As a side note, it seems to me that the argument that the descendants of slaves are doing better than the people living in Africa is kind of a load.
The fact remains that the median standard of living for the descendants of slaves in the USA is lower than the median standard of living for the decedents of slave owners. This is a problematic discrepancy.
If we follow the above argument to its conclusion, are we to then expect that the African-American community should be thankful for slavery?
Right. That was indeed the point made by this author. He said that he was better off for being an American, so the institution of slavery had worked to his personal advantage. It’s an intentionally shocking POV.
>> If we follow the above argument to its conclusion, are we to then expect that the African-American community should be thankful for slavery?
No, if we follow the argument to its logical conclusion, the land should be returned to the Indians, white Americans should pack their bags and return to Europe, black Americans should pack their bags and return to Africa and Asian Americans should pack their bags and return to Asia.
Then we can start undoing all the wrongs that happened in those places like Spain can sue the Arabs for having occupied their country for 800 years, Holland can sue Spain for having occupied their country, All of Europe can sue France for Napoleon, etc. Where do we stop?
>> … the median standard of living for the decedents of slave owners
Dead people have living standards? I’m scratching my head over that one.
Main Entry: de·ce·dent, Function: noun, Date: 1599
: a deceased person – used chiefly in law
Etymology: Latin decedent-, decedens, present participle of decedere
That argument strikes me as sort of a load as well. World history would be significantly different if there hadn’t been the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Millions of people–more than those killed in the Holocaust–were stolen from their lands. There’s no reason to believe that African nations would have followed the same trajectory if African peoples had just been left the hell alone. So no one can really say who is “better off”. Unless–that is–someone has actually visited an alternate universe ala Sliders.
First, I don’t think it’s been established that reparations were only going to people who could present such evidence. But lets put that aside for the moment. IMHO the reason it’s disingenuous is because it couches the terms of the suit in a way which ignores the realities of the situation. Correct me if I’m wrong but the suit is based on the idea that black’s today were damaged, and are still experiencing a common degree of harm, from the atrocity which was slavery. My thinking goes like this:
Were blacks who lived during the 1800’s harmed by slavery? Definitely. Without question.
Were the children of ex-slaves harmed by their parents being formerly slaves? Yep. Their parents likely didn’t have the material means nor skills necessary at the time they became free to provide well for their family. So, the children of ex-slaves were definitely damaged by what happened to their parents. I liken this to the children of a business owner. If the business owner dies due to some negligence on the part of another organization do the children have the right to sue the offender based on the damage done them? Course they do. It impacted them directly.
Were the grand children of ex-slaves whose parents weren’t slaves harmed by their grand parents being slaves? Yes, but probably not in any direct way. The harm experienced by these grand children is of a different variety. Mostly along the lines of experiencing discrimination in which jobs they could hold, what establishments they could frequent, what opportunities were available to them, etc.
Were the great grand children of ex-slaves harmed by their great grand parents being slaves? Maybe, but not necessarily, and almost definitely not in a direct way. The harm experienced by these great grand children is of yet another variety. Discrimination still exists in American culture but it isn’t enshrined by law. In fact the reverse is the case. The law makes it a crime to discriminate based on race. While discrimination is still a real every day issue, socio economic factors IMHO are the big determinant as a measure of probable success for an individual black person in America today.
IMHO a person only has a legal/moral base for a suit if it can be shown that they were directly impacted in a negative fashion. For current day blacks to demonstrate that they are still experiencing harm based on the slavery of yesteryear and that the government is responsible for said damages they would need to demonstrate that the government is facilitating that harm. In other words, systematic institutionalized discrimination by the gov’ment. That’s racism. That’s very much a black vs. white issue.
That is a lousy argument. Luckily it’s not one that I’m making.
Never said that the country is all about them. What I am saying is that it’s a ruling which will have a disparate impact. If a tax law has a disparate impact on the wealthy should they be concerned? What about if a law has a disparate impact on the elderly, should the elderly be concerned? The answers of course are “Yes” and “Yes”. I realize that you’re indicating that you’ll be paying out of your own pocket if reparations are made just like any other American (white, black, latino, asian, etc.) and this is true. However it doesn’t capture the reality of the situation. Let’s say there are 280,000,000 people in America and that 35,000,000 of them are black. Let’s say that each person contributes $1 to a reparations fund and that that fund is then redistributed equally to the 35,000,000 blacks. Yeah, you “paid” a dollar into the fund but you got eight dollars back. Technically you paid your portion of the new tax but realistically you were it’s beneficiary.
Setting aside the fact that it’s difficult for people to agree on what is “Right” in a given situation I agree that public opinion shouldn’t sway the courts. However, it hasn’t been established that the US owes current day blacks reparations. IMHO it must first be determined that blacks living today were damaged to a reasonable degree by actions performed by the gov’mt approximately 140 years ago.
I’m not sure how exactly that relates to my example of company “A”. Please explain.
I don’t feel wounded however I do feel offended. The reasons are:
The vast majority of suits brought against the guv’mt are not class action suits. They are individuals with a grievance which has affected them directly.
Reparations presumes damages on behalf of a group whose wishes or status the plaintiff’s cannot possibly represent accurately.
Reparations assumes that blacks are currently being damaged today in a direct and measureable way by a state which existed approximately 140 years ago.
The chances IMHO of the suit winning combined with the practical obstacles in implementing it (how black do you have to be to qualify? 1/2 black? 1/4 black? some melanin test? etc.) give me the impression that this is nothing more then an attempt to legally extort $$$ from institutions wishing to avoid bad publicity.
Calling my hypothetical silly doesn’t make it so. Tell me, why is it silly? If it’s simply because of the number of people found in “A” (three) vs. the number of people in America (280,000,000) then at what magic cutoff point isn’t it an implicit accusation? Or is there some other attribute which is the distinguishing characteristic between the two organizations?
BTW, Please answer the questions I posed above. Here they are again:
In my hypothetical above is an accusation against “A” an implicit accusation also against it’s 3 members?
If not why? If so how is an accusation against America not an accusation against Americans as individuals?
What do you think is the chance (percentage wise) that the plaintiff’s will win their slavery-reparations case?
If you think their chances are very low what do you think is their probable motivation for filing suit?
Grim
Small nit: you may have noticed (if you are reading this thread) that this phrasing gaff on my part has already been pointed out, and that I have already sheepishly acknowledged it. But thanks for bringing it up again, and deliberately missing the obvious point that I was making.
I’m not Monstro but I’ll have a crack at your hypthetical scenario, Grim. First, let’s replay what you wrote:
IMO, all of this is based on perception and it is not necessarily connected with what is real. If I start up a corporation with a few of my friends and one of my friends screws up the finances, and an outside party complains about it, it would be highly unprofessional for me to be personally offended by their complaint simply because I was one of the partners and had nothing to do with the problem directly. The adult thing would be to swallow my pride and take care of business, not throw a fit and scream “But it’s not MY fault, it’s HIS fault!” Right? The immature and selfish thing to do would be to hold on to my own personal feelings of non-impropriety and prevent a valid problem from being addressed.
In sum, corporations (and governments) are to be treated as single-bodied entities, not individuals within a corporation. That’s why when if a corporation messes up, all stockholders pay the price, not just certain ones. That’s why the whole Enron situation is the cluster-fuck that it is. Because of a few shady nimwits, everybody from the CEO to the janitors are suffering now. Becoming a part of any group removes you of some of your individuality. That’s the reality of it.
The reality of the situation is that it’s against “A”, not implicity or explicity against the members of “A”. A business is more than the sum of its individuals. When we speak of Coca-Cola, we are speaking of a corporate entity, not all the individual stock-holders. If I was to sue “A”, the case would not be called Grim Beaker & 2 of his friends versus you with the face. It would be called “A” vs you with the face. Now I’m not saying you can not perceive it as an implicit accusation against you personally, but that’s not an objective way of viewing the situation.
Because the US Government, while composed of individuals, is not made up of all the citizens of the country and is not controlled by the whims of individuals, either. Consider every tax-payer a stock-holder in the corporation called The United States. When this corporation is sued, should these stock-holders feel personally attacked by the litigants? If they do, they aren’t thinking sensibly. A reasonable approach is to keep an eye on the corporation and assess the situations it gets into, and admit when wrong is done and do something about it instead of taking umbrage because you think someone is calling you names. That’s how I see it.
I don’t think these plaintiffs have much of a chance at all. Less than 1%.
People play the lottery all the time knowing the odds are highly stacked against them. I think these litigants are will to play these odds for the chance at getting some money.
Basically, like all civil suits.
They’d be better off marshalling their votes and political strength to elect sympathetic lawmakers rather than pursue this court case, which will ultimately satsify no-one and alienate many. How much reparation is enough, anyway? Give every black person $1 million? $5 million? Are rich black people exempt? If individual payments are unsuitable, is the plan to create a large fund from which payments will be doled out? How is this different from any existing welfare program?
The “40 acres and a mule” promise was made, but by General Sherman in the heat of the Civil War, and eventually overturned by President Johnson. It has no legal strength. And if the basis of the lawsuit is “broken promises”, you’ll have to get in line behind descendants of Native American populations and their collections of broken treaties.
So if you start now, maybe you can talk Colin Powell into running for President in 2008. Meantime, I suggest you focus on the 2002 Congressional elections. Reparation-seekers might not get any wealth from their lawsuit (at least, I hope they don’t), but I have no sympathy at all if they won’t take the legal means to gain power for themselves.
I, myself, will be filing suits against the Egyptian government for forcing my ancestors into slavery for that whole Pyramid scheme.
Shalom.
Amusing, but in the interests of accuracy (this being the Straight Dope©, after all). it should be noted that your forebears were enslaved to harvest crops, not to build pyramids–the last of which had been built several hundreds of years prior to the birth of Joseph.
I know, but I was in the same boat as Cecil when he found the less accurate version to be a lot funnier.
Is that 1865 US dollars? Confederate dollars? Gold dollars? What?
I’m not impressed that organizations of whatever stamp “spent time and effort” estimating how much wealth was accrued. Some people spend time and effort trying to figure out the value of pi to some astronomical number of decimal places, too. But what of it? Everybody now living suffered losses exactly equal to the gains of everybody else now living, which is to say zero. Let’s move on.
And before you say that I have gained from slavery I’ll tell you that my great grandfather served in a volunteer regiment from Illinois in the Civil War to fight, at risk of his life, against slavery. Fortunately he didn’t lose his life or I never would have had mine. But he surely gave up opportunities and money he would have had, had he stayed home. He put his life on hold to fight the fight. Only after the war did he marry and father eight children. Go Grandpa!
I have just gone through all THREE pages of this thread. For some reason, this jumped out at me: (bolding mine)
What is your point? I know you are being sarcastic, but what is your point?
Just about everyone on this thread–and many white people that I’ve met in my life–all claim that no one in their ancestry owned slaves. And yet there’s tons of descendants of slaves floating around this country. Where did they all come from? Certaintly their ancestors all can’t be traced to one slaveowner.
And since I’m the one with the microphone, I’ll say it first: I have an ancestor who was a slaveowner. He was my great-great-grandfather, an Irish-Scottish guy named Buck Henry who had relations with one of his woman slaves. Subsequently producing my mother’s lineage and me. Please note how I have no shame or guilt about my association with this man.
If American slavery was so far back in the past that it deserves comparison with ancient Egyptian slavery, it amazes me how sure people are that NO ONE in their lineage owned slaves. And yet I’m 100% certain that I am descended from slaves and at least one slaveowner. This type of certainty–on my side and the side of people denying relation to slaveowners–would not exist if American slavery was as ancient as the Spanish Inquisition.
It also strikes me funny how many Americans suddenly reject their citizenship prior to 1865 when the talk is about slavery, but have no problem feeling pride in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independance and all that. Thomas Jefferson is a great man who all presidents should try to emulate, they say. Bullshit. You can’t pick and choose which things in American history you want to connect yourselves with. If you call yourself American, you are connected to everything–good and bad–committed in your country’s name.
Do you see my point now?
I don’t know about getting cash for past suffering. If so, I think
almost every nationality can trace back far enough to where they
were disenfranchised. Hell, eventhough I grew up in a nice upper-middle community, I’m part Irish and at one time they were the “n***ers of Europe.”
BUT, there is the whole 40 Acres and a Mule thing. Since we live in a capitalist country, and need capital to survive, emancipated slaves were supposed to get 40 acres and a mule to help get them off their feet. This unfortunately never happened for the great majority of freed slaves.
Which is a reason that African Americans as a whole are significantly poorer even today than whites as a whole. I, for one,
would wholeheartedly support economic reparations congruent with this 40 acres and a mule thing. Only question is how to implement it…
And even if it were implemented, would it have any effect on the power structure?
Yes…but it seems like you’re acusing some of us of lying.
I can prove it-the earliest my ancestors came over would be the 1870s, MAYBE late 1860s-I suspect the reason they may have come over would be Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, the Chancellor’s massive attack on Catholic Germans in the new German Empire (I could be wrong about the dates-I’ll look it up). My ancestors came from the largely Catholic South Germany, in Alsace-Lorraine and possibly Austria. Since there was a lot of tension over the former region, and frequent wars, such as the Austro-Prussian and Franco-Prussian wars engineered by Bismarck, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to guess this might be the case.*
On my mom’s side, they didn’t come until the early 1900s. THIS I can provide sites for.
I think the point people are trying to make to YOU is, that while we see slavery as horrible, it was by no means the ONLY and/or WORST horror in the world. And I am highly against punishing people for the deeds of their ANCESTORS against OTHER ancestors. Good god in heaven-how will we ever survive if we keep doing that?
I don’t want to forget what happened, but at the same time, you cannot keep it isolated, as the most horrid and disgusting thing in history. Any history major such as myself will tell you-human beings SUCK. History is rife with disgusting examples. That’s why people start bringing up other attrocities-because they see this as simply the starting point for others to jump on.
*please do not assume I am comparing the Kulturekampf to slavery.
>> And yet I’m 100% certain that I am descended from slaves and at least one slaveowner.
Ok, so would you be paying, receiving or both? Maybe you can take some money with your left hand and give it to your right hand so you would be paying for the sins of your slaveowner ancestor and receiving for the suffering of your slave ancestors.
BTW, since African slaves were enslaved and sold by Africans, shouldn’t African nations be paying too?
And while we are talking of reparations… why don’t we just give everything back to the Indians?
Personally I don’t get all this talk about reparations. There is slavery and awful things going on in Africa today. We can and should do something to correct this. Talking about what happened 150 years ago while we do little or nothing about what happens today is IMHO obscene.
No, I am not.
**
I’m not saying there aren’t any white people who aren’t descended from slaveowners, Guinastia. I’m not saying ALL white people were slaveowners, or that all white people living here now can be traced to Americans of slavery times. So while I appreciate the description of your family lineage, it is not necessary to prove anything to me. I’m not blaming ANYONE LIVING TODAY OF ANYTHING.
[sub]got it now?[/sub]
**
How is asking for a formal apology from the federal government punishment, Guinastia? For the last million posts or so, that’s all I’ve been proposing.
And how is the federal government apologizing for something it did tauntmount to belittling all the other “horrors” of the world? Because humans are inherently evil our government is excused from putting a formal apology down in the public record for the world to see? Excuse me, but that’s a crazy-ass argument.
**
Where have I posted that this is the most horrid and disgusting thing in history? Argurably it’s one of the most horrid and disgusting things in American history, but in the world’s? I don’t believe I ever said that. So please don’t put words in my mouth.
**
My problem with people bringing up atrocities from ancient times is that most of those events have not had much bearing on this country’s history. But the legacy of American slavery is tightly woven into the fabric of this country’s history, from its foundation to modern times. When I see posters comparing American slavery to things that happened 6000 years ago, I can only assume they are trying to obscure the truth for the sake of their “argument”. They, IMHO, are being foolish.
With all due respect, I don’t think that’s the point most of the people on this thread are trying to make. Monstro has not once said anything belittling about all the other atrocities that have been committed in the world. Other people repeatedly bring up all these crimes against humanity in what seems to be an attempt to diminish the impact of American Slavery. In doing this they are obscuring the issue.
Why?
American Slavery took place in America. So mentioning the Spanish Inquisition and the Egyptian Captivity is moot because these crimes were committed in other countries. We should be dealing with our own country’s foul-ups before pointing at the foul-ups of others. Do otherwise smells of red herring.
The Spanish Inquisition et al took place millenia ago. American Slavery was in existence less than 150 years and the effects of it are palpable today. When you start comparing atrocities that were committed way back in the days of Adam and Eve (and I’m exaggerating, okay?) with something that happened only 3 generations ago, that fosters resentment on the part of those who feel that experience is being belittled.
Millenia ago? Eh, no. Try maybe, oh, five-six hundred years ago? A long time, but not millenia!
Yeesh.
And I think a LOT of people feel that to compare something that happened 150 years ago to something that happened to people STILL LIVING TODAY is ridiculing the whole thing.
Not comparing what happened 150 years ago to now. What I hope this lawsuit is about (and if it turns out to be some greedy bastard trying to make some bucks, I’ll be very disappointed) is showing causation. So many people think: slavery happened so long ago, why are black people A)still complaining? B) still underacheiving? and C) not getting their collective acts together like all the other immigrant groups?
I don’t think the plaintiffs stand a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. I don’t think they should. I think reparations for slavery is a bad idea. But the “slavery was sooooo long ago and all the slaves are dead” attitude looks like defensiveness on my side of the color line. If my stating the facts makes you feel like I’m trying to lay a guilt trip on you, that’s not my fault.