That’s not unreasonable. I think limiting it to children, or at least dependents, compensates those who could reasonably demonstrate that they were harmed. From the second generation on, everything becomes speculation: “my grandfather might have been a millionaire and left me hundreds of thousands of dollars and a house in the Hamptons, if only he went to school.”
Were some English classes removed from her curriculum during her senior year? I’m really not getting it. If I’m reading the article correctly, she was in school for ONE year during Massive Resistance. She was able to go to the same school she attended during the previous years. How was her already “white” school harmed by Massive Resistance? The vagueness in that article (and the source of this article) is making me think her claim is a load of crap. If she had indeed suffered some harm, don’t you think the article would have done a better job of describing just what happened?
If I was receiving a grant from a program that was meant to atone for the evils of Jim Crow and I knew people would look at me askance for taking advantage of this opportunity, I’d probably make myself out to be a champion crusader as well, just to take the fishy smell away. Of course, I’m looking at this woman through very cynical eyes (and bitter ones too…I just watched a documentary about Massive Resistance. It was absolutely no joke).
If this woman was black and she was suing the state of Virginia because her senior year of high school–the one she graduated from just like everyone else in town–was tarnished because of some vague “lack of access to facilities”, I REALLY do not think anyone on this board would be coming to her defense. Not after the very ugly reparations threads we’ve endured. Tell me I’m wrong.
If this woman were black, yet many white persons in the same area received compensation under the same program the hypothetical black person was applying under? You think that no one on the board would support her right to use the same government program? :dubious:
What I hear you saying is that because the article does not provide you with sufficient evidence to condemn this woman, there is something wrong with the article. That isn’t a very well-considered argument.
She isn’t suing anyone. Why don’t you make an argument based on the actual facts of the case?
I don’t know because the article doesn’t say. It’s tough for me to decide whether or not she should get the scholarship based on what little information I have. So until I find out some more information I’ll just have to accept that whoever doles out the scholarships felt that she qualified to receive one.
Nobody’s being sued.
Ya’ll are picking nits to avoid answering the heart of the question.
No one is suing anyone, but this is a government program designed to amend for its own policies and laws. It is admitting it was wrong. So let’s take away the program. I’m one of the people who suffered because of Massive Resistance and I decide to sue for the harm inflicted on me by the great commonwealth.
Would the Dopers who have expressed support for Jeffrey be supportive of me suing Virginia? Would you support me if my harm was at the level of Jeffrey’s (let’s say she was denied access to a library…which is the only facility I can really imagine affecting her ability to learn)? Would you support me if I lost five years of schooling? Why would suing a government for reparations be bad, but receiving monies from a reparations program established by the government on its own volition be A-OK?
I’m asking because this thread has turned out to be very strange to me. If people do a search on this board about reparations, whether they be regarding Jim Crow or slavery, you’ll find the consensus is, “NO ONE SHOULD GET ANY MONEY BECAUSE OF STATUTE OF LIMITATIONS AND I DIDN’T DO NUTTIN’ TO NOBODY ANYWAY!” Now all of a sudden, where we have an actual real-life program of reparations (I don’t know why an earlier poster disagrees that this is reparations, but whatever) and we have a woman making a tenuous claim about suffering (remember, she still got to go to school, she still graduated as far as we know, and nothing was codified into law to deny her of anything), we get almost unanimous support of her receiving compensation. Did I just stumble into the Twilight Zone or something? Why am I the only one seeing the double standard?
I was walking down the street today and I saw a rabbi eating a turkey sandwich. I told him he shouldn’t be eating that sandwich. He asked why, and I explained that if the turkey sandwich was instead a ham and Swiss, he would be committing a sin.
This is what you have done in your last two posts: asked us to judge a white person as if she had sued for reparations - but she didn’t. She got a scholarship.
If you want to explain why her receiving a scholarship was wrong, stop talking about suing for reparations. Or at least start another thread that isn’t about scholarships for students who had their studies affected because Virginia shut down the public school system for racist reasons.
…are those people participating in this thread? If you want to pit those people, then maybe you should request that the thread be moved to the pit. But you posted an OP in Great Debates and people are responding directly to your OP and I’m not entirely sure why you have an issue with that, or why posters here should have to defend statements made by others in defense of your assertions.
I’m a Samoan/Maori living in New Zealand who is a big supporter of the Waitangi Tribunal and the efforts made to right the wrongs of yesteryear. I also, like the others in this thread, from the information posted in your OP see nothing wrong with Jeffery receiving a scholarship.
Tell me. What do reparations mean to you? To me, they can come in any form. Direct pay-out or scholarship program. Both of them are a way of making amends for an institutional wrong. No different than giving an arbitrary amount of money to interned Japanese Americans or Holocaust survivors. So what do reparations mean to you?
And if you can’t answer a simple question (Would you support Jeffrey or a black counterpart suing the Commonwealth over Massive Resistance?), why should I treat you like you have any genuine interest in this thread?
You’re right. I’m accusing posters in this thread of being hypocritical when I don’t have evidence of such.
But as I said, this thread is unfurling in a way that is inconsistent with how other reparations threads have in the past. Usually before we even get to the third post, someone posts about “getting over the past” and “Why should I pay for something I didn’t do?” I’m wondering why those voices aren’t piping up now.
Are reparations paid to everyone affected? That’s not what is happening here. They aren’t awarding scholarships to everyone, they are only giving them to a few people each year who are already enrolled in school. It’s a tribute to commemorate the anniversary of Brown vs. Board of Education, to the tune of $15,000 a year. I got a scholarship once that was created to commemorate the first female elected in Canada, was that a reparation for not treating women equally for years? Scholarship /= Reparation.
From the linked article:
*Virginia is awarding scholarships to some returning students whose education was interrupted by desegregation as far back as 57 years ago, but the awards are being offered to white students as well as black, sparking anger among some who say whites don’t need the compensation.
The scholarship, created in 2004 to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision of 1954, assists former students who were directly affected in the tumultuous years following the landmark Supreme Court decision.*
Bolding mine.
IMHO, this is a reparations program, a way to help people who were “directly affected in the tumultuous years” of Massive Resistance.
Now we can argue if “directly affected” means “directly harmed”. That would require digging up the legalese behind this program. But this is not your everyday scholarship program, Implicit. That much is clear.
Because the reparations most people object to are things like slavery reparations, being paid not to actual former slaves, but to the descendents of former slaves. That’s what some people think are unjust. Most people here haven’t spoken out against paying reparations to people like interned Japanese or Holocaust victims.
There are plenty of scholarships out there with strange criteria, from being being tall or short to having the name Van Valkenburg. Since this one commemorates a specific event they’ve initially chosen to award the scholarships to anyone who was affected. It’s a nice gesture, it’s not reparations.
Here is part of the text of the bill that was passed creating the scholarship fund:
Do private citizens pay reparations? Here is announcement for the initial funding for the program:
I would tend to think that reparations is a term that tends to carry a connotation of paying damages to a racial or ethnic group for mistreatment. In this case, I’ve said that I don’t think these scholarships are reparations because they seem to be intended for children of any race who had their educations affected because of the state’s extreme stance on a racist issue.
The nearest analogy I can think of to the Virginia situation would be something like this: California shuts down all its hospitals in 1942 in order to help round Japanese into internment camps, and later sets up a compensation system to help those who got sick because hospitals were closed. Even though the hospitals were closed to support a racist policy, the effects would have gone beyond those who were Japanese. Therefore, compensation should be available to all, recognizing that some may have suffered more than others due to their ability to afford private doctors or whatnot.
I think I’m more interested in the OP than you are, frankly. You are criticize some who received scholarships, then hijack the debate into matters of hypothetical lawsuits.
In any case, I would tend to support those who would sue Virginia for the absurd and hateful response of closing down public schools to support a racist policy.
On another topic, do you know if Virginia has formally apologized for this action? I believe the state legislature has declined to formally apologize for slavery.
Is it your position, then, that only black people were harmed by Massive Resistance?
Firstly I do not think it can clearly be considered a reparations program. Because I think the fact that it is awarded only if you’re intending to go to school makes it questionable. A reparation to me is a cash payout that you get regardless of what you do with it. But for the sake of argument let’s call it a reparation.
If the State wrongfully imprisons me and the prosecutor deliberately commits misdeeds and the judge fails at his duty to properly and fairly adjudicate the proceedings I can and would sue the State. If I was in a State in which there were statutory definitions as to how much compensation I was owed, then what would happen is the lawsuit would be dismissed and I’d be pointed to the compensation fund and given the statutory amount (this is one of those areas where the statute can override whatever a court might think you deserve based on concepts of equity, punitive damages or etc…YMMV with differing state constitutions and differing state supreme courts.)
If the state however did not have a statutory compensation scheme for wrongful imprisonment then I’d basically be suing the state and it’d be up to a judge or jury to decide how much money I received, and it might be in the multiple-millions.
I’m perfectly okay with that scenario. Someone was gravely wronged by the negligence or intentional misdeed of another. Our tort system exists to try and fix that. In this scenario instead of me being wronged by another citizen I was wronged by the state–but that’s okay, our system can handle that too.
Now let’s say instead of a single improper act, instead we had a state crime lab that was ran by a corrupt individual who deliberately forged lab results for some several hundred accused persons over several years. In each case he essentially stacked the deck against those persons (this actually happened in West Virginia, by the way.) I would be fine with a fund being set up to compensate all persons who had been wrongfully convicted due to evidence tampered with by that lab administrator. I would be fine with those “reparations”, and I might even support them also providing for some level of payout to immediate family (essentially spouse + dependents, because they were harmed in various ways.)
In such a scenario would I support one of the individuals eligible for monies from that fund suing the state to try and get more? Well, it would depend. It would ultimately go to the state supreme court and if they felt that the monetary award given from the fund is reasonable across the board and thus the court cannot consider a case in which they may be awarded more, I’m fine with that and with the person essentially being required to take the fund payout or go home empty-handed.
Now let us say that we dig up some historical documents in the State archives. We find undeniable evidence that a certain state judge in 1860 essentially decided treat with extreme bias some 1,000 defendants at random–insuring their wrongful conviction and punishment. Would I support a fund in the year 2011 being set up to compensate the probably 50,000+ descendants of those person wronged 150 years ago? No, I would not support that.
I don’t know what you specifically mean when you say people usually have a problem with reparations. If you’re talking about reparations given to people right now for slavery then I can say the reason we have a problem with that is most people do not think you deserve financial compensation for things done to ancestors many generations removed from the present time. There’s several different reasons to that, but let us leave those reasons to be discussed later if necessary (I argue they do not need to really be expanded upon at present.)
If you are wondering why the same people (like myself) that are opposed to slavery reparations but would support these “Massive Resistance” reparations–well the difference for me is the Massive Resistance reparations (and note I’m only stipulating they are reparations for purposes of discussion) are being paid to the people who were directly wronged. That is the key difference to me.
If you’re wondering why people who were opposed to reparations for slaves during the 1860s would support this, then I don’t know. I think it would have been proper to give the slaves significant reparations after the Civil War. I also think it would have been proper to give reparations to persons who suffered under Jim Crow. However because Jim Crow is not as easily demarcated as slavery that would be a much more difficult issue (where do you do the cutoff?) Additionally because of the large population of people who were subject to Jim Crow and the fact that they probably could not be as easily compensated justly as the slaves, we would probably have to do something a little different. I would argue in some ways Affirmative Action is similar to what I would say should have been done to correct for Jim Crow, but more Federally ran and centralized. (Essentially a government run UNCF on steroids.) Note I argue slaves might be easier to compensate because we could have just taken all the land and assets of the ~10% of the population that owned slaves and divvied it up. Instead of those slaves becoming semi-feudal sharecroppers in fief to the same people they used to be enslaved by, they would instead become members of a form of cooperative.
Oops, think I got my stories mixed up. I guess Virginia did apologize for slavery. I don’t know if they have apologized for Massive Resistance.
I didn’t want to dig up the last “long” thread we had on this subject, but here it is.
A thread about Jim Crow reparations
Take home message from that thread? Let’s just say it wasn’t, “Yeah, let’s do something to help black people who were impacted by Jim Crow!” But you’re right. No one had a problem with helping out the interned Japanese or Holocaust victims.
It’s really an interesting read, if only to see all the back-bending people were doing in an effort to not sound…crazy.