Reply to It's (finally) time for reparations. It's time for the US to pay its debt.

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Reply to "It's (finally) time for reparations. It's time for the US to pay its debt. "

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]How much do people think they should get in reparations?  How "black" does one need to be to get reparations?  If I have a great great grandparent that was black, does that mean I get reparations even if I have a Chinese grandparent and three seemingly white other grandparents?  Are we going to genetically test people?[/quote]

She addresses eligibility in her essay. 
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Perhaps you can share that information then because doing a find on “eligibility” turns up nothing.  Again, how much MONEY do you want?[/quote]

Perhaps you can read it. 
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It’s a freaking manifesto that’s way TLDR.[/quote]

It’s filled with great points and data that everyone should read. 
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But I think that reparations paid to people who are not the ones who were injured is morally and ethically wrong.  She doesn't convince me that it is the moral thing to do.

There are social and utilitarian reasons to help black Americans including by such efforts as affirmative action (which has varied over the decades) and preferential hiring as well as the programs for all Americans including public education, welfare, Medicaid and Medicare and Social Security, etc.  But targeted reparations to people who were harmed by slavery/the failure of Reconstruction/Jim Crow/redlining/racial discrimination is a mushy concept that is problematic for many reasons, practical (which can be overcome) and ethical.

I disagree with her premise.  [/quote]

Black people in the US today ARE harmed all of the various forms of white supremacy over the past 400 years - from slavery to Jim Crow to redlining to systemic racism.

Time to make amends. 
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You personally are not harmed by things that happened 400 years ago.  Systemic racism TODAY does harm you.  I think this is an important distinction that the premise of "reparations" obscures.    [/quote]

“Things” started 400 years ago and continue today. White supremacy has evolved over time but has always existed in various ways that harm black people. Even today.

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Lot's of "things" started 400 or more years ago and continue today.  Four hundred years ago, my ancestors were living in ghettos and forbidden to own property.  Where is my reparation?   Also 400 years ago,  West Africans sold their fellow West Africans into slavery.  So do you now collect from West African nations?  Or, since black lives here are generally better than there, do you pay them?  The wealth of every American today derived from land origonally owned by Indians.  After we pay blacks for slavery, do we all give our land back to the Indians?

I could go on and on.  I know a lot about history.  I love to study it.  It's mostly a story of misery, conflict and cruel mistakes.  You'd be surprised what sort of things still have an effect today.   It's good to learn about these things. But we can't make up for one single second of past misery.  We can only fix the present.  [/quote]

If you know history, you should know that Native Americans believed that land owns man and not the other way around.[/quote]

That doesn't mean they wanted to be forcibly moved, then or now. [/quote]

How do you give land to a group of people that don't believe in land ownership? I'm sure a modern Native American would take it but the reason they were relocated was because their ancestors didn't lay claim to any ownership of the land they were living on. [/quote]
Right, so because they didn't even believe in land ownership, that gave us a right to lay claim to their villages and hunting grounds, shoot them, push them ever westward, break treaties with them, and force them onto reservations where they rot in perpetual poverty.

But Oprah still deserves a cash payment, a free house or whatever.

Don't you see the ethical problem in trying to fix present problems using past claims?[/quote]

But the past sins have "residual harm" that manifest as present problems. 
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Yes, the key words are "present problems."  Blacks in America today have problems today.  So do poor whites.  And immigrants.  So lets fix what is front of us.  We can't fix what is behind us. [/quote]

So it is just a language issue for you? You are OK eliminating the wealth gap and "fixing residual issues" for black people as long as we don't mention the 400 years of atrocities?

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