The US government allowed these discriminatory and harmful policies and practices to take place when it had the power to make them illegal.
For example, if marital rape were legal, then the authority (i.e. the government) that allows this to be legal bears some culpability for any rapes that occur. Do you agree or disagree with this?
Shodan, you ask me a lot of questions, which I almost always try to answer, but very rarely do you answer my questions. I probably won’t be answering any more of your questions unless you actually try and answer the one in the paragraph above. Thank you.
Jurisdiction and precedent. Asked and answered, over and over in this thread. That you refuse to acknowledge it doesn’t make it worth asking, again and again.
I’ve said that the goal of reparations is to make America stronger, better, and more just in the future, by mitigating the possibility of a permanent aggrieved black underclass. This does not conflict with reparations being targeted at addressing past wrongs – the existence of these past wrongs, and that they have not been fully acknowledged and addressed, is what increases the chance of this permanent aggrieved black underclass in the future, in my opinion.
I’ve never said this – only that there have always been the kind of casual and flippant feelings of unjust grievance against black people that you raised as a possible reaction, and I do belive that these sorts of unjust grievances against black people are based on racism and ignorance.
I’ve never seen a single post from you that I can recall that had even the smallest shred of racism, and I would not characterize you as a poster as ignorant. I accept that someone can oppose reparations for reasons other than racism and ignorance.
iiandyiiii, let me sum up much of this thread thus far:
You have been pushing for an idea (reparations) which contains many glaring potential problems - problems that are so glaring that they don’t require a study to identify. For instance, immense cost, the difficulty of identifying who truly deserves it or not, etc. To use a conservative analogy, it would be like someone proposing that all 13 million illegal immigrants be forcibly deported from the United States - you don’t need to run a study to tell that that sort of idea already presents immense problems. The problems are so obvious that we don’t need a study to tell us that the problems exist.
Yet, in this thread, when people have pointed out the glaring problems with reparations, you have repeatedly fallen back on “Well, we need a study. Wait for the study. We haven’t done a study yet.” I’m not opposing a study, but rather pointing out that the problems with reparations are so glaring that we don’t need a study to know that there are huge problems - just like we don’t need a federal study to know that trying to eject 13 million illegal immigrants will cause all sorts of mayhem.
Furthermore, if you are going to fall back repeatedly on “wait for the study” - then should we just all…be silent on the topic and not debate it further until the “study” comes out? Because evidently anything we say is silenced by “wait for the study to be done.”
I’m not attacking you personally, just pointing out that this is intellectually dishonest. If you want to have a healthy debate on the issue, then you should address the numerous problems that people have brought up with reparations - the immense cost, the likelihood of people trying to fleece the government out of cash motives rather than genuine racial grievance, the resentment that such a program would cause - rather than telling us to wait for some governmental study that may or may not come.
Admirable, but I don’t think that would prevail on a lawsuit from a poorer city or neighborhood which is not predominantly black. I don’t think the feds are allowed to base decisions on race.
This is the fundamental disagreement - you think these problems are so obvious and immense, just because, that there’s no possibility of even considering overcoming them. I say no - we’ve done it before. We did it for Japanese American internees, and Germany did it for Holocaust victims and survivors. I’m not proposing anything that would necessarily be orders of magnitude larger or more difficult than these successful endeavors. Certainly studying and researching would not be particularly difficult.
What if I suggested this - America should fully identify and fully acknowledge, and attempt to quantify, when possible, the harm done to living Americans by discriminatory policies and practices. Would you say that is not worth considering or discussing? At this point, that’s what I advocate for. I wouldn’t push for any reparations program that I believed would harm the country financially.
I don’t believe you’ve fairly addressed what I’ve actually advocated for.
The world is finite resources, time and options. Everything has to be weighed in a cost:benefit balance. Not every problem that “ought” to be solved can be solved or should be solved. And what’s being proposed here (slavery reparations) is something that would be immensely costly, cause immense problems of its own, and skews heavily towards the “drawback” side of benefit-versus-drawback.
It would most definitely be orders of magnitude larger. The number of people affected by slavery and/or racism in the United States vastly dwarfs those affected by the Japanese-American internment.
Morally, to some extent. Legally, no. Since we are talking about legalities. I assume you would agree that a bill requiring reparations is a legal construct.
But that goes back to something I mentioned way back to the start of the thread - the moral culpability would be much, much more on the marital rapist, and very little on the government. And again, since segregation and discrimination have been illegal since 1964 and slavery about a hundred years before that, the moral culpibility is even more diminished. “My husband raped me in 1950 so I need money from the government in 2019” is not IMO a very strong argument. Sue your husband, if he is still around - if not, sorry, but sometimes things can’t be fixed.
Fair enough. You have a direct answer. So now you can answer mine. TNC’s answer to McConnell appears to be “because you were alive at the time”. Is this the basis for your belief that the US government is culpable, and that the US taxpayer should pay reparations?
After 30 years, I am unable to explain exactly what the programs I administer are supposed to do for whom. All I do is apply an extremely complicated decision-making framework, which does not consistently further any laudable public policy I can ascertain. In other words, the system does not clearly define who is the target population of the most “needy/deserving”, and does a pretty lousy job of identifying which of the huge number of applicants satisfy that problematic definition.
Sure, some “needy/deserving” people get assistance, but the program as a whole should be DRASTICALLY redefined and narrowed.
So excuse me if I am dubious about creating a similar entitlement/benefits/reparations program - especially given the potential magnitude and complexity of “reparations.” IMO, far more workable alternatives exist. Of course, those would lack the imposition of “guilt,” - which I believe is a significant desire of many who favor reparations.
Says you, apparently to the point that you’re unwilling even to research the level of harm done.
One order of magnitude larger? That’s not “orders of magnitude larger”. And would it be orders of magnitude larger than the Holocaust reparations undertaken by a significantly smaller country?
The consistent objection to reparations (even researching the possibility!) has been something like “The amount of harm done to black Americans was so incredibly vast that it could never be made up for, therefore we shouldn’t even consider the possibility of looking into it”. I reject this argument. Even if the first part of that sentence is correct, I reject that this necessarily means “we cannot attempt to do anything to make up for it”. At the very least we should try and look into it – see what the harm has been done, fully identify and describe it (this is possibly the most important part, that almost no one ever addresses!), and see if we can try and make up for some small fraction of it.
Of course it would be a legal construct. I believe that we as a country have a moral responsibility to look into the possibility of trying to make things right. As a country, in cases like this, we can make laws to determine legal responsibility – I believe this should be done.
I don’t agree that it would be “very little on the government”. The rapist would be enormously responsible, but so would the government, since it had the power (and the moral obligation) to make such actions illegal. But this is a question about morality, and folks are going to have different feelings about morality.
Some things can’t be fixed, but since we haven’t even tried to delve, in rigorous detail, the actual harm done by decades and centuries of discriminatory, oppressive, and brutal policies against black people (or Native Americans, or other groups), I’m unconvinced that this is one of them. At least in its entirety – we can never make up for everything that was done wrong, but we can sometimes make up for some of it. I don’t believe we’ve even tried.
All we’ve done, at best, is pull out the knife. We’ve barely even tried (if that!) to heal the guy we stabbed over and over again; we just left him bleeding.
I believe that is only a very small summation of TNC’s answer to McConnell. That would be a very small part of my believe that the US government is morally culpable, and that the US government (funded by taxpayers) should pay reparations, but is not the entirety at all.
My personal belief is that this is not “vastly more difficult” – if you are black, and over 60, and lived in America your entire life, then I think it’s almost certain that you were disadvantaged as a result of racism. It’s highly likely for other black Americans that the answer is yes, if a bit less likely for younger and recent immigrant black people.
But I don’t believe this question is the starting point – I believe that “what harm, in detail, was done to Americans by discriminatory policies and practices?”, which is indeed a very difficult (but also very worthwhile, IMO) question, should be the starting point. I don’t believe that question has been answered.
But what about the precedent that’s set? Let’s say America acknowledges past wrongs caused by racism - like slavery, redlining, and school segregation - and declares that the appropriate response to this is to offer a huge financial settlement. (And while we might not have the exact figures, I think we can agree this would be one of the largest government programs in our history.)
You don’t see how this would have an effect on how other wrongs are addressed? You don’t think there would be people, who are not otherwise racist, who would balk at the idea of acknowledging a new set of wrongs like disenfranchisement, police shootings, and sentencing disparities, when they knew that these would be followed by a call for a second huge financial settlement?
Reparations would be saying that addressing racial problems comes with a trillion dollar price tag. And that’s going to make a lot of people feel that we shouldn’t address those problems.
Of course there are people who would resist and object. I think it’s extremely unlikely that this will ever occur – those who object are, in general, vastly wealthier and more powerful than those who are in favor of it. But I still think it’s the right thing, and in the long run would be very beneficial to the country. And I think it might be the only possible thing that, at least in the medium term (next 50-100 years), might have a chance to prevent a permanent aggrieved black underclass.
If we have a permanent aggrieved black underclass for the next 100 years, then I think it would be fair to call the American experiment a failure, for the most part. A country can’t be “great” and have a permanent aggrieved underclass.
Apologies. Then please stand with me in advocating for HR 40, or a similar congressional bill that would make such a significant historical research project possible.
I’ve seen this as a not infrequent objection to the idea of reparations. I don’t have a unique view of this topic, but certainly far from a majority perspective. Wasn’t born in North America. New to it’s shores. None of my ancestors had any role to play in the history of North America as far as slavery or destruction of indigent populations. As far as I’m aware, my karma is quite clean of all that.
I suppose that as much as anyone can be, I have the standing to object to being involved in financial burden of reparations or sharing “guilt”. However, I am a member of this society now and expect to remain so for the rest of my life. As such, I can’t help but feel that if I can contribute to the overall improvement of my fellow man that has suffered an institutional social injustice, I should. Because that would make for a better (more just) society. It puzzles me that otherwise intelligent and well meaning people often don’t see it that way as well.
The metaphor I’ve used over and over again (which I believe TNC used before me) is that a powerful guy has been stabbing a less poweful guy, over and over again, with multiple knives, for a long, long time. Finally, the powerful guy stops actively stabbing. He pulls out the biggest knife (i.e. slavery), but leaves several other knives in, and occasionally adds another small knife for good measure. Then, eventually, he pulls out most of the other knives (the mid 20th century CR movement and advances), and stops adding more. Maybe, in the present, he’s removed all the knives (though we’re not exactly sure about that). But he has done very little, if anything, to help heal all the wounds he caused. Some of them might be superficial, and will heal on their own, but some of them hit vital areas that can’t heal without medical attention. He hasn’t fully acknowledged the harm he caused or even allowed a doctor to examine and catalogue them all.
HR 40 is a bill that would send in a doctor to start examining the patient, logging all the wounds, and start working up a plan to heal the damage.