Yea, a power struggle between an entity which opposed slavery and one that used it as the basis for it’s economy. This whole reparations thing is one of the silliest ideas to come down the pike in recent memory. Sheesh.
tomndebb - your interpretation of “reparations movement” is grossly inaccurate. When I say “reparations movement” I mean specifically “the movement around reparations for slavery” and not some umbrella concept for claiming oppressed status. And by involvement in the reparations movement I mean Blacks, Latinos, and whites all involved in the effort to win reparations for slavery - through rallies, political activity, and so forth and so on. I mean exactly that and nothing more.
but they’re the same thing. Asking for reparations is predicated on being a member, or sympathizing, woth a member of a class whose whose ancestors’ enslavement has led directly to modern-day oppression. Basically, it’s asking for free money, and perpetuates the “the government owes me, so I’m going to sit on my ass and refuse to help myself” mentality.
You know what you should be marching for tomorrow? Real-life, practical improvements in the lives of the impoverished. For example, Anacostia has no big box stores:no Target, no Giant, no Home Depot. They have to shop in crappy little mom- and-pop shops that carry chips, soda, and beer.
The DC police need to create more community-based policing of neighborhoods, and treat the residents of eastern DC as allies, not adversaries. The DC city government needs to become more responsive to its citizens’ needs.
DC needs to pump more money into the libraries and schools. They need to make the schools, clean, safe, and appealing , and ensure that students get a proper education, instead of being shugffled through rotting buildings by an uncaring establishment. The libraries are also decaying and their hours have been cut.
White and black DC have to become one city, instead of one city for the rich and middle class, and another for the poor and idsenfranchised.
I will support a movement to ensure fair treatment for all citizens, but I cannot support the “somebody owes me cos’ my great, great, great, grandaddy was a slave.”
I agree with your assessment of what the reparations movement is, gobear, but your conclusion just doesn’t follow. Or, to put it another way, what’s the difference between rallying and marching for financial reparations from corporations (since it’s been demonstrated that the government is not the focus here) and rallying and marching to demand civil rights from the government? The “self-help” approach is a myth, and a dangerous one at that. If it were actually a viable approach, there probably wouldn’t need to be these marches for reparations in the first place.
As for all the other things you listed about DC (of which I am most certainly aware), part of the point of our going out there tomorrow is to argue the connections between the reparations struggle and the fight to better the poorest neighborhoods of the District. We’re not going out there just to say “woo reparations, yay Black folks” but to talk to people and push the fights further.
You make many good points, Olentzero, but I gotta disgree on others.
The major difference between the two is that the reparations demand is shaking down companies for long-past injustices. No black American today is entitled to money they didn’t earn. Reparations to Japanese-Americans were made to the people who were imprisoned, not to their descendants six generations down the line. They were paid on the basis of specific injuries and losses, not to a general grievance based on skin color. The reparations movement is based on race, not on income. Moreover, it perpetuates the dependence of poor blacks Americans on government handouts, which, IMO, has done more to cripple their self-determination than a whole army of Klansmen.
I could not disagree more vehemently with this. Keeping poor people dependent on government largess is what’s dangerous. The difference between your approach and mine is that you want to take fish from fishermen and give them to the fish-less. I want to give the fish-less the rod and reel, bait, and waders so they can catch their own (whcih is a really clumsy extension of the proverb,“give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man how to fish, feed him for a lifetime.” )
The solution to poverty is not to merely to redistribute wealth; that’s a temporary solution. You need to give poor people the means by which they can control their own lives, and the only way to do that is by economic self-determination.
Look at how successful the 14th Street Fresh Fields in Logan Circle has been. It’s given employement to the poor and it has become a social center where the different classes and races can mingle. DC needs to encourage more major stores to move into the poorer neighborhoods so that there can be employment opportunities, a bigger local tax base, and providing access to a higher standard of living. There is no reason why poor blacks in anacostia or poor Latinos in Mt. Pleasant should not have a Giant or Shoppers Food Warehouse in their neighborhoods.
See, with demands for reparations there is no connection between effort and reward. All you are teaching poor people is that other people owe them a living, I believe that we should ensure that every child gets equal education and economic opportunities, but we should also teach that hard work is essential to getting ahead.
mm, OK. In the following statement, I took the (now) highlighted their to mean "the reparations movements of those other people.
Sorry for the confusion.
OTOH, I believe my other objections to cross-generational reparations stand as posted and I still think reparations for slavery is a bad idea. (It is amusing to watch you and Krauthammer standing on the same side of the fence, however. 
)
But the denial of civil rights to Blacks lasted almost a century. So it’s only good to fight against injustice if it’s still occurring?
I fail to see how slavery cannot be viewed as a specific injury and/or loss.
So are you saying that no descendants of now-deceased Japanese who were in those camps received reparations?
Is that why the US government returned the land they seized to the rebels they seized it from, after promising it to the freedmen? Seems to me actually giving former slaves land to work as their own would have been beneficial to their self-determination. Or should they have bought the land only after earning enough from other work?
When I see a government budget appropriating over $400 billion to the military and a tiny percentage of that to social spending programs, I kinda wonder if it’s government largesse conservatives have a problem with, or poor people.
Well, the freedmen didn’t even get that after the Civil War. They were given land to farm, then they got that taken away. The parable rings hollow.
Your version of “teaching hard work” is akin to telling some people they have to run a full marathon hopping in a potato sack with both feet tied together against some of the world’s top professional runners.
tomndebb - oh, please. Krautpsycho there is saying “either reparations or affirmative action and suchlike. Make your choice.” I say they have a right to both and if people have to fight for those rights, I’ll march right along side them.
I don’t know if you are intentionally spreading falsehoods or whether you are just embarassingly misinformed about the cause you think you are supporting. Either way, as has been pointed out to you before, there is a definite focus on getting reparations from the government - not, by the way, that whether they come from the government or private corporations really makes any logical or moral difference. Consider the following quotes.
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How about this:
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A24253-2002Aug15.html
Do you still deny that the reparations movement is also, indeed primarily, about getting money from the U.S. government? Suits against private corporations are the thin end of the wedge, the means, not an end.
Reparations are fuzzy-minded demagoguery. There is neither a legal nor moral basis for awarding them, but it sure is a lot of fun to use a sense of entitlement to whip up a big crowd and chant cool slogans, isn’t it?
That is a lame metaphor. Do you really think black people are incapable of competing in the marketplace? Do you think poor people can’t be educated? Do you see no alternative for poor people besides an eternal reliance on the welfare state and eternal dependence on others for their daily bread?
If Koreans and Vietnamese can come here, poor, speaking no english, and build businesses, black people can do it, too. all they need is some help to get started.
I’m really insulted by this. I was raised poor, by a 22-year-old mother with three kids and no husband (he died when I was three). Later, she married the step-monster and had another child. It wasn’t until my mom wnet to nursing school that she was able to stop living hand-to-mouth. I know about poverty firsthand, buster, and for you to say what you said really makes me mad.
Point noted, and I agree. But it’s 2002, not 1865. Let’s live in the now.
But the corporations the movement claims to be targeting weren’t the ones denying blacks their civil rights. That was the government. I’m just honestly confused because on the one hand you claim that you’re seeking reparations from companies like Aetna for their involvement in insuring slaves, but then you bring up the civil rights issue. Well, at the time that Aetna was in that business, enslaved blacks didn’t have any civil rights. Free blacks did, though, and AFAIK, they were protected just like any other person’s. Meanwhile, post-13th Amendment but pre-1964, Aetna was long gone from that business, and had nothing to do with persistent denial of civil rights. So the targeting seems kind of unfocused here. I can’t help but feel that that’s deliberate, as I doubt that any kind of reparations would satisfy some of these people.
(As an aside, I question the degree to which insuring slaves propped up the business. Slaveowners were going to use slaves, insured or not. Sure it deflected the risk of something happening to the slave, but in the Southern economy, not using them was rarely an option.)
(I also wonder whether this guy thinks Aetna owes him reparations.)
But none of these people have suffered this injury! I can absolutely guarantee that nobody who will be marching this weekend has ever been enslaved. What injury has Johnnie Cochran suffered as a result of slavery?
I just . . . my father’s family never stepped foot on these shores until after 1900, and they were poor Jewish immigrants. Believe me, the Jews know from being denied civil rights in this country. It wasn’t really until the 1960s that one could say they were Jewish in mainstream society and not be made to feel uncomfortable. My mother’s family, meanwhile, fought for the Union in the Civil War, and lived in the portion of Virginia that stayed with the Union and become West Virginia. Do I not have a legitimate right to feel resentful that someone I’ve never met thinks I owe them money just because of my, and their, skin color?
For what it’s worth, here’s my two cents:
If there’s a living former slave, by all means pay them reparations. They suffered, they should get the money.
If there are no living former slaves, then we need to examine the average lifestyle of a black person descended from slaves in the U.S. versus the average lifestyle of a black person in West Africa. If the average U.S. black person descended from slaves has a better lifestyle than the average West Africa black person, no reparation is necessary – slavery can be argued to actually have helped this person, since they enjoy a better lifestyle than they would if their ancestors had remained in West Africa. On the other hand, if the average West Africa black person has a better lifestyle than the average U.S. black slave descendant, then let’s pay reparations based on the disparity.
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I don’t know if that’s what he’s saying, but that is, in fact, correct. Compensation was only paid to surviving former internees.
Sauron, not bad. But I hear PETA is filing suit on behalf of the animal kingdom. Something about primogenitor rights, and the land being built on the enslavement, mental impoverishment, and displacement of the native animals by species-ists who imprisoned most if not all of the natives, and still do to their descendants today. As nigh 100% of our gains came at the expense of animals, therefore the Cultural Injustice Reparations is a mooed point.
Olentzero-tell ya what? How about the people of Russia today suing the government for what Lenin and Stalin did to their ancestors?
Don’t go there.
I think it’s a great idea that has been a long time coming. This country is in deep denial, to the point that the government couldn’t even get itself together to apologize for slavery.
You know you’ve hit a nerve when you have so many protesting reparations, coming up will all types of arguments of how it won’t work, who should get paid, and on and on. The reparation movement is about finally getting america to own up to the history of this country. I know this is uncomfortable for a lot of people, most of them white, but it has to done.
That, or a lot of people think it’s a really stupid idea and are able to point out multiple flaws in the way it’s being presented.
This is such racist bullshit!
Why wouldn’t we examine the average lifestyle of a white person living in this country right now to that of a black person descended from slaves?
I have a better idea, assume that a white person had a job working a plantation from sun up to sun down and calculate what they would have been paid then multiply that by the number of black slaves that did that work. Additionally factor in the effects of jim crow i.e. calculate what whites made and blacks couldn’t because of racism and segragation. Lastly, factor in the disparity in lending rates, wages, and the amount of revenue generated from prison industry(legalized slavery).
The notion that it’s a stupid idea is changing.
Even those that thought is was stupid or now chaning their mind.
When the best reason you can come up with to oppose reparations is “Why you bringin’ up old stuff” your self righteous indignation is uncalled for.
If I kicked you in the balls yesterday and ran away while you were curled up in pain, I would not be justified to complain if you were angry the next time you see me.
A slavery museum is a place I would visit/donate to/take my son. If more black history was taught in the schools (rather than during black history month - as in my neck of the woods) I believe more people would see the horrors of slavery and the strength of the slaves. If this museum was opened with a ceremony with a public appology from the goverenment, would this be another path to healing the wrongs?