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Metropolitan DC Local Politics
The Maryland Reparations Commission has been enacted into law
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Anonymous
from one minority to another, that's a funny thing to hear. i think where you and i are differ is what to do about it or how do you live your life. my approach is keep working, keep moving forward. your way is keep looking back and seek justice whatever that means. well, carry on |
Anonymous
You don’t know anything about me or how I live my life. Frankly, it’s irrelevant to this discussion. We are discussing the MD government researching more about the harm it may have caused to specific communities. Hopefully they are also including local governments in their study. It’s reasonable to expect restitution for people who can demonstrate harm. Why so fearful of a study? If they can clearly document specific cases then let’s shed light on it. |
Anonymous
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^ And if you are still referencing slavery 9 pages in, you’re either not well-informed or being intellectually dishonest.
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Anonymous
Good luck demonstrating personal harm from activity occurring over a century ago. Proving causation for someone's current circumstances due to ages-old social and legal constructs is not practically possible. It's going to be much easier to demonstrate that an individual's personal circumstances are the predictable result of choices made by their parents and by themselves. Trying to attribute responsibility for present-day financial failures to others who are long gone is a fool's errand. |
Anonymous
What is false is the proposition that present-day people cannot succeed if they care to make the effort to do so. It's their own behaviors which hold them back, not racism in centuries past - racism today prevents nobody from obtaining as much education as they care to pursue, remunerative employment, not having children they cannot afford, or from avoiding criminality. Plenty of minorities are successful. Why then are some not successful? Did the dead hand of racism reach out and hold back just some people of a given race, while leaving others free to prosper through their own efforts and ambitions? |
Anonymous
You honestly think that Jim Crow laws, redlining, and discrimination in education & employment had zero financial effort on people living today - including the ones who experienced it first hand? Their kids? And thanks for demonstrating why we sadly still need DEI today. |
Anonymous
Literally no one said that. The government wronged people and caused damage that still exists today. This is a foreign concept to MAFAs but we should hold it accountable. |
Anonymous
| ^MAGAs |
Anonymous
Sovereign immunity is a huge stumbling block in this plan of just sue the government. Then the problem of singling out a race of people for collective punishment to pay off others in an unjust enrichment scheme. Good luck! |
Anonymous
| Can women claim the same? They were not allowed to attend university, could not own property and could not get credit as late as the 1970s. Who are the people who depend on public assistance? Mostly women. |
Anonymous
What “plan”? This is just a study. Strawman. No one said anything about suing the government or singling anyone out for punishment. |
Anonymous
Read page 9. You must have missed it. |
Anonymous
Different poster here. Part of a difference between some immigrants and African Americans who descended from slavery is that many immigrants have relatively higher standards of living abroad. Their entry pathways here matter. Did an immigrant's family have access to health care and education? Did that immigrant have working English skills when they arrived? Were they able to settle into middle class neighborhoods and access decent public schools for their kids? Even if an immigrant doesn't have much materially when they come here, they often have had those basics in their home country, which shapes them differently than how intractible poverty here does. An example is Asian immigrants. Vietnamese immigrants fled as refugees from the war, often spoke no English, were settled in lower income neigbhorhoods, and didn't have many transferable skills. That generation worked super hard just to stay afloat and did not accummulate much wealth. A Chinese immigrant who had some family money (even modest money), had had access to decent quality education before coming here, who spoke at least some English, who had access to colleges here, are set up to be more successful in that initial generation. Their subsequent generations here will likely continue to do better than their parents did. But it takes multiple generations to even begin evening things out. Compare both to Americans descended from slavery. Enslaved persons were given freedom after the Civil War, but their owners were compensated for their loss of wealth as their economic engine collapsed underneath them. Formerly enslaved people were not compensated for their enslavement. If reconstruction had occured with fidelity, we wouldn't be having any of these conversations. But you can thank President Andrew Johnson for that. Funny how he's revered by Trump and company. He issued mass pardons to insurrectionist confederate soldiers. He allowed Black Code laws, which are the forerunners to Jim Crow laws. The Black Code laws were the beginning of criminalizing things that Black people couldn't always control. Vagrancy laws to punish being unemployed for example. African Americans had no de facto access to owning land, couldn't vote, couldn't attend the best schools possible, couldn't hold jobs, couldn't go to college. While white people kept doing all of that. Those gaps in opportunity and wealth accumulation continued to grow. And large events continued to interfere with wealth accumulation. Tulsa Race Massacre, the burning of the Black Wall Street. Black people get too much money or power, and whites often take it away. When Social Security was first enacted, it excluded two huge groups of workers - agricultural workers and domestic labor, like maids. Guess who disproportionately held those types of jobs? The GI Bill, the way my low income father made it through college, was not available to Black veterants. They couldn't access college tuition or more. The way my low income father accumulated some wealth to transfer to us was not available to Black Americans his same age. Black wealth has been repeatedly destroyed, blocked, or transferred away from them since slavery. That doesn't mean there aren't wealthy Black families. Prince George's County is a wonderful example of highly educated, high income African American families. And anecdotally only, the Black families I know who've really accumlated some wealth somehow got land right after slavery. That's definitely the minority of families. But we can't forget the systemic, legal wrongs that ensured Blacks, as a whole, did not gain wealth and power. I haven't even touched on illegal wrongs like lynching. I'm just talking what government did. And for that, government needs to provide a remedy. Accruing family wealth can take generations. Your success today is often built on what your grandparents were able to accomplish and whether/how they could set up your parents for success. I don't think Maryland can be successful with reparations. For a variety of reasons. I am the prior poster who mentioned Baby Bonds, and I think that's the closest we can get to something workable. But that doesn't mean we can or should just erase history and not recognize how government has played a huge role in inequalities for generations. |
Anonymous
I love how you think everyone who disagrees with you is some sort of Trump nut-swinger. |
Anonymous
Convincingly demonstrate the chain of causation down to specific people today, whose situation is exclusively the result of the actions of long-past governments. It cannot be done. Those governments no longer exist, generations have passed, and people alive today are not held back in the slightest by any current laws or government policies. Claiming your great great great-grandfather would have been a billionaire who would have left his fortune to you so you could now have a life of indolent luxury is a preposterous fantasy. It's equally likely that, absent the slave trade, you'd be living in appalling poverty today in South Sudan, Burundi, or in any one of the other countries which supplied the slave trade. Funny, I don't hear anyone clamoring to be repatriated as "reparations". |