Reparations, Again.
Advocates who say black Americans should be compensated for slavery and its Jim Crow aftermath are quietly chalking up victories and gaining momentum.
Fueled by the work of scholars and lawyers, their campaign has morphed in recent years from a fringe-group rallying cry into sophisticated, mainstream movement. Most recently, a pair of churches apologized for their part in the slave trade, and one is studying ways to repay black church members.
The overall issue is hardly settled, even among black Americans: Some say that focusing on slavery shouldn’t be a top priority or that it doesn’t make sense to compensate people generations after a historical wrong.
Yet reparations efforts have led a number of cities and states to approve measures that force businesses to publicize their historical ties to slavery. Several reparations court cases are in progress, and international human rights officials are increasingly spotlighting the issue.
Anyone who supports reparations or an apology does not know their history. Every nation on the earth has had slavery at one time or another. It is just one economic stage every country goes through as it moves from an agrarian society to an industrial society.
I am not saying slavery is okay, because it is not. But to look at those who owned slaves back when the US had slavery and call them evil is a total misrepresentation of the facts. Is England going to apologize for their slaves? Ireland? Africa?
One of the best kept secrets is the US never captured a single slave from Africa. The continent had slaves long before the US was born. Slave traders were afraid of going on shore because of fear of being captured and sold as slaves themselves and some were. Are they now going to apologize for having white slaves? I think not.
One common fallacy in the apologetic history movement is to look at history with today’s eyes. Did you know only one-fourth of land owners had slaves? Are the other three-quarters to be punished? Did you know most slave owners only had one slave? This is hardly making money off the backs of others.
Unlike what is shown is the movies, most slaves were not beaten. Who would purposely destroy extremely valuable property worth more than three or four tractors today? No sane person would. Most slaves lived with their owners, hardly the image of demonstrated in the movies of slaves living in subsistent housing.
Sure slavery is wrong today. But to look at yesterday with today’s eyes is also wrong. Are we to apologize for something every nation goes through? Are we to apologize for the people who once owned slaves 141years ago are long, long dead. Are we to apologize for all those people who did not own slaves. Are we going to pay reparations to those who were not even alive at the time of slavery? It’s the perfect irony. Many blacks want money for what they themselves did not go through from people who did not do it to them. Wow! Only in America.
I do not have any black in me as far as I know, but if we are on an apologizing binge then let’s get to apologizing. I am part Cherokee Indian, I want an apology for the Trail of Tears and for losing the land my ancestors had in Georgia. I am part Irish, so I want an apology for the way we were treated when we came to this country. (Which was pretty bad.) I am part French, so I want…. (Okay maybe I owe others an apology for that.) The point is I could go on and on and on. Where do we stop? The reparation movement is just an excuse for failure. “I can not succeed because of the way my ancestors were treated.” Total b/s. If you can not succeed to America today, it is your own fault.
A voice of reason from the wilderness? Maybe.
“The reparations movement is based on a fallacy that cripples the thinking on race the fallacy that what ails black America is a cash problem,” said McWhorter, who is black. “Giving people money will not solve the problems that we have.”
Isn’t that the truth?!
Mark Noonan from Blogs for Bush has another interesting point.
This is also proof that there’s nothing too stupid for a leftist to advocate. I’d love these people to just do this mental exercise: Tran Nguyen arrived here in 1975 - to whom does he owe reparations to? Kwame Nkrumah arrived here in 1985 - does anyone owe him reparations? Entirely outside the injustice of visiting the sins of the great-great-great-grandfathers on their descendents, there is the practical impossibility of determining who gets paid, and who pays it.
Hat tip:newsalert
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Holy Crap Chuck, you and I actually agree on something.
I posted this at a forum I frequent:
Interestingly, the countries that ended slavery without a civil war, (all of them except us) paid reparations to the slave owners for their loss of laborers.
In the interest of fairness, if reparations are paid to the blacks we should also give back Texas, NM, AZ, CA, UT, CO, OR to Mexico for starting a war and stealing the land from the brown people, that would leave the US with the original 13 colonies and the land Jefferson bought from France known as the Loiusiana Purchase. However, since the colonists pushed the original land owners off their land illegally, we would have to give back that land to the red people. Of course we would get to keep NYC because we did legally buy that for $24 worth of trinkets.
I can see no downside to this. We’d be rid of Corruptionville, California, West Texas, the Mormons and several other undesireable groups, and we’d still have WI, central and East Texas and the UP. There is no downside.
And since most of the colonists came here because of religious persecution in Europe, we could force those European countries to let us return and get reparations from them for their bad behavior toward our anscestors. I could then move back to Germany and spend the rest of my life in the lap of luxury drinking warm German beer.