Wouldn’t there be a statute of limitations on something like this?
“Get your mule and land by X date” and after that, tough shit.
Also, do blacks that imigrated over from Europe get the money, too? What sort of documentation would be neccessary to prove slave liniage?
(Disregard the boldtype.)
You know, some time ago I coined an adage: In politics, the worst thing you can do is to have an unrealistic agenda. It’s always a bad idea to start a fight you know you can’t win. You needlessly create conflict and provoke your opponents. You waste a lot of time and energy. You make things difficult for those trying to implement solutions that have a chance of succeeding. You just make a big mess of things and everyone is worse off than before. Another example would be efforts to eliminate premarital sex, but this one definitely fills the bill.
As for a statute of limitations, thinksnow, perhaps a legal expert can tell us whether one actually applies, but there ought to be a de facto statute of limitations on historical injustices. A hundred years sound about right. It’s a nice round figure and roughly corresponds to a human lifetime. And in case anyone thinks of committing an injustice now and getting away with it by holding off for a hundred years, we’ll make a one-time-only deal. So the year 1900 is the cuttoff. Anything that happened prior to that is off the books.
Some friend. The 3/5ths compromise was in the Constitution itself. The Constitution, the law of the land, kept slavery as a “legitimate” institution. I also recall that the Supreme Court ruled that slaves who escape to the north should be returned to the south. I apologize for not knowing the specific case though.
Marc
Don’t mean to cite and run, but here’s an article from the January 1999 issue of the Pennsylvania Law Review which makes quite a strong argument for legislative reparations, in my opinion.
Sorry…the page I cited contains only the Introduction to the article (entitled, “Sweep Around Your Own Front Door: Examining the Argument for Legislative African American Reparations”). I’ve read the whole thing in hardcopy, and it’s very good. You should be able to find it at your friendly neighborhood law library.
My biggest problem is the aspect of how they would pay reparations anyway. Every person who feels they are black? Every person who has documentation to prove they are at least 1/8 black? Every person who can show a direct lineage from someone who was a slave? I have known some guys who considered themselves to be black, but from physical apperance, I never would have guessed that that they had anything but European ancestry. Birth records are pretty unreliable for many rural areas in the 19th century. Will they have a pigmentation meter at the reparations office?(“sorry sir you don’t seem black to me, no money”). Not to mention the later African immigrants, who could never have been promised forty acres and a mule anyway. What about the adopted desendants of slaves, If the whole deal is about hereditary property, then do other races who were ancestrally adopted at some time by black parents qualify.
No matter the morality of paying reparations, the logistics of trying to do it are just way too screwed up to do it.
‘40 acres and a mule,’ if I am, correct, was promised to freed slaves who joined the Union Army in lieu of pay. After the Civil War, the Federal government reneged on this promise. Then again, the ‘40 cares and a mule’ was also promised to White soldiers from several States and they were screwed also.
So, can descendants of the White screwed soldiers of the civil war join in the suite, or is it exclusively for Black slave descendants?
Statute of limitations.
Roughly 20 years past, or more, I recall an article where the government would no longer include interest accumulated on war bonds, promissory notes and so on, from the Civil War that people found in their attics, Great Uncle Joe’s old Yankee uniform pocket or whatever. At one time, they honored these notes in full and paid accumulated interest, and these things started popping up all over the place. The government paid out millions. Around this time they started placing accumulated interest limits on old unsatisfied or redeemed WW2 bonds and even current Savings Bonds.
If we follow the repayment ideology, should we not sue England for abusing us? France refused to pay off the great WW2 war debt it owes the US, so should we sue them and maybe send in troops to collect? After we kicked Sadaam’s butt and cleaned up his mess, the government of Iraq didn’t write us a check for the billions spent. Should we sue them? Can the parents of every unwilling draftee who got slaughtered in 'Nam sue the Vietnamese government?
Can the Mexican illegals who work in the fields as migrant workers for below minimum wage, face discrimination, and often get deported if they irritate the boss prior to pay day sue the State governments who allow this practice to go on? How about the farmers who hire them because they know they can save money that way?
We, as part of the government of the US, would find ourselves paying 50 to 75% taxes to cover all of the lawsuits if we accept them all and only the lawyers would win.
Speaking of which, should we file suits against lawyers for screwing everything up and over charging us while doing it?
I still want to sue ex-communists-I have cousins in Poland who suffered under the former Soviets…
And I want to sue Lilibet…hey, I’m not greedy-the Koh-i-noor would look GREAT on my mantle!
snicker
I don’t think people are saying that by keeping silent over relevant things is a good way to stop racism. But it’s not a good idea to bring up past ills that are WAY over and done with. It only hurts one. The wound has healed…quit scratching it open.
Or as my friend Zae says, “Get off your cross-somebody needs the wood.”
Dred Scott was the case in question, I believe…
The 3/5ths thing was put in to keep the country together… It’s a lot easier to get rid of something if you control it. The people who owned the slaves were also politically powerful, so the had to be appeased. If they hadn’t been, who knows? The South could have formed a seperate country and slavery would have lasted even longer…
I’m not sure what you are talking about here. Escaped slaves were always required to return to the south. In the 1850’s the Fugtive Slave Act was passed to punish people who assisted slaves in escaping.
I think you are talking about The Dred Scott Decision which addressed slaves who lived in free states legally. Dred Scott was a slave owned by a Missouri army officer. When the officer moved to Illinois, a free state, Scott went with him. After a number of years the officer returned to Missouri and then died. Scott sued for his freedom, claiming he was free because he lived in a free state for so long.
The court decided that no slave or decendent of a slave could be a citizen, nor has ever been a citizen, and therefore Scott could not legally sue anybody in federal court. The case was thrown out and Scott returned to slavery.
Let’s look at this realistically. Obviously, reparations would be paid by the government, so payments would be made by every taxpayer according to the current taxation system, albeit at higher levels. So millioniare blacks would pay just as many extra taxes as millionare whites, just like everyone pays higher taxes to fund welfare or foreign aid.
But who’s going to get reparations? How does someone qualify to recieve reaparations? Do you have to be black? That makes no sense, since african immigrants could claim reparations even though they never suffered from slavery. So it seems that you would have to prove that you are the legal heir of a slave in order to claim reparations. Any decision that would hand out money simply based on the “race” of a person is simply unworkable.
There is no objective way to categorize race. I suppose we could get a special panel of Klansmen, and hook them up to polygraph machines. Every candidate for reparations would be paraded in front of them. If a majority of the Klan polygraphs pegged in response to racial hatred of a perceived “black” person, then that person could get reparations. So the government gets into the racism business.
Reparations are totally unworkable, even if it were determined that they might be ethically owed (which I’m not conceding either). Who gets the money? There is no way to answer this question. If you support reparations, can you think of some way that you could legally prevent me from applying for them? Simply because you percieve me to be caucasian? What makes your perception privledged?
Yes, we compensated Japanese-Americans who were interned. But we only compensated those people who could prove that they were interned, or could prove that they were the legal heirs of those who were interned. This is impossible with slavery reparations.
That way madness lies too. The current Canadian government is neither benefitting from nor responsible for the abuses at government-run residential schools for First Nations people several decades ago, but to whom should plaintiffs in a class-action lawsuit turn?
If any of y’all cared to peruse the article excerpt I linked, or to find the full text, I think it addresses the specifics of reparations in some detail. They come, if I remember correctly, mostly in the form of tax credits, scholarships, and revitalization both of the urban infrastructure and of urban schools. But don’t take it from me–read the article.
But wouldn’t this be a case of punishing people for the sins of their fathers? Let’s accept that the descendants of slaves have a justified grievance. American citizens might want to sue Britain for war damages for the war of independance. Britain might want to sue France for the Normandy Invasion. North african countries have a claim for the Crusades. South american indians have a claim against Spain. Historically people have done a great job of being unpleasant and nasty to each other for centuries, so how do we put all of that right?
Gadarene is right. The money would be spent on infrastructure, schools, and scholarships, NOT on checks to individuals.
I think that’s part of the point of calling for reparations–the wound hasn’t healed. The systematic oppression and exploitation of slave labor allowed for accumulation of wealth by white owners and no economic recources to black people. This trend has continued through the history of this country and to the extent that the original structure affects people’s opportunites today, it’s not over.
Yes, there are poor white people and rich black people today. But the pattern still exists of oppression and it has its origins in how black people first came to this country.
Tax credits for who? Scholarships for who? Do you just have to be black to get them? In that case, blacks who just got off the plane from Africa would be eligible. For that matter, the descendents of black slaveowners would be eligible.
Poor and working class whites were treated little better than blacks (which makes a mockery of that whole “white privilege” theory), and I could cite any number of instances in which whites were exploited just as badly as blacks. There is no important difference between a twelve-year-old black kid being worked to death in a sugar cane field and a twelve-year-old white kid being worked to death in a coal mine. Why compensate the descendents of exploited blacks but not the descendents of exploited whites?
I think there’s an important difference between “owning” a person based on their skin color and working them for no benefit to themselves save the bare necessities, and employing someone, albeit in terrible working conditions. Yes, slavery was a part of the accepted economic system, as was exploitation of hired labor, but I think there is an intrinsic difference.
I think we are caught between discussing the theoretical merits of reparation and the practical details of how they would work. Does the fact that they may not be practically viable make reparations something not worth talking about?
For the record, West Germany paid several Billion dollars worth of reparations to the world’s largest Jewish orginization - the state of Israel - in the early 1950s. Some of the money went to the government; most went directly to holocaust survivors.
From a financial point of view, the score with Germany has been settled.
THEre may be a difference, but if we are to pay those who were wronged, why distinguish? Sure, they may have been wronged to a different degree by the inaction of the government, but if we are to offer financial recompense, why bar some wrongs and pay others?
Teh was plenty of indentured servitude in the eary days of our country. Why exclude those servants entirely?