Yes. It would be more difficult to identify exactly which African Americans were directly impacted by segregation, Jim Crow, housing discrimination, and the like, but it certainly seems like an achievable task.
Would you oppose efforts to compensate those who suffered directly because of laws and practices that were instituted and/or tolerated by states and the federal government?
We need to keep in mind that there are orders of magnitude issues here that may well make this very dissimilar from the Japanese-American issue.
82,000 Japanese-American detainees received $20,000 each for $1.2 to $1.6B.
If we go with Ta-Nehisi’s figures, you are looking at:
39,000,000 African-Americans receiving $33,000 at 1.3 trillion with a “T” as they say.
Or 1,300 billion dollars.
Or over 1,000 times the amount paid to Japanese-American detainees
That makes this a completely different issue. That’s a lot of cabbage coming out of one people’s pockets to another’s. That’s my point. If there is going to be a serious discussion about reparations, we can’t divorce the discussion from the money.
Sounds reasonable. I support reasonable and serious discussion about reparations, and the discussion does not need to be divorced from the money.
I’m glad we’ve come to such a polite agreement 
What in the world makes it seem like an achievable act? You keep handwaving this problem away, but what sources do you think will give us access to all this information?
Asking to borrow a thousand dollars from a friend is asking a lot, but it is certainly within reason. Asking for a million dollars from the same friend is, in most circumstances, not reasonable.
I’m not handwaving – and I’m not saying it’s easy. What in the world makes it seem like it would not be an achievable act?
Here’s one way, just off the top of my head: Home ownership is a pretty well documented thing. Coates goes into a bit of detail about communities that were extremely negatively impacted by housing discrimination in the 60s and prior decades. There are many records: loan applications, deeds, and various other financial dealings that would provide a record of some who were negatively impacted by such policies.
Another way, just off the top of my head: school records from segregated schools.
Another way, just off the top of my head: employment records and salary records from those who were discriminated against (and paid less) due to their race.
Federal and state governments instituted or tolerated these policies, and I think a good case can be made that they are culpable.
Just off the top of my head: You really have no idea what the words “reasonable” and “possible” mean.
What a breathtakingly eloquent argument. I, for one, am totally persuaded.
We have maps from decades in which many Americans who are currently alive lived, which laid out which neighborhoods were denied, by government policy, housing loans. We have records that show who lived there.
The '60s (and decades before) were not some distant, mysterious period in which we only have vague ideas of how ancient humans lived. There were records, and there are tens of millions of Americans who were alive then who remember.
The PATRIOT Act was passed in 2001. The Homeland Security Act was passed in 2002. The 9/11 commission didn’t report until 2004.
So that’s where you put those goalposts! And here I thought we were talking about Civil War/Slavery reparations-silly me! If all we’re talking about is reparations for those who suffered in the last few decades, then that’s a different kettle of fish, because then all you have to deal with are ghod knows how many paid personnel pouring over what remains of inaccurate and/or incomplete paper records, checking what remains to see if they indicate the racial nature of the people in those records, then imputing what there is into the computer.
For those who are still concerned with Civil War/Slavery reparations, it should be noted that the U.S. Census did not collect the names of slaves.
Ahem:
(emphasis added, because evidently it will be helpful for some)
Feel free to try again.
It would help if you actually read my posts. Did you really think I was talking about slavery alone? I guess you never read Coates’ article, either.
Oh, really? Well, you might want to reread your own thread.
Yes. Assuming they have he/she innate talent for the thing he/she would like to do. Someone slight of build is not going to ever be an NFL running back. Someone with an IQ of 110 is never going to be a brain surgeon.
It doesn’t have to be a determining factor in single individual’s life today. And that is where the emphasis should be. Not on some group identity that keeps people focused on a problem they cannot fix, but on themselves, individually.
I’d say the bigger influence is Welfare. It is the one thing most responsible for the break-up of the Black family and that I’d say is the primary reason Blacks, writ large, have done so poorly.
Why don’t you tell them? Who do you think has the best chance of controlling this part of the dialogue, the majority, which is about 16% Black? Or the Black community itself? I have a Black friend who is outlandishly successful, his dream is to bar all Black kids from participating in sports for a couple of generations. Of course it can’t be done, but it does get one thinking about where the problem lies and what would fix it.
Complete nonsense. Claiming the problem is lack of money is the oversimplification. Money is not the problem. The problem is millions of kids going to school without getting the most basic education at home. The problem is that many of the worst school districts have an incidence of single-family households of over 95%. The problem is that many Black kids grow up in an environment where there is no love or respect for learning. The problem is that so many young Black kids do not know people who get up to go to a job from * - 5, five days a week. Education dollars are not the problem. I wish it were that easy. Go read about the Kansas City Experiment. Read No Excuses, Closing the Racial Gap in Learning, by Abigail and Stephen Thernstrom.
I think you have a very naive view of records.
Sure, we have deed records as to who lived in various communities. We DON’T, however, have records of who wanted to live in those communities and couldn’t. Loan applications from the 1960s or earlier? No. Most financial institutions will not have unsuccessful loan applications that are more than six to ten years old (depending on state law). Even coming up with financial statements beyond ten years or so may be very difficult to impossible, depending on the institution.
Beyond that, these records are going to show who DID have accounts, but will tell you nothing about the people who wanted 'em and could not have them. They won’t tell you about the people who would have liked to purchase a home but were prevented from doing so, or the ones whose applications were rejected, or the ones whose realtors steered them into less desirable neighborhoods.
Even if you know that John Doe owned property in X neighborhood, the deed records won’t tell you if Mr. Doe bought it because it was next door to his best friend or down the street from his church or the only property in town that someone of his race was allowed to buy.
Employment and salary records dating back even fifty years? Outside of federal and some state governments and a few of the largest corporations, they’d be so incredibly rare as to be nonexistent. Most companies regularly purge their files of unneeded information, and salary records for people who haven’t worked there in decades qualify as “unneeded.” (That’s not even counting all of the companies that have gone out of business, with their records sent to the landfill or incinerator.)
My state government, e.g., has an active records management division. Records on unsuccessful job applicants are, by regulation, to be kept for three calendar years. Three years. Not thirty, or a hundred and thirty. Three. Even if this state did discriminate against black applicants in the bad old days, how would you ever hope to prove it without being able to identify who applied and who didn’t? (And even if the applications were still around, you still don’t know who didn’t bother to apply because the foreman was a bigot or the jobseeker knew there was no point.)
This is an astonishingly goofy discussion. Either there are legitimate claims here or there aren’t - but some of you are saying they should all be extinguished because some of them might be hard to prove.
some? Do you not understand that what is being discussed here is all-encompassing examination of unidentified-as-yet victims of unset and unnamed number of local, county, state and federal programs over an unidentified number of years with the purpose of reparating said unidentified victims in an as yet unknown fashion. Now, you may be able to pick out certain individuals that you think could easily be identifiable as victims of certain governmental programs, but that does us no good when trying to solve the overall problem.
This is why I posted my thought experiment about the magic device. I suspect that most opponents of even studying the issue of reparations would oppose payment even in the presence of that device. If that’s the case, then all this talk about the difficulty of determining victims is just a red herring.
It’s also worth noting that we require payments for past injuries with imperfect information all the time. Undoubtedly, BP is paying some fishermen who decided to retire the day before Deepwater Horizon. But we don’t scrap the whole tort system because of imperfect information. Instead, we make reasonable efforts to get things right because we believe that imperfect justice is better than no justice.
I’m far from persuaded that spending money to study reparations is a good idea, much less that reparations themselves are a good idea. But the hostility and shallowness of the arguments against the study presented in this thread suggest to me that the opposition is more emotional than intellectual.