How Will Reparations For Slavery Work?

I think we need to focus on the present generation and stop killing black babies in the womb. From Michael Knowles at The Daily Wire:

No country in history has ever paid reparations to the descendants of African slaves for their ancestors’ servitude. Less than 4% of Africans sold in the Atlantic slave trade ended up in the present-day United States. The plurality of captured Africans, a full 40%, wound up in Brazil. Yet neither Brazil nor any other country has ever attempted such an historic restitution. 

Democrats pressing for reparations have yet to answer the central question: how would it work? History raises more questions than answers. On March 8 of either 1654 or 1655, the African indentured servant John Casor became the first person arbitrarily declared a slave for life in America. Casor claimed to have already served his indenture of “seaven or Eight years” [sic]. Nevertheless, a Virginia court ruled in favor of Casor’s master: a black Angolan named Anthony Johnson. 

In a little-known historical irony, the first formally recognized American slave owner was black. How will the existence of black slave owners affect present-day African-Americans’ eligibility for reparations? Can Casor’s descendants sue Johnson’s descendants for restitution? What if someone somehow descended from both men? How about mixed race Americans more broadly? If one descends from both slaves and slave owners, will they pay or collect in a reparations regime? Perhaps the government will purchase 330 million DNA tests to match against a master database of history’s heroes and villains. 

One way or another, the federal government will have to determine the relative historical culpability of its own slavers’ descendants. But who will make the Indian nations pay? Native Americans of the Five Civilized Tribes — the Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole — owned black slaves at roughly the same rate as neighboring whites, and they held their slaves in bondage longer. 

While the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves in rebel states as early as 1863, and the Thirteenth Amendment freed all American slaves in 1865, federal law didn't apply to Indian nations. They held onto slavery until the U.S. government forced them to free their black slaves in the Treaties of 1866. Will the federal government force the Cherokee Nation to pay reparations to the descendants of its own black slaves? 

Beyond slavery, the advocates of reparations point to the historical struggles of black Americans after abolition as a justification for the redistributive program: Jim Crow, segregation, red-lining, lynchings. But while black Americans suffered oppression in a particularly widespread and sustained way, other demographic groups have also endured hardship. The largest mass lynching in American history claimed the lives of 11 Sicilian Americans in New Orleans. Mayor Joseph Shakespeare described Sicilians as “the most idle, vicious, and worthless people among us” and urged his constituents to “teach these people a lesson they will not forget.” Are the descendants of Sicilian immigrants entitled to any reparations for their ancestors’ suffering? (Read more.)

From Coleman Hughes at Quillette:

In 2008, the House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery and Jim Crow. In 2009, the Senate did the same. Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable health care. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery. 

Nearly everyone close to me told me not to testify today. They said that even though I’ve only ever voted for Democrats, I’d be perceived as a Republican—and therefore hated by half the country. Others told me that distancing myself from Republicans would end up angering the other half of the country. And the sad truth is that they were both right. That’s how suspicious we’ve become of one another. That’s how divided we are as a nation. 

If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further, making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today; we would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors; and we would turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction—from a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants. What we should do is pay reparations to black Americans who actually grew up under Jim Crow and were directly harmed by second-class citizenship—people like my Grandparents. 

But paying reparations to all descendants of slaves is a mistake. Take me for example. I was born three decades after Jim Crow ended into a privileged household in the suburbs. I attend an Ivy League school. Yet I’m also descended from slaves who worked on Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello plantation. So reparations for slavery would allocate federal resources to me but not to an American with the wrong ancestry—even if that person is living paycheck to paycheck and working multiple jobs to support a family. You might call that justice. I call it justice for the dead at the price of justice for the living. 

I understand that reparations are about what people are owed, regardless of how well they’re doing. But the people who were owed for slavery are no longer here, and we’re not entitled to collect on their debts. Reparations, by definition, are only given to victims. So the moment you give me reparations, you’ve made me into a victim without my consent. Not just that: you’ve made one-third of black Americans—who consistently poll against reparations—into victims without their consent, and black Americans have fought too long for the right to define themselves to be spoken for in such a condescending manner. 

The question is not what America owes me by virtue of my ancestry; the question is what all Americans owe each other by virtue of being citizens of the same nation. And the obligation of citizenship is not transactional. It’s not contingent on ancestry, it never expires, and it can’t be paid off. For all these reasons bill H.R. 40 is a moral and political mistake. Thank you. (Read more.)

From Andrew Klavan:

They tell us this is the road to Utopia but in fact, it’s a road that has no end. Just more and more division, more and more hatred between us, more and more government solving our problems by taking our freedom and telling us what to think and who to be. Americans have been breaking chains for nearly 250 years: the chains of southern slavery, the chains of Jim Crow, the chains of Nazism, the chains of Communism. It’s time to break these new chains, these mental chains, of identity politics and political correctness. 

So, I'm watching this yesterday. This is the - A bad idea whose time has come. Reparations. OK. This is all part of what I'm talking about. Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote this article, I think it was for The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates is overrated. I mean he has this kind of vague dramatic way of writing. He's a very personable guy when he's talking to people, but he doesn't reason as far as I'm concerned very well. But he put forward the idea that yes-yes-yes what we need is reparations for slavery and for Jim Crow because of all that accumulated wealth. All that wealth was kept away from people and now needs to be paid back because blacks are behind because of Jim Crow and because of slavery. Never mind that Jews were excluded. Never mind the Irish were excluded, the Italians, never mind all that. Blacks specifically. 

So now, of course, the Democrats as they drift further and further to the left have taken this up in the House Judiciary Committee which is Jerry Nadler's crap show. They are having a hearing on a bill about reparations that would basically create a federal commission to study and report on the impact of slavery and the Jim Crow segregation laws that followed abolition. And who gets the money, you know who would get money to be paid back for this. This Is called H.R. 40 and it's got a lot of supporters got more than 60 co-sponsor-sponsors. Public endorsement from Pelosi, who has not endorsed a reparations bill before. (Read more.) 

More HERE.

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