Black Americans asking for reparations and taking it seriously would be like me suing the Irish Government for failure to quell the potato blight of 1860’s that forced my Great great grandparents to go a sailing.
Nonsense.
Actually, the famine was in the 1840s and it was the British government…stupid Melbourne and Peel!
And hell, I gotta sue the Russians-since Catherine the Great basically divided up Poland and screwed everyone there!
BTW, I once used the Irish reperations argument when someone e-mailed me about the message I left at NCOBRA. He said that then the Irish SHOULD look into it-he actually took it seriously, rather than I was being flip.
Takes all kinds, I guess.
Black Americans were explicitly promised “40 acres and a mule” by the government, to be implemented after the Civil War. Andrew Johnson, when he became president, reneged on that promise. So the thing Blacks fought for, besides their freedom, that is their own land that the other pioneers in the West had, they was denied. Black people until recently suffered ever since because only a few of the people owned land. Thus they cannot establish nearly as much capital as other communities can to start up thriving business.
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That’s not exactly accurate, capacitor. They was no such promise by the U.S. government. In January 1865, General Sherman issued Special Field Order 15 setting aside some land in the South for the use of freed slaves. Each family was supposed to receive 40 acres and the army was supposed to loan mules as well.
Sherman, however, had no authority to give this land away to anyone. Andrew Johnson returned the land to it’s former owners in the fall of that year.
Zev Steinhardt
Well, if this is the basis (and it does seem to be the basis), then the pro-reparations people have their math off a bit. They seem to think that every black person should get the modern equivalent of 40 acres & a mule. I saw (somewhere, I’m lazy right now) that this is about $8 Trillion (with a T) based on the avg. value of 40 acres of arable land.
My proposed compromise: It seems apparent to me that, if anything, it should be the modern equivalent of 40 acres (as above), but multiplied by the number of slaves counted in the 1860 census (the last one that counted slaves). Divide this much smaller amount between every person who can document freed slave as ancestors. This is to be paid in 30-year T-bills. From that point forward, people can (rightly) bemoan the legacies of racism in the US, but no more calls for reparations.
Well, so what? The government promises a lot of things it doesn’t give. What was it Bush said-Read my lips-NO MORE TAXES???
Did he keep his promise?
Not all white people got the ‘free land.’ But here’s an idea, lets kill the last of the indians, take their land, and give it to the black people. Then it will be fair.
Jesse Jackson says, “You committed genocide for those people, why wont you commit genocide for us.”
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by labdude *
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:eek: Did Jesse Jackson really say that??? Or are you kidding us and I’m falling for it? If he did, do you have a cite?
Zev Steinhardt
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by zev_steinhardt *
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sorry, just joking:)
The implication is that, had they not been promised 40 acres and a mule, they wouldn’t have fought for their freedom?
Personally, I think the reparations idea would have been a wonderful one anytime up until around 1900. If a government allows inhumane actions, it should compensate the victims (even if they were legal actions at the time. While the Holocaust wasn’t legal under German law, most of the confiscation of Jewish property was.) At this point, however, who do you compensate? Say there’s a person out there (I’m sure there are many) who had a slave as a great-great grandparent, but the other 15 great-greats were white. Does this person get full compensation, 1/16th compensation, or nothing? Do descendents of Indian tribes like the Seminoles, who took in escaped slaves, get a tax credit the year compensation is made? I just don’t think it can be done.
BTW, there is a fascinating article in this month’s Atlantic Monthly, in which four well-known class-action plaintiff’s lawyers discuss the possibility of a reparations lawsuit. They break down all aspects of the suit.
Sua
I’ve got no position on reparations, but I’m surprised that nobody’s discussing the question of reparations for more recent forms of overt governmental discrimination against blacks.
Most noticeably, the Jim Crow laws, and the separate-but-‘equal’ status of blacks in the South that persisted until the 1960s, had an extremely adverse effect on the economic, political, and social status of blacks, many of whom are still alive and kicking today. And even in non-Southern states, many state governments allowed discriminatory contracts, e.g. covenants in deeds to real property that forbade all future owners of that property from ever selling to a Negro. Up until the 1960s, it was also legal to refuse to hire someone based on their skin color. That certainly had an adverse effect on blacks’ job prospects.
Given that we’ve paid reparations to the interned Japanese-Americans from WWII, I’d be interested in whether people think there’s an argument for reparations to those who suffered under the discriminatory laws that were in play for roughly two decades after WWII.
P.S. Hey Sua, which issue of the Atlantic was that? I don’t remember seeing it in the 1/01 or 12/00 issues, and I can’t find reference to a recent discussion of reparations on their website.
Excellent point, RT. To strengthen it a bit, a lot of the Jim Crow discrimination wasn’t legal even at the time - just no one had challenged it yet.
As for which issue of the Atlantic it was, I’m going to have to call Mommy - I read the article at her house over the holidays. Back to you with the info when I can.
Sua
Even assuming that something like this happened, who would get the money? There are many black families here, I’m sure, who immigrated after the civil war and so on (the boston area here is filled with, uh, haitians? Some foriegn black, anyway)
Since I’m sure there aren’t great records of whose great-great grand-daddy was a slave, how the hell are we supposed to pull this off even in theory? Becuase if we don’t get it right even this won’t end it.
Besides, can I get some of the Royal Jewels for my family’s lives of serfdom? Surely England owes me at least a five-pound note or a pint of bitters or something for all that trouble way-back-when.
“Excellent point, RT. To strengthen it a bit, a lot of the Jim Crow discrimination wasn’t legal even at the time - just no one had challenged it yet.”
A good article about Jim Crow in a particular field – passenger rail travel – is in this month’s (February 2001) Trains Magazine, “When Jim Crow rode the rails” by John Edward Wilz. The article emphasizes the fact that the court cases of the time, going back to Plessy v. Ferguson in the 1890s, required “separate but equal” facilities but the railroads provided “colored” facilities that were clearly NOT even remotely equal to the white facilities. When the Federal government started putting real teeth into “separate but equal” on the rails in the early 1940s (yes, over a decade before Brown v. Board of Ed) the railroads found operating two sets of equal facilities to be such a logistical nightmare that they began to give up on segregation altogether in direct defiance of state Jim Crow laws. That is, except in the “deep South,” where it hung on on minor intrastate lines into the early 1960s.