In the Great Debates Thread Reparations For Jim Crow, I- along with most responders- argue that while financial reparations to those who suffered under Jim Crow laws would certainly be a worthy expense in the abstract, the concrete problems- where would the money come from? How do you attribute blame? What precedent would this set? How can you determine the level of harm? How about the families of people who died 30 years ago?- make it infeasible, even almost ridiculous. I understand the sentiments (not the anger so much as I seriously doubt any Dopers really suffered under Jim Crow), but I think it’s a practical impossibility.
This isn’t a pitting of the opposing arguments, and if you have a valid argument against my position put in that thread. It’s for this, foolguinea’s response to my statement that
I keep quiet about it of course, but I’ll share a secret with you: I was born in Alabama as were my parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and some of my great-great-grandparents- in fact every branch of my family was here before the Civil War, which they fought in- for the Confederacy. I was born a few blocks from where Rosa Parks was arrested on the anniversary of her arrest (albeit in a different bus seat). Perhaps that’s why Fool’s Guinea thinks I go berserk at the notions of “paying money to a nigger”.
My best refutation to that is “Fuck you, you arrogant whining piece of ignorant hogs-fed-on-seal-blubber-and-chicken-innards shit”. I am against reparations for the reasons I said I was against reparations. Calling me a racist (which no, technically you didn’t say it in those words due to a lack of guts or a lack of clarity, one or the other, but the implication is clear) is not only insulting to me but is an insult to every other person in that thread of either race. I somehow don’t think that the people who suffered under Jim Crow and risked their lives and liberties to struggle against it did so in order for a hypersensitive nothing like you to hurl baseless charges of hatred on their behalf.
As mentioned, I am indeed an Alabamian- a demographic not terribly respected on these boards- and pretty much all of my friends, people I love very much, are Alabamians as well. I guarantee you that not only do none of us say the word nigger (except perhaps when reading aloud from Mark Twain or quoting an asshole), we dont’ tolerate the presence or pretend to be anything other than pissed and offended at those who do. You can believe this or not, I don’t give a fuck, but it’s true nonetheless, and when you hurl accusations like that- that my motives are not seeing money go to ‘niggers’- it pisses me off big-time.
You don’t know me. This accusation is uncalled for, hateful, ignorant, stupid, and a concession of defeat. Not to mention ironic coming from somebody whose username contains a racial slur. Disagree with me all you want and argue with any point I make, but you’ve crossed a fucking line.
And as anyone who’s read me knows, I could say a lot more on the subject, but it would all be variations on some of the above and the whole point is
GO FUCK YOURSELF FOOLSGUINEA
and that whatever race you’re a member of (I honestly don’t know), you’re not in the black on their list of assets.
And in case I don’t hear from you before, have a safe and happy Thanksgiving.
And how fucking DARE YOU appraise Dr. King of your take on the point on the destination? That’s… that’s… just… no words… that’s like me telling Anne Frank “I know how you feel because I had to put rat traps in my attic… it was hot and nasty up there”. Just… Caesar had less Gaul. However far you’ve come, I can assure you— that you yourself personally didn’t have jack-shit to do with it. I doubt you’re an inch from where you started.
A Pit thread over one measely remark? You can’t just let it roll off your back or come up with a smart-alecky retort in the thread? I don’t think this is a case of “the lady doth protest too much”, but it could come across that way to someone who didn’t know you. Just saying…
And I’m sorry, but there wasn’t a lot of intelligent debating going on in that thread. Much of the blame goes to the OP for not creating a very well-thought out post, but most posters were plopping out one-liners that weren’t much better. I don’t blame foolsguinea for getting carried away (which he fully admitted). I got angry too.
[Aside]
Sampiro, might not the name be a reference to the British gold coin? And perhaps to the poster’s family’s origins?
I’m just not seeing that as an ethnic slur.
[/Aside]
I thought the OP wasn’t the most compelling piece of argumentation in the land, but there was nothing trollish or wacky about it.
And I’m sorry, Sampiro, I think you’re a cool guy…but come the fuck on. You basically argued that allowing blacks to vote and run for office and essentially carry on like people not being oppressed by a system like Jim Crow constitutes reparations for said institution. Can you not see how insulting (not to mention circular) that is?
I support foolsguinea’s response to you, although I would have laid off the nigger card.
QUOTE=j666;10497716][Aside]
Sampiro, might not the name be a reference to the British gold coin? And perhaps to the poster’s family’s origins?
I’m just not seeing that as an ethnic slur.
[/Aside]
[/QUOTE]
Sure it can. Probably is. But if he can say that the only people who don’t follow his logic are racists, I can certainly call guinea into question.
Yes you do or you wouldn’t have mentioned it (unless you’re just dying for people to know you’ve read Hamlet). And no, it’s not. I honestly believe he crossed a serious line and his puny whining unpology (posted after I posted this incidentally) doesn’t cut it. Unable to win with a low heart he decided to play a spades, and call bullshit, illegal move.
Why does this infuriate me so much other than the obvious? It’s because there IS very real, totally legitimate racism out there. The same reason it infuriates me when people are called homophobes (I started a pit thread when GLAAD called Gene Shalit one) or sexist or anti-semitic or other such labels without adequate reason, because it castrates the words and the charges, and when the charge is valid it means next to fucking nothing.
Don’t worry that by missing Jim Crow you missed your chance to fight prejudice- it’s not like the Third Reich, it’s still out there. Still time to get your licks in, you don’t have to buy a medal at a junk shop and say you earned it. Hatred and irrational prejudice is alive and well, you don’t have to make it up, just look a little and you can find the real thing, or wait a while and it’ll probably find you.
But self imposed victimization makes me sick. It’s also a reason I’m against hate crime laws (because I’m gay I’m special? A violent attack on me is intrinsically worse than a violent attack on my straight brother? Or am I so helpless that I need extra terms applied to my assailant?), but that’s another thread.
His unpology was posted after I started this thread, incidentally- there was a technical burp that ate it for a while. And in said unpology he acknowledges there’s some chance that we who disagree aren’t racist, we could just be ignorant and uneducated. Racist v. Ignorant & Uneducated… hmmm… which one to choose… I can’t have both applied to me?
And I didn’t pit you either. That’s because the nigger card is the subject of the pitting.
Do you not see that while, indeed, reparations for everybody affected by Jim Crow and every other bad thing the USA has ever done would be wonderful, it’s not even remotely feasible and it’s not fair to taxpayers and it’s never ever ever going to happen in three million years?
Horrible things happen. As I type this there are little girls somewhere being raped by their fathers, there are innocent Iraqis crying for innocent loved ones killed by American bombs, there’s an old man in a nursing home who’s remembering the forever young loved ones American bombs killed in Dresden and an old man in a nursing home in Tel Aviv remembering forever young loved ones who died in concentration camps [possibly worked at by the man who lost his family at Dresden]. All of the money in the world would not undo these things.
It would be wonderful if everybody who had a sad beginning could have a happy ending and believe me, if it were in my power I’d make it happen. If it were in my power there’d be a cute Cuban bartender in Boca Raton smiling but not listening as the old vacationing Jewish lady drones on and on about her grandkids and her husband the retired proctologist and the years she spent hiding in an attic in Amsterdam, but it’s not in my power. It’s not in the government’s power either- the only thing a government can do for a problem is throw money or bombs at it, they can’t work magic. The notion of spending countless billions we can’t afford in reparations most people had nothing to do with, essentially mortgaging the future which we CAN make better to pay a past that we CAN’T make better, is ludicrous, counter productive, and impossible.
Life’s unfair, mine is, your’s is, everybody’s is, we go on= whether we want to or not- that’s why you find humans in places where cockroaches can’t live. But you laugh sometimes and there’s good food if you know the right places. That’s what you learn to look for.
Sampiro, I don’t think you’re racist or ignorant, just grandstanding. Your first response to the thread was awfully silly: scholarships, affirmative action and whatever else you and your friends call “social programs” do notequal “decades of reparations” for Jim Crow. At best, they’re underfunded attempts to rehabilitate a population, for centuries crippled with government connivance for the sake of racism, for the good of the entire community. Though some will never believe it, even white folks benefit from adequately-housed, fed, educated and employed minorities. And mostly, let’s admit, our generation isn’t suffering for any of it, except that our bigoted brethren kind of resent it.
The “who do you tax” paragraph is similarly inane: we don’t sift the census to target taxpayers and match them with expenditures. Does the country owe money to demonstrated victims of Jim Crow? is the question, and if you have a case to make for gays or epileptics or anyone else, make it – we’ll be all for you. The precedent argument stops well short of demonstrating any equivalence between Jim Crow and you calling an epileptic retarded. But mostly the aside “If you can prove you were murdered…” seemed just kind of ignorant and callous.
Of course, your recently-expressed extreme views in support of hypotheticals which will never cost you money or friends (of course you’re infuriated because there IS REAL racism out there: it’s ubiquitous, dangerous, and really handy when your behavior or words are called into question) should be honored, and I do, in spite of some of my fellows.
Um, so you’re telepathic? You must be really fuming over what I’m thinking right now.
He said something provocative and you’re feeding him. You know you’re not a racist. You know 99% of Dopers know you’re not a racist. So why the fuck do you care so much about a one careless, inflammatory remark?
foolsguinea’s remark does not warrant this stream-of-consciousness, Sampiro. Really.
Even if I accept that it was an unpology, I still think your reaction is over-the-top. But perhaps I’m biased because I’m pretty sick of the kinds of arguments I read in that thread, including some of yours. So foolsguinea’s frustration was my own. One day I will learn to stay away from threads like that because they never end well for me.
Thanks Junior, that there’s mighty good a you. For the record I don’t think you’re a pedophile or a suicide bomber (or if you are you’re at least not a very good one as evidenced by the fact you’re alive to post).
Read carefully:
THERE CAN BE NO REPARATIONS FOR JIM CROW.
THE PAST CANNOT BE CHANGED.
99% of the people responsible for it and 99% of the people affected by it are dead. In their graves. They are bleeding demised. They are ex-oppressors and ex-oppressees.
As Winnie supposedly observed, “History is just one damned thing after another.”
Now, as for affirmative actions and ““social programs”” being nothing but (at best) underfunded rehabs, do you pretend they are nothing at all? Is it only imagination that they have cost many billions of dollars over the years and helped the lives of millions of people (of all races) for the better?
What about other groups: the Jews who came to this country not speaking a word of English, having paid every penny they had for tickets on overcrowded ships, kicked out of Russia and fleeing Germany and other countries, crowded into 10 to a room and 50 to a toilet tenements and paid $5 a week in sweatshops, what rehabilitation programs were they given? There were Jewish philanthropists, yes, but none were rich enough to help every Jewish person who came here. They experienced hate crimes, discrimination of all sorts- are they or their descendants entitled to reparations?
What about the black people who left the South by the hundreds of thousands to work in Detroit and in Chicago and factories throughout the nation- are any troubles they experienced due to Jim Crow laws? Was Nate Shaw/Ned Cobb wrong, is it true that ultimately All God’s Dangers ARE white men?
And if so, all white men, or just some? And if just some, are they living? How long will their descendants need to pay for the sins of the fathers- the biblically prophesied 7th generation or can the first 3 generations perhaps pay extra towards the principal?
Is the fact that there is not one single accredited college that I can get into that a non-white person with an equivalent GPA could not factually incorrect or is it just completely meaningless? How about the changing attitudes of young people- the fact that today it’s common to see biracial couples and while they encounter the occasional bigoted git (like we all do) it’s rare for them to be bothered, or that if your doctor is black the only racial thought likely to pass your mind is “I guess the Iranian and Indian guys are off today”? There are people still alive, still in the work force, to which these things would have been unthinkable-
Prime example: Barack Obama’s Attorney General nominee is the brother-in-law of [the late] Dr. Vivian Malone. If you’re not up on Civil Rights history but have seen the movie Forrest Gump, she’s the black she-student who drops a book that Forrest hands her as armed guards escorted her into the University of Alabama. That was in 1963; most freshmen who entered college that year would now be about 63, still in the work force, the point being: it wasn’t that long ago.
Today the school has 3,000 black students. It minimizes her bravery and the work of a hell of a lot of people of all colors and creeds to say that the court decisions (which, as we have seen, did not always oppose segregation) and the laws enacted and the scholarship assistance programs that were implemented specifically to help minority students and say “pffft! That’s nothing.”
But I’ll ask you a question, and it’s not rhetorical-
What WOULD be enough? What that could be done could conceivably be justice?
I honestly don’t think you understand the amount of money we’re talking about here. An amount of money we are talking about here is NOT an extra $10 to everyone’s taxes.
So follow me here:
There are approximately 5 million black people still alive who were teenagers or older under Jim Crow laws. (Census figures- that’s taking half the number of black people ages 55-64 and adding it to the number of black people 65 and over.)
Now let’s assume that of those, 1 million are deemed eligible for reparations- reasonable? Conservative even, yes?
Now, the OP stated and others agreed should be $1 million each.
$1 million per claimant
x 1 million claimants
$1,000,000,000,000
That is ONE QUADRILLION DOLLARS, or roughly the amount of revenue the U.S.A. raises from all income taxes over the course of, roughly, 1,100 years at its current rate of taxation.
[Note to nitpickers: Yes, I know, technically it’s a billion dollars, because the term billion is used incorrectly instead of the correct word for 1,000,000,000 which is, indeed, milliard.
Now, unless you just always wanted to get a modern day visual of that anecdotal German housewife taking a wheelbarrow full of Reichsmarks down to the corner grocer to buy a loaf of bread, you will concede, will you not, that we can’t do this… neh?
So then, let’s play with the amounts.
Let’s say we limit it to people who can prove bodily injury or lost earnings to Jim Crow Laws, and that’s about… 250,000 people. That’s 5% of the 5 million people who were old enough. Does that sound reasonable?
Okay, now let’s take that amount down to a more reasonable number. Instead of $1 million, let’s halve it. It’s now, presto chango, $250,000, a quarter of the original amount.
So…
$250,000 per claimant
x 250,000 claimants
$62,500,000,000
Now that’s FARRRRRR more reasonable, isn’t it?
Now then, there are 300 million Americans, that figure comes up to… oh, let’s call it $200 each. Except of course most of those are kids or seniors or others who don’t file taxes aren’t they?
So, in 2006 there were 132 million people who filed tax returns.
$62,500,000,000 divided by 132 million = $474
Well, actually, of the 132 million who filed taxes, 42 million didn’t actually pay anything… so that means it’s really 90 million who paid taxes.
$62,500,000,000 divided by 90 million = $695 each.
If you paid taxes last year, it will cost you, on average, about $695 to pay money to people who were affected by injustices you did not cause 50 years ago.
OF COURSE NOW, that’s only the still living people. If my father suffered under Jim Crow, even though she’s been dead for 30 years, and if he were alive he’d be eligible for $250,000, then you better goddamned well BELIEVE I’m going to be at a lawyer’s office saying “I want my daddy’s reparations!”
Do you have $695 you don’t mind spending for something that wasn’t your fault to begin with and that won’t even fix what it’s going towards?
And if you answer you’re against the war but you’ve paid more than that in “war taxes”, then I feel your pain. So have I. Does that mean we should tack on more?
And can you think of the floodgates that would open if we started handing out big fat checks for all things that were bad.
DO YOU UNDERSTAND A BIT BETTER NOW WHY I ASK, ‘WHO’S GOING TO PAY FOR THIS?’ Should a Laotian immigrant family, in the country legally and employed in middle class occupations but who’s just barely getting by in have to pay hundreds of dollars they can’t afford so that a 90 year old woman can be paid for a brother who was murdered (and whose murder NOBODY denies was horrible and senseless, but he’s still dead and the men who killed him still died in their beds free men) 50 years before the family came to this country? Explain this one to me reallly slow.
Actually, leaving aside the question of whether it’s the right thing to do, the number you’ve quoted here ($1,000,000,000,000) is only about 50% more than the government has just approved to bail out the country’s financial institutions. Yes, it’s a hell of a lot of money, but it’s a figure that is not as unbelievably huge as your post would have us believe.
I also very much doubt it would take the IRS 1,100 years to collect this much from taxation. That would mean that, on average, the IRS collects less than 1,000,000,000 ($1 billion in standard American nomenclature) per year. If there are, say, 100 million taxpayers in America, then if your calculation were correct they would be paying approximately $10 each per year in income tax. Somehow, i don’t think that’s the case.
If you’re going to try and make your case using mathematics, you might want to start by not sucking at it.
And the fact we’ve pledged that much (which we don’t have) to corporate bailouts is somehow an argument we should spend more on reparations that have no conceivable advantage at a time when we’re also fighting a $10 billion per month war?
Technically you are right, of course, Monstro. But just as Sampiro can never fully understand what it is to be an African-American in 21st Century America, so too you cannot understand how it feels to be an open-minded, civil-rights supporting white Southerner accused unfairly of racism.
The big bold fonts make you look unhinged, Sampiro.
If your argument is that it would be too costly to give reparations to Jim Crow surivivors, I think that’s a valid point to be made.
But why be so emotionally over-the-top about it? I’m not seeing why this one issue is worth paragraphs and paragraphs of melodramatic pontification. And anyway, one million dollars was something picked arbitrarily by the OP in the other thread, so hyperventilating over math implications specific to that number is literally a waste of breath. If Jim Crow victims were awarded $10,000 or even just$1000, I have a feeling you’d still have a problem with it if your previous arguments are any indication.
The feasibility of reparations has nothing to do with whether there is a valid case for reparations.
But you didn’t answer my question. So I’ll repeat it for you:
I suspect foolsguinea wouldn’t have gone there with you if you’d simply said reparations aren’t feasible. But because you went beyond that by opining that MLK Day and Barack Obama are adequate reparations, out came some snark. I’m trying to get you to understand why it was deserved.
I’m not saying he should have let the comment slide. But really, all the giant font, unbroken paragraphs, irrelevant ramblings about homophobia and sweethome Alabama is quite melodramatic. It communicates nothing except that he loves the sound of his own horn.
If a Doper had been called a nigger and he posted a tirade like the one in the OP, people would be telling him exactly what I’m telling Sampiro.
