hundreds of years of compound interest, its probably unfathomably large.
> But some people come from ancestors who made a LOT of money off slavery, and the benefits of that have been passed down to them one way or another.
If those people can be identified then someone may lodge a claim against their assets. From what I learned in Black World Studies, the fruits of slavery are largely considered to have been spread through society in a way that can't be traced and reconstructed because everything is tainted.
> Do you honestly think that forcefully stealing money from someone at the threat of imprisonment if they don't pay is really going to fly?
Yeah its called taxation.
> You do realize that every civilization that has ever existed has both enslaved others and been enslaved in the past, right?
I'm not convinced that this is true. do you have any documentation?
> Where do your reparations end? Are you going to forcefully take money from me because African Americans were enslaved generations ago, but then forcefully have money taken from them for the other Africans and other races they themselves enslaved in Africa before that? Where does it end?
Claims are against the legal institutions that still exist. People aren't held responsible for the sins of their ancestors, rather the same institutions that benefitted still exist and can be sued for damages. There's a pending claim against them.
> Do you think putting a gun to my head and taking money from me really makes sense when my ancestors emigrated here only a couple generations ago?
You didn't know that we collect taxes here when you immigrated?
> Of course my language is extreme, but that's what taxes and similar payments are. It's backed by the force of the government and if I don't pay, eventually someone with a gun will come to put me in prison, and if I refuse, that gun will be pointed at me.
If you're opposed to taxation, arguing against reparations is probably the worst possible way to make your point. Slavery and taxation are quite similar (some would say the difference matters but those people are pro-tax).
> But reparations should be paid, if for nothing else, at least for the unpaid hours.
You must be young to speak with such certainty.
Post-slavery, black sharecroppers basically made nothing after expenses. So how much was their time actually worth? (An economist will ask this.)
Post-slavery, norhern states, which had no slaves, paid the cost of welfare for millions of black families. So how does that factor in?
Since there's intermarriage in America, what's a quanta of African blood? How much does one get paid per 1/32? (This is referring to the heated race arguments of the 1800s and 1900s.)
Do you have any experience with the above? My family is from the Detroit area, so I'm one of few posters on HN that actually does know something about these issues.
The US paid a heavy price during the civil war, one of the biggest issues being related to slavery. Do the northern states get reparations for freeing the slaves?
That's the problem when you drag history into modern times. One of the biggest advantages that the US has over other countries is that we don't continue to fight the same battles over and over.
Even before corona, black familiies in America struggled greatly with maintaining households and educating their children. Instead of virtue signalling, why don't you contribute to solving today's enormous problems?
Now that you mention it. Modern Germany should pay the US enormous sums in reparations for our role in destroying Nazi Germany, saving Western Europe (which Russia did not do, Russia enslaved half of Europe), freeing people from Nazi death camps, propping up a post-war democratic Germany against the conquering monster to the East.
Not just the US of course. Britain and France among others are owed a lot more in reparations for what Germany did and the long-term consequences.
The US got repaid - only in part - for its war lending. It has never been paid reparations for its losses in WW2 (including 400,000 military deaths).
What's the reparations tally for 400,000 dead, going by the numbers thrown around these days? $10 trillion? Germany and Japan can figure out the split on that and then write some big fat checks to the families in question.
I study WW2, and FYI it's much more complicated than "the Treaty of Versailles."
The problem is that the "state" that started WW2 was the Austria-Hungarian Empire (against Serbia), and Germany was just a treaty ally. But then A-H dissolved, leaving Germany holding the bag. It didn't help that Germany refused to negotiate a peace treaty earlier, and that they destroyed the Alsace region during their retreat.
But in the end, it would have taken an occupation to demonstrate that Germany actually lost, and that didn't happen.
Hence the later Allied occupations of Germany and Japan in WW2.
I study WW2. One of the most startling things, and one that takes the longest to comprehend, is that the entire industrial output of the US went into the war effort for about 5 years.
If you're young and stupid, everything looks simple. Just pull down all the statues right? Even when they're for black historical figures, like Frederick Douglass:
> Post-slavery, black sharecroppers basically made nothing after expenses. So how much was their time actually worth? (An economist will ask this.)
How much was the labor of slaves worth to the slaveowners? surely you're not arguing it was worth nothing?
> Post-slavery, norhern states, which had no slaves, paid the cost of welfare for millions of black families. So how does that factor in?
The price of social programs don't factor in at all.
> Since there's intermarriage in America, what's a quanta of African blood? How much does one get paid per 1/32? (This is referring to the heated race arguments of the 1800s and 1900s.)
This will come up if the reparations take the form of payments to individuals.
> Do you have any experience with the above? My family is from the Detroit area, so I'm one of few posters on HN that actually does know something about these issues.
Thank heavens we live in a country where people are allowed to have opinions without demonstrating the right to those opinions on the basis of heritage.
> The US paid a heavy price during the civil war, one of the biggest issues being related to slavery. Do the northern states get reparations for freeing the slaves?
Why would they?
> That's the problem when you drag history into modern times. One of the biggest advantages that the US has over other countries is that we don't continue to fight the same battles over and over.
Sadly you can't get rid of the effects of history by choosing to forget about it.
> Even before corona, black familiies in America struggled greatly with maintaining households and educating their children. Instead of virtue signalling, why don't you contribute to solving today's enormous problems?
Seeing a lot of emotion and exclamations, but no experience, logic or insight. I can reply to all of your snarky comments with, "Why wouldn't what I said apply?"
> surely you're not arguing it was worth nothing?
So how much was it worth? Where is your calculation?
The south fell behind the north because of using manual labor over industrialization, so it may well have been worth nothing.
People fail to distinguish that the south was involved in slavery, not the north. The north literally owes nothing, and that means the US federally owes nothing.
> This is unhelpful.
No, your virtue signalling is completely unhelpful. We know where you stand - all talk and no action. You've suggested no solutions, and offered nothing but snarky rhetoric.
Yes, having even just a starting point for numbers on this would be very helpful. Part of the issue is people won't even countenance the concept of reparations, so no one gets as far as saying, well if your great grandfather was enslaved for X years under system Y, here's an estimate of the value of their labor that was stolen by that system.
What are the limits? Who will be excepted? How will it be enforced? All good questions! But we can hardly answer them if we refuse to engage with the idea of reparations to begin with.
> But we can hardly answer them if we refuse to engage with the idea of reparations to begin with.
That's because the first order of business is to demonstrate that reparations are even a good idea. Engage with those who don't like the idea, and address the concerns they raise, if you can; then deal with minutae.
Literally paying a person for their time. If an employer was stealing money from their employees, why would you have to demonstrate they should have to pay off the debt? There is a measurable financial debt here.
Also, it sets a precedent: if you care about your decedents and progeny at all, there is nothing to gain from cheating. You may benefit and die before repercussions occur, but all debts must be paid eventually. Justice is hard, but not when it comes to hours worked vs hours paid.
If that's the principle involved, then I think, though IANAL, the statute of limitations applies. If my employer from 20 years ago cheated me of some pay, I'm pretty sure he's safe from litigation at this point.
> if you care about your decedents and progeny at all, there is nothing to gain from cheating. You may benefit and die before repercussions occur, but all debts must be paid eventually.
I really hope you're not suggesting that we set a precedent of digging through history to find old debts we might be owed.
The statute of limitations is a law. We are talking about a moral claim that supercedes the text of laws. Remember this is from a time when slavery itself was legal.
Also consider there is no statute of limitations for some crimes including murder.
> I really hope you're not suggesting that we set a precedent of digging through history to find old debts we might be owed.
I think he's more suggesting we not set a precedent of permitting people to benefit financially from atrocities if they can run out the clock.
More important, the statute of limitations is a law that’s established at the discretion of the legislature for policy reasons. There’s no inherent moral right to a statute of limitations
And the second order of business assuming it is even a good idea would be to determine who should pay. The answer "taxpayers" is an absolute non-starter. My family only showed up in this country in the mid 80s and have zero responsibility for things that happened well over 100 years ago. We also don't live in states where slavery was ever a thing.
> We also don't live in states where slavery was ever a thing.
That’s not really... likely. Even if your state wasn’t a ‘state’ Pre-abolishion, there was slavery there. The history of slavery in North America did not start at Plymouth Rock.
> And the second order of business assuming it is even a good idea would be to determine who should pay.
Thats easy, the same government that permitted and regulated slavery is the first defendant. After that any other legal institution that still exists in the same form (universities, state and city governments, non-profits, etc.).
> We also don't live in states where slavery was ever a thing.
They made the cross country railroad on slave labor. Pretty sure every state has benefitted from rail traffic.
> My family only showed up in this country in the mid 80s and have zero responsibility for things that happened well over 100 years ago.
I guess, here is a simple non-rhetorical thought question: Why should your family get any of the benefits of this country's past? I don't know you or where you/your family immigrated from, but your family came here for the benefits of the US. Maybe the US was a wealthier country than where your family left, or maybe more stable, or maybe they felt there was more opportunity for economic mobility. Those benefits/properties where present before your family decided to move, so why should you benefit from them?
Note, I'm actually pro-immigration and support people moving here, but I think it's a good exercise to walk through. All of those benefits were accrued before your family came here, and yet your family gets to benefit from them. Why? As you said, they had zero responsibility for things that happened before they arrived.
So by the same token, if the country had both assets and debts before you arrived, why shouldn't the logic that says you and your family should take on and gain from those assets that pre-dated you, also not mean that you should take on the associated debts?
I can't think of a reason why someone immigrating should only take on the benefits of the assets but be excluded from the liabilities. But am open to discussion.
Engaging with those who don't like the idea is a fool's errand, because a lot of these people will just cherry-pick whatever objection they can think of in bad faith. And even in good faith, people who don't like the idea all have different reasons. Start with the root axiom "Slavery is wrong", people will be happy to engage with you on that. Disregard them and move on to the next syllogism, you'll have a different set of people objecting.
One thing that might be helpful, if I'm in favor and you're opposed, then maybe identify one obstacle - it can be as big as you wish - where if resolved, you'd be in favor of reparations. Then maybe that is worth engaging with.
> One thing that might be helpful, if I'm in favor and you're opposed, then maybe identify one obstacle - it can be as big as you wish - where if resolved, you'd be in favor of reparations. Then maybe that is worth engaging with.
On the contrary; if I represent the status quo and you represent a new idea, the onus is on you to defend it. It's your responsibility. Put it out there. Say exactly what your thesis is, and back it up, and defend it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant - anything about your ideas that are indefensible will be shown to be so, and what's left will be gold.
To make my point via reductio ad absurdum, let's flip the script and use something hyperbolic: you represent the status quo, and I represent (heaven forbid) some new variation of racial cleansing. But, I declare to those opposed, "engaging with those who don't like the idea [of racial cleansing] is a fool's errand, because a lot of these people will just cherry-pick whatever objection they can think of in bad faith." So, I say to you, the skeptical defendent of the status quo, if you don't like the idea of racial cleansing, "then maybe identify one obstacle - it can be as big as you wish - where if resolved, you'd be in favor of [exterminating a race]."
To me, flipping your proposition on its head like that makes it pretty obvious that it's unsatisfactory as the starting point of an intellectual discussion. It even tends to beg the question: you've made your position the 'null hypothesis'. The status quo should be the null hypothesis.
> And even in good faith, people who don't like the idea all have different reasons. Start with the root axiom "Slavery is wrong", people will be happy to engage with you on that. Disregard them and move on to the next syllogism, you'll have a different set of people objecting.
Yes, exactly. Your job is to answer every set of people who don't like your idea. Just because you believe that this new thing is moral and right does not make it so, and it is the acme of hubris to distain to justify your proposed actions.
The onus is not necessarily on me to convince you. Reasoned arguments exist to convince people, but there isn't any sense in expecting to convince 100% of people, including my racist drunk Uncle Harry. The bar you're setting with "Your job is to answer every set of people who don't like your idea," is essentially saying that change should not happen at all unless there is unanimous acceptance.
> That's because the first order of business is to demonstrate that reparations are even a good idea.
The first order of business is to demonstrate the validity of the claim. The benefit of the reparation is dependent on the form of the reparation itself.
edit: expected downvotes of course; nobody dares to engage on this particular discussion about the vast sums the Europeans must be made to pay for their evil deeds (which they've skirted for hundreds of years now, like cowards)
> Next we need to figure out who profited the most from slaves and where that money is today.
The most? The Europeans. Where is the money? It's in London and Amsterdam among a few other former empires.
The Europeans transported around 12.5 millions slaves to the Americas. They owe so much in reparations it will bankrupt half the nations in Western Europe.
It's very interesting how the Europeans - who were responsible for African slavery in the Americas - never want to talk about it and how nobody in the US ever asks any questions about how much the Europeans are going to pay.
The Europeans transported close to five million slaves to Brazil, nearly ten times as many slaves as were transported to the territory that became the US. One can imagine the reparations tally just for that alone to be in the tens of trillions of dollars.
Britain and the Netherlands should just go ahead and write a check equal to 10% of their entire national wealth to African-Americans. That might get things started on the path to justice. All of the assets of the British throne should be liquidated as part of the process and put into the reparations pot.
There were three primary groups of beneficiaries - planters in the America's, slave traders in Europe, and the Kingdoms in Africa who were among the procurers and sellers.
The European empires had all the power: they had the military dominance, they had the means, they had the transport, they had the economic controls, and they benefitted the most accordingly. They also spent centuries torturing Africa.
12.5 million Africans don't end up enslaved and heading to the Americas without the European empires making it happen.
The US owes a lot for its part, no question (what I'm saying is not a reduction in the responsibility of the US, I'm properly adding the Europeans to it). The Europeans owe that much more, including for the other 12 million slaves in the rest of the Americas (which, again, nobody ever wants to talk about re reparations, not under any circumstances). Every discussion is always about the US paying reparations. The Europeans were primarily responsible, the US didn't exist yet and banned the import of slaves as one of its first major actions post formation in January 1808. The US has spent two centuries dealing with the consequences of what the European powers did. We have had to deal with the consequences of their slave trade, while they've skirted it almost entirely.
What consequences have the Europeans suffered over the past two centuries, for what they did? Almost nothing. It's long past time for the Europeans to pay, big time.
It will bankrupt parts of Western Europe. That's how big the reparations number very obviously is.
99% of European didn't have anything to do with this trade and slavery was progressively forbidden on the territory of nearly all European countries during middle age (since 1315 for France for example but also in other countries https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_medieval_Europe).
Kings of the time obviously use this trade as an instrument of power but it was not something that had a meaningful impact on life of ordinary peoples.
You are just inventing an alternate history to find someone to dislike.
It's pretty meaningless to say that slavery was outlawed in most European countries for hundreds of years, even though some had colonies around the world until well into the 1900s. European countries just outsourced the slavery and called it empire building.
There is a lot of difference. Morally, why European people should be responsible of regime that oppressed them and against they rebel multiple times ? Economically, European peasants that were the great majority of population didn't get any advantage of all of this, and some of them in southern/eastern Europe were victims of similar behaviour from other countries. Why someone from south of Italy whose ancestor were enslaved by Ottomans should pay for crimes of kings of Britain, Spain and Portugal ?
People who are holding real estate exposure in the US are the primary beneficiaries.
Then you add in redlining, and it starts to look systemtic.
So the cure should be appropriate to the disease, make home ownership practical, affordable, and (if you are into reparations) subsidized.
Or at least as subsidized as being a rich person is in the mortgage origination process (via that stealth socio-economic test that is your FICO score).
Let’s set up a state guaranteed mortgage guarantor so the banks can relax their landing standards. And let’s call it Fannie Mae, or perhaps Freddie Mac...
Why are we talking about Fannie and Freddie? They are direct subsidies!
I'm talking about building power lines and wastewater plants and shit like that. Encouraging counties to adopt zoning that simplifies residential construction. Etc.
Just have Fannie and Freddie give preference to those loans in their purchasing decisions. You'd end up with weird MBS based on population performance as opposed to regional or time based, but at least then you can bid up the mortgages (and down the yields faced by consumers of color).
> (via that stealth socio-economic test that is your FICO score).
Fun fact: First thing you learn from when moving to USA is to get a credit card immediately. Start working on that score. Even if you don't intend to stay, just in case you change your mind.
My first credit card 5 years ago had a $1000 limit. And only if I kept my bank balance above $1000.
Disclaimer: my parents are immigrants, and I have absolutely no genealogical connection to American slavery.
> having a well founded number for what the cost of reparations should be
I just don't understand how someone can talk about a "well-founded number" for reparations in a serious way.
How can you calculate a dollar amount, even within 5 orders of magnitude, for something that happened to millions of people for hundreds of years, affects millions of people today, and we don't have details about any of it?
There are many people who:
- had African ancestors who sold other Africans to slavers
- have a mixture of heritage
- immigrated from Africa long after slavery ended
It's nonsensical to come up with a dollar amount for even a single person, so how can we possibly do it at scale? Should African Americans descended from slave traders be paying reparations to African Americans descended from slaves? Should African Americans pay reparations to Native Americans for living on land that was stolen from them?
There are so few records for any of this, it just seems absolutely insane to me. I am a huge history nerd, and there aren't concrete answers for a lot of things that happened this decade, even with impeccable records.
I’m an immigrant, and I’ll never stand for any kind of reparations for descendants of former slaves. Invariably this will come out of tax dollars to which I’m contributing by way of income tax. Why should I be charged for wrongs - however horrible - in which neither myself nor my ancestors were involved? When there was still slavery in America, my people were enslaving members of their own ethnic group back in the old country. Forgive me for not wanting any part of this current dispute.
And to those who will certainly tell me that I’ve benefitted from the modern spoils of slavery: I beg to differ. My first decade in the US was all about climbing out of the pit of “you’re not white enough for us because you didn’t go to a top school”. That shit still haunts me to this day.
> Invariably this will come out of tax dollars to which I’m contributing by way of income tax.
This is no different than paying taxes for any number of other social programs, however its a singularly bad place to draw the line.
> Why should I be charged for wrongs - however horrible - in which neither myself nor my ancestors were involved?
Because you aren't being charged. The government that legalized and regulated slavery is being charged. This government is (one of) the legal institutions that permitted slavery and benefitted from slavery that still exists. Therefore they are responsible for satisfying legal claims that are still pending.
> When there was still slavery in America, my people were enslaving members of their own ethnic group back in the old country. Forgive me for not wanting any part of this current dispute.
If you don't want any part of it then you are free to remain neutral in discussions of this issue. By arguing against reparations you are participating in the dispute.
> And to those who will certainly tell me that I’ve benefitted from the modern spoils of slavery: I beg to differ. My first decade in the US was all about climbing out of the pit of “you’re not white enough for us because you didn’t go to a top school”.
That doesn't challenge the assertion that you benefitted from the accumulated capital that was in part built on the forced labor of slaves.
> That shit still haunts me to this day.
I'm truly sorry for your traumatic experience.
p.s. I've upvoted this comment because while I disagree with the substance, it raises important arguments that need to be responded to and the comment itself contributes to the discussion. I'd like to ask down voters to consider why they feel this comment needs to be suppressed because I disagree with their opinion on the value of the comment and its contribution to the discussion.
> I’m an immigrant, and I’ll never stand for any kind of reparations for descendants of former slaves. Invariably this will come out of tax dollars to which I’m contributing by way of income tax. Why should I be charged for wrongs - however horrible - in which neither myself nor my ancestors were involved?
Why should you be a contributor to the wrongs of this country's past? Simple, because you are a member/resident of this country, and this country benefits from them. I could be wrong, but I don't see any complaints about paying of any war debt accrued by the US from entering WW II or the Vietnam war, but you also pay towards that. It's accepted that current us citizens who benefit from the previous actions of the country, also have responsiblity for the previous decisions of the country.
An enormous part of the reason why this country is so financially successful is because of slavery and stealing wages for so long. That's why the US was an agricultural powerhouse, that's why the north industrialized so quickly, that's why we became a major economic power in the 20th century.
And even you yourself admit you see all of those benefits, and reap them. You came to this country presumably for those exact reasons. You're as you say an immigrant, and the reason you chose to come here, and not stay where you were was because of exactly the benefits this country accrued by leaning heavily on slavery during it's critical period.
The fact you had negative experiences while here (and I'm sorry you did), doesn't invalidate or outweigh the fact that you came here to benefit from America's benefits, and that you have benefited from them.
American education does an incredibly poor job of covering the financial windfall of slaver in the US. And (extremely reasonably) people from other countries who move here never learned about it back home. To give some perspective, the value of "human capital" held as chattel slaves, was more valuable than all industrial and transportation capital in the entire country.[1] That's how much value was present. I'd highly recommend anyone who hasn't really read about slavery to really read about it. Unfortunately there was an intentional concerted effort in the middle of last century to downplay the scope and impact of slavery in the US and a lot of those vestiges are present because it was very successful.
There is way more here than the simplistic arguments that are made online in chat forums. I'd recommend looking into it. While not ideal, this essay is a decent place to start if you're curious. [2]
Slavery was not in the least a contribution to "financial success". It was very much a dysfunctional and failing system, for reasons that were made clear even by Adam Smith, who wrote in 1776 - and that are agreed upon by modern economists. What it did was create a huge unfair advantage for the few who could afford to "own" someone who had been enslaved - but that never translated to region-wide progress. Indeed, the part of the U.S. where slavery was widespread is still the most unequal today and the one with the most uninclusive, regressive, extractive culture and institutions (despite a very real change in outlook during the 1980s), and that's no coincidence.
'Slavery made economic sense' is a narrative that, until recently, you would only have heard from the likes of "Black-Israelite" conspiracy peddlers. Let's not give credence to such unscientific and misleading claims.
I don't think that interpretation of history is quite so strong, for a few reasons. While buying enough slaves to run a plantation was extremely expensive - buying a single slave to have for household purposes was not unobtainable or rare at all. Since slave status was inherited and the "one-drop" rule ensured it tended to get inherited, it was extremely common for less-financially well-off slave owners to simply rape an enslaved woman (multiple times over her lifetime) and then to either sell his mixed children, or commonly - to gift them as slaves to his white children when they come of age. This is a hugely valuable financial advantage for those who inherit a slave, and having a slave made them more valuable as a spouse as well, meaning they could increase their wealth more by marrying better than they could have without a slave. Nearly every white person from the south, has a family member who owned a slave - even if you would never guess by their economic status today. I'm from the south myself, and even though my great-grandparents were dirt poor in the mountains, I don't doubt someone somewhere back in time owned a slave. It really was just so common that the probability is a near certainty.
Also, when slavery was at it's height, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia were far more prosperous regions than they eventually became post-civil war. The south in general was more financially well-off during the time of slavery than it has been since - and you can read primary sources from the time and region saying as much. I can point you towards primary sources from elected officials of the time period saying as much - that they knew slavery was evil, but they also knew it was the source of economic and social stability that they enjoyed. The institution of slavery itself did not directly lead to economic fall of the southern states - rather it was the tensions from having a nation with both slaveholding states and non-slaveholding states, and the south's extremely strong incentive to protect their advantageous status even at the cost of war.
When the war did happen, the civil-war-related destruction that happened in the south (ie, the burning of Atlanta), had an equally dramatic impact and the outcome that we see today. Decades of slavery were certainly impactful, but so were the effects of the civil war, reconstruction, the great migration, and later cycles of industrialization, which tended to reach the south last due to network effects (there was no impetus to branch out from the skilled workers available up north... until unions took hold at least). All of those effects are more recent, and more relevant to the economic conditions today.
Additionally, the cultural regressiveness you speak of is closely tied to the Great Awakening and the particularly conservative religious denominations that became regionally dominant - and notably, these denominations had, and still have strong pull on southern white and black communities alike. The south actually had a reputation for being quite a fun and "sinful" place before that. My own state, NC, founded the first public university in the world (UNC Chapel Hill) - a paradoxically very progressive institution - despite being founded by slavers during a period of widespread slavery.
So understanding inequality and culture that exists in South, both now and then, and today is a complex thing. I would strongly caution trying to reduce it down that completely.
> Slavery was not in the least a contribution to "financial success"... What it did was create a huge unfair advantage for the few who could afford to "own" someone who had been enslaved
I think you have been given a very skewed view of the role that slavery played in our country's economic past. There have been long efforts to downplay the role of slavery, and there still are. Cotton was the US's #1 export from ~1800 through 1930 due to slavery, and then continuing into the extremely exploitive sharecropping. That's the core period our country developed - and the single export that brought in the most capital into this country. That continuous inflow of capital is also what made New York City the financial powerhouse it became. [1]
Slavery wasn't a just for the few. One of the number one ways that people mislead with slavery is by trying to show the percentage of the slaves divided by the total population in 1860. That's extremely misleading, as individuals didn't own slaves, families did. The same way measuring what percentage of families own their home is accurate, not individuals that own the home, as only one in the family typically owns the home.
There were 15 slave states in 1860. Of the top 10 states, in all of them at least 25% of families owned slaves. With the top two states South Carolina and Mississippi topping out at 46% and 49% of families. Almost half the families owned slaves. And that's ignoring everyone else in the south who didn't own slaves, but participated in the slave trade - and those who rented slaves for labor but didn't technically "own them". [2]
On top of that of the top 5 states owning slaves, enslaved people ranged from over 40% of the population in Georgia, to almost
60% of the entire population of the state of South Carolina. [3]
Slavery and the white supremacy views it was built on, were an absolutely core part of the first part of this country's existence - culturally, economically, politically. Slavery wasn't a niche occurrence only for the elite - and especially so for the white South. It was disgusting, it was violent, it was immoral and it was everywhere. It didn't play a minimal role. The idea that a few wealthy elite slave owners "tricked" the rest of the southern population
to go to war for them is a farce. The entire south gathered up to go to war because white supremacy was the culture of their land.
It's taken this country a long time to try to undo that work - and we still haven't finished...
But to downplay Slavery is to also downplay what was taken from Black Americans, and how much that theft built this early country.
> Cotton was the US's #1 export from ~1800 through 1930 due to slavery
Wait, you're making a very different claim than what I was talking about. I agree that it probably made some sense to have some kind of plantation economy in the South, and that, as a matter of fact the plantations the South did have were based on enslaved labor. And for sure, there are interesting debates to have about the unacknowledged contribution that's inherent in that. But slavery was never a necessary part of that successful economy; indeed, it's quite physically possible to have plantations that employ free laborers as opposed to relying on slaves!
I’m also an immigrant, and I think that’s the wrong way to look at it. It’s not about “benefitting from the spoils of slavery.” It’s about having to pay taxes to fund any other kind of obligations that existed before you came here. The US still has outstanding bonds from the first bond issue 1790. It’s still paying pensions from the Spanish American war. If you move to Chicago, you’ll have to pay off pensions for people who retired decades before you moved there.
> My first decade in the US was all about climbing out of the pit of “you’re not white enough for us because you didn’t go to a top school”.
I likely do not understand what you mean here, because a casual reading of this seems ridiculous. Most white people do not go to top schools either.
On the flip side, if one were to list factors that play a role in becoming decently successful, going to a top school is fairly low on that list (as in most successful people didn't go to one either).
I'm probably not interpreting the comment as you intended, though.
> It's nonsensical to come up with a dollar amount for even a single person, so how can we possibly do it at scale?
It's almost as hard to come up with a fair number on how much help a given person should get due to being adversely affected by the pandemic. Yet that's not seen as a barrier to provide money.
> Should African Americans pay reparations to Native Americans for living on land that was stolen from them?
> It's almost as hard to come up with a fair number on how much help a given person should get due to being adversely affected by the pandemic. Yet that's not seen as a barrier to provide money.
Absolutely not. That is ludicrous.
There are measurable effects to the pandemic: changes in income, medical expenses, etc. There is certainly an emotional toll for even the best-off people, but no one is proposing paying people for emotional pain. It's all about getting them through this exceptional (and temporary) time.
Reparations for slavery are about things that can't be measured (generations of lost opportunities, not months), immense/immeasurable pain, and a long tail of policies (like racist zoning laws) that outlived slavery by 100+ years.
Your analogy to the pandemic actually makes it even more stark how difficult it is to calculate something so large, complex, and obscured by the fog of history.
> As a collective? Yes.
OK, let's say you do this. Let's say you decide the amount that a particular official/organized tribe should get is $1T. You don't have to decide who gets the money because the tribe has already done all that legwork for you and has an official roll.
Now how do you decide who pays? Do you try to trace the heritage of every American and determine when/how they took tribal land?
Maybe not. So do you just take it out of social programs? The same social programs that are intended to fix some of the cycles of poverty that people descended from slaves are relying on to get them some equity?
Well, you can't do that either. So how do you decide who pays, and who decides who pays?
Eventually you get into the business of punishing or rewarding people for their ancestors' crimes, which is not at all different from forcing a murderer's child to give money to his victim's family. If you look at it in a microcosm, it seems completely insane because it is.
Your ancestry definitely has a big effect on your life, but that's not the same as being culpable for their crimes, and it's not deterministic. My family was fantastically wealthy until my dad's generation, and then they were poor. Should my dad, as a completely broke 25-year-old, have had to pay reparations to someone for his ancestors' wealth (which I'm sure was gained unfairly)?
> Reparations for slavery are about things that can't be measured
If it can't be measured, it should be omitted. Nobody is suggesting making up random numbers based off feelings.
> Should my dad, as a completely broke 25-year-old, have had to pay reparations to someone for his ancestors' wealth (which I'm sure was gained unfairly)?
First off, if your dad is actually 25, you are fantastically intelligent for your age (and props for that). But also, there are ways to use math to make things fair. For instance: progressive taxation based off wealth. Lower income pay a small percentage (probably less than 1%) while higher income pays 1-2%. And given that slavery lasted ~90 years, so too could the timeline for paying reparations.
There are solutions here. Nobody is saying do it all at once and make people starve. But there is a way to pay off -- if nothing else -- the debt of unpaid hours.
It's better late than never, and if there is one thing the world respects about Germany, it's that they owned up. We can too.
Honestly, I'd be willing to say this could be one of the best cost vs benefit long-term PR investments the US could make on the world stage. But only if it's done right, and not as a punitive thing.
> If it can't be measured, it should be omitted. Nobody is suggesting making up random numbers based off feelings.
Then reparations for slavery are completely off the table. You can't measure the economic output of someone who died 150-400 years ago. There are major disputes about what a human life is worth now, when we know every possible detail about them.
> First off, if your dad is actually 25, you are fantastically intelligent for your age
I think you missed where I said "have had to pay" (meaning "when he was 25").
> But there is a way to pay off -- if nothing else -- the debt of unpaid hours.
Let's assume, first, that people are owed money that rightfully belonged to their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents. I would disagree with that, but I'll leave that aside for now.
How much are the following worth, in today's dollars?
- 1 hour of planting crops at 3pm on a sunny day in Alabama in February of 1802
- 1 hour of planting crops at 10am on a cloudy day in Georgia in March of 1791
- 1 hour of breastfeeding a slaver's baby
- 1 hour of cooking food for a 10-person family
Are those worth $5? Surely not, because minimum wage is higher than that. But that is what a lot of undocumented immigrants get paid for the same work, so maybe $5 is correct?
Or is it worth $50, because those people's bodies were in constant pain from beatings, over-work, malnutrition, and poor health care?
Let's say we settle on $25/hour. If we divide it up between that person's 1,000+ descendants, it's not much money. But then we have to consider the interest! Should we use the national rate of inflation? Should we just peg it to the adjusted dollar? Should we assume that money would've been invested in gold?
I think you see my point. There is no way to come up with a formula for any of this that makes any sense. And then once you get to the end and decide on a number, how do you decide who pays it? Should recent immigrants pay reparations for slavery? Should a rural, white meth addict lying in their own vomit pay reparations for all of their "privileges"?
It makes far, far more sense to just have a strong society safety net and not try to figure out what events 100, 200, or 500 years ago resulted in someone's current situation.
> if there is one thing the world respects about Germany, it's that they owned up. We can too
The example of Germany supports my point. Here are the major differences:
- Germany was forced to pay most of its reparations by the Allies
- Planning for German reparations began a few months after the war ended
- Many Germans were enslaved by the Allies as a form of reparation, and those people were then paid reparations
- Much of the rest of Germany's reparations were paid directly to Holocaust survivors[1] or their spouses or to Israel, not to millions of their descendants hundreds of years later[2]
The best number I can find for the total reparations paid by Germany is ~€60B, which translates to €4.3k for every living Jew (~14M) since 1945. I know that's not perfect, because some Holocaust survivors are dead and many living Jews are not descended from one, but bear with me.
If you look at that number yearly by person, you get €57/person/year.
That is not a meaningful amount of money compared to the consequences of slavery, even if you change it by a couple of orders of magnitude. Germany arguably owes Jewish people trillions of euros, not billions.
It seems as though you're saying that because we can't get a perfect estimate for cost, the next best guess is $0.
There's obviously a lot of tolerance on these estimates, but even with extreme tolerances $0 seems a bit low.
> There is no way to come up with a formula for any of this that makes any sense
The first step would be having a serious discussion about every question you raised. They're all good questions, and with some amount of investigation, yield closer and closer answers.
This is a daunting task -- no doubt -- but I see no reason why you should be opposed to it, or assume it's impossible.
> It seems as though you're saying that because we can't get a perfect estimate for cost, the next best guess is $0.
Correct.
> This is a daunting task -- no doubt -- but I see no reason why you should be opposed to it, or assume it's impossible.
I'm opposed to trying to adjudicate a distant and poorly-documented past in order to take money from one group and give it to another. That's why the best estimate, for me, is $0. The first thing to do is to do no more harm, and as we see from the enslaved-Germans example, reparations can end up being another injustice that needs to be repaired.
I am not opposed to fixing the unfair deficits caused by slavery, but I don't think we need to (or that it's ethical to) look at history to do that. We can simplify it to, "Who was born with fewer opportunities? Who has fewer opportunities now? Who is discriminated against now?"
In many cases, the most deeply affected parties will overlap with the people affected by the legacy of slavery. But we'll also cover people who had generations of near-slavery (e.g. white Appalachian sharecropper who became timber workers and then coal miners), as well as people are suffering deeply from modern atrocities like the opioid crisis.
"Achieving reparations" is difficult language for me to accept. It is "thinking past the sale" that does not treat the subject with the necessary fair-minded big picture consideration.
It's not clear that reparations are a good idea in practice, or something to be "achieved," or even strived for (they might do more harm in practice to the group they intend to protect, as many well-intentioned and politically extremist ideologies do) not to mention any considerations involving whether it would be possible to sustain, or affordable, etc.
Be careful with your thinking if you care about being even-handed with your empathy. Being empathetic is a fantastic thing, but don't allow cynical people to hijack your empathy.
> It's not clear that reparations are a good idea in practice, or something to be "achieved," or even strived for (they might do more harm in practice to the group they intend to protect,
This is a very patronizing argument. If someone breaks into your bank account and steals your cash, then later is caught. There is no valid line of reasoning that goes "well I'll only give the money back if you tell me how you plan to spend it first". "Oh, you planned to spend it all on bubble gum and sweets? Then no I don't need to give it back, because I think that might do you more harm than good."
Argue on the merits of the topic, not based on knowing what's best for people.
Well, by your own analogy. If both you and the robber have been dead for 300+ years would it make sense to make the robbers family pay your descendants for it?
Keep in mind none of the people had contact with anyone remotely involved with the original robbery or had any way to influence it or impact it.
Should the sons pay for the sins of the fathers? Pretty sure I could find someone in your ancestral line that commit a crime, can I convict you for it?
So my dad goes and steals your dad's land. He give me the land as his son. I split it in half and give half to a friend of mine. The investigation occurs and determine this land was stolen and should be returned. I don't think the argument of, "sorry won't return it because I didn't steal it, my dad did" holds much water. Nor the argument of, "nope I won't return it because a friend of mine that has nothing to do with the theft is benefiting from it" holds much water either as reasons for your family to not get their land returned.
And related, possession of stolen goods is a fairly common legal concept. Regardless of penalty, at minimum once discovered the goods are returned, even if they'd previously be sold or given to someone else.
This might come as a surprise to you, but being a slave is not in fact a job.
If there were any wages to be stolen in the first place they wouldn't be slaves.
But considering how many times you've been wrong and are just moving the goalpost to keep arguing and are behind a throwaway I assume at this point your just trying to waste time and lowkey troll.
Sure, except randomly distribute the goods, and then forcefully extract payback from many who were never involved, and many who fought to prevent the theft, and now you're getting closer.
Will there later be reparations for the reparations taken now from uninvolved parties since the point of reparations is that stealing labor and wealth is wrong and must be corrected via payment in later generations? If we take from them we're perpetuating the same sort of theft? I agree if we were omniscient it would be "right," but we're far far from that.
Also, let's say there's a reparation payment, but it doesn't rectify inequality, because there are more systemic problems at play, like local tax revenue funding local schools, so poor towns have poor schools. After "reparations," you don't think voters will think "we paid reparations, stop complaining."
If the purpose is "righting a wrong" I think the tool is too blunt and will create many more wrongs.
If the purpose is to "fix inequality", I think it won't address the underlying structural problems, but will "check the box" and absolve responsibilities.
2) Second and third-generation descendents of slaves are still alive. In other words, people who conceivably would have benefited directly from their grandparents or great-grandparents receiving substantial reparations.
3) Reparations have been called for
for more recent attacks on Black American rights and economic wellbeing; discriminatory and destructive public policy that dates back decades but that also goes up to, at least, the predatory lending practices backed by the government in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, which saw black-owned wealth in America cut in half.
> It's not clear that reparations are a good idea in practice, or something to be "achieved," or even strived for (they might do more harm in practice to the group they intend to protect, as many well-intentioned and politically extremist ideologies do) not to mention any considerations involving whether it would be possible to sustain, or affordable, etc.
These are important considerations that impact directly on the form that reparations "should" take. However they are orthogonal to the merits of the claim for reparations.
This comment feels weasel-y, its like saying "be careful returning stolen property to the rightful owner's descendants, they may not be as 'good' with it as the thief"
In a similar vein,
George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate - today privately owned and operated as a living history museum - has an excellent series of exhibits which puts names and stories to the Washington family’s enslaved servants and laborers:
The re-enactors are all fantastic and very knowledgeable. It’s unsettling talking to a black re-enactor who’s firmly in-character as a slave, which I suppose is the point:
Washington is always the one that gets me. His will freed his slaves not when he died but when his wife died. So he knew what was right but intentionally allowed that only after he could be assured it wouldn't cause any hardship to him or his spouse. That feels more evil then just being a creature of the time. That's knowing better but making a conscious decision to embrace evil because it makes your life easier.
> That's knowing better but making a conscious decision to embrace evil because it makes your life easier.
The average middle/upper class person today is the same, living on the fruit of foreign slave and subsistence laborers for clothing, food, and toys, and eating from the suffering of factory animals.
> So he knew what was right but intentionally allowed that only after he could be assured it wouldn't cause any hardship to him or his spouse. That feels more evil then just being a creature of the time. That's knowing better but making a conscious decision to embrace evil because it makes your life easier.
I'm pretty sure Washington's will freed his slaves on Martha's death because he didn't want to break up slave families (her slaves were part of her dowry and as such could not be manumitted so easily at will). Manumission law was quite complicated, and IIRC Washington himself lobbied to liberalize Virginia's law somewhat so that it was not as difficult to free slaves.
One of the most appalling aspects of US slavery was that it did break up families quite often. Washington doing this to keep the families together is hardly evil compared to what the alternative would have been.
EDIT: The parent post has grated on me a bit more. Why are we so arrogant to assume we know the whole context of what was going on two or three centuries ago? Every time I review the literature of historical situations, the richness and complexity is remarkable. We tend to think of our time as "more complex," but I think we are comparing the complex reality we experience with the simple stories we have been told (and continue to tell ourselves) about the past. In reality, much of the past was comparably complex to our own lives today.
I think the behavior is timeless. Topical drive-by commenting seems to be quite in vogue on your typical modern platforms; we get plenty of it here too. Trying to put together a good context requires a lot of investment!
Too bad they feel the need to run their own platform instead of contributing to wikidata. They're using the same software, and the data falls squarely within Wikidata's scope.
Even worse that they feel the need to stamp this with a CC license. Not only does this make it incompatible with the CC0/public domain requirement. I consider it borderline offensive to assert copyright over the basic facts of someone's life: https://enslaved.org/record/person/Q405665
This project obviously involves a lot of work. And, taken as a whole, some of that work is creative in nature. But individual records are not.
Luckily, US law does not recognise copyright for databases.
I think there's something to be said for putting this data in their own Wikibase instance. There are a lot of items here, including many items like 'Inventory of person X in year Y'. Adding so many items to Wikidata would not have been without its controversy. Also, i could imagine they need a lot of properties that are not available, or aren't used in the same way on Wikidata. There is a reason why all museums and other heritage institutions use their own databases and thesauri instead of putting it all in the same database.
However, the beauty of using a linked data platform is of course that it's easy to link back to other sources, like Wikidata. I could definitely see that in the future Wikidata could do an import of many of these items, or link properly to them using a new property.
I do agree that it's unfortunate that they're licensing everything under CC-BY instead of CC-Zero.
Yes, there are legitimate reasons here, and the presentation is, indeed, very nice. There's some momentum enabling various hybrid models for wikibase, and allowing projects such as this to enjoy the freedom of an individual platform, while still using Wikidata as the backend for some or most or all of the data seems promising.
I disagree with the idea that this data is inferior in some way to what is expected for inclusion in WD. Their sourcing seems to be impeccable, better than maybe 80 % of WD at the statement-level ("Imported from cebwiki") and certainly adequate on the item-level.
Data on individual slaves also strikes me as far more useful for the possibilities that Wikidata offers than academic papers. The latter are important in their own right, but metadata on journal articles is of little use unless you're studying impact factors, academic careers, or the rise and fall of academic disciplines.
Structured data on slavery neatly connects with geography, economics, culture, and really any aspect society today. I imagine there were changes in regions of origin over time, for example, and it'd be interesting to see if these can still be found in, say, regional culinary preferences, language, or music.
I'm not arguing that the data is inferior (because it's definitely not, the sourcing is properly done like you mentioned), just that any large import of so many data items (whether it is about streets, academic papers or people) will first need to be discussed with the community. Also, Wikidata always refers to existing sources, and this website is just that: an excellent source for future reference on items.
They want to publish it in an academic setting. Curation is important and reasonable in that context.
And under US law, the copyright on a database would apply to the collective work and not to the individual facts, so your frustration and analysis are sort of strange (they can't copyright the facts and whether the collective work would gain copyright is an open question without an obvious answer).
> They're using the same software, and the data falls squarely within Wikidata's scope.
The data only falls within Wikidata's scope if "every single enslaved person" can be described using reliable sources. That's a very dubious position. And Wikidata has scaling problems already due to their scholarly-article data - but at least that comes with plenty of surrounding info about authors, topics, citations etc. etc. that's uniquely suited to a general-purpose knowledge base. Can one make the same claim about the micro-level archival history of slavery in the antebellum U.S.?
I like to use etymonline.com to find how a word has been used over time, for "spare" I find "sense of "lacking in substance; lean, gaunt; flimsy, thin; poor," is recorded from 1540"
To all those who say it is "impossible" to right the wrongs of history: My family were refugees from a war that resulted in both the Nazis and Soviet Union expropriating property in their home country. Eventually they, and other branches of my family got their property restored or compensated. After the breakup of the Soviet Union, property in many of the former Soviet Union nations was returned to rightful owners, or compensation was issued. Expropriated property is restored in many cases. Compensation for expropriation is commonplace. American slavery was a business, and businesses keep records. There are no valid excuses.
There is a pervasive fear that admitting that the US owes the descendants of slaves something could potentially validate the complaints black people have about other issues in America. See the posts about Timnit Gebru for comments depicting the demands of black people as "too disruptive".
I think the resistance to reparations comes from folks like me who don't see a reason we should pay anything. Most of my ancestors are German immigrants to the northeast US who arrived after slavery was abolished. The remainder were poor Scotts Irish who continued to live in poverty in northern Appalachia.
I understand, but do not agree with, the logical hoops many jump through to justify indebtedness to all current Americans. I also do not think direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America.
A reparations law suit would most likely involve a court of law in which victims and benificiaries are identified, damages are calculated, and assets change hands. This fantasy where you just have to give up your personal property for no good reason is just a fantasy. It's not the way the law works. There will be a reason, it will be documented by a trail of papers and professional judges and attorneys will agree that it is fair.
If there is no paper trail saying that you are a beneficiary of human trafficking, you will not pay reparations. In order to understand this, you and also the justice system need to evolve to see the world more granularly than just "race". Slaves had names, they had families, they had descendants. Those descendants have legal standing in the most basic sense: they have been deprived of property. Justice demands that those stolen assets be returned to the rightful, legal owners.
Forget "resolving racism". That's a red herring. Just return the stolen property to the rightful owners. That's a much more concrete, actionable goal.
Edit: please post response instead of downvoting. Why should this comment disappear?
> benificiaries are identified, damages are calculated, and assets change hands
The assets changing hands will be the federal government paying descendants some sum of money taken from its tax base. And federal taxes are paid by everyone, even those of us whose families arrived after slavery and Jim Crow was abolished.
This is why some people are adamantly against reparations.
I already told you that's just a fantasy. There is clearly a strong opposition to that, to the point where it would never make it through congress. A real investigation is needed to separate beneficiaries from those who were uninvolved.
How does this work when no one alive today stole any of the property? When none of the people it was stolen from are alive?
What is the (broadly consistent) legal doctrine for expropriating living people's property on the basis of their ancestors sins?
How do you draw the line around legitimate grounds for litigating a criminal grievance from the past? How do you establish the appropriate damages?
I ask these important contextualizing questions not to imply that reparation aren't possible or are necessarily a bad idea, but rather to illustrate that the attitude of "this is easy, just do the obvious thing" is not going to be sufficient here. And when the comment begins with asserted speculation about what enacting reparations "would most likely" involve... I get very suspicious.
You're thinking about the situation upside down. First we find the stolen property, then we return it to the legal owner. One cannot legally own stolen property. The law is very clear: no one gives what one does not have. If for example "Leslie" inherits assets from human traffickers, those are not Leslie's assets; they are stolen assets. Leslie is not a criminal being prosecuted for crime. No one is being punished. Stolen property is being returned to the rightful, legal owners. This has nothing to do with sin, or morality, or emotion, or even race. This is just about accounting and following the law. It really is as simple as it sounds.
If reparations for slavery ever happen in the US, it will be a political decision, not one resulting from a lawsuit. That isn't to say they courts won't be involved at one or more points, as you can certainly imagine challenges, but for it to happen it will have to come from Congress first.
That's pretty similar to the arguments of why you should not have to pay part of your taxes because you don't agree with part of how it's spent. It might not have been "your" fault, but we all live in a society that bears the fault.
Do you accept fault for the atrocities committed to Native Americans? Why aren’t you paying them reparations, too?
And while we are at it, what about the descendants of the Japanese Americans who were imprisoned during World War 2 in Colorado and other states?
What about the children who worked in sweat shops and coal mines during the 19th and early 20th centuries, many of whom died young? Their relatives should be compensated. What about the descendants of the Tuskeegee Syphilis experiment? What about people affected by lead in drinking water pipes? Lead solder for drinking water wasn’t banned until 1986, so there are generations of people and their descendants who have suffered.
I can go on and on and our country will be bankrupt before we’re done. But hey, at least you’ve taken responsibility for the actions of others.
There's this old scene in the Simpsons where Grampa Simpson stands up and says, "Sure, we COULD fix up main street," and everyone in the town hall meeting cheers, and he says, "shut up! I'm just saying we COULD blow all our money on a stupid little street," and the townspeople cheer again and lift him on their shoulders.
Anyway, your comment reminded me of that.
I'm less familiar with lead in water. If that was just lack of science knowledge, that's different than, say, deliberately putting lead in water to make it easier to profit off the people drinking it.
Lead pipes and lead-based solder is just one example and if you don’t like that example because it happened due to “lack of science”, I can come up with others. My point is that there are countless atrocities in America’s past, recent and not so recent.
How can we compensate everyone who deserves it and how can we prioritize one group (e.g. descendants of slaves) over another (e.g. descendants of Native American civilians who were slaughtered at one of the many massacres)?
> How can we compensate everyone who deserves it and how can we prioritize one group (e.g. descendants of slaves) over another (e.g. descendants of Native American civilians who were slaughtered at one of the many massacres)?
you're looking at this backwards. They both have claims pending. We can pay both of them if we choose to.
> I can go on and on and our country will be bankrupt before we’re done.
Isn't that a shame, well at least we could then hold our heads high.
> But hey, at least you’ve taken responsibility for the actions of others.
The title is encumbered. For the same reason that laundering money doesn't make the original theft disappear, its not ethical or moral to benefit financially from atrocities then launder the money and pretend that nothing can be done.
Are you really so sure that once the ill-gotten gains are subtracted from this country's wealth there would be nothing left? In that case how could you ignore such widespread and lucrative immoral heritage?
> I can go on and on and our country will be bankrupt before we’re done. But hey, at least you’ve taken responsibility for the actions of others.
Spoken by Abraham Lincoln and inscribed on his memorial:
"Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
> direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America
This conflates two separate issues. One is about a financial debt owed to people. This is owed for forced labor and land thefts which continued into the 20th century. Like the OP said, for the most part this is well documented. Debts are repaid in cash or like goods.
Racism is a separate topic, which I agree should be approached differently.
Conflating the two issues is not helpful for understanding best approaches.
If you ask, many Black families will tell you about these thefts, which again are in the public record as title transfers.
Here's an example from the 20th: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce%27s_Beach . Events like this were common for decades in the 20th century. Even if you just limited to quasi-legal property theft via eminent domain, there's billions of documentable dollars owed and easily tracked. There's absolutely no reason not to give the land back to those families, or a cash payment for its fair market value.
What about the treaties we broke with Native Americans, stealing their land after we agreed they could have it in perpetuity? This happened dozens of times in different parts of the country.
Do we repay them as well? And how many trillions (since that’s there value of such land now, with or without interest)
I know this is supposed to be a gotcha, but I would suggest the burden is on the thief to justify why a documented theft should stand. Put it in writing. Codify it into law. How long does one need to hold stolen property before it conveys under the law? Was this a one-time allowable theft? Was it only allowable to steal from certain people during the applicable time? During what time period? How do we define precisely who it was acceptable to steal from?
We live in a legal regime where it's not even permissible to take sunken treasure that's near countries, even after centuries at sea. But somehow land stolen from indigenous people and Black people more recently is somehow unrecoverable? We need to at least write down in our laws the rationale for this.
More immediately pertinent: why were these thefts substantially different from those the Supreme Court ruled against in Oklahoma?
If we're not willing to at least do that much, yeah we should just give it back. The alternative is choosing lawlessness, which is not something we are bound to do.
We don't have to worry about converting to dollars because we can just return title to the land itself. The Supreme Court did the same this year in Oklahoma, so it wouldn't even be unprecedented.
> I understand, but do not agree with, the logical hoops many jump through to justify indebtedness to all current Americans. I also do not think direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America.
There's no "logical hoops." It's a concrete and straightforward argument. Black and Native Americans are differently situated in a way that shows up starkly in the data: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353
Most distinct subgroups of Americans are converging with whites in terms of income over generations:
> White and Hispanic children have fairly similar rates of intergenerational mobility.... Because of these modest intergenerational gaps, the income gap between Hispanic and white Americans is shrinking across generations
> The changing patterns of intergenerational mobility for Asians make it more difficult to predict the trajectory of their incomes, but Asians appear likely to converge to income levels comparable to white Americans in the long run.
The two exceptions are Black and Native Americans:
> In contrast to Hispanics and Asians, there are large intergenerational gaps between black and American Indian children relative to white children.
> The large intergenerational gaps for blacks and American Indians relative to whites lead to disparities in earnings for these groups that persist across generations. If mobility rates do not change, our estimates imply a steady-state gap in family income ranks between whites and American Indians of 18 percentiles, and a white-black gap of 19 percentiles. These values are very similar to the empirically observed gaps for children in our sample, suggesting that blacks and American Indians are currently close to the steady-state income distributions[.]
> While there have been some gains in income since the Kerner Commission, "in terms of the wealth gap, there's been almost no progress," says UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, who studies wealth inequality. "The average wealth of African Americans was 15% of the average wealth of whites in 1963 — and it's still around 15% today."
In 1963, the schools in my Maryland county were still segregated. They were desegregated in 1966. But half a century later, Black-white income and wealth gaps haven't changed at all. The founder of BET, Robert Johnson, has made a good capitalist case for reparations: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/bets-robert-johnson-calls-fo...
> “Damages is a normal factor in a capitalist society for when you have been deprived for certain rights,” he said. “If this money goes into pockets like the [coronavirus] stimulus checks ... that money is going to return back to the economy” in the form of consumption. There will also be more black-owned businesses, he added.
Arguments about whether white people today, or immigrants who came here after a certain time, should pay are misplaced. The United States, an entity that is legally distinct from its people, was culpable for enabling slavery and segregation. It can be held liable and forced to pay for its part. The United States government is still paying pensions owed to child...
> The United States, an entity that is legally distinct from its people, was culpable for enabling slavery and segregation. It can be held liable and forced to pay for its part.
Ignoring for a while a bunch of practical (though probably solvable to a large degree) problems with this, like on what basis exactly we decide who is paid, and how much are the damages exactly, a more interesting question to me is: what's next? Does this settle the claim completely? Do we consider the descendants of slaves, who get this settlement, to be made whole, and any further claims of the descendants of slaves are to be dismissed with prejudice? Are we supposed to no longer give any racial preferences and special treatment (beyond ensuring equal treatment that's a right of all American people regardless of their ancestry) to the descendants of slaves, given that any of their claims are settled in full? And finally, what do we do if the settlement does not close the gap completely? Are we then allowed to throw up our hands in the air, and say that the United States has settled its claims, and is not obligated to entertain any new ones beyond ensuring that those of actual unequal treatment are properly litigated?
My opinion here is that while settling the liability might look desirable from certain moral point of view, I sincerely doubt that it will bring a long term resolution of the problem attributed to the legacy of slavery. What I expect is that once settlement is paid up, everything about the issue will soon go back to exactly where it has been. This is not an argument against doing such settlement, but rather against high hopes for any positive long lasting change it is purported to bring about.
> what's next? Does this settle the claim completely?
That would be the idea, yes.
> Do we consider the descendants of slaves, who get this settlement, to be made whole, and any further claims of the descendants of slaves are to be dismissed with prejudice?
It would depend on the specifics of the settlement, this is actually seriously discussed among reparations advocates. Its not all about writing checks to individuals. People want to put money in a fund that makes small business loans to qualified individuals.
> Are we supposed to no longer give any racial preferences and special treatment (beyond ensuring equal treatment that's a right of all American people regardless of their ancestry) to the descendants of slaves, given that any of their claims are settled in full?
That would do a lot to put an end to the racial animus in this country.
> And finally, what do we do if the settlement does not close the gap completely? Are we then allowed to throw up our hands in the air, and say that the United States has settled its claims, and is not obligated to entertain any new ones beyond ensuring that those of actual unequal treatment are properly litigated?
I'm not sure anyone is obligated to do anything but these questions will need to be addressed and conclusive answers may elude us but the existence of these questions doesn't invalidate the claim.
> My opinion here is that while settling the liability might look desirable from certain moral point of view, I sincerely doubt that it will bring a long term resolution of the problem attributed to the legacy of slavery. What I expect is that once settlement is paid up, everything about the issue will soon go back to exactly where it has been. This is not an argument against doing such settlement, but rather against high hopes for any positive long lasting change it is purported to bring about.
This is a good point and it may depend on the form of the settlement.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that."
This seems like a huge stretch and reeks of taking a tortured argument one major leap too far.
How many people in society 1) were in a position to redline or seriously influence redlining, 2) called for and actively supported it, or 3) even knew about it?
Even if someone's ancestors arrived post-slavery and pre-civil rights movement (forget a specific overhanging issue like redlining), would you significantly attribute the state and dynamics of American society to them? What about establishing your own sense of how this society works and establishing your own economic beachhead. Are you immediately supposed to jump in to the oldest and thorniest and most contentious issues of your new home country as if you knew what you were doing?
Let's extend that argument then. Why isn't there a strong, unequivocal history of latin immigrants fighting hard for reparations for slavery? Or asian immigrants? Do those immigrant communities also deserve part-blame for not fighting redlining in the 70s?
Would it be anathema do admit some white people in America had absolutely nothing to do with the plight of black people in America? Can the leftish political discourse bear this weighty notion, or would it break under its bulk?
I don't understand the question. The socioeconomic structure of many of our largest cities is defined by redlining. Lawndale and Englewood in Chicago? Entirely the product of redlining. The property values of houses in areas cordoned off for white people? Redlining.
I overinterpreted your response to the previous commenter and jumped the gun a bit. Sorry for the exaggerated rhetoric, it wasn't needed and may not have been correctly aimed (at you).
But, to your points, there are historical forces that bring people good/bad fortune - including racism in America. How do you decide which ones are worthy of ex post facto adjustment on a society-wide level? How do you balance and justify that to the orthogonal part of your population; the part that had no role in the history but would still be impacted by the expenditure of communal resources? Keeping in mind here, the wider the net you cast for who need adjustment, the bigger the impact on the orthogonal population.
I don't so much want to wade into the reparations question. I find a lot to agree with in Rayiner's position and a lot to think about in the concerns of people who worry that it would be impossible to administer.
All I have to contribute is the fact that whatever the impact of slavery was, it wasn't confined to our distant past. This country practiced economic apartheid well into my own lifetime, and the aftereffects are impossible to miss.
I live near Division and Chicago, just outside of Chicago in Oak Park. If I cross my alley and the street behind it, Austin Blvd, I'm in the Chicago neighborhood of Austin, where, if I'm a teenaged Black kid, my likelihood of being murdered shoots up dramatically. And Austin is a middle-class neighborhood (a typical Black household making $75k/yr lives in a higher-poverty neighborhood than a white family making $40k/yr). What changes when you cross that street is that you cross a famous redlining boundary.
A few years back you could easily get a map of Chicago redlining without consulting an encyclopedia or doing any research; you just needed to look at Uber's Chicago service map. The neighborhoods they wouldn't commit to serving were uncannily the redlined neighborhoods of the 1960s.
It wasn't because Uber was trying to perpetuate the practice, but because redlining ravaged west- and south-side Chicago, and we are nowhere close to digging our way out of it.
Lots of different groups of people have been economically disadvantaged in the United States, but I don't think anything like this, at this scale, with this impact. It fucked my city --- the best city in the country --- right up. It fucked up Detroit. It fucked up STL. It's a big deal and we should all be freshly furious about it.
There are a large number of varied proposals for reparations, many of which do not involve collecting money from all white citizens. I think the knee-jerk resistance to the idea based on wanting to watch your own wallet is just that: a knee-jerk response.
> I think the resistance to reparations comes from folks like me who don't see a reason we should pay anything.
I agree that individual Americans shouldn't have to pay anything. All former slaveowners are long dead. These claims are properly levied against the government and whatever other institutions still exist (universities and corporations come to mind).
> I also do not think direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America.
You'll be relieved to learn that there are proposals for reparations that do not ask for payments to individuals.
I have a pretty good idea, its about investing in Africa. America has a lot of assets, in the black population, they should encourage people to visit their homeland, on a paid trip. Helping the African economy and helping African Americans create business connects to Africa. Then there should be a programme where African Americans get a lump sum, if they start a business or invest in land in Africa. France is doing something similar but Americans have a much higher advantage something like 30 million people of African decent.
After visiting Africa I think will also help people expand their mind set about the world and that Africa is not a bad place and has lot of opportunities.
Africa has a lot of future, plenty of growth. China knows this and has invested a lot into Africa.
Taiwan does something similar with a paid trip to visit Taiwan to learn about the culture and history and create business connection between the people.
It would not cost anything as well, you just reallocate aid money.
To a degree European Africans have been doing this for a long time, plenty of YouTube videos about people moving to Africa to start a business. Fun to watch too. Many of these European Africans have positions of power in the government or private sector.
It's not a new idea - it was tried in the newly-made country of Liberia. The country has a very screwy subsequent history where, to put it short, the former U.S. slaves became a new oppressing elite and there was all sorts of backlash from the natives.
This might trigger some people. If you used a term like "ancestral region(s)" or something, it might've been less triggering.
Firstly, the word "homeland" is not one typically associated with one's country of ancestry. I've rarely ever heard someone use that term. On the contrary, I have heard people say "my ancestors came from X country", or like "my great-grandparents came from Italy". The term "homeland" is usually used for the region where a person's current home is. And this not to mention that even a first-generation immigrant who has lived in X country for a long time, could consider X country to be his true homeland.
Secondly, there's an implicit assumption here that "Africa" is the "homeland" of African Americans. I don't need to explain why that's troubling.
Thirdly, many of my "African American" friends are of thoroughly mixed ancestry. One such friend did a 23andMe test, and it turned out he had 54% European ancestry (even though physically "he looks black"), 30-something% African ancestry, and a smattering of other ancestry groups (including Native American) for the rest. It would be inaccurate and inappropriate to consider him as someone "of African ancestry" (even though he looks somewhat so). The phenotypes a person's genome expressed do not necessarily correspond to a person's actual genetic ancestry.
I could go into more reasons as to why it's not a great term to use, but I think these three reasons make a good case.
----
> get a lump sum, if they start a business or invest in land
While the underlying motivation behind your idea is pretty decent (and a fairly lofty goal I might add); I, for one, would rather prefer direct foreign aid (not loans, but literal foreign aid grants with no expectation of return). There's too much of a risk of corruption with your idea, and bad incentives are baked right into it. Just increase the current foreign aid to developing countries across the board. Do something like the Marshall Plan, where in exchange for free-market economic policies, we directly invest in education, infrastructure, and other things in developing countries.
On a secondary note, domestically, I would rather focus on just getting some kind of actual, concrete, meaningful (maybe financial) reparations bill passed through Congress. That alone seems like a huge and almost insurmountable political challenge, and I want to see that tackled somehow. We want to improve the quality of life and access to opportunity for the poorest economic classes in the US, so they can pursue their ambitions and dreams from a similar starting point as more well-off Americans. Achieving this alone would be a huuuge deal in and of itself.
Yeah - And I should invest specifically in Mexico because my grandma happened to be born there. African Americans - are Americans. They often have their own American subcultures, but the U.S.A is their home. Sure they have history connecting them to somewhere. But they can invest wherever the heck they want. No need to limit our generosity to our many generations removed ancestral roots.
> Black Americans are more likely than either whites or Hispanics to be the third generation Americans. Seventy-five percent of black Americans indicate they are at least the third generation born in the United States, compared to 58% of whites and 13% of Hispanics.
Those numbers are very hard to believe. I bet most if not 100% Hispanics have American ancestry going back before pre-Colombian times while literally 0% of White and Black have such roots.
The meaning of "American ancestry" used above is "United States ancestry", not "North-or-South-American continent ancestry". Hispanic Americans certainly have plenty of deep American ancestry in the latter sense, but for relatively few of them this American ancestry is from United States.
Black Americans whose families go back far enough have substantial Native American ancestry, actually, having been treated similarly as an underclass during the early years of English/Dutch colonization of North America. It's harder to find connections because of anti-miscegenation and one-drop rule laws and customs, and the relative nascence of reliable genetic testing (which themselves may be misleading due to their reliance on statistical proximity to controls).
Irish Potato Famine, cause of mass migration to North America, happened in 1846, i. e. near the end of slavery. The Italian wave of immigration came even later IIRC.
(And "Hispanic" literally means "from Spain". Very few Spaniards crossed The Atlantic before Columbus.)
You may be interested to find out that in the 1800s there was a similar program pursued. The country of Liberia was originally founded by black Americans.
Depends on where in Africa (which is, famously, not a single country). Ghana has encouraged immigration with the promise of citizenship; Mauritania is not quite so hospitable. Liberia's situation is interesting in that it was one of several examples of America's export of colonialism coming back to bite us (one other being Japan, which went from staunchly isolationist to trying to take over half the world in the scant few generations following Perry's opening).
Would you say that white Americans homeland is Europe?
Most of African Europeans a)know what country their ancestors are from, b) have direct links to their relatives in Africa.
> Africa has a lot of future, plenty of growth. China knows this and has invested a lot into Africa.
I think this is exactly Africa's main issue: being seen first foremost as a land of resources and economic ventures. You go to the Americas/Europe/Asia/Oceania to visit, and Africa to make money/for "humanitarian aid". Things may evolve when they change to "X has invested a lot in Africans".
> Would you say that white Americans homeland is Europe?
I would say — from a European perspective — a baffling number of white Americans cling on to a European cultural identity. It feels to an outsider like many Americans want to be American + something else. Many/most black Americans don’t have this luxury, and my hot take is that Kwanza and other pan-African neo traditions seek to fill this gap? As a counter-example, I lived in the anglophone Caribbean for many years, and it always felt like there was a strong sense of national identity there, very distinct from trying to associate with Africa in any way. I guess I’d also expect 2nd/3rd generation African immigrants to America to maintain their cultural identity — I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone with Ethiopian heritage describe themselves as anything other than Ethiopian whatever their passport or recent ancestry
Its not really a hot take, but an express intent. Slaves had their culture and traditions aggressively stamped out in order to further the disconnect and reinforce their place as property. Their original tribes and homelands that they could hold on to as a touchstone were repressed almost totally. This is more or less exactly why there's a 'black' culture instead of Nigerian or Ghanaian or whatever tribes existed before national boundaries were drawn. White Americans can generally point to an Italian or Irish or Swedish heritage or whatever, a luxury that black americans often don't have. At least didn't before modern DNA genealogy.
How about we stop treating black different because they are black? Is that in the year 2020 too much to fucking ask for? Why would we subsidize African Americans investing in Africa but not white Americans? Racist nonsense.
Mindblowing this was just 220+ years ago, like even the Egyptian Greek Roman Mongolian Chinese Japanese Spanish empires, always blows my fucking mind how much better our conditions are right now.
Often in histories of slavery, the slaves don't speak. If you want to hear their voices, read "Slave Testimony," edited by John Blassingame. It's stunning in length and detail. Not all suffered the same slavery we know today.
This passage is by an enslaved (interviewed by the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission) in Kentucky, 1963, named Charlotte
"I belong to Gen. Thos. Strange. I have two boys. I pay a dollar a week to him, and support myself and children, and pay my house rent. I have been hiring myself for over fifteen years; I get along very well, and keep the hire paid up. You couldn't pay me to live at home, if I could help myself. My master doesn't supply me with anything -- not even a little medicine -- no more than if I didn't belong to him. Each of my children pays him $2.00 a week. They work in tobacconist shops. I support them. One of my boys is thirteen years old and the other seventeen. They get $2 a week pay. If the boys make more than $2 a week a piece I get what is over; if they don't make that, I have to make it good to him. He has got to have it Saturday night, sure. I have not had good health. Sometimes I am ailing, but I always keep up enough to try to make my wages. I have only one room, and pay three dollars a month for it. I live by washing."
> Not all suffered the same slavery we know today.
What is the "slavery we know today"?
Do you mean "American slavery as we understand it today", or "Slavery in the current day"? If the former, then how is the passage you quoted different from our understanding of American slavery? Do you mean to say it was better, worse, or in some other way different?
Specifically slavery was more varied than "American slavery as we understand it today." The passage I quoted is different, in that it departs from the traditional model of plantation based, field labor slavery. It is still reprehensible exploitation, of course. It's just important to remember/question how diverse people's experiences actually were.
“Not all suffered the same Holocaust we know today. It’s just important to remember/question how diverse people’s Holocaust experiences actually were.”
Maybe it’s just me but these type of statements seem to miss the point. Given the deplorable state of American understanding of slavery, Reconstruction, the state-sanctioned apartheid that only ended a few decades ago, and all its effects that continue to reverberate, I don’t think “a nuanced understanding” of slavery is really what’s called for. The evidence suggests that most Americans never even learned the ABCs of slavery and its effects.
Nope! Never said it did. EDIT: Literally just picked a random (that I thought would fit in the space I had--didn't want to go over-long) passage from the Freedman's interviews section of the book.
The parent comment you're responding to didn't downplay slavery in any way, nor did they say that this person had it better or worse. Just that this person's experience was different. There's nothing wrong with acknowledging that slavery didn't always look the same as we may imagine. There were varying experiences. It's history.
TBH I am a bit tired with the obsession with American slavery imposed on the rest of the world. There were far more serious situations all over the world and much more recently. People were serfs, people died in genocide, people were living under totalitarian regimes, people were sent to all kind of "camps". All this happened in the 20th century and some of it happens even these days yet all we hear about is blacks in the US and their slavery, as if this is the most important issue in the last 200 years. Give me a break, I don't want to hear this whinging anymore, slavery ended long time ago and the black in the US live in a far better situation than 80% of the world.
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[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 239 ms ] threadThere are some places in the US which have started, but they're just kind of pulling numbers out of a hat and I don't see that being scalable. But reparations should be paid, if for nothing else, at least for the unpaid hours.
Next we need to figure out who profited the most from slaves and where that money is today.
Do you honestly think that forcefully stealing money from someone at the threat of imprisonment if they don't pay is really going to fly? Do you think putting a gun to my head and taking money from me really makes sense when my ancestors emigrated here only a couple generations ago? How do you foresee this working? How do you foresee this helping anything?
Of course my language is extreme, but that's what taxes and similar payments are. It's backed by the force of the government and if I don't pay, eventually someone with a gun will come to put me in prison, and if I refuse, that gun will be pointed at me.
Do you realize that's an extraordinary claim? You have proof for this, right?
Warning; while there really was slavery in Ireland at one time (indeed Dublin was one of the biggest markets in Europe before the Normans suppressed it in the 12th century), if you Google for this you are likely to get a good bit of nonsense. Decent summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_slaves_myth
Obviously GP's claim is a dumb one, because all you have to do is say "Here is one counter example, you're wrong". But looking at that page makes it very clear that slavery is a big part of most of world history.
Slavery was and is a traditional human activity, and has been for thousands of years.
The Koran, written in the 7th century, glorifies slavery.
The Nazis had tens of millions of slaves. (The French Resistance became active only after Sokel began enslaving all able-bodied French citizens, men and women.)
After the EU border-free crossings started, UK business owners had slave camps for Poles. That was only 10-20 years ago.
So before you go all SJW on HN, at least learn what you're talking about. The US is not uniquely evil because we had slaves. What is unique is that we had a civil war to free them, and that's lost in the SJW narrative.
If the second, then note a lot of slaves were initially captured and sold to white slavers by their own kind. [1]
[1] http://www.understandingslavery.com/index.php-option=com_con...
But IMO, if we can figure out how much time/money was stolen and who benefitted the most from it, we can start to have some idea of what's fair.
I'm a big fan of UBI as well, and it'd make a lot of sense to have the ancestors of slaves be the first to get onto UBI. But, obviously, this is a group decision and should be based off logic and records; not feelings.
For example, there's examples (IIRC) of former slaves owning slaves themselves; how is that addressed? What moral principles are in play, which can be logically applied to figure out if such a person's progeny receive reparations?
*descendants
The same issues that make UBI a bad idea will probably preclude the individual payment approach to reparations
All those people are dead. The only entities left to sue are legal entities that aren't natural persons.
> If the second, then note a lot of slaves were initially captured and sold to white slavers by their own kind.
Then governments, corporations, etc. in Africa and Europe can be held to the same standard.
I don't think anyone should pay any more than they benefitted from slavery.
The average person has no ancestors who owned slaves, and the only benefits they got were things like cheaper goods and services. Added up over a lifetime, it's probably not a lot.
But some people come from ancestors who made a LOT of money off slavery, and the benefits of that have been passed down to them one way or another.
So I think different people should be in different brackets based off how much they benefitted from slavery, and those brackets should be proportion of wealth tax over 20-30 years. Not so much to bankrupt anyone, but enough to pay the off the debt.
Also, I think it should be treated as the alpha version of UBI. Basically, the ancestors of slaves should be the first to get on the list for UBI because they're kind of opposites of each-other.
This is a logical fallacy (though a popular one). An idea is either good or bad. The traits of the person speaking the idea are irrelevant, and do not make a good idea bad, or a bad idea good.
Further, an idea doesn't become more or less "subject to discussion" as a result of the race of the person speaking it.
I'm basically claiming, ofc I think my idea is good, but I really don't want to assume it.
In the latter case, we can probably start collecting our reparations for the Barbary slave trades from the Arabs, and probably even make money! (Reparation arbitrage).
I accept petrol or petrodollars. Check my bio for the paypal link.
The average person benefitted from compound accumulation of capital. After hundreds of years of compound interest, its probably unfathomably large.
> But some people come from ancestors who made a LOT of money off slavery, and the benefits of that have been passed down to them one way or another.
If those people can be identified then someone may lodge a claim against their assets. From what I learned in Black World Studies, the fruits of slavery are largely considered to have been spread through society in a way that can't be traced and reconstructed because everything is tainted.
How many American citizens went to prison because they refused to send in their contribution to the reparation funds for Japanese internment?
Yeah its called taxation.
> You do realize that every civilization that has ever existed has both enslaved others and been enslaved in the past, right?
I'm not convinced that this is true. do you have any documentation?
> Where do your reparations end? Are you going to forcefully take money from me because African Americans were enslaved generations ago, but then forcefully have money taken from them for the other Africans and other races they themselves enslaved in Africa before that? Where does it end?
Claims are against the legal institutions that still exist. People aren't held responsible for the sins of their ancestors, rather the same institutions that benefitted still exist and can be sued for damages. There's a pending claim against them.
> Do you think putting a gun to my head and taking money from me really makes sense when my ancestors emigrated here only a couple generations ago?
You didn't know that we collect taxes here when you immigrated?
> Of course my language is extreme, but that's what taxes and similar payments are. It's backed by the force of the government and if I don't pay, eventually someone with a gun will come to put me in prison, and if I refuse, that gun will be pointed at me.
If you're opposed to taxation, arguing against reparations is probably the worst possible way to make your point. Slavery and taxation are quite similar (some would say the difference matters but those people are pro-tax).
You must be young to speak with such certainty.
Post-slavery, black sharecroppers basically made nothing after expenses. So how much was their time actually worth? (An economist will ask this.)
Post-slavery, norhern states, which had no slaves, paid the cost of welfare for millions of black families. So how does that factor in?
Since there's intermarriage in America, what's a quanta of African blood? How much does one get paid per 1/32? (This is referring to the heated race arguments of the 1800s and 1900s.)
Do you have any experience with the above? My family is from the Detroit area, so I'm one of few posters on HN that actually does know something about these issues.
The US paid a heavy price during the civil war, one of the biggest issues being related to slavery. Do the northern states get reparations for freeing the slaves?
That's the problem when you drag history into modern times. One of the biggest advantages that the US has over other countries is that we don't continue to fight the same battles over and over.
Even before corona, black familiies in America struggled greatly with maintaining households and educating their children. Instead of virtue signalling, why don't you contribute to solving today's enormous problems?
Yeah, no. There are simple answers to several of your questions.
Not just the US of course. Britain and France among others are owed a lot more in reparations for what Germany did and the long-term consequences.
The US got repaid - only in part - for its war lending. It has never been paid reparations for its losses in WW2 (including 400,000 military deaths).
What's the reparations tally for 400,000 dead, going by the numbers thrown around these days? $10 trillion? Germany and Japan can figure out the split on that and then write some big fat checks to the families in question.
The problem is that the "state" that started WW2 was the Austria-Hungarian Empire (against Serbia), and Germany was just a treaty ally. But then A-H dissolved, leaving Germany holding the bag. It didn't help that Germany refused to negotiate a peace treaty earlier, and that they destroyed the Alsace region during their retreat.
But in the end, it would have taken an occupation to demonstrate that Germany actually lost, and that didn't happen.
Hence the later Allied occupations of Germany and Japan in WW2.
typo, make that WW1.
https://www.whec.com/rochester-new-york-news/frederick-dougl...
If the US gets to the point of considering reparations, then economists will get involved, and it will be a logical calculation, not an emotional one.
The problem of intermarriage will probably end up being an intractable one. But you didn't think about that, now did you?
How much was the labor of slaves worth to the slaveowners? surely you're not arguing it was worth nothing?
> Post-slavery, norhern states, which had no slaves, paid the cost of welfare for millions of black families. So how does that factor in?
The price of social programs don't factor in at all.
> Since there's intermarriage in America, what's a quanta of African blood? How much does one get paid per 1/32? (This is referring to the heated race arguments of the 1800s and 1900s.)
This will come up if the reparations take the form of payments to individuals.
> Do you have any experience with the above? My family is from the Detroit area, so I'm one of few posters on HN that actually does know something about these issues.
Thank heavens we live in a country where people are allowed to have opinions without demonstrating the right to those opinions on the basis of heritage.
> The US paid a heavy price during the civil war, one of the biggest issues being related to slavery. Do the northern states get reparations for freeing the slaves?
Why would they?
> That's the problem when you drag history into modern times. One of the biggest advantages that the US has over other countries is that we don't continue to fight the same battles over and over.
Sadly you can't get rid of the effects of history by choosing to forget about it.
> Even before corona, black familiies in America struggled greatly with maintaining households and educating their children. Instead of virtue signalling, why don't you contribute to solving today's enormous problems?
This is unhelpful.
> surely you're not arguing it was worth nothing?
So how much was it worth? Where is your calculation?
The south fell behind the north because of using manual labor over industrialization, so it may well have been worth nothing.
People fail to distinguish that the south was involved in slavery, not the north. The north literally owes nothing, and that means the US federally owes nothing.
> This is unhelpful.
No, your virtue signalling is completely unhelpful. We know where you stand - all talk and no action. You've suggested no solutions, and offered nothing but snarky rhetoric.
What are the limits? Who will be excepted? How will it be enforced? All good questions! But we can hardly answer them if we refuse to engage with the idea of reparations to begin with.
That's because the first order of business is to demonstrate that reparations are even a good idea. Engage with those who don't like the idea, and address the concerns they raise, if you can; then deal with minutae.
Also, it sets a precedent: if you care about your decedents and progeny at all, there is nothing to gain from cheating. You may benefit and die before repercussions occur, but all debts must be paid eventually. Justice is hard, but not when it comes to hours worked vs hours paid.
> if you care about your decedents and progeny at all, there is nothing to gain from cheating. You may benefit and die before repercussions occur, but all debts must be paid eventually.
I really hope you're not suggesting that we set a precedent of digging through history to find old debts we might be owed.
The statute of limitations is a law. We are talking about a moral claim that supercedes the text of laws. Remember this is from a time when slavery itself was legal.
Also consider there is no statute of limitations for some crimes including murder.
> I really hope you're not suggesting that we set a precedent of digging through history to find old debts we might be owed.
I think he's more suggesting we not set a precedent of permitting people to benefit financially from atrocities if they can run out the clock.
That’s not really... likely. Even if your state wasn’t a ‘state’ Pre-abolishion, there was slavery there. The history of slavery in North America did not start at Plymouth Rock.
Thats easy, the same government that permitted and regulated slavery is the first defendant. After that any other legal institution that still exists in the same form (universities, state and city governments, non-profits, etc.).
> We also don't live in states where slavery was ever a thing.
They made the cross country railroad on slave labor. Pretty sure every state has benefitted from rail traffic.
I guess, here is a simple non-rhetorical thought question: Why should your family get any of the benefits of this country's past? I don't know you or where you/your family immigrated from, but your family came here for the benefits of the US. Maybe the US was a wealthier country than where your family left, or maybe more stable, or maybe they felt there was more opportunity for economic mobility. Those benefits/properties where present before your family decided to move, so why should you benefit from them?
Note, I'm actually pro-immigration and support people moving here, but I think it's a good exercise to walk through. All of those benefits were accrued before your family came here, and yet your family gets to benefit from them. Why? As you said, they had zero responsibility for things that happened before they arrived.
So by the same token, if the country had both assets and debts before you arrived, why shouldn't the logic that says you and your family should take on and gain from those assets that pre-dated you, also not mean that you should take on the associated debts?
I can't think of a reason why someone immigrating should only take on the benefits of the assets but be excluded from the liabilities. But am open to discussion.
One thing that might be helpful, if I'm in favor and you're opposed, then maybe identify one obstacle - it can be as big as you wish - where if resolved, you'd be in favor of reparations. Then maybe that is worth engaging with.
On the contrary; if I represent the status quo and you represent a new idea, the onus is on you to defend it. It's your responsibility. Put it out there. Say exactly what your thesis is, and back it up, and defend it. Sunlight is the best disinfectant - anything about your ideas that are indefensible will be shown to be so, and what's left will be gold.
To make my point via reductio ad absurdum, let's flip the script and use something hyperbolic: you represent the status quo, and I represent (heaven forbid) some new variation of racial cleansing. But, I declare to those opposed, "engaging with those who don't like the idea [of racial cleansing] is a fool's errand, because a lot of these people will just cherry-pick whatever objection they can think of in bad faith." So, I say to you, the skeptical defendent of the status quo, if you don't like the idea of racial cleansing, "then maybe identify one obstacle - it can be as big as you wish - where if resolved, you'd be in favor of [exterminating a race]."
To me, flipping your proposition on its head like that makes it pretty obvious that it's unsatisfactory as the starting point of an intellectual discussion. It even tends to beg the question: you've made your position the 'null hypothesis'. The status quo should be the null hypothesis.
> And even in good faith, people who don't like the idea all have different reasons. Start with the root axiom "Slavery is wrong", people will be happy to engage with you on that. Disregard them and move on to the next syllogism, you'll have a different set of people objecting.
Yes, exactly. Your job is to answer every set of people who don't like your idea. Just because you believe that this new thing is moral and right does not make it so, and it is the acme of hubris to distain to justify your proposed actions.
The first order of business is to demonstrate the validity of the claim. The benefit of the reparation is dependent on the form of the reparation itself.
> Next we need to figure out who profited the most from slaves and where that money is today.
The most? The Europeans. Where is the money? It's in London and Amsterdam among a few other former empires.
The Europeans transported around 12.5 millions slaves to the Americas. They owe so much in reparations it will bankrupt half the nations in Western Europe.
It's very interesting how the Europeans - who were responsible for African slavery in the Americas - never want to talk about it and how nobody in the US ever asks any questions about how much the Europeans are going to pay.
The Europeans transported close to five million slaves to Brazil, nearly ten times as many slaves as were transported to the territory that became the US. One can imagine the reparations tally just for that alone to be in the tens of trillions of dollars.
Britain and the Netherlands should just go ahead and write a check equal to 10% of their entire national wealth to African-Americans. That might get things started on the path to justice. All of the assets of the British throne should be liquidated as part of the process and put into the reparations pot.
12.5 million Africans don't end up enslaved and heading to the Americas without the European empires making it happen.
The US owes a lot for its part, no question (what I'm saying is not a reduction in the responsibility of the US, I'm properly adding the Europeans to it). The Europeans owe that much more, including for the other 12 million slaves in the rest of the Americas (which, again, nobody ever wants to talk about re reparations, not under any circumstances). Every discussion is always about the US paying reparations. The Europeans were primarily responsible, the US didn't exist yet and banned the import of slaves as one of its first major actions post formation in January 1808. The US has spent two centuries dealing with the consequences of what the European powers did. We have had to deal with the consequences of their slave trade, while they've skirted it almost entirely.
What consequences have the Europeans suffered over the past two centuries, for what they did? Almost nothing. It's long past time for the Europeans to pay, big time.
It will bankrupt parts of Western Europe. That's how big the reparations number very obviously is.
All big European revolutions after 1789 had claims to stop slavery in overseas territory. So lots of European people have actually fought a to put an end to this long before Americans. Europeans were also victims from slavery from North Africa and Ottoman Empire at the same time (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbary_slave_trade and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_the_Ottoman_Empire).
Kings of the time obviously use this trade as an instrument of power but it was not something that had a meaningful impact on life of ordinary peoples.
You are just inventing an alternate history to find someone to dislike.
Then you add in redlining, and it starts to look systemtic.
So the cure should be appropriate to the disease, make home ownership practical, affordable, and (if you are into reparations) subsidized.
Or at least as subsidized as being a rich person is in the mortgage origination process (via that stealth socio-economic test that is your FICO score).
How would that work?
You make it easier for people to own, then the prices increase. Do you subsidize more? If so, then it's just 2008 again.
https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/collins-v-mnuchi...
I'm talking about building power lines and wastewater plants and shit like that. Encouraging counties to adopt zoning that simplifies residential construction. Etc.
Fun fact: First thing you learn from when moving to USA is to get a credit card immediately. Start working on that score. Even if you don't intend to stay, just in case you change your mind.
My first credit card 5 years ago had a $1000 limit. And only if I kept my bank balance above $1000.
> having a well founded number for what the cost of reparations should be
I just don't understand how someone can talk about a "well-founded number" for reparations in a serious way.
How can you calculate a dollar amount, even within 5 orders of magnitude, for something that happened to millions of people for hundreds of years, affects millions of people today, and we don't have details about any of it?
There are many people who:
- had African ancestors who sold other Africans to slavers
- have a mixture of heritage
- immigrated from Africa long after slavery ended
It's nonsensical to come up with a dollar amount for even a single person, so how can we possibly do it at scale? Should African Americans descended from slave traders be paying reparations to African Americans descended from slaves? Should African Americans pay reparations to Native Americans for living on land that was stolen from them?
There are so few records for any of this, it just seems absolutely insane to me. I am a huge history nerd, and there aren't concrete answers for a lot of things that happened this decade, even with impeccable records.
And to those who will certainly tell me that I’ve benefitted from the modern spoils of slavery: I beg to differ. My first decade in the US was all about climbing out of the pit of “you’re not white enough for us because you didn’t go to a top school”. That shit still haunts me to this day.
This is no different than paying taxes for any number of other social programs, however its a singularly bad place to draw the line.
> Why should I be charged for wrongs - however horrible - in which neither myself nor my ancestors were involved?
Because you aren't being charged. The government that legalized and regulated slavery is being charged. This government is (one of) the legal institutions that permitted slavery and benefitted from slavery that still exists. Therefore they are responsible for satisfying legal claims that are still pending.
> When there was still slavery in America, my people were enslaving members of their own ethnic group back in the old country. Forgive me for not wanting any part of this current dispute.
If you don't want any part of it then you are free to remain neutral in discussions of this issue. By arguing against reparations you are participating in the dispute.
> And to those who will certainly tell me that I’ve benefitted from the modern spoils of slavery: I beg to differ. My first decade in the US was all about climbing out of the pit of “you’re not white enough for us because you didn’t go to a top school”.
That doesn't challenge the assertion that you benefitted from the accumulated capital that was in part built on the forced labor of slaves.
> That shit still haunts me to this day.
I'm truly sorry for your traumatic experience.
p.s. I've upvoted this comment because while I disagree with the substance, it raises important arguments that need to be responded to and the comment itself contributes to the discussion. I'd like to ask down voters to consider why they feel this comment needs to be suppressed because I disagree with their opinion on the value of the comment and its contribution to the discussion.
Why should you be a contributor to the wrongs of this country's past? Simple, because you are a member/resident of this country, and this country benefits from them. I could be wrong, but I don't see any complaints about paying of any war debt accrued by the US from entering WW II or the Vietnam war, but you also pay towards that. It's accepted that current us citizens who benefit from the previous actions of the country, also have responsiblity for the previous decisions of the country.
An enormous part of the reason why this country is so financially successful is because of slavery and stealing wages for so long. That's why the US was an agricultural powerhouse, that's why the north industrialized so quickly, that's why we became a major economic power in the 20th century.
And even you yourself admit you see all of those benefits, and reap them. You came to this country presumably for those exact reasons. You're as you say an immigrant, and the reason you chose to come here, and not stay where you were was because of exactly the benefits this country accrued by leaning heavily on slavery during it's critical period.
The fact you had negative experiences while here (and I'm sorry you did), doesn't invalidate or outweigh the fact that you came here to benefit from America's benefits, and that you have benefited from them.
American education does an incredibly poor job of covering the financial windfall of slaver in the US. And (extremely reasonably) people from other countries who move here never learned about it back home. To give some perspective, the value of "human capital" held as chattel slaves, was more valuable than all industrial and transportation capital in the entire country.[1] That's how much value was present. I'd highly recommend anyone who hasn't really read about slavery to really read about it. Unfortunately there was an intentional concerted effort in the middle of last century to downplay the scope and impact of slavery in the US and a lot of those vestiges are present because it was very successful.
There is way more here than the simplistic arguments that are made online in chat forums. I'd recommend looking into it. While not ideal, this essay is a decent place to start if you're curious. [2]
[1] - https://slate.com/business/2013/07/america-s-slave-wealth.ht... [2] - https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-cas...
'Slavery made economic sense' is a narrative that, until recently, you would only have heard from the likes of "Black-Israelite" conspiracy peddlers. Let's not give credence to such unscientific and misleading claims.
Also, when slavery was at it's height, Virginia, South Carolina, and Georgia were far more prosperous regions than they eventually became post-civil war. The south in general was more financially well-off during the time of slavery than it has been since - and you can read primary sources from the time and region saying as much. I can point you towards primary sources from elected officials of the time period saying as much - that they knew slavery was evil, but they also knew it was the source of economic and social stability that they enjoyed. The institution of slavery itself did not directly lead to economic fall of the southern states - rather it was the tensions from having a nation with both slaveholding states and non-slaveholding states, and the south's extremely strong incentive to protect their advantageous status even at the cost of war.
When the war did happen, the civil-war-related destruction that happened in the south (ie, the burning of Atlanta), had an equally dramatic impact and the outcome that we see today. Decades of slavery were certainly impactful, but so were the effects of the civil war, reconstruction, the great migration, and later cycles of industrialization, which tended to reach the south last due to network effects (there was no impetus to branch out from the skilled workers available up north... until unions took hold at least). All of those effects are more recent, and more relevant to the economic conditions today.
Additionally, the cultural regressiveness you speak of is closely tied to the Great Awakening and the particularly conservative religious denominations that became regionally dominant - and notably, these denominations had, and still have strong pull on southern white and black communities alike. The south actually had a reputation for being quite a fun and "sinful" place before that. My own state, NC, founded the first public university in the world (UNC Chapel Hill) - a paradoxically very progressive institution - despite being founded by slavers during a period of widespread slavery.
So understanding inequality and culture that exists in South, both now and then, and today is a complex thing. I would strongly caution trying to reduce it down that completely.
I think you have been given a very skewed view of the role that slavery played in our country's economic past. There have been long efforts to downplay the role of slavery, and there still are. Cotton was the US's #1 export from ~1800 through 1930 due to slavery, and then continuing into the extremely exploitive sharecropping. That's the core period our country developed - and the single export that brought in the most capital into this country. That continuous inflow of capital is also what made New York City the financial powerhouse it became. [1]
Slavery wasn't a just for the few. One of the number one ways that people mislead with slavery is by trying to show the percentage of the slaves divided by the total population in 1860. That's extremely misleading, as individuals didn't own slaves, families did. The same way measuring what percentage of families own their home is accurate, not individuals that own the home, as only one in the family typically owns the home.
There were 15 slave states in 1860. Of the top 10 states, in all of them at least 25% of families owned slaves. With the top two states South Carolina and Mississippi topping out at 46% and 49% of families. Almost half the families owned slaves. And that's ignoring everyone else in the south who didn't own slaves, but participated in the slave trade - and those who rented slaves for labor but didn't technically "own them". [2]
On top of that of the top 5 states owning slaves, enslaved people ranged from over 40% of the population in Georgia, to almost 60% of the entire population of the state of South Carolina. [3]
Slavery and the white supremacy views it was built on, were an absolutely core part of the first part of this country's existence - culturally, economically, politically. Slavery wasn't a niche occurrence only for the elite - and especially so for the white South. It was disgusting, it was violent, it was immoral and it was everywhere. It didn't play a minimal role. The idea that a few wealthy elite slave owners "tricked" the rest of the southern population to go to war for them is a farce. The entire south gathered up to go to war because white supremacy was the culture of their land.
It's taken this country a long time to try to undo that work - and we still haven't finished...
But to downplay Slavery is to also downplay what was taken from Black Americans, and how much that theft built this early country.
1. https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cr... 2. https://www.snopes.com/news/2019/08/07/percent-of-whites-own... 3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1860_United_States_census
Wait, you're making a very different claim than what I was talking about. I agree that it probably made some sense to have some kind of plantation economy in the South, and that, as a matter of fact the plantations the South did have were based on enslaved labor. And for sure, there are interesting debates to have about the unacknowledged contribution that's inherent in that. But slavery was never a necessary part of that successful economy; indeed, it's quite physically possible to have plantations that employ free laborers as opposed to relying on slaves!
I likely do not understand what you mean here, because a casual reading of this seems ridiculous. Most white people do not go to top schools either.
On the flip side, if one were to list factors that play a role in becoming decently successful, going to a top school is fairly low on that list (as in most successful people didn't go to one either).
I'm probably not interpreting the comment as you intended, though.
It's almost as hard to come up with a fair number on how much help a given person should get due to being adversely affected by the pandemic. Yet that's not seen as a barrier to provide money.
> Should African Americans pay reparations to Native Americans for living on land that was stolen from them?
As a collective? Yes.
Absolutely not. That is ludicrous.
There are measurable effects to the pandemic: changes in income, medical expenses, etc. There is certainly an emotional toll for even the best-off people, but no one is proposing paying people for emotional pain. It's all about getting them through this exceptional (and temporary) time.
Reparations for slavery are about things that can't be measured (generations of lost opportunities, not months), immense/immeasurable pain, and a long tail of policies (like racist zoning laws) that outlived slavery by 100+ years.
Your analogy to the pandemic actually makes it even more stark how difficult it is to calculate something so large, complex, and obscured by the fog of history.
> As a collective? Yes.
OK, let's say you do this. Let's say you decide the amount that a particular official/organized tribe should get is $1T. You don't have to decide who gets the money because the tribe has already done all that legwork for you and has an official roll.
Now how do you decide who pays? Do you try to trace the heritage of every American and determine when/how they took tribal land?
Maybe not. So do you just take it out of social programs? The same social programs that are intended to fix some of the cycles of poverty that people descended from slaves are relying on to get them some equity?
Well, you can't do that either. So how do you decide who pays, and who decides who pays?
Eventually you get into the business of punishing or rewarding people for their ancestors' crimes, which is not at all different from forcing a murderer's child to give money to his victim's family. If you look at it in a microcosm, it seems completely insane because it is.
Your ancestry definitely has a big effect on your life, but that's not the same as being culpable for their crimes, and it's not deterministic. My family was fantastically wealthy until my dad's generation, and then they were poor. Should my dad, as a completely broke 25-year-old, have had to pay reparations to someone for his ancestors' wealth (which I'm sure was gained unfairly)?
If it can't be measured, it should be omitted. Nobody is suggesting making up random numbers based off feelings.
> Should my dad, as a completely broke 25-year-old, have had to pay reparations to someone for his ancestors' wealth (which I'm sure was gained unfairly)?
First off, if your dad is actually 25, you are fantastically intelligent for your age (and props for that). But also, there are ways to use math to make things fair. For instance: progressive taxation based off wealth. Lower income pay a small percentage (probably less than 1%) while higher income pays 1-2%. And given that slavery lasted ~90 years, so too could the timeline for paying reparations.
There are solutions here. Nobody is saying do it all at once and make people starve. But there is a way to pay off -- if nothing else -- the debt of unpaid hours.
It's better late than never, and if there is one thing the world respects about Germany, it's that they owned up. We can too.
Honestly, I'd be willing to say this could be one of the best cost vs benefit long-term PR investments the US could make on the world stage. But only if it's done right, and not as a punitive thing.
Then reparations for slavery are completely off the table. You can't measure the economic output of someone who died 150-400 years ago. There are major disputes about what a human life is worth now, when we know every possible detail about them.
> First off, if your dad is actually 25, you are fantastically intelligent for your age
I think you missed where I said "have had to pay" (meaning "when he was 25").
> But there is a way to pay off -- if nothing else -- the debt of unpaid hours.
Let's assume, first, that people are owed money that rightfully belonged to their great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandparents. I would disagree with that, but I'll leave that aside for now.
How much are the following worth, in today's dollars?
- 1 hour of planting crops at 3pm on a sunny day in Alabama in February of 1802
- 1 hour of planting crops at 10am on a cloudy day in Georgia in March of 1791
- 1 hour of breastfeeding a slaver's baby
- 1 hour of cooking food for a 10-person family
Are those worth $5? Surely not, because minimum wage is higher than that. But that is what a lot of undocumented immigrants get paid for the same work, so maybe $5 is correct?
Or is it worth $50, because those people's bodies were in constant pain from beatings, over-work, malnutrition, and poor health care?
Let's say we settle on $25/hour. If we divide it up between that person's 1,000+ descendants, it's not much money. But then we have to consider the interest! Should we use the national rate of inflation? Should we just peg it to the adjusted dollar? Should we assume that money would've been invested in gold?
I think you see my point. There is no way to come up with a formula for any of this that makes any sense. And then once you get to the end and decide on a number, how do you decide who pays it? Should recent immigrants pay reparations for slavery? Should a rural, white meth addict lying in their own vomit pay reparations for all of their "privileges"?
It makes far, far more sense to just have a strong society safety net and not try to figure out what events 100, 200, or 500 years ago resulted in someone's current situation.
> if there is one thing the world respects about Germany, it's that they owned up. We can too
The example of Germany supports my point. Here are the major differences:
- Germany was forced to pay most of its reparations by the Allies
- Planning for German reparations began a few months after the war ended
- Many Germans were enslaved by the Allies as a form of reparation, and those people were then paid reparations
- Much of the rest of Germany's reparations were paid directly to Holocaust survivors[1] or their spouses or to Israel, not to millions of their descendants hundreds of years later[2]
The best number I can find for the total reparations paid by Germany is ~€60B, which translates to €4.3k for every living Jew (~14M) since 1945. I know that's not perfect, because some Holocaust survivors are dead and many living Jews are not descended from one, but bear with me.
If you look at that number yearly by person, you get €57/person/year.
That is not a meaningful amount of money compared to the consequences of slavery, even if you change it by a couple of orders of magnitude. Germany arguably owes Jewish people trillions of euros, not billions.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/world/europe/for-60th-yea...
2. https://www.jewishvirtua...
There's obviously a lot of tolerance on these estimates, but even with extreme tolerances $0 seems a bit low.
> There is no way to come up with a formula for any of this that makes any sense
The first step would be having a serious discussion about every question you raised. They're all good questions, and with some amount of investigation, yield closer and closer answers.
This is a daunting task -- no doubt -- but I see no reason why you should be opposed to it, or assume it's impossible.
Correct.
> This is a daunting task -- no doubt -- but I see no reason why you should be opposed to it, or assume it's impossible.
I'm opposed to trying to adjudicate a distant and poorly-documented past in order to take money from one group and give it to another. That's why the best estimate, for me, is $0. The first thing to do is to do no more harm, and as we see from the enslaved-Germans example, reparations can end up being another injustice that needs to be repaired.
I am not opposed to fixing the unfair deficits caused by slavery, but I don't think we need to (or that it's ethical to) look at history to do that. We can simplify it to, "Who was born with fewer opportunities? Who has fewer opportunities now? Who is discriminated against now?"
In many cases, the most deeply affected parties will overlap with the people affected by the legacy of slavery. But we'll also cover people who had generations of near-slavery (e.g. white Appalachian sharecropper who became timber workers and then coal miners), as well as people are suffering deeply from modern atrocities like the opioid crisis.
It's not clear that reparations are a good idea in practice, or something to be "achieved," or even strived for (they might do more harm in practice to the group they intend to protect, as many well-intentioned and politically extremist ideologies do) not to mention any considerations involving whether it would be possible to sustain, or affordable, etc.
Be careful with your thinking if you care about being even-handed with your empathy. Being empathetic is a fantastic thing, but don't allow cynical people to hijack your empathy.
This is a very patronizing argument. If someone breaks into your bank account and steals your cash, then later is caught. There is no valid line of reasoning that goes "well I'll only give the money back if you tell me how you plan to spend it first". "Oh, you planned to spend it all on bubble gum and sweets? Then no I don't need to give it back, because I think that might do you more harm than good."
Argue on the merits of the topic, not based on knowing what's best for people.
So, yeah, the merits are kinda low to.
So my dad goes and steals your dad's land. He give me the land as his son. I split it in half and give half to a friend of mine. The investigation occurs and determine this land was stolen and should be returned. I don't think the argument of, "sorry won't return it because I didn't steal it, my dad did" holds much water. Nor the argument of, "nope I won't return it because a friend of mine that has nothing to do with the theft is benefiting from it" holds much water either as reasons for your family to not get their land returned.
And related, possession of stolen goods is a fairly common legal concept. Regardless of penalty, at minimum once discovered the goods are returned, even if they'd previously be sold or given to someone else.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Possession_of_stolen_goods#Uni...
Will there later be reparations for the reparations taken now from uninvolved parties since the point of reparations is that stealing labor and wealth is wrong and must be corrected via payment in later generations? If we take from them we're perpetuating the same sort of theft? I agree if we were omniscient it would be "right," but we're far far from that.
Also, let's say there's a reparation payment, but it doesn't rectify inequality, because there are more systemic problems at play, like local tax revenue funding local schools, so poor towns have poor schools. After "reparations," you don't think voters will think "we paid reparations, stop complaining."
If the purpose is "righting a wrong" I think the tool is too blunt and will create many more wrongs.
If the purpose is to "fix inequality", I think it won't address the underlying structural problems, but will "check the box" and absolve responsibilities.
2) Second and third-generation descendents of slaves are still alive. In other words, people who conceivably would have benefited directly from their grandparents or great-grandparents receiving substantial reparations.
3) Reparations have been called for for more recent attacks on Black American rights and economic wellbeing; discriminatory and destructive public policy that dates back decades but that also goes up to, at least, the predatory lending practices backed by the government in the run-up to the 2008 financial crisis, which saw black-owned wealth in America cut in half.
These are important considerations that impact directly on the form that reparations "should" take. However they are orthogonal to the merits of the claim for reparations.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/groundbreaking-exhibi...
The re-enactors are all fantastic and very knowledgeable. It’s unsettling talking to a black re-enactor who’s firmly in-character as a slave, which I suppose is the point:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=MVFdsqQby9o
The average middle/upper class person today is the same, living on the fruit of foreign slave and subsistence laborers for clothing, food, and toys, and eating from the suffering of factory animals.
I'm pretty sure Washington's will freed his slaves on Martha's death because he didn't want to break up slave families (her slaves were part of her dowry and as such could not be manumitted so easily at will). Manumission law was quite complicated, and IIRC Washington himself lobbied to liberalize Virginia's law somewhat so that it was not as difficult to free slaves.
One of the most appalling aspects of US slavery was that it did break up families quite often. Washington doing this to keep the families together is hardly evil compared to what the alternative would have been.
EDIT: The parent post has grated on me a bit more. Why are we so arrogant to assume we know the whole context of what was going on two or three centuries ago? Every time I review the literature of historical situations, the richness and complexity is remarkable. We tend to think of our time as "more complex," but I think we are comparing the complex reality we experience with the simple stories we have been told (and continue to tell ourselves) about the past. In reality, much of the past was comparably complex to our own lives today.
Too bad they feel the need to run their own platform instead of contributing to wikidata. They're using the same software, and the data falls squarely within Wikidata's scope.
Even worse that they feel the need to stamp this with a CC license. Not only does this make it incompatible with the CC0/public domain requirement. I consider it borderline offensive to assert copyright over the basic facts of someone's life: https://enslaved.org/record/person/Q405665
This project obviously involves a lot of work. And, taken as a whole, some of that work is creative in nature. But individual records are not.
Luckily, US law does not recognise copyright for databases.
However, the beauty of using a linked data platform is of course that it's easy to link back to other sources, like Wikidata. I could definitely see that in the future Wikidata could do an import of many of these items, or link properly to them using a new property.
I do agree that it's unfortunate that they're licensing everything under CC-BY instead of CC-Zero.
I disagree with the idea that this data is inferior in some way to what is expected for inclusion in WD. Their sourcing seems to be impeccable, better than maybe 80 % of WD at the statement-level ("Imported from cebwiki") and certainly adequate on the item-level.
Data on individual slaves also strikes me as far more useful for the possibilities that Wikidata offers than academic papers. The latter are important in their own right, but metadata on journal articles is of little use unless you're studying impact factors, academic careers, or the rise and fall of academic disciplines.
Structured data on slavery neatly connects with geography, economics, culture, and really any aspect society today. I imagine there were changes in regions of origin over time, for example, and it'd be interesting to see if these can still be found in, say, regional culinary preferences, language, or music.
And under US law, the copyright on a database would apply to the collective work and not to the individual facts, so your frustration and analysis are sort of strange (they can't copyright the facts and whether the collective work would gain copyright is an open question without an obvious answer).
The data only falls within Wikidata's scope if "every single enslaved person" can be described using reliable sources. That's a very dubious position. And Wikidata has scaling problems already due to their scholarly-article data - but at least that comes with plenty of surrounding info about authors, topics, citations etc. etc. that's uniquely suited to a general-purpose knowledge base. Can one make the same claim about the micro-level archival history of slavery in the antebellum U.S.?
etymonline.com/word/spare
http://tiny.cc/2ip6tz
Which gives us "spare made", "well made", and "well set" as descriptions.
A similar "ethnography" (http://tiny.cc/3ip6tz) gives me this:
"Although from their wiry and spare conformation of body, the Villees look tall, they are not so in reality."
Which I would think implies thin.
I think the resistance to reparations comes from folks like me who don't see a reason we should pay anything. Most of my ancestors are German immigrants to the northeast US who arrived after slavery was abolished. The remainder were poor Scotts Irish who continued to live in poverty in northern Appalachia.
I understand, but do not agree with, the logical hoops many jump through to justify indebtedness to all current Americans. I also do not think direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America.
If there is no paper trail saying that you are a beneficiary of human trafficking, you will not pay reparations. In order to understand this, you and also the justice system need to evolve to see the world more granularly than just "race". Slaves had names, they had families, they had descendants. Those descendants have legal standing in the most basic sense: they have been deprived of property. Justice demands that those stolen assets be returned to the rightful, legal owners.
Forget "resolving racism". That's a red herring. Just return the stolen property to the rightful owners. That's a much more concrete, actionable goal.
Edit: please post response instead of downvoting. Why should this comment disappear?
The assets changing hands will be the federal government paying descendants some sum of money taken from its tax base. And federal taxes are paid by everyone, even those of us whose families arrived after slavery and Jim Crow was abolished.
This is why some people are adamantly against reparations.
What is the (broadly consistent) legal doctrine for expropriating living people's property on the basis of their ancestors sins?
How do you draw the line around legitimate grounds for litigating a criminal grievance from the past? How do you establish the appropriate damages?
I ask these important contextualizing questions not to imply that reparation aren't possible or are necessarily a bad idea, but rather to illustrate that the attitude of "this is easy, just do the obvious thing" is not going to be sufficient here. And when the comment begins with asserted speculation about what enacting reparations "would most likely" involve... I get very suspicious.
And while we are at it, what about the descendants of the Japanese Americans who were imprisoned during World War 2 in Colorado and other states?
What about the children who worked in sweat shops and coal mines during the 19th and early 20th centuries, many of whom died young? Their relatives should be compensated. What about the descendants of the Tuskeegee Syphilis experiment? What about people affected by lead in drinking water pipes? Lead solder for drinking water wasn’t banned until 1986, so there are generations of people and their descendants who have suffered.
I can go on and on and our country will be bankrupt before we’re done. But hey, at least you’ve taken responsibility for the actions of others.
Anyway, your comment reminded me of that.
I'm less familiar with lead in water. If that was just lack of science knowledge, that's different than, say, deliberately putting lead in water to make it easier to profit off the people drinking it.
Lead pipes and lead-based solder is just one example and if you don’t like that example because it happened due to “lack of science”, I can come up with others. My point is that there are countless atrocities in America’s past, recent and not so recent.
How can we compensate everyone who deserves it and how can we prioritize one group (e.g. descendants of slaves) over another (e.g. descendants of Native American civilians who were slaughtered at one of the many massacres)?
We can’t and shouldn’t.
you're looking at this backwards. They both have claims pending. We can pay both of them if we choose to.
"yes we can" -US President Barack Obama
Isn't that a shame, well at least we could then hold our heads high.
> But hey, at least you’ve taken responsibility for the actions of others.
The title is encumbered. For the same reason that laundering money doesn't make the original theft disappear, its not ethical or moral to benefit financially from atrocities then launder the money and pretend that nothing can be done.
Are you really so sure that once the ill-gotten gains are subtracted from this country's wealth there would be nothing left? In that case how could you ignore such widespread and lucrative immoral heritage?
I already do.
Spoken by Abraham Lincoln and inscribed on his memorial:
"Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."
This conflates two separate issues. One is about a financial debt owed to people. This is owed for forced labor and land thefts which continued into the 20th century. Like the OP said, for the most part this is well documented. Debts are repaid in cash or like goods.
Racism is a separate topic, which I agree should be approached differently.
Conflating the two issues is not helpful for understanding best approaches.
If you ask, many Black families will tell you about these thefts, which again are in the public record as title transfers.
Here's an example from the 20th: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce%27s_Beach . Events like this were common for decades in the 20th century. Even if you just limited to quasi-legal property theft via eminent domain, there's billions of documentable dollars owed and easily tracked. There's absolutely no reason not to give the land back to those families, or a cash payment for its fair market value.
Do we repay them as well? And how many trillions (since that’s there value of such land now, with or without interest)
We live in a legal regime where it's not even permissible to take sunken treasure that's near countries, even after centuries at sea. But somehow land stolen from indigenous people and Black people more recently is somehow unrecoverable? We need to at least write down in our laws the rationale for this.
More immediately pertinent: why were these thefts substantially different from those the Supreme Court ruled against in Oklahoma?
If we're not willing to at least do that much, yeah we should just give it back. The alternative is choosing lawlessness, which is not something we are bound to do.
We don't have to worry about converting to dollars because we can just return title to the land itself. The Supreme Court did the same this year in Oklahoma, so it wouldn't even be unprecedented.
https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-court-oklahoma/us-suprem...
There's no "logical hoops." It's a concrete and straightforward argument. Black and Native Americans are differently situated in a way that shows up starkly in the data: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353
Most distinct subgroups of Americans are converging with whites in terms of income over generations:
> White and Hispanic children have fairly similar rates of intergenerational mobility.... Because of these modest intergenerational gaps, the income gap between Hispanic and white Americans is shrinking across generations
> The changing patterns of intergenerational mobility for Asians make it more difficult to predict the trajectory of their incomes, but Asians appear likely to converge to income levels comparable to white Americans in the long run.
The two exceptions are Black and Native Americans:
> In contrast to Hispanics and Asians, there are large intergenerational gaps between black and American Indian children relative to white children.
> The large intergenerational gaps for blacks and American Indians relative to whites lead to disparities in earnings for these groups that persist across generations. If mobility rates do not change, our estimates imply a steady-state gap in family income ranks between whites and American Indians of 18 percentiles, and a white-black gap of 19 percentiles. These values are very similar to the empirically observed gaps for children in our sample, suggesting that blacks and American Indians are currently close to the steady-state income distributions[.]
We tend to think of equality for Black Americans getting better over time, and while that has happened in the legal arena, it hasn't happened at all economically: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/06/09/872402262/what...
> While there have been some gains in income since the Kerner Commission, "in terms of the wealth gap, there's been almost no progress," says UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, who studies wealth inequality. "The average wealth of African Americans was 15% of the average wealth of whites in 1963 — and it's still around 15% today."
In 1963, the schools in my Maryland county were still segregated. They were desegregated in 1966. But half a century later, Black-white income and wealth gaps haven't changed at all. The founder of BET, Robert Johnson, has made a good capitalist case for reparations: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/bets-robert-johnson-calls-fo...
> “Damages is a normal factor in a capitalist society for when you have been deprived for certain rights,” he said. “If this money goes into pockets like the [coronavirus] stimulus checks ... that money is going to return back to the economy” in the form of consumption. There will also be more black-owned businesses, he added.
Arguments about whether white people today, or immigrants who came here after a certain time, should pay are misplaced. The United States, an entity that is legally distinct from its people, was culpable for enabling slavery and segregation. It can be held liable and forced to pay for its part. The United States government is still paying pensions owed to child...
Ignoring for a while a bunch of practical (though probably solvable to a large degree) problems with this, like on what basis exactly we decide who is paid, and how much are the damages exactly, a more interesting question to me is: what's next? Does this settle the claim completely? Do we consider the descendants of slaves, who get this settlement, to be made whole, and any further claims of the descendants of slaves are to be dismissed with prejudice? Are we supposed to no longer give any racial preferences and special treatment (beyond ensuring equal treatment that's a right of all American people regardless of their ancestry) to the descendants of slaves, given that any of their claims are settled in full? And finally, what do we do if the settlement does not close the gap completely? Are we then allowed to throw up our hands in the air, and say that the United States has settled its claims, and is not obligated to entertain any new ones beyond ensuring that those of actual unequal treatment are properly litigated?
My opinion here is that while settling the liability might look desirable from certain moral point of view, I sincerely doubt that it will bring a long term resolution of the problem attributed to the legacy of slavery. What I expect is that once settlement is paid up, everything about the issue will soon go back to exactly where it has been. This is not an argument against doing such settlement, but rather against high hopes for any positive long lasting change it is purported to bring about.
The way we pay for everything else—we have the Fed print money.
That would be the idea, yes.
> Do we consider the descendants of slaves, who get this settlement, to be made whole, and any further claims of the descendants of slaves are to be dismissed with prejudice?
It would depend on the specifics of the settlement, this is actually seriously discussed among reparations advocates. Its not all about writing checks to individuals. People want to put money in a fund that makes small business loans to qualified individuals.
> Are we supposed to no longer give any racial preferences and special treatment (beyond ensuring equal treatment that's a right of all American people regardless of their ancestry) to the descendants of slaves, given that any of their claims are settled in full?
That would do a lot to put an end to the racial animus in this country.
> And finally, what do we do if the settlement does not close the gap completely? Are we then allowed to throw up our hands in the air, and say that the United States has settled its claims, and is not obligated to entertain any new ones beyond ensuring that those of actual unequal treatment are properly litigated?
I'm not sure anyone is obligated to do anything but these questions will need to be addressed and conclusive answers may elude us but the existence of these questions doesn't invalidate the claim.
> My opinion here is that while settling the liability might look desirable from certain moral point of view, I sincerely doubt that it will bring a long term resolution of the problem attributed to the legacy of slavery. What I expect is that once settlement is paid up, everything about the issue will soon go back to exactly where it has been. This is not an argument against doing such settlement, but rather against high hopes for any positive long lasting change it is purported to bring about.
This is a good point and it may depend on the form of the settlement.
Did you read the article? There are two people being paid (as of 2013), and they are the daughters of Civil War vets. So what’s the problem?
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
How many people in society 1) were in a position to redline or seriously influence redlining, 2) called for and actively supported it, or 3) even knew about it?
Even if someone's ancestors arrived post-slavery and pre-civil rights movement (forget a specific overhanging issue like redlining), would you significantly attribute the state and dynamics of American society to them? What about establishing your own sense of how this society works and establishing your own economic beachhead. Are you immediately supposed to jump in to the oldest and thorniest and most contentious issues of your new home country as if you knew what you were doing?
Let's extend that argument then. Why isn't there a strong, unequivocal history of latin immigrants fighting hard for reparations for slavery? Or asian immigrants? Do those immigrant communities also deserve part-blame for not fighting redlining in the 70s?
Would it be anathema do admit some white people in America had absolutely nothing to do with the plight of black people in America? Can the leftish political discourse bear this weighty notion, or would it break under its bulk?
But, to your points, there are historical forces that bring people good/bad fortune - including racism in America. How do you decide which ones are worthy of ex post facto adjustment on a society-wide level? How do you balance and justify that to the orthogonal part of your population; the part that had no role in the history but would still be impacted by the expenditure of communal resources? Keeping in mind here, the wider the net you cast for who need adjustment, the bigger the impact on the orthogonal population.
All I have to contribute is the fact that whatever the impact of slavery was, it wasn't confined to our distant past. This country practiced economic apartheid well into my own lifetime, and the aftereffects are impossible to miss.
I live near Division and Chicago, just outside of Chicago in Oak Park. If I cross my alley and the street behind it, Austin Blvd, I'm in the Chicago neighborhood of Austin, where, if I'm a teenaged Black kid, my likelihood of being murdered shoots up dramatically. And Austin is a middle-class neighborhood (a typical Black household making $75k/yr lives in a higher-poverty neighborhood than a white family making $40k/yr). What changes when you cross that street is that you cross a famous redlining boundary.
A few years back you could easily get a map of Chicago redlining without consulting an encyclopedia or doing any research; you just needed to look at Uber's Chicago service map. The neighborhoods they wouldn't commit to serving were uncannily the redlined neighborhoods of the 1960s.
It wasn't because Uber was trying to perpetuate the practice, but because redlining ravaged west- and south-side Chicago, and we are nowhere close to digging our way out of it.
Lots of different groups of people have been economically disadvantaged in the United States, but I don't think anything like this, at this scale, with this impact. It fucked my city --- the best city in the country --- right up. It fucked up Detroit. It fucked up STL. It's a big deal and we should all be freshly furious about it.
I agree that individual Americans shouldn't have to pay anything. All former slaveowners are long dead. These claims are properly levied against the government and whatever other institutions still exist (universities and corporations come to mind).
> I also do not think direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America.
You'll be relieved to learn that there are proposals for reparations that do not ask for payments to individuals.
After visiting Africa I think will also help people expand their mind set about the world and that Africa is not a bad place and has lot of opportunities.
Africa has a lot of future, plenty of growth. China knows this and has invested a lot into Africa.
Taiwan does something similar with a paid trip to visit Taiwan to learn about the culture and history and create business connection between the people.
It would not cost anything as well, you just reallocate aid money.
To a degree European Africans have been doing this for a long time, plenty of YouTube videos about people moving to Africa to start a business. Fun to watch too. Many of these European Africans have positions of power in the government or private sector.
Thoughts?
This might trigger some people. If you used a term like "ancestral region(s)" or something, it might've been less triggering.
Firstly, the word "homeland" is not one typically associated with one's country of ancestry. I've rarely ever heard someone use that term. On the contrary, I have heard people say "my ancestors came from X country", or like "my great-grandparents came from Italy". The term "homeland" is usually used for the region where a person's current home is. And this not to mention that even a first-generation immigrant who has lived in X country for a long time, could consider X country to be his true homeland.
Secondly, there's an implicit assumption here that "Africa" is the "homeland" of African Americans. I don't need to explain why that's troubling.
Thirdly, many of my "African American" friends are of thoroughly mixed ancestry. One such friend did a 23andMe test, and it turned out he had 54% European ancestry (even though physically "he looks black"), 30-something% African ancestry, and a smattering of other ancestry groups (including Native American) for the rest. It would be inaccurate and inappropriate to consider him as someone "of African ancestry" (even though he looks somewhat so). The phenotypes a person's genome expressed do not necessarily correspond to a person's actual genetic ancestry.
I could go into more reasons as to why it's not a great term to use, but I think these three reasons make a good case.
----
> get a lump sum, if they start a business or invest in land
While the underlying motivation behind your idea is pretty decent (and a fairly lofty goal I might add); I, for one, would rather prefer direct foreign aid (not loans, but literal foreign aid grants with no expectation of return). There's too much of a risk of corruption with your idea, and bad incentives are baked right into it. Just increase the current foreign aid to developing countries across the board. Do something like the Marshall Plan, where in exchange for free-market economic policies, we directly invest in education, infrastructure, and other things in developing countries.
On a secondary note, domestically, I would rather focus on just getting some kind of actual, concrete, meaningful (maybe financial) reparations bill passed through Congress. That alone seems like a huge and almost insurmountable political challenge, and I want to see that tackled somehow. We want to improve the quality of life and access to opportunity for the poorest economic classes in the US, so they can pursue their ambitions and dreams from a similar starting point as more well-off Americans. Achieving this alone would be a huuuge deal in and of itself.
A famous quote: "broke is temporary, poor is eternal"
Tongue in cheek, if we had a program of cash payments I suspect that TV manufacturers and car dealers would have record years.
> Black Americans are more likely than either whites or Hispanics to be the third generation Americans. Seventy-five percent of black Americans indicate they are at least the third generation born in the United States, compared to 58% of whites and 13% of Hispanics.
(And "Hispanic" literally means "from Spain". Very few Spaniards crossed The Atlantic before Columbus.)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Colonization_Societ...
Later Marcus Garvey motivated another 'Back to Africa' movement. As I understand it the, the movement did not send very many blacks back to Africa.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Garvey
We have to wonder, do Africans want Black Americans to come colonize their homelands?
Most of African Europeans a)know what country their ancestors are from, b) have direct links to their relatives in Africa.
> Africa has a lot of future, plenty of growth. China knows this and has invested a lot into Africa.
I think this is exactly Africa's main issue: being seen first foremost as a land of resources and economic ventures. You go to the Americas/Europe/Asia/Oceania to visit, and Africa to make money/for "humanitarian aid". Things may evolve when they change to "X has invested a lot in Africans".
I would say — from a European perspective — a baffling number of white Americans cling on to a European cultural identity. It feels to an outsider like many Americans want to be American + something else. Many/most black Americans don’t have this luxury, and my hot take is that Kwanza and other pan-African neo traditions seek to fill this gap? As a counter-example, I lived in the anglophone Caribbean for many years, and it always felt like there was a strong sense of national identity there, very distinct from trying to associate with Africa in any way. I guess I’d also expect 2nd/3rd generation African immigrants to America to maintain their cultural identity — I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone with Ethiopian heritage describe themselves as anything other than Ethiopian whatever their passport or recent ancestry
Sure—why not set an example by starting your own fund?
This passage is by an enslaved (interviewed by the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission) in Kentucky, 1963, named Charlotte "I belong to Gen. Thos. Strange. I have two boys. I pay a dollar a week to him, and support myself and children, and pay my house rent. I have been hiring myself for over fifteen years; I get along very well, and keep the hire paid up. You couldn't pay me to live at home, if I could help myself. My master doesn't supply me with anything -- not even a little medicine -- no more than if I didn't belong to him. Each of my children pays him $2.00 a week. They work in tobacconist shops. I support them. One of my boys is thirteen years old and the other seventeen. They get $2 a week pay. If the boys make more than $2 a week a piece I get what is over; if they don't make that, I have to make it good to him. He has got to have it Saturday night, sure. I have not had good health. Sometimes I am ailing, but I always keep up enough to try to make my wages. I have only one room, and pay three dollars a month for it. I live by washing."
What is the "slavery we know today"?
Do you mean "American slavery as we understand it today", or "Slavery in the current day"? If the former, then how is the passage you quoted different from our understanding of American slavery? Do you mean to say it was better, worse, or in some other way different?
Have you actually compared the two? You'll notice one is far more insidious if you do.
Also, don't conveniently leave out the inflation of the world reserve fiat global enslavement system.
I know we can always opt to live in the woods, and barter, but you've got to take both into consideration to honestly consider what it is I said.
“Not all suffered the same Holocaust we know today. It’s just important to remember/question how diverse people’s Holocaust experiences actually were.”
Maybe it’s just me but these type of statements seem to miss the point. Given the deplorable state of American understanding of slavery, Reconstruction, the state-sanctioned apartheid that only ended a few decades ago, and all its effects that continue to reverberate, I don’t think “a nuanced understanding” of slavery is really what’s called for. The evidence suggests that most Americans never even learned the ABCs of slavery and its effects.
Yeah, obviously we need to fix the appalling state of our Civil War and slavery history in this country.