I think I like this plan even more. It gives them responsibility into their own personal well being, without a gifting of $$, or something that could be seen as $$ from the outside. This is just outside help.
It will also hopefully change attitudes on the importance of certain things, like education
So, you are going to buy them 40 acres of solar panels? Do have any idea the cost? And, why would they have to move?
Might as well write them a check.
We owe nothing. My Greatgrandfather was a Union Soldier, fresh off the boat signed up. We never owned any slaves. My GGF in fact worked to free the slaves. (well, he spent the whole war cutting railroad ties but that was pretty critical).
Ok, find those who benefited from slavery and make them pay.
Why not just condition the program on lack of wealth and family land ownership? If you already admit that the target demographic has a measurable disadvantage, I suggest crafting a means-tested program instead of reverse discrimination on the basis of race.
~Max
One of the primary advantages that white people have over blacks is wealth and familial land ownership. Frequently this land was received for free from the government as a homestead that was only available to white people.
We do? No wealthy blacks, none own property? That’s pretty racist.
And no, almost no one still lives on homesteads.
and anyone could homestead:
The Homestead Act of 1862 parceled out millions of acres of land to settlers. All US citizens, including women, African Americans, freed slaves, and immigrants, were eligible to apply to the federal government for a “homestead,” or 160-acre plot of land.
Why just poor blacks? why not poor hispanics, poor homeless veterans, poor Native Americans, poor asians?
We owe the indians much more in many ways.
This indicates to me that you didn’t read the original post, or my response to it, which specifically read: “descendants of american slaves and american indians”
~Max
Maybe you weren’t aware of this, but we were fighting the civil war in 1862. It only passed because the entire southern United States withdrew from Congress, and it didn’t have much effect for the minorities in those states even after the war. African Americans could not be citizens, and therefore could not qualify, until the Dred Scott decision was overturned by the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868. Asians could not qualify until the Wong Kim Ark decision in 1898. Married women could never qualify as they would not be considered the head of household.
~Max
It hardly seems like reparations if everyone qualifies. I don’t know if there is any appetite for expanding this sort of program to extend reparations to people who are not the descendants of slaves.
It’s not reverse discrimination and its not based on race. A black man who recently immigrated from nigeria would not qualify, asians would not qualify, whites would not qualify, only the descendants of slaves and american indians.
Just like the internment camp reparations were not paid to all asians and could not correctly be called reverse discrimination.
On the whole yes. The average white family is worth almost $200K, the average black familiy is worth about 15K.
Sure there are some poor whites and some rich blacks but those outliers are not what is setting the racial tone of society.
Even if they don’t live on homesteads now, the wealth derived from those almost 2 million homesteads made a difference. There were 1.6 million hometeads in america at a time when there were about 24 million people. That’s 1.6 million households, even if that was just a man, a woman and 2 children, it was 25%+ of white people in america. This 25% was likely poorer than average.
There were something on the order of about 10,000 black homesteaders in places where white people didn’t really want to be. Imagine we took the poorest 25% of the black community back then and gave them the opportunity to accumulate wealth over generations through hard work and sacrifice. The ses profile of the black community in america would look dramatically different.
And while it was technically available to anyone, homesteading was not available to asians. Asians had to buy their farms in the west before the government put them in internment camps and effectively stripped them of their property. Blacks trying to make homestead claims in the west were not allowed to do so and were frequently driven off. I think there may have been parts of the country where hispanics could homestead but probably not in mississippi.
The value of white wealth is powerful.
This indicates to me that you are ignoring hispanics, poor homeless veterans, and poor asians. why?
You clearly didnt bother to read the cite:
The Exodus of 1879 was the first mass migration of African Americans from the South after the Civil War. These migrants, most of them former slaves, became known as exodusters , a name which took inspiration from the biblical Exodus, during which Moses led the Hebrews out of slavery in Egypt and into the Promised Land. The exodusters settled in the states of Colorado, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Kansas was seen as a particularly promising land of opportunity, because it had fought hard for its status as a free state.
It wouldn’t be reparations any more.
You are discriminating against candidates who can neither prove Black ancestry in the USA prior to 1965 nor prove membership in a Native American tribe. Black people who lived in the USA prior to 1965 is a subset of Black people as a race; contrast with membership in a Native American tribe which is a form of citizenship and not necessarily a race. I feel confident in saying that your proposed program discriminates on the basis of race.
If there exists a single person interned under similar circumstances (same timeframe, because of racial prejudice and not military necessity, without an individualized hearing) who was not ethnically Japanese, I think they would win a lawsuit for a violation of the equal protection clause, as incorporated by the due process clause upon the federal government.
~Max
I read the cite. The part you actually reproduced in post #44 is highly misleading, because, as I explained and as it reads in the article, African-Americans were not citizens until 1868, while Asian (Chinese) immigrants did not have the rights of citiznes until 1898.
Reading the text of the actual law, I must retract my claim about married women being ineligible. The wording is “[…]any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years, and is a citizen of the United States[…]”
~Max
True, most Blacks couldnt vote, but some could (Free back males could vote in several Northern states)and as the article makes it clear, there was a great diaspora of blacks to homestead after 1868.
So many blacks did homestead.
Black property rights prior to the mid to late 20th century were pretty much nonexistent. And not just in the South. Through the whole country, if a white land owner wanted to encroach on a black landowner’s land, the black landowner had very little chance of keeping it. The courts existed to serve white interests, not black interests. There may have been exceptions, but they were rare.
Regardless of state voting rights, there were zero Black citizens of the United States between 1857 and 1868.
~Max
[quote=“DrDeth, post:42, topic:920594, full:true”]
So, you are going to buy them 40 acres of solar panels? Do have any idea the cost? And, why would they have to move?
Might as well write them a check.[/quote]
I am imagining a program where we would train them to run and maintain a solar farm.
Then we are going to give them land (that they cannot sell and their family must live on to perfect their title); then we are going to guarantee power purchase agreements so they know they can sell enough of their generated power for a set price and they can use this to collateralize low interest SBA loans to buy the solar cells.
I never mentioned 40 acres but 40 acres of land doesn’t sound unreasonable. You wouldn’t need 40 acres of solar cells to have a viable solar farm but it would give them room to grow.
According to Landmark Dividend, the average solar farm profit per acre lands somewhere between $21,250 and $42,500. Of course, it’s very important to remember that these figures vary wildly on a project-by-project basis. Actual profits can be much lower or much higher. You probably want the solar plant to be at least 2.5 acres with another 1.5 acres to accommodate operations.
I’m a non-white immigrant. I am about as disconnected to slavery as you can get and still be in this country. And from this non-white/non-black immigrant’s point of view, the legacy of slavery is pretty obvious and white people seem to be the primary beneficiaries of that legacy.
That would be every white person in america but I don’t think a “white tax” would be politically viable so a wealth tax seems like a reasonable proxy. Even a russian immigrant stepping onto these shores today benefits from the societal structure and biases that were crystallized during 400 years of slavery and 100 years of segregation.
Nothing is going to make history go away, reparations for the WWII internees did not erase that episode from our history and it did not actually compensate the internees for their lost land and unjust imprisonment. It only compensated the internees who were still alive in the 1980s (who were mostly kids at the time). But it let us get past that episode in many ways.
Only to the extent that slavery discriminated on the basis of race.
We are not opening this up to all black people, only those who were likely descendants of slaves.
There were some korean pows in the hawiian internment camps. They were either conscripted or non-combatant forced labor but that is probably besides the point. The point is that the injustice was based in part on race so the reparation would similarly be based in part on race.
Nevertheless your proposed reparations are race-conscious. By broadening criteria from proof of slave ancestors to likely descent, you have introduced the certain possibility of race-based discrimination. The mere possibility obligates you to overcome strict scrutiny - you must prove that your reparations proposal satisfies a compelling state interest, that your proposal is narrowly tailored to satisfy that interest, and that it uses the least restrictive means to satisfy that interest. I suggest that means-based programs can satisfy the compelling interests involved here, and are less restrictive than race-conscious reparations, therefore I cannot support your proposal.
You can’t have it the other way, either. As DrDeth points out, it can be very difficult to prove that one’s ancestor was a slave because of poor recordkeeping.
~Max