I was listening to NPR a few days ago with Mr. Coates who wrote a piece in The Atlantic regarding reparations. You can listen and/or read the transcript here. In this segment, Mr. Coates mentioned that John Conyers (D-MI) has put H.R 40 every year since 1989. H.R 40 is a piece of legislation to study the era of enslavement, the impact of slavery on African-Americans, and recommendations for redress. Sadly, both Democrats and Republicans have refused put H.R 40 to a vote. I don’t understand why. Why prevent a piece of legislation that simply aims to study the impact of slavery on African-Americans? What are Democrats and Republicans afraid of?
Indeed, if the legacy of slavery has no bearing on present day African-Americans, such a study would be a vindication. It would show that era of slavery and Jim Crow has no effect on its descendants and that it was simply a “bump in the road”. However, by refusing to put H.R 40 to a vote, it comes off that Democrats and Republicans are afraid to come to terms with the legacy of slavery.
They’re afraid of a political backlash. The idea of reparations is not politically popular among either party.
I think it’s a good bill and it should be put to a vote. It would inevitably fail that vote, but it’s still a good bill.
Here is the article from Ta-Nehisi Coates, by the way (it’s quite long and very impressive, IMO). Coates does a good job of explaining how the legacy of slavery and subsequent discrimination (such as housing discrimination) still has very significant effects on black people. He does a good job of explaining how, for most of our history, white supremacy was absolutely integral to American history and policy. He also does a good job of explaining why it’s necessary to discuss these things and how it could be very positive for the whole country, even if reparations ultimately don’t happen.
Why would you put something to a vote in Congress that you knew would fail? When that is done, it’s usually because the party in power wants to use the votes against its opposition in the next election.
In that case, you’d expect the Republicans to be more sympathetic to such a vote than the Democrats, since you’d get mostly Democratic votes in favor.
It acknowledges the fundamental injustice and inhumanity of slavery
It establishes a commission to study slavery, its subsequent racial and economic discrimination against freed slaves;
It studies the impact of those forces on today’s living African Americans; and
The commission would then make recommendations to Congress on appropriate remedies to redress the harm inflicted on living African Americans.
O.k., sure. Slavery is unjust and inhumane. You need a new bill to actually point this out? Has this point not been covered at all legally elsewhere?
Who will be on this commission, and what will their qualifications be?
Are there no previous studies done? What will this study do that previous studies couldn’t?
What power will this committee have to enforce any suggestion they give to Congress? Haven’t suggestions involving redress been made, and ignored, in the past?
I’m not against any such study being done. The fact that slavery and the legacy of racial discrimination has had a negative impact on African Americans is pretty hard to deny. I am against reparations for for slavery, but, as many including Coates pointed out, African Americans faced serious problems including having their property seized, debt peonage, were denied their civil rights, and were not afforded the protection of the law (lynching anyone?) I am at the very least amenable to reparations for those.
But I’m not really even sure what reparations would entail. A check to every person descended from a slave? Social programs?
I think a good start would for middle and high schools to be a bit more honest about how rough African Americans had it during and after slavery. When I was 12 or 13 we covered things like the Civil Rights movement and while I understood that being denied the vote was bad that was a little abstract to my teenaged self who could not vote himself. The fact that a white person could address a black man as boy, would refer to married black women by their first name or as “auntie,” and could expect to be given preferential treatment over any black person on a day-to-day basis is not something we really covered in class very well. And what I did learn about the CRM was that, hey, sure, there was Brown v. Board of Education followed by that little hiccup in Little Rock, after which all the white people decided to play nice. No, sorry, there were problems throughout the nation and other school districts that shut down to avoid integration. And blacks pretty much had to fight court case after court case to get Brown vs. BoE enforced.
I think just recognizing what a raw deal African Americans got would go a long way towards improving relations between people.
Yes. To highlight how it effects present day African-Americans.
No idea. Maybe Issa?
I haven’t searched on the Internet but I suspect there has not been a study on it. Remember, it was only in the 90’s when blacks got a formal apology for slavery. If memory serves, this was done by Mr. Clinton but I could be mistaken.
I don’t think the committee would have any power. That’s the point. They are coming up with recommendations.
Exactly. The majority seems to believe that slavery and Jim Crow have no palpable effect on African-Americans. This would go long way in providing a counterweight to that (erroneous, IMO) belief.
It seems to me that there was one legitimate attempt by the American government to address the massive inequalities caused by slavery, and that was Reconstruction. And this was over the extremely bigoted and often violent resistance of southern whites. But Reconstruction was given up after about a decade, and for nearly another century, those in power in the South (and elsewhere) tolerated and even supported and administered policies (like housing discrimination, which Coates notes continues to have extremely powerful repercussions) that were designed to enrich white people at the expense of black people, or just oppress and dehumanize black people for no economic reasons at all.
You should really do a search on the effect Civil War Slavery has had on modern African Americans. There are reports that have been done on the long term psychological, economical, familial and societal effects it has had on the African Americans in today’s society.
I doubt very much you could come up with any sort of evidence that would support that statement. Just because you can’t find enough people to support your idea on how best to remedy what has happened in the past doesn’t mean that people don’t think there is a problem out there.
Anyone can see horrible things were done in the past but each passing day puts that era further into the past. In fact overt instances of racial discrimination are getting fewer and fewer and are starting to fall into the background of other “isms” like ageism, sexism, class ism, homophobia, prejudices against people for being overweight, being too old, being too young, prejudice against foreign people, etc… In fact there have been times like this recent case:http://newyork.cbslocal.com/2014/05/30/white-police-lieutenant-awarded-1-35-million-in-racial-discrimination-lawsuit/ where a white person sued for racial discrimination.
We just do not have any “Rosa Parks” type incidents happening anymore.
Because the purpose of the bill is help enable taking money from whites, asians and hispanics to give to blacks. It’s not that difficult.
I don’t have a problem with giving reparations to individuals wronged by the government, as was done for the Japanese-Americans put in internment camps during World War II (though it would be nice if we could take that pound of flesh from the politicians responsible instead of from the taxpayer). I do have a problem with people claiming that because they’re eight degrees separated from someone who was once wronged, everyone else should be forced to pay them.
I never said that. I say it has changed and evolved into something different than the old days of when blacks had to sit in the back of the bus and use separate drinking fountains.
And that form is largely indistinguishable from other forms of prejudice.
That’s bullshit. Hey, moderators, can we say bullshit? Well anyway, this is bullshit. Warning/banning be damned. The reason is because the purpose of H.R 40 is not give out taxpayer money to African-Americans, it is simply to determine whether slavery has had an deleterious impact on African-Americans that persist to present day. This isn’t some arcane experient.
