I think this is pretty narrowly tailored. Certainly more narrowly tailored than affirmative action as it is practiced today.
The chances of a black citizen in 1965 not having slave ancestry is pretty small. The Immigration act of 1924 implemented a quota system. Under the new quota system, the United States issues immigration visas to 2 percent of the total number of people of each nationality in the United States at the 1890 census. This meant a quota of about 1000 black immigrants per year from 1924 to 1965. Due to anti-miscegenation laws and general social attitudes towards racial mixing (looking at white women seems to be a primary reason for lynching), the chances that a black citizen in 1965 did not have slave ancestry was vanishingly small.
I argued that means-tested programs would be less restrictive. Even if your proposed plan is “narrowly tailored” (and I have not claimed otherwise), you still have to explain why it is less restrictive than a means-tested race-neutral alternative.
Finding good land is going to be an issue but you don’t need to live in death valley to get lots of sun (btw people live in death valley). We would build roads and utility connections like we do for white rural areas. Why wouldn’t we?
They can build their home with a mortgage like everyone else. It may not be much to begin with but but as their solar farm earns money, they can add amenities.
I thought I was clear that the reason why was to address the issue of reparations. Right now we are doing a half assed job of reparations by offering up affirmative action mostly to hispanics and immigrant blacks at the expense of mostly asians. And white people pretending that this is justice.
Slavery was not race neutral so the reparations for slavery cannot be race neutral. If you just opened it up to everyone, it would just be another welfare program. You could certainly have a means tested homesteading program but it would not put the issue of reparations to bed.
I don’t think that strict scrutiny requires that I make reparations available to people who are not the descendants of slaves.
Well, yes a few hundred people do live in Death valley. Mostly park workers, etc.
Sure, we build roads and utility connections for rural people- white, black, brown, whatever. But when we do it’s not hundreds of miles, it just the next farm over- and most of them are already done.
Affirmative action is treated as a form of reparations, a form of reparations that disproportionately falls on the shoulders of asians and doesn’t actually help the descendants of slaves particularly well. I think it would be more fair if the country as a whole bore the burden of reparations and if those reparations took a form that was likely to make lasting difference for the descendants of slaves rather than simply help mostly hispanic and black immigrant groups.
I think you’re missing the point. The fact that you would have the government discriminate based on race at all means you have to satisfy strict scrutiny. This is, according to the Supreme Court, a consequence of the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, as incorporated against the federal government through the due process clause in the Fifth Amendment. When determining whether you have to satisfy strict scrutiny, it doesn’t matter why you’re discriminating by race. Citations available upon request.
“Reparations for slavery” is the thing you are proposing. Reparations, in and of itself, be a compelling government interest. You can’t just walk up to the judge and argue, “your honor, the Renewable Reparations Homestead Act satisfies the compelling government interest in having a Renewable Reparations Homestead Act”. You can’t say building a public highway over a majority-black neighborhood satisfies the compelling government interest in building a public highway over a majority-black neighborhood. You have to be a little more in-depth in your explanation, no matter how obvious it may seem to you.
Helping disadvantaged groups succeed is my idea of a compelling interest. Helping disadvantaged groups acquire homes and wealth is laudable. So is investing in alternative power sources like solar and wind. Do you have something else in mind? The burden is on you, after all, to explain what government interests you are satisfying and why they are compelling.
Clearly I do, in this case. You don’t have to agree with me though.
Perhaps we are missing each other’s point. I think we agree that reparations itself does not discriminate based on race. It sounds like you are taking issue with the shorthand i am using to establish slave ancestry by making the descendants of all black citizens in america before 1965 eligible for the program. Lets get rid of that and just assume that I develop a foolproof method to determine who is actually a descendant of american slaves and we limit the benefits of the renewable reparations homestead act to those people and indian tribe members.
It absolutely matters why I am discriminating by race. When we interred the japanese, there were some germans and italians that were also interred. They sued under equal protection, claiming that it was racially discriminatory to give reparations to the japanese but not the germans. The court pointed to the finding of racial/ethnic animus behind the japanese internment that did not exist for the germans, so they didn’t need to apply reparations to everyone that had been interred. I would suggest that slavery and segregation was driven by racism and so you may similarly discriminate based on race to find the remedy. So I think remedying past racial discrimination by the government (which is a compelling state interest) justifies racial discrimination in the remedy.
I think the argument would be that the Renewable Reparations Homestead Act satisfies the compelling government interest in mitigating the effects of 400 years of government supported slavery and segregation to the descendants of american slaves and american indians. It’s not really a bootstrap argument.
The government has a compelling state interest in reversing the effects of its injustice. I don’t think I have to work very hard to convince any of the justices that 400 years of slavery and segregation was an extraordinary injustice. I could be wrong.
The problem you may be having is that it is overly broad and not only compensating the descendants of slaves but also a handful of other blacks that had immigrated to the US after slavery. I think the current population of black people in america whose pre-1965 black ancestry consists solely of pre-1965 black citizens who were not themselves the descendants of slaves is effectively zero.
So while I admit I don’t know for a fact how the court would rule on reparations, neither do you. I don’t think this is knowable.
No,reparations itself does discriminate based on race. Indeed that is it’s very purpose.
The Germans and Italians who were interned were all Citizens of a Enemy nation. That is normal, and if we had just interned the Japanese Citizens things would have been fine. But we didnt, in fact we also interned American citizens of Japanese descent.
I disagree. I don’t think we would offer reparations to recent immigrants from nigeria. The fact that american slaves were exclusively black doesn’t make reparations to the descendants of those black slaves racially discriminatory.
Yes, so we interred them based on race/ethnicity. And the remedy was also only provided to people who were of the discriminated against race/ethnicity. How is this different than providing reparations to the black descendants of black slaves?
In your mind, who else should get reparations for slavery? I am open to reparations for any american that is the descendant of american slaves. I just don’t think that there were many non-black slaves in america. Can you identify any?
Any person who was themselves a slave, paid for by the people who kept them. Note that the reparations paid to the Japanese internees were paid to those interned, not seven generations later.
These is much dispute about Irish Indentured servants. Some were treated pretty much as slaves, but in general, I am doubtful here.
You need more than lots of sun to have a viable solar farm. For starters, you need to have land available (that leaves out western Kansas, e.g., where the feds own very little land; it was homesteaded long ago). You need stable and relatively flat land; trying to put up machinery or panels on a mountainside adds substantially to the cost and reduces productivity. You need land that is not already covered with thick vegetation, timber, or other obstacles, as the cost of clearing these can make a project uneconomical. You need existing infrastructure, such as roads (for moving the equipment in) and electrical grid connections (running a distribution line from the adjacent farm is a whole different ball game from running high-voltage transmission lines for many miles, not to mention installing a substation or other interconnection facility). You need money, and a lot of it: a single acre of solar panels can cost north of half a million bucks to install. Your starting premise that there is lots of the western US “very suitable for solar farms and wind farms” is flawed, probably fatally.
If you could, which you can’t, then I would drop all of these objections.
Well, almost all of my objections. I thought you also intended to provide some remedy for discrimination post-1865 (under Jim Crow, or redlining, for example). If I am not mistaken, you have either changed the intent of your proposal, or you have made it under-inclusive.
When determining whether or not you have to overcome strict scrutiny, it doesn’t matter why you are discriminating by race. All that matters is whether you are discriminating by race or not.
The Second Circuit declined to address whether Japanese internment reparations had to overcome strict scrutiny merely because it was a race-conscious policy. In that particular case, they thought Japanese internment did overcome strict scrutiny. Jacobs v. Barr, 959 F.2d 313 (1992).
Chief Judge Mikva, in ober dictum, was doubtful that any argument could persuade the Second Circuit to require strict scrutiny. The Jacobs court cited the Supreme Court as saying that “benign race-conscious measures mandated by Congress”, like minority preference policies, need only pass intermediate scrutiny. Metro Broadcasting, Inc. v. FCC, 497 US 597 (1990).
Well, I strongly disagree with the majority in Metro Broadcasting. So does the Supreme Court, which explicitly overruled that case by holding 5-4 that racial classifications imposed by the federal government must overcome strict scrutiny. I agree fully with the arguments used to reach that conclusion, and you can read them for yourself at Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, 515 U.S. 200 (1995).
You can’t possibly hope to mitigate all the effects of “400 years of government supported slavery and segregation to the descendants of american slaves and american indians” by subsidizing houses and power farms on federal lands. Perhaps you mean to say, “mitigate the economic effects of …”?
The economic effects are a relative lack of wealth and home ownership among descendants of american slaves and american indians. Do you follow what I’m getting at? Means-tested programs also mitigate the relative lack of wealth and home ownership among descendants of American slaves and American Indians. Means-tested programs work towards the same goal - the same interest - without being race-conscious. Therefore, a fortiori, I cannot support your race-conscious proposal.
This isn’t just me suggesting that a court should rule against you, I sincerely don’t support your proposal because I think there is a better alternative. We can safely ignore all the legal mumbo-jumbo and I still have what I think is a convincing argument against you - the two paragraphs immediately preceding this one.
Yes, I agree that the Japanese reparations did not address the descendants of internees. But I thought you were questioning the constitutionality of reparations. So i brought up the internees to show that reparations based on race may very well pass constitutional muster.
I am not saying that because we paid the survivors of interment camps we must pay the descendants of slaves, even thought we didn’t pay the descendants of those placed in interment camps.
Servitude for a fixed term of years entered into voluntarily by the indentured servant is different than being forced into bondage, being raped by white men so that they can sell the resulting baby for more money. I don’t think you can compare.
If american slavery was the result fo bargained for passage to america and only lasted 7 years, I would be much less sympathic to arguments about the 'legacy of slavery" I would probably point to the chinese railroad workers and ask how their history is significantly more crippling than that history
ETA I fucking hate how you have to put the [quote] and [/quote] on separate lines
It looks like a large part of the western USA is federally owned desert. There are roads through those deserts. We can build more, we always build infrastructure to accommodate expanding development, why would we make an exception for black people? I literally just saw a development go up and they state built a new road.
The cost of the solar panels is irrelevant. The important factor is ROI. If the solar panels will produce a positive cash flow, then they can borrow to purchase the panels.
Take a good look at that map again. How much of it is relatively flat desert? A north-facing scree slope isn’t a suitable solar site, for example; most mountainous areas in general aren’t.
For this new development you saw, how long a road did the state build? How far is this new development from existing grocery stores, hospitals, schools, and other amenities? How far to existing utility infrastructure, including both electricity and water? (Oh, yeah, water is a huge deal in much of the desert southwest, and humans can’t live very long without it, nor can photovoltaic systems keep generating without washing the panels periodically.)
Are you expecting the feds to build the high-voltage transmission lines and other equipment required to move this generated electricity to where it is useful? Have you figured out how much that will add to the bill? If not the feds, then who?
The cost of the solar panels is highly relevant. If a 10-acre solar farm requires several million dollars in initial investment, that’s a lot of money to lend to somebody with no track record, on speculation that their business plan will be viable. (Remember, most existing solar farms depend heavily on government incentives to generate that positive cash flow; are the incentives going to continue?)
I think the population of black people who were subject to Jim Crow and the descendants of slaves form almost perfectly overlapping venn diagrams.
I was mostly talking about remedying racism as a compelling state interest.
I agree that racial discrimination requires strict scrutiny.
A lot of it is economic but you could not mitigate the legacy of slavery and segregation with a cash settlement.
I simply don’t support reparations for white people. You seem to be arguing for a “war against poverty” in a thread about reparations. Let’s say that we do your war against poverty and there is still a significant black/white gap. The argument for reparations would still be there so your war against poverty does not address the issue…
for every north facing slope there is a south facing slope.
We spend however much it costs to build the water infrastructure, roads, hospitals, schools and other government facilities, like we do for white people. The grocery stores will go where there are customers. Most of rural america would not exist if we didn’t build roads, hospitals, water infrastructure, schools and other government facilities.
How much will it add to the bill? We just spent 2 trillion dollars to keep mostly white people from feeling the discomfort of coronavirus.
yes the incentives will continue at least long enough for the homesteaders. The lenders will be able to rely on the federally guaranteed power purchase agreements. Each homesteader will be certified in running and operating a solar farm.