That’s an unfair way to interpret the statement. Think of it more that comparing immigrant groups can suffer from self selection bias - it’s comparing a group that has chosen to immigrate.
I don’t know about the economy in general, but one unintended consequence of the Civil Rights movement was that black businesses which provided goods and services otherwise denied to the black community because of segregation did take a hit. For example places like Camp Atwater did see less enrollment once successful middle class professionals could send their children to other prestigious, but now desegregated summer camps. Historically Black Colleges in the South did face a brain drain once top students could go anywhere they wanted. How to solve this dilemma is perplexing. Obviously bringing back legal segregation is unacceptable. However, the loss of the variety of small businesses, not to mention the visible presence of a successful middle class that used to exist in some black communities is depressing.
Since the context shows that I was not talking about that, we can disregard the rest of your silly post. Richard Parker also talked about what the point I made was, as he pointed out, you are just relying on ignorance.
If Coates is reading this thread he’s probably clapping his hands in excitement over your posts. Because you are literally providing hard evidence that a politically disenfranchised black community is not only of zero concern to mainstream America, but in fact is the preferred state.
Without even blinking an eye, you’ve essentially argued that blacks need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make jobs for themselves rather than clamor to be heard by politicians. Now ain’t that a wonder? If “liberal elites” were to preach the same message to working class whites, all hell would break loose. In fact, this message is supposedly just the thing that turns them turn into angry Trump voters. Why should we not expect this same response from snubbed black people? And why does the casual admonishment of blacks to stay politically invisible come so easy for you?
Well, I think “lack of ambition” is a consistent phenomenon in poor communities of all races. And it’s often caused by a lack of any real means of channeling ambition into something productive in the first place. A black kid growing up in the suburban Connecticut town where I did (and we had a few) has a reasonable expectation of getting into college. Some of the poorer neighborhoods and projects in nearby Bridgeport, not so much.
Why should I pay? My family didn’t own any black people. In fact, being of Irish and Jewish decent, maybe I should get some money for the injustices suffered by my people?
If they are going to give reparations from people who can prove their ancestors were slaves, they should only pay for it with funds from people who can prove their ancestors were slave owners.
Should you get compensated if your decedents were slaves before 1789? America wasn’t a country then. Go take it up with the King of England.
You wouldn’t be paying, or at least you wouldn’t be paying any more than you do for any other government function. America is responsible – America benefited for decades from the plunder of black bodies, labor, and property – so America should pay. And it’s not just about slavery; it doesn’t even have to be about slavery at all. There are government policies and practices that greatly harmed living black Americans (like redlining) – without such policies, and with fair treatment in early and mid-20th century, black American family wealth would likely be significantly higher.
A good model could be reparations for Japanese internment, which occurred in the 80s and didn’t cause some great outcry of “why should I pay?!?”. For redlining, the government maps used to discriminate still exist – with a little effort, we could find out who lived in those neighborhoods during redlining periods, and come up with a reasonable level of compensation.
Or we could at least talk about the idea of compensating living Americans who were very significantly harmed by government policies without people recoiling in shock and horror.
There are many other threads on this topic, if you’re curious about more info on reparations.
I don’t really understand this argument.
Suppose a major bank committed a heinous theft a hundred years ago, effectively dispossessing some of its clients – a loss in wealth that can be seen in their descendants to the present day – but was protected from lawsuits by some obscure law. The bank was indisputably guilty of this crime but no justice was done. Then much later, discussions started surfacing about, hey, maybe this particular law protecting the bank from making restitution was never a good law and should be changed.
Is it really a strong argument for a current shareholder to make that they weren’t a shareholder when the crime was committed? That no one in their family was a shareholder when the crime was committed, that their grandparents bought the shares fifty years ago, and that they merely inherited ownership after the fact?
The bank as an institution was clearly guilty. The same institution continues to exist. So what’s wrong, exactly, with allowing the descendants of those dispossessed to stake their claim against the very same institution that wronged their ancestors? While it might be totally true that the bank, under current leadership, would never commit the same crimes, and that the current set of shareholders hold management to a much higher standard, it’s also true that this is the same institution and that the institution never made amends. I don’t see how the relative innocence of the current shareholders absolves the institution as a whole. The United States as an entity committed a massive and ghastly crime, which didn’t even end with the abolition of slavery but whose legal effects, and the second-class-citizen status of black people, continued in the lawbooks for at least a century afterward – well into the lifetime of living citizens.
And no restitution for this crime was ever done, not the original crime of slavery nor even the continuing bias in the laws for a century afterward. It should’ve been forty acres and a mule back in the day: genuine land ownership. It should have been breaking apart the slave states and creating new minority-majority states where former slaves would have had genuine political representation in at least some areas of the country, which they could use to protect themselves from the injustices of Jim Crow. They got literally none of that. No property. No government willing to protect their lives and treat them fairly. They got only more discriminatory measures, written right into the laws, continued for another century afterward their notional freedom.
This was an egregious crime of the United States. It makes sense to me that the United States should pay for it.
I agree with the arguments that say reparations don’t depend on some kind of individual karmic retribution. But it’s also worth observing that someone like msmith537 has almost certainly benefited from white privilege.
I sketched a brief bio of myself in one of these threads, but the short version is I could tell a kind of bootstraps story. I had a lower middle class upbringing. I worked through high school and college and took out loans. I didn’t inherit any wealth. But, I also didn’t get arrested for underage drinking or getting into a fight one summer, just like virtually no other white kid in my town got arrested for those things. I went to middle-of-the-road public school that was just fine, where I was never suspended or expelled for my frequent truancy or because I talked back to my teachers. I had a stable single parent homelife in part because my Mom got help from her parents (Mormons whose parents and grandparents lost most of their property in various purges), whose financial stability came from things like the GI Bill and ownership of a home that steadily increased in value. I am good at standardized tests, as I was constantly told and expected to be, and so I got a college scholarship. I didn’t have a lot of trouble quickly adapting to college, because of my decent public school and because the class gap for me was significant but bridgeable and I had no other social gaps to overcome. Ditto law school, though the class gap was even larger that time. And then I went into an industry where, if I had chosen to pursue private success, how many rich people I had social connections to would have been extremely important to my ability to bring in clients. On and on and on.
All of that was influenced by my race and the race of my parents and grandparents. So if I have to pay a little more in taxes to, say, pay for down payment assistance for families affected by housing discrimination, I count that not just as good policy but as a kind of justice that applies to me as an individual and not just at some social or institutional level.
I think this line of argument has merit, but the magnitude of that merit decreases with each passing year. It was strongest immediately after the civil war I’d say, when you had those directly impacted, and those directly responsible. With the next generation, the support fades in some way, and so on. In 100 years, all other things being equal, would it still be acceptable to create some kind of transfer payment rubric on the basis of horrific treatment 100 or 200 years past? What about in 500 years or 1000 years?
If there are continuing wrongs, continuing actions that support redress, then those things should be the basis for recompense. At some point the ghosts of the past need to be laid to rest.
btw, I really appreciated your post #498.
A lot of it depends a lot on how durable you think differences in wealth (and other injuries and traumas) are. If wealth, and all that is confers–including the way it shapes inequalities of opportunity for subsequent generations–is the kind of thing that you can create a systemic disparity in Year 1 and in Year 1000 you’re still going to see traces of that disparity, through whatever social mechanisms, then I see no reason why in Year 1000 there isn’t still an obligation to correct it. Indeed, it might even be the case that, absent intentional corrections by the state, state-created disparities have the tendency to go the other direction and become larger.
If my grandpa steals your grandpa’s horse, and as adults I’ve got a herd of horses and you’ve got nothing, don’t I owe you some horses? Why should the fact of the passage of time make that better? And why should it be any different if the State of Alabama steals the labor of your grandpa? Or his land? To me, the question isn’t how long ago it happened. The question is whether the injury still persists. As long as it does, justice requires that this injury be compensated.
Hopefully, the injuries attenuate. If so, then I agree, with attenuation of injury should come attenuation of obligation.
I also think it’s very important to keep in mind what things looked like from 1875 to 1945. There is an exponentially larger difference between 2015 and 1945 than there was between 1945 and 1875 in the ability of an average Black person to make it in America, compared to an average White person’s ability to do so in the same periods. So that change is the living memory of family members at this point. Because of that, even if you really discount the effect of housing, educational, and police discrimination in the period from 1945 to present (which I think is a mistake), you’re still talking about stuff that’s not that distant.
Willis McCall died in 1994, of old age, never having served a day in prison. So I don’t think we’re really that far attenuated.
Thanks.
Your analogy falls apart because a country isn’t a company. If you acquire stock in a company you buy into all of it’s existing liabilities. If you don’t want them, then you don’t buy the stock. None of us chose our parents or to be born in any country. The idea that children are not responsible for the actions of their parents is uncontroversial. If this were a thread about the Dreamers, for example, we would see many posts about how they didn’t do anything wrong and shouldn’t suffer for something they have no control over. It’s only the sin of slavery/racism that is seriously mooted as something this country should be responsible for.
The idea that a generic white person benefits from the historic enslavement and discrimination of black people is wrong. The legacy of that is an underclass of people who are a drain on society. Imagine that, instead of racism, it was a disease that caused 5-10% of our country to be more violent, commit more crimes, and be suited only for menial jobs. Would that make you richer? Of course not. It would make everyone poorer as society is robbed of the potential talents of those people, suffers the effects of their crimes, and must pay to support them.
So I take it you believe that it was morally wrong for the country to pay reparations to those Japanese Americans interned during WWII? If not, then why would it be wrong to pay reparations to living Americans who have been harmed by federal government policies and practices?
How about you clearly address the portion my argument you disagree with instead of asking a random question about an entirely different situation.
The events under discussion for possible reparations have significantly harmed living Americans. Further, reparations for Japanese American internees were not paid by those Americans who made that policy happen.
I see that your answer is “No, I will not clearly address the portion of your argument I disagree with and will continue asking random questions about an entirely different situation”.
Instead of responding with hostility, it might be more productive for this forum for you to explain why you think the situations are entirely different. To my eyes, the question goes directly to your claim that black reparations would be unique.
My responses are addressing your argument, as clearly as I’m able. What part is not clear?
I don’t have a lot of interest in getting involved in another pointless side track while my main points remain unaddressed.
Okay, I’ll try again.
This appears to be an argument that countries can’t be held responsible for any past events. Do you really believe this? Did Germany bear no responsibility at all for the Holocaust?
If this isn’t your argument, then under what conditions can a country be held responsible for something?
Except it wasn’t a disease. It was plunder – transfer of the wealth of labor (slavery) and property (one example: outright theft for decades after slavery – black landowners had their land stolen by white neighbors because courts always sided with the white litigants). That was wealth moving from black families to white families. The plunder also extended to discriminatory policies like redlining – black families and potential home buyers paid taxes, yet only white families received the benefits of government backed loans to buy new houses, the foundation of long-term wealth for most families. That was more wealth transfer – black taxes being transferred to white families by way of biased government policies on housing assistance.
Those are just a few of many, many examples. Government policies reduced and held back the wealth of black families to the benefit of other (largely white) families, including those families of living Americans. It seems reasonable to consider making reparations for these policies that directly harmed black Americans to the benefit of other Americans.
Are we talking about reparations now?