This is funny but no one has linked to a single case of black people suing for reparations.
If it weren’t for Dopers always bringing up this topic (usually in the opposition), then I’d never have a chance to talk about it.
Are you including me? Because I’ve really tried to keep emotion out of my posts so I don’t get accused of being shrill and hysterical.
Show how you reach this conclusion by refuting some points. Extra credit if intellectual rigor is involved.
In few demographics is homophobia stronger than the African American community. The 70% of black voters who voted for Prop8 were enough to push it over the edge. So if gay marriage is legalized one day, can gays sue them for reparations?
This entire debate is shite. It’s never going to happen regardless of whether it’s warranted and the premise is intrinsically flawed.
The percentage that you quoted is bogus. You’ll need to offer up a site to back up what you’re saying.
The difference between your position and mine is that I think it matters who the debtor is.
You see the debtor as nameless, vague “society.” “Government.” But when you demand money from those institutions, I see the real people who are going to be ground into the dirt to pay the money that those institutions owe. Real taxpayers, real citizens with lives, real individuals who were not even alive when those laws were repealed.
Suppose you were owed billions of dollars by Coca-Cola. Is it really Coca-Cola the company who will pay for that? Or will they just raise the price of a Coke by $0.50 and make the consumer pay it?
You want to extract the money from the institution. But they’re going to pass the cost along to the taxpayer. Do you really think that anybody’s learning a useful lesson from this?
Yes. Reparations are fine in principle. I don’t see how you separate “the government of 1950 owes you” from “taxpayers of 2000-2100 will end up footing the bill.”
Questions:
When your reparation check is calculated, will your share of the benefit of affirmative action programs be deducted from the total?
Do black people get a tax credit so only Whites, Hispanics, Chinese and Other end up paying for these reparations? Who pays and who does not?
Let me add one thing:
If you establish the precedent of reparations, putting a dollar value on freedom, you open a tremendous can of worms. We have already seen the government of G.W. Bush throw out 800 years of common law in order to imprison some terrorists without trial, seen them shred important documents, seen them piss away the Constitution.
Now you’re saying, they give our next of kin a few bucks and we just let it slide? Take a payoff, call it even? Pay a fine, no biggie, we’ll just raise taxes. Who cares about the rights of human beings that we fought countless wars to protect? Just toss 'em a few bucks and they’ll shut up.
That’s a really, really, really awful precedent to set. I do not want to see what the likes of Dick Cheney would do to us, with an escape hatch like that.
Do you think this discussion has been about sueing white people?
You haven’t explained why goddammit! If this debate has been shit, it’s because you can’t seem to argue without using red herrings (“Reparations aren’t going to fix anything!”), self-absorbed appeals to emotion (“I didn’t do nuttin’ to nobody and I ain’t no racist!”) or plain ludicrosity (“It’s too EXPENSIVE!!”). We have legal precedence for reparations, we have people who can document how they’ve been harmed, and it’s not even debatable that people were harmed. And yet somehow you think it would be fair to deny these people legal redress. Unless you’re totally against the point of the legal system, I don’t understand.
Shite indeed!
You’re right. Reparations aren’t going to happen. But that doesn’t make this debate useless. If I can convince a single person that they are perfectly entitled to and justified in seeking legal redress from their own government, then I’ve done a good thing. Perhaps if black Americans had been bold enough to exercise this basic right during the 60s and 70s (or the 1860s and 1870s), we wouldn’t even be having this discussion. Maybe the next oppressed minority group won’t be as passive and we’ll start finally doing things the right way.
I’m hoping so, anyway.
It sounds bad when you say it like that, but I’m not talking about just blacks. I bet you could pick any random 1 million people, give them a million dollars, then sit back and watch the disaster. From MSN, lotto winner stories.
Who do you think would get the blame for all the trouble this would cause?
Are taxpayers being ground into the dirt from the Iraq War? You know, maybe if Americans were so worried about their pocketbooks, we wouldn’t have launched such an expensive, illegal war in the first place.
It’s beyond selfish for Americans to worry about paying back their fellow Americans without shedding nary a tear about the money we’re spending to blow up a third-world country halfway around the world.
If Coke owed me a billion dollars, you better believe I’d be suing them to get my money! Are you telling me that you would forgo 1 billion dollars just so everyone can pay $1 for a bottle of Coke? If so, you’re a freakin’ saint. A fool but a saint.
Reparations aren’t about lessons. They are about compensating people. I hope I don’t have to say this again.
If an individual runs you over with his car with malicious intent, are you going to take into consideration his children when you take him to court? Will you say to yourself, “This jerk hurt me, yes, but his poor children didn’t do anything to me. Why should they suffer?” No. If you’re a reasonable person, you will sue the guy to get compensated for the harm he caused you. Individuals and institutions should be treated the exact same way.
Fifty years from now, Americans will be paying down the debt that we are accruing now. We will have a totally different administration, as will China. Most of the people who would paying down the debt haven’t even been born yet. Unfair? Yes. But such unfairness is the price of this society and we can’t function any other way.
People can claim statute of limitations all they want, but as long as my parents and grandmother are still alive, I refuse to think that enough time has passed for Jim Crow to be marked as “ancient” history.
If you’re bringing suit against Boondocks, MS, benefits provided from a federal program have no bearing on whether Boondocks, MS screwed you over. And it’s entirely possible not to benefit from AA but still suffer from past discrimination.
Do you think Asian Americans were exempted from paying taxes when reparations for interned Japanese Americans were meted out? Do people receiving veteran’s benefits get exempted from taxes? What about people receiving Social Security?
If you sued your state government for not protecting water quality and knowingly exposing you to toxic substances, the compensation you would receive would be drawn out of the tax money you contributed to. This makes perfect sense to me. There’s no reason to view this as some kind of paradox.
We gave the interned Japanese Americans $1.6 billion. Can you cite any negative fall-out from this windfall?
And if the only trouble is that people would spend money, that doesn’t seem so bad to me. Especially now, with everyone too broke to buy Christmas presents and businesses closing down.
If the premise is flawed (instrinsically or not…WTF?), then why did the interned Japanese get reparations for crimes committed generations ago and by an administration totally different from the one who gave them redress? What, exactly, makes these folks different than black people who were also denied their civil liberties? Here are some possibilities.
There were fewer interned Japanese than Jim Crow victims.
Okay yeah. That would make more people eligible for JC reparations than internment reparations. And? That doesn’t mean JC victims are less deserving. And anyway, according to some of folks in this thread, most of people directly affected by it are dead. So we might not even be talking about that many people.
The interned Japanese lost property and opportunities to which you can affix a price .
If a victim of JC can prove that because of the government’s discrimination, they lost property and opportunities and can make a case for damages, then they should do so. I don’t doubt that people can show this. A good example of it was cited earlier in this thread.
The internment was done in a violation of the constitution and therefore was unlawful.
The same can be said for Jim Crow. There was nothing explicit in the constitution forbidding Jim Crow, true. But there was nothing in there prohibiting the whole concentration camp thing, either.
Can anyone think of substantial differences between the interned Japanese and JC victims? If someone can make a compelling, dispassionate (meaning, no 48-font histronics) argument as to why the former were deserving of reparations but not the latter, perhaps I might understand where all the “this debate is shite” talk is coming from. As it stands, I’m not getting that point of view at all.
Blacks were only 6% of the voters, there were a lot more whites that voted in favor of the measure which is why it passed. This is one of those typcial use the black person as a scapegoat in an attempt to divide and conquer.
I think the OP is on the right track but an even more compelling case I think can be made for reperations in housing discrimination which is still happening today.
False dilemma. I think the amount of money we’re spending on the Iraq War is wasteful and stupid, and I oppose it entirely. We are enriching the military-industrial friends of Cheney and achieving virtually nothing for our efforts.
Similarly, I see more harm done than good by doling out a million bucks apiece to Jim Crow victims. Many people will look at reparations as “suck it up, now we’re even.” It would, in my opinion, set back the cause of racial equality more than it would advance the opportunities for the victims.
If there were a way to suitably recompense Jim Crow victims in proportion to the damages done without being divisive, I would be perfectly in favor of it. At the moment, I don’t see how it can be done. Setting a price inevitably means someone must pay. I can’t see how that can breed anything but unrest.
But Coke wouldn’t end up paying it. Consumers would. That’s my point. And no, I wouldn’t sue them for $1 billion.
What’s the consumer going to learn from the exercise of expensive soda? Nothing — why punish them?
What’s Coke going to learn if I bankrupt them and put thousands out of work? Nothing. Why punish Coke’s employees?
I’d ask for a stake in the company because they can’t pass off that price to others. That would send the right message to the right people, without killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.
I must have mistaken you when you said
What did you mean by that?
I would press charges on him and see him prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, and I would get the money from his insurance. Only if he had no insurance would I sue him. Not everything is about suing people. Not every unfairness can be solved by waving money at it.
If you’re asking if I would take his children into consideration, then yes: I wouldn’t sue them 50 years later to make them pay their father’s debt.
So wait a minute, if you have damages of $50,000 from Jim Crow, but received benefits of $100,000 from Affirmative Action, you still get the $50,000? If that’s your position it makes it look more than ever like a money grab.
I have no idea how it works, to be honest. I was asking a question because I wanted to know how you’d go about determining the net reward of a plaintiff, and what monies would be taken into account.
They received $20,000 each. That’s not enough to tempt you to quit your job, buy a house you can’t afford, etc. We KNOW what happens when people buy houses they can’t really afford, BTW.
Reparation means “act of repairing.” Can you cite that Japanese reparations actually repaired anything?
If you just want money to spend on Christmas, then you’re not into reparations, you just want to pump money into the economy and get a wide-screen plasma TV out of the deal.
What you deserve is an apology. You can’t prove that a fat check would be anything other than a fat check.
The difference is that any consumer that helped pay what Coke owed you would be doing so by choice. To stop Coca-Cola taking your money, all you need to do is stop drinking Coke. To stop the government taking your money, you’d have to go into exile.
Why do I keep having to say this?
The intent behind reparations isn’t to promote racial equality. Or progress. Or reconcilliation. It is to compensate people for demonstrable harm. Believing otherwise is to believe it would be fair to deny someone an insurance settlement because it’s not going to stop people from having future car accidents. Very true, but very irrevelant.
People said the same thing about freeing the slaves and abolishing Jim Crow. That there would be unrest, that people would be resentful, that there would be divisiveness and disharmony. And guess what? Those people were right. But that doesn’t mean this is a valid excuse for denying justice.
If Coke set up shop literally in your backyard and tainted your drinking water with toxins, I doubt you’d forgive them the moment you kicked them off your property. Especially not if you found out their toxins gave you cancer or killed your chances of having kids. You would want to be compensated for this harm. You would want someone to pay you back for your loss. You wouldn’t care one whit about some Coke-a-holic somewhere having to pay an extra dime for a 20-ounce. (And I doubt they would have to pay extra anyway. Companies have insurance policies for a reason).
The Coke analogy is so ridiculous that I feel like we’re just wasting time now. We are talking about governmental institutions. Governments provide protection and welfare for its tax-paying citizens. Coke is a luxury item. A price increase in the cost of a can of Coke does not constitute punishment. People don’t have any obligations to Coca-Cola nor does Coca-Cola have any obligations to them. But governments do.
If you’re going to come up with an analogy to make your point, stick with something that makes sense.
Oh, come off it! By suing his insurance you are suing him. And institutions pay insurance too. If they didn’t, they really would go bankrupt.
But that’s not what reparations are about. I haven’t been talking about suing anyone’s children, but rather suing the institutions that exist the same as they did back when they were inflicting harm. Can you follow this basic premise?
First off, how would anyone determine that a person received $100,000 from AA? That’s a ludicrous claim right off the bat.
Secondly, why the hell not? If you’re suing city hall for bombing your house, it matters not a nary bit if you’ve already received a settlement from the Feds for poisoning your drinking water. Two independent crimes. Two independent criminals.
I don’t know either. I’m not a lawyer or a legislator. But previous cases have shown that it is not impossible to do.
I don’t get your point. If someone is owed a million dollars, then they should get a million dollars. Regardless of how “risky” it is to give it to them.
The OP is the only one talking about a million dollars any way. I haven’t put a dollar amount in any of my posts. So I’m wondering why people seem fixated on some astronomical amount of money. We could be talking about a million dollars or a thousand dollars.
Did you hear any of them complaining after they got their reparations?
I don’t want anything.
Some could argue that an apology without compensation is meaningless. Does saying “I’m sorry” get you out of your financial obligations? Why should it be any different for a government?
No one owes me anything. But why should I begrudge someone else to seek their own legal redress? No one has really explained this to me.
This “discussion” has been all over the map. It’s about using the courts, no it’s about Congressional acts, no it’s about the state level, it’s about atonement, no it’s about punitive damages.
Darlin’, we both have some fishy breath. I’ll admit I haven’t been a master debater but you should admit the same.
How is that ever a ludicrous argument? I don’t think anybody would disagree that the government paying for everybody’s health insurance premiums would be a wonderful idea. People need healthcare, too many people don’t have access to it because they’re uninsured or underinsured, and then the excess of doctor to patient ratios could be improved by the government building state-of-the-art teaching hospitals all over the country and expanding the ones that are there and training anyone who can pass the entrance exams and has the right GPA to be doctors, nurses, and other healthcare professionals. You’ll never have to worry about not being able to afford to get preventative or real treatment and there will never be a bill. This would be absolutely great, wouldn’t it?
But “It’s too EXPENSIVE!!”. We can’t do it. It would be wonderful if the government would buy every veteran and every homeless person a house, paid for, but again- “It’s too EXPENSIVE!!”.
On a personal level, I’d love to buy a hybrid car. The people next door might love to redecorate and replace their outdated furniture and fixtures. The hybrid car has practical value- less emissions, cheaper gas, reduces foreign oil dependence, and for the family next door redecorating and remodelling their house would increase their net worth by adding to the value of their home, yes? But if I were to pay $40,000 for a hybrid car it would wipe me out- the downpayment, the car payment, etc., and the hypothetical family next door- they can’t afford to pay $30,000 to improve their home out of pocket and borrowing that much, even though it would add to the value of their home, would probably be a very bad move if they’re just getting by as it is and don’t want to sell the place.
Or, obviously I don’t know your financial state, but let’s say that you have $1,500 in ready cash, regular rent/mortgage and family responsibilities, you depend on your paycheck to make your expenses each month. Now suppose that you had a fantastic opportunity- your dream vacation is available, wherever that is- 2 months, first class accomodations and travel- and it’s $5000, which is a fifth what it’s worth- BUT it’s non transferrable (you can’t resell it at a profit) and would more than wipe you out in cash and require you to put a lot on your credit cards and then you’d lose income after your vacation time’s exhausted and you have to go on leave- Would you agree that “great thing, too expensive” is a valid reason not to go?
Now on the other hand if I had to have an operation and it cost me $50,000- everything I have or can borrow and then I have to finance the rest- but without it I’ll be an invalid. Then, the only real answer is “go into debt”, because this is vital. But if it’s a facelift, it would be stupid.
I can think of few excuses better than “It’s too expensive” when it’s not an absolutely essential purchase, even if that purchase has practical merit.
If they can document financial harm, that’s another thing entirely. Just having survived Jim Crow is not the same thing.
The degree of harm is a different matter.
The Japanese are not comparable to blacks under Jim Crow. I don’t agree that’s a precedent.
The following is true of the Japanese interned in camps- show me which is true of the blacks under Jim Crow:
------they were removed forcibly from their homes by troops acting on orders from the Federal government
—entire families were incarcerated behind barbed wire in barracks like buildings guarded by machine gun wielding soldiers without trial or charge-
—people were removed from their jobs, causing them to lose income
—businesses failed and mortgages were foreclosed on because of the enforced absence of their owners
—many were required to work without fair compensation in war effort factories
—they had no freedom to leave
—they were denied the same medical care available on the outside
—they were removed forcibly from their homes by government troops
—these were completely innocent people and they were forced to live in a concentration camp. (That term conjures images of Auschwitz and Treblinka that are of course inappropriate- there was no attempt to starve or kill them, but it was a Federally ordered indignity nonetheless.)
How is this comparable to blacks under Jim Crow?
If you say so.
How?
I don’t mean this as an ad hom but as a statement of relevant fact: I think you have a seriously simplistic view of both of those historical eras.
Is there a particular type of wood you prefer for your patibulum or do you find one kind works the pecs better and another trikes?
My final words on the subject (on which neither of us have exactly represented our viewpoint well):
By your own admission, reparations do not atone for or change the past.
By your own admission, they are best described as punitive measures.
Punitive = Punishment
99+% of the people who imposed Jim Crow Laws are dead, the other <1% dying. You can’t punish them. The government that is in place now is comprised 100% of different people than then. The burden of payments would fall on taxpayers who had nothing to do with the actions- you’re punishing people today for something that their grandfathers may or may not have done.
The affirmative action programs and social programs that you dismiss completely as worthless were installed to help make real, not symbolic, atonement for the past. Millions of people have benefitted from them. THOSE WHO ARE STILL ALIVE WHO SUFFERED UNDER JIM CROW WERE ELIGIBLE TO BENEFIT FROM THEM.
As mentioned above with the Emmett Till case- which I do not believe you’ve responded to- who was responsible for his murder? Show a tangible causal link between ANY BRANCH OF THE FEDERAL OR STATE GOVERNMENT and his murder. Prove liability.
The government’s coffers are not just overextended but grossly overextended. The government is not a corporation- it does not work at a profit and all monies it controls are derived from the people. The people of today have NO LEGAL LIABILITY to those who suffered under Jim Crow, PERIOD.
I descend from people who had their farms destroyed and the heads of their family killed in the Civil War- these were women and children who couldn’t even vote, let alone vote secession, and they got no reparations. The Cherokee Indians were forced from the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, etc., strictly so the whites could seize their land and gold fields and IN CLEAR VIOLATION OF A DIRECT RULING FROM THE SCOTUS, they have reservations but no reparations as far as the gold taken from Georgia or the land redistributed. For that matter my ancestors moved onto land forcibly seized from Creek Indians as ‘reparations’ for damage caused by DIFFERENT CREEK INDIANS- those Indians got no reparations. Irish, Jews, Italians, Chinese, immigrants of every shade and dialect and creed came here by the millions and battled prejudice and unfair laws, they got no reparations. What makes Jim Crow survivors so special?
I think the most ridiculous comment made- I can’t remember who said it- was $62 Billion is chump change to the Federal government. Utter rubbish- $62 billion is enough to buy every house in Pittsburgh, or Detroit, or D.C… At only 1% interest the interest on that money is enough to pay the full tuition and books for more than 100,000 students per year FOR THE REST OF TIME. Don’t let the overuse of the word billion fool you, it’ ain’t chump change, not even if the chump in question is Warren Buffet (who isn’t worth that much).
Anyway, there’s not going to be consensus here, so have a happy Thanksgiving and the same to your family. I mean that sincerely.
[terrorist fist bump proffered]