What conclusions will it reach? Presumably you already know, or you wouldn’t be able to call it redundant.
This is like being in Alice in Wonderland. Please, please, please show one committee, commission, inquiry that has the power to turn recommendations into the force of law. Not to do a* School House Rock*, but don’t laws originate in the House, ratified by the Senate, and signed into law by the U.S President? Can you point one data-point in the history of the United States where a committee, commission, and inquiry was able to put recommendations into law by circumventing the Executive and Legislative branch?
Thank you.
- Honesty
It’s called closure.
- Honesty
You clearly didn’t read the article by Coates. See post #2. I guess you had no problem when taxpayer dollars were used to deny housing and jobs to African-Americans. Remember the words of Audre Lorde, Grumman, “Your silence will not protect you.” Similarly, metaphorically putting one’s hand in the sand like an ostrich won’t make 400 years of mistreatment go away. Hand-waving the study as a means to get money from “hispanics, whites, and asians” is ridiculous. Keep in mind, sir, it’s only been a bit over 50 years when the U.S government has deigned us human enough to walk with the rest of humanity.
- Honesty
It’s not a valid response because H.R 40 does not seek to transfer money from “whites, hispanics, and asians” to black people. You know this. I know this. Grumman knows this.
This isn’t directed at Little Nemo specifically but: Lest there is any confusion, this thread is NOT this thread where I advocated the U.S government pay for the reparation and repatriation expenses for blacks to escape/move to another country. It’s a damn good idea especially when the government has a handy mechanism to pay for things without paying for them (est 1981). This thread is about why H.R 40 has not received an up and down vote. Indeed, as I stated in the beginning, if slavery and Jim Crow have little-to-no palpable effect on African-Americans, such a study would be vindication of the slave-holding States and the U.S government.
- Honesty
P.S. If you think this title was bad, you should’ve seen what I originally wanted to title it.
Your thread title is, at best, misleading if what you say is true. The fact that you had considered something else is irrelevant.
I think the US was remiss in not compensating the slaves when they were freed. At this point, though, I can’t see it being a viable policy. I’m not against it in principle, but I don’t see how it could be done in such a way that we could wipe the slate clean. And we’re just to far in time from the source of the problem that it makes sense to do it.
Fair enough. Will a moderator change the title to “Why have Democrats and Republicans refused to vote on H.R 40 for 25 years?” I thought it was clear from the OP, the inclusion of the NPR audio/transcript, and the addition of Mr. Coates article what the thread was about but I can see how the title can lend people to think it’s* just* about reparations. My bad.
- Honesty
Reported for title change.
Done.
I’ve only read 1/2 of Coates’ article: I haven’t finalized my views.
Blue ribbon commissions are a standard method of translating academic work into policy recommendations.
Oh I have evidence. Or rather Coates does: I borrow freely and shamelessly. Go back to the memoirs of escaped slaves and it turns out that their greatest motivation was not capturing the fair fruits of their labor, but avoiding the horror of having their family split up via slave auctions: in some parts of the south a slave had a 30% chance of being sold in their lifetime: 25% of interstate trades destroyed a first marriage and half destroyed a nuclear family.
Slavery was followed by Jim Crow which wasn’t just about drinking from a colored water fountain. It was a reign of terror: forget to doff your hat when a good 'ol boy passed and you could get your ass kicked with no expectation of help from the law. The last US lynching occurred in 1968, a date which I’d say marks the close of that era. Starting in the 1950s the US poured massive subsidies into private home ownership, but tilted the FHA rules against African Americans via the process of red-lining. Certain areas (yes, marked on red on the maps) were not eligible for federal assistance, which meant that banks weren’t interested in residential loans. As a matter of law that ended in 1968.
So government put the hammer on African Americans, enforcing the slave trade to steal their labor, rape their women and leave their kids uneducated, followed by 90 years of explicitly legal discrimination, later leaving them at the mercy of all manner of real estate scammers, dubious legal chicanery, and legally protected bullies as well as the occasional terrorist act. Well that’s all in the past, right? When a mugging goes wrong and a victim is stabbed 10 times, we lock the perpetrator up but it’s not like the victim deserves medical treatment, a hospital stay, surgery or physical therapy. No, we expect our crime victims to suck it up and attend work the next day.
Except in the case of African Americans, there’s an exacerbating factor. American democracy was built on the sweat and blood of slavery: the [del]free[/del] market tells us this. Yale historian David W Blight notes slaves were by far America’s largest capital asset: “In 1960, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together.” To that add a second economic concept, the concept of compound interest.
Ezra Klein: [INDENT]You might remember, as a kid, getting this problem on a test: Would you rather have $10,000 per day for 30 days or a penny that doubled in value every day for 30 days?
The answer, of course, is you want the penny that doubles in value every day. If you take the $10,000 you end up with $300,000 after the first month. Take the penny and you end with about $5 million.
What Coates shows is that white America has, for hundreds of years, used deadly force, racist laws, biased courts and housing segregation to wrest the power of compound interest for itself…
Though the sums are gargantuan — using standard government calculations, the theft from slavery alone stretches into the quadrillions of dollars — it’s relatively easy for people to think in terms of the compound interest that’s accrued to the income stolen from African Americans. But the power of compound interest doesn’t just apply to money. It also applies to education and families and neighborhoods and self-respect. And this is where Coates’ piece is so devastating. America didn’t just plunder what African-Americans earned, or what they had saved. By far the hardest part of the piece to read was this account of what slavery did to black families…[/INDENT]
Politics aside, slavery reparations are workable and affordable. Which doesn’t imply that I necessarily support them. After all I’m a white heterosexual male: what’s in it for me? I hope to address that question in a future post.
The damage suffered by the African American community was enormous in conception and compounded over time. Furthermore, all existing US residents are beneficiaries of US the social and economic institutions that underlie our shared prosperity. Yet despite this imbalance, many Americans have long balked even at the very concept of affirmative action, which let’s face it is pretty weak sauce compared to what preceded it. So yeah, Americans give the African American experience short shrift.
It seems that the largest grievance blacks have is against certain of the states, not the federal government.
The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was a federal action, as was the FHA, as was the longstanding refusal to enforce the 14th amendment to the constitution. The benefits of slavery captured by non-blacks were broadened as well (regionally if not racially), given deep capital markets and interest compounding.
And keep in mind that slavery was enshrined in the Constitution of the Federal Government.
I said “largest grievance”, not “only grievance”.
The federal government did not require slavery nor did it require Jim Crow. I stand by my statement.
Not really. It was allowed, but was not required. There were plenty of non-slave states.
Do you dispute my claim that the largest grievance is against certain of the states?
Staying focused: good.
We don’t live in a land of proportionate liability. In the US liability is joint and several. To the extent that the captured, stolen and channeled benefits of slavery accrued to all regions, this is appropriate. I can’t rule out a carve out for certain regions, but I’d have to see the economic model. I’m guessing that Northern consumers, savers and financiers benefited substantially from stolen labor; value added in market systems tends to be diffused out.
Even if the end result doesn’t give you what you want?
Something as profound as slavery or other crimes against humanity doesn’t get something as pat as closure. It may, however, obtain something more profound. Ta-Nehisi Coates: [INDENT]Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.
Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.
What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history. [/INDENT] Coates is a damn fine writer and a smarter man than I am. Which is not to say that his proposal is a viable way forward. I don’t know.
Coates uses the word “reparations” the way a stage magician uses the word “alakazam!”. What exactly does he mean by it? Where does it come from? How much is it? Where does it go?
Not quite alakazam. Here is the author’s answer: [INDENT] Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.”
A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested. [/INDENT] So that’s your answer: the OP.
More generally, I linked upthread to a proposed reparations program by the wonk Matthew Yglassias. I’ve been idly mulling over sovereign wealth fund schemes. One of the problems though is that a serious reparations proposal would invite serious push-back. Or maybe that’s a feature. And in the back of my mind is the knowledge that our country’s conservative clownshow would have a field day with this, to the electoral detriment of the Democrats. But I’m beginning to grok to the idea that the proposal isn’t quite as preposterous as it seems, not entirely. The Germans ponied up reparations to Israel in the teeth of popular opposition after all.