I understand exactly what is being discussed here. I keep asking people if they’d support the idea if the proposed commission was not going to make recommendations about compensating the victims; no takers. magellan at least admitted that he still opposed the idea because it would invariably lead to calls for reparations.
If it were guaranteed that there would be no monetary reparations, then I would have to know how much money and time it would take to implement the rest of the bill.
And I asked the other group of people if they would take the idea of reparations off the table to move this forward and there were no takers.
Let’s be realistic. This whole effort is directed to the same point - dollars. So as I said up thread, divorcing this from the Benjamins - trillions of them - is a fools errand.
My larger issue with this is the term reparations. I think many are using compensation and redress interchangeably, and there are not in my opinion. A panel could decide to give each person $30,000 for example as compensation. They could buy a car or groceries or go on vacation.
But I don’t think any of that would redress the ills of slavery that exist today (if indeed they are traceable to that). Perhaps that could be done by the government providing a free education for all African Americans for 20 year for example. But that wouldn’t directly help a 65 year old.
I think these courses address different goals. Not sure I’d support either one (depending on the cost) but I’d support the latter more than the former.
No, it won’t be perfect, and we don’t have perfect records. We never will. I don’t see why perfection is the enemy of the good here – if you oppose reparations or compensation for injustices like housing discrimination on principle, okay, but if you just oppose it because it would be very difficult to get the claims close to 100% accurate, then I think that’s just laziness.
The text of H.R. 40 includes an appropriation of $8 million. By way of comparison, the 9/11 Commission had a budget of $15 million.
I would strongly support paying reparations to former slaves, but that ship sailed many decades ago. Even the generation impacted by Jim Crow and lynch mobs is fading away. Paying reparations to people who were not personally affected, just because they are related to somebody who was affected, does strike me as basically a form of genetic lottery.
Beyond that, why just blacks? While slavery and Jim Crow were notably longer-lasting and more pernicious than what other immigrants went through, this country has a long history that encompasses No Irish Need Apply and anti-Catholicism, and poor whites suffered disenfranchisement and redlining too. (Plus, Native Americans.) Are you planning to hold this magic device over everybody’s head, or only those with a threshold level of melanin?
In the real world, of course, your magic device isn’t around. Working from imperfect information is one thing; working from no information is something altogether different. Even knowing that somebody’s ancestors were slaves in Alabama in 1860 doesn’t tell you anything at all about how the person alive today has been affected, emotionally or financially. Knowing that the black community as a whole has suffered $X in losses over the past two centuries doesn’t tell you how much Peabody S. Jackson has been injured. The amount of money it would take just to figure out who is the descendant of black slaves in the U.S. (as opposed to free blacks in the U.S., or slaves in the West Indies) is money that could be better spent improving the conditions and opportunities for all Americans.
$8 million? That’s nowhere near what they would need to accomplish their stated goals.
So now you don’t like the idea because it doesn’t cost enough. I guess Richard Parker nailed it.
You should really quit guessing. I don’t like it because that sum, like the stated goal of the bill itself, is unrealistic.
Did compensating Japanese-American detainees have any positive value for society whatsoever? Do you think compensating those who were directly harmed by Jim Crow, segregation, housing discrimination, and the like would have any positive value whatsoever?
Even if all the studies were skipped and it was decided to pay a set amount to all who qualified, and even if a realistic amount was determined, and even if there was a realistic source of funding that didn’t screw up either the economy or the taxpayers, there still remains this question:
Who should get this money?
Would it still be worthwhile if the accuracy level was ten percent instead of a hundred? I’m not talking about “very difficult”; if it were absolutely impossible to be more than ten percent accurate, is that good enough?
Based on my experiences with government and archival records, I’d say that ten percent accuracy may be very optimistic. The gaps in the record are just that many and that profound. Whoever establishes the compensation would have to make so many guesses and so many assumptions as to make the final figures basically pulled out of thin air.
Personally, I have a very difficult time separating the utter impossibility of even reasonable accuracy from the moral principles. If we’re not going to be able to do more than a half-assed job, what moral principle are we upholding?
Amnesia much? It’s already been shown why compensating Japanese-American detainees was a simpler task.
Well, the whole issue is your assumption that they aren’t personally affected. The black middle class was essentially shut out of home ownership for decades, which was the primary piggy bank of the middle class. That fact alone accounts for a large amount of the massive wealth differential between black and white families. And that wealth differential affects millions of people today–both the actual individuals who were directly discriminated against and their children. That’s the nature of wealth accumulation. It is intergenerational.
Because white supremacy is rivaled in its scope and effect only by the treatment of Native Americans. Let’s include them too, but I’m telling magellan01 that it was your suggestion.
Maybe so. And that’s an important question to answer. But what if all the law did was allow people to present evidence of a claim? If the evidence is insufficient, they get nothing. If they have a preponderance of evidence that they were injured to a sufficiently determinable degree, then they get money. Then you’re just talking about the cost of assessing that evidence, but that’s a cost we can reasonably calculate since we do that all the time in many different contexts. Indeed, “reparations” could just take the form of expanding the scope of standing and eliminating statute of limitations issues, and letting the civil courts offer redress to those who can prove an injury. Imperfect, but better than nothing.
I’m not asking about that. I know it was easier. I’m asking if you think it was valuable at all, and if you think compensating Jim Crow/housing discrimination/segreation/etc. victims is worth any effort at all.
All you’re saying is “it would be hard!!”.
Yes, of course it would be hard! That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it. I’m wondering if you have any argument at all beyond “it would be very hard”, which I don’t deny.
No. But even if we just asked all black people born before 1960 “were you harmed by segregation, housing discrimination, Jim Crow, or other discriminatory laws and practices?” and took their answers as the truth, we’d probably get greater than 50% accuracy (and maybe much higher). And obviously I’d be for some better evidence.
That doesn’t sound realistic, unless you’re arguing that only a very small number (like 10% or so) of black people were harmed by these policies and practices. If you believe, as I do, that most black people in America before 1960 were harmed by these policies and practices, then even just including them all would guarantee a >>50% accuracy level. And I don’t support that – I want to see more research done, including testimony from those who suffered.
If, as I believe, most black people alive then did suffer due to those policies and practices, then getting reasonable accuracy will be pretty damn easy.
Oh, I get that quite well. My problem comes back to proof: who was personally affected? Even if you could somehow prove specific acts that shut out your grandparents, that’s not actually proof that you were affected, since not everybody inherits even where there is something to inherit. Moreover, in the absence of specific acts, we’d have to guess: if black home ownership in Detroit in X year was twenty percent lower than for whites, and my grandparents were black non-homeowners in Detroit in year X, does that prove anything at all about the effect on me? Not every white family owned their home, so we can’t assume that every black family would have if not for this-that-the-other.
For that matter, the black middle class really starts to emerge in large numbers only in the 1960s, with the vast expansion of educational opportunities. That’s also the period when segregation and redlining start to disappear. (Discriminatory mortgage lending practices continued, and in fact are still around, but that is despite government efforts, not because of them.)
Unfortunately, the people most likely to have been affected are also the people least likely to have records or evidence thereof. The descendants of illiterate black sharecroppers in the rural South, e.g., are going to have what?
I do genealogical research as an avocation, and I’m currently working with a man whose family was black working-class in Birmingham, Alabama. The family was summarily evicted from their rental in 1960-something and lost everything. The guy doesn’t even have a picture of his own mother (who was already dead by that point). I can come up with a few bare facts about her life, such as where she was born and which high school she attended. After several months of effort, I still don’t really know anything about her (what she smart? hard-working or lazy? pursuing goals or content to drift? working three jobs or hardly working at all?), because the records simply don’t exist any more. That’s a woman who was alive in living memory, and I can say virtually nothing about how her life might have been different had she not been born in the segregated south. Push that back to somebody who lived and died in the 19th century–what can anybody say?
The people most likely to have evidence are the people who suffered the least–that’s more than just imperfect.
If we are going to lift the statute of limitations for historic injuries, how far do or should we go? Should I, as the great-great-great-granddaughter of a slave owner in Mexican Texas, be expecting the process-server? Even for injuries directly suffered in the 1940s and 50s and 60s by blacks alive today, there’s a pretty fair chance that the business or person doing the injury isn’t around anymore. Should somebody’s chances at financial recompense depend on the longevity of their opponent, or should claims be upheld against people who themselves did nothing wrong, but are related to somebody who was a creep?
Reparations is one of those ideas that sounds good in theory, but once you get into the murky details, it becomes unworkable much beyond the first generation.
I don’t have a problem saying that most blacks in America before 1960 suffered some harm due to policies and practices. The level of that harm, and the degree to which that harm has affected subsequent generations, is the part that needs proving, and that’s the part where the records are insufficient.
For example, what percentage of the problems of the modern black community in the U.S. today are the result of the lingering effects of discrimination, versus what percentage can be traced to the unintended consequences of the War on Poverty? (The War on Poverty, of course, was intended to alleviate the systematic effects of poverty, particularly those who were disadvantaged by circumstances of birth, such as rural southern blacks.)
Which leads me to the next point: what are the consequences of handing out cash for reparations likely to be? If you are in poverty, e.g., an extra $30,000 in the bank, e.g., ends eligibility for housing subsidies and Medicaid and many educational financial assistance programs, etc. (absent special exemptions), but without the tools to manage the money, then what? Among some of the people with whom I work, $30K would be a godsend and well-used; among others, $30K means the local drug dealers are going to be getting very very rich. I don’t think anybody in the 1960s predicted that the destruction of black families would be an outcome of that decade’s actions; are we confident that we know that reparations would actually be a net benefit to those receiving them?
Reasonable concerns, and worthy of discussion. I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I’m glad to see them approached in a thoughtful and not knee-jerk way.
What is unrealistic about it? They’re not going to be polling every black person. What would be a more appropriate figure?