UN demand US pay reparations for blacks.

This is antagonizing, literally... this is leftist propaganda, at its root. These people are trying to incite more and more societal volatility. If you come out against this, with total logic, you're still branded racist. These people do not care about society... an unstable environment, is an easily taken environment. There is a ridiculously long list of slave-based atrocities, from all over the world... but, the United States having the high profile history that it does, is the recipient of blatant propaganda, and destabilizing intent. It is absolutely disgusting.

Not my family wrote:

The vast majority of slave owners were British. Even then only about 10% of white folks owned slaves. Most could not afford them. My family came to America from Germany and Austria in the late 1800's and early 1900's. They worked in the steel mills and the mines when there were no rights for any workers. Injury, sickness be damned, there were no government benefits back then. Their lives were controlled by the "Company". Low wages, poor working conditions and the "Company" did not house of feed them They suffered through the great depression. They struggled to make ends meet, once again without government assistance. Answer me please: Why on earth should anyone from my family make reparations to anyone?

The vast majority of slave owners in America were American citizens. Slavery in America was dying out until Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin in the 1790s. That precipitated a huge cotton boom, establishing the so-called Cotton Kingdom in the Deep South; it also led to a huge internal slave trade from Virginia down across the Appalachians into Tennessee, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. In 1860, America was one of the three biggest slaveowning countries in the world, but Brazil had far more slaves. Also in 1860, only 5% of white southerners owned slaves (i.e., the male head of the household), but 20% of white southerners (i.e, mama, grandpa, the kids, etc.) lived in slaveholding families. In Mississippi and South Carolina, roughly 50% of white people lived in slaveholding families.

That last statistic isn't as well known as it should be.

Nobody from your family should make reparations to anyone, but I don't believe that those who argue in favor of reparations ever suggest that individual white people make direct cash payments. Rather, they suggest that nations, as nations, bear a responsibility. Some proponents of reparations want cash payments, but many do not. Many want an official taking of responsibility along with certain kinds of investments.

Reparations is a very complicated and very thorny issue. Speaking as a guy who teaches southern studies at Ole Miss, I think there's a much stronger case for reparations coming out of the Jim Crow laws, most of which were instituted between 1890 and 1915, and some of which were still in effect into the late 1960s. In 1960, for example, only 6.5% of black Mississippians were registered to vote--this at a time when 20-25% of black Alabamians and Georgians were registered. That's because a rich stew of Jim Crow legislation (poll taxes, literacy requirement, etc.) along with a reign of terror made it all but impossible for black folks to register. That's a flagrant denial of civil rights and citizenship, and laws were what underpinned it.

If Jim Crow hadn't happened, nobody would be asking for reparations for slavery now. It would be a non-issue. It was southern segregation that did it.

But this raises a key problematic: the differential between the North and the South. And of course there was the West, too--overtly racist states like Oregon, which specifically kept black folks out.

As I say, it's a thorny issue. I wouldn't trivialize it or reject it out of hand, but neither do I think it's an easy case to make. Still, there's no question that specific patterns of law and social/commercial practice, like red-lining of certain neighborhoods, has had a measurable negative long-term impact on black personal wealth.

More from the crazies wrote:

This is antagonizing, literally... this is leftist propaganda, at its root. These people are trying to incite more and more societal volatility. If you come out against this, with total logic, you're still branded racist. These people do not care about society... an unstable environment, is an easily taken environment. There is a ridiculously long list of slave-based atrocities, from all over the world... but, the United States having the high profile history that it does, is the recipient of blatant propaganda, and destabilizing intent. It is absolutely disgusting.

Well, yeah, except that The UN DOES NOT demand and HAS NOT demanded that the US pay reparations for blacks.

Other than the fact that the central point of your rant was INCORRECT it was a really good one. Keep it up!

They did not "get" on the boat. They were captured and forced on the boat and millions died in the process.

This is a pretty stupid rationalization for an atrocity (slavery).

Ta-Nehisi Coates had an excellent think piece in the Atlantic several years ago called "The Case for Reparations." It's long, it tells a lot of stories--and most of the stories are about the 20th century.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from towards the end:

he early American economy was built on slave labor. The Capitol and the White House were built by slaves. President James K. Polk traded slaves from the Oval Office. The laments about “black pathology,” the criticism of black family structures by pundits and intellectuals, ring hollow in a country whose existence was predicated on the torture of black fathers, on the rape of black mothers, on the sale of black children. An honest assessment of America’s relationship to the black family reveals the country to be not its nurturer but its destroyer.

And this destruction did not end with slavery. Discriminatory laws joined the equal burden of citizenship to unequal distribution of its bounty. These laws reached their apex in the mid-20th century, when the federal government—through housing policies—engineered the wealth gap, which remains with us to this day. When we think of white supremacy, we picture Colored Only signs, but we should picture pirate flags.

On some level, we have always grasped this.

“Negro poverty is not white poverty,” President Johnson said in his historic civil-rights speech.

Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past—at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge—that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.

And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.

Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

_________________________________________________________________

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

It is thorny, so let's bare it all and get it out in the open. What do African-American leaders think will even the score? If we're ever going to get over this atrocity, and the atrocities that followed, we need to air it out and see what is demanded by those oppressed. We can't just sit here and say "Slavery was so bad and it continues to oppress to this day." Let's get past all of that and make our peace. I think that is the only way forward.

You are correct that 46% of the South Carolina population (free citizens) belong to a family that owned slaves during the years leading up to and during the Civil War. And it was 49% in Mississippi. Granted, overall populations were not nearly what they are today, and slaves outnumbered the free citizens. So we need to remember that the majority of United States citizens did not own slaves, and furthermore, the majority of "whites" in the United States are not descendants of ancestors who lived in American during the mid-to-late 1800s, let alone those who owned slaves. So the false narrative that "our ancestors" were slave holders needs to stop.

That said, slavery most certainly did have a measurable, negative, long-term impact on black personal wealth - an impact that many of the later immigrants have not had to face - and therefore we need to figure out what can be done to reverse that horrible chain of events.

Why not hear them out (African-America leaders such as the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus) and see what is proposed?

Or does this open Pandora's Box? I mean, what do we owe the Native American's? What do we owe the Irish and Italian immigrants who perished at the hands of the robber barons? The Chinese who built the rail infrastructure?

Okay, to hell with it - just give them their reparations - the first item they’ll waste it on is drugs, not such a bad result as it will hopefully keep them in a state of constant euphoria so they won’t be rioting, looting and attacking we white folk.

You can rationalize all you want. Keep living in denial...https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/27/u-s-owes-black-people-reparations-for-a-history-of-racial-terrorism-says-u-n-panel/

Look Who's Talking wrote:

Well, yeah, except that The UN DOES NOT demand and HAS NOT demanded that the US pay reparations for blacks.

Other than the fact that the central point of your rant was INCORRECT it was a really good one. Keep it up!

KudzuRunner wrote:

Ta-Nehisi Coates had an excellent think piece in the Atlantic several years ago called "The Case for Reparations."

One of my favorite pieces on the topic and one that changed my mind on the matter. He also did a fantastic interview on one of the NPR shows about the piece.

He comes dangerously close to erasing or rewriting history on a number of his points, and he was asked about this, but on following up he understands the criticism.

Also, I did not add the comma to Native Americans in my previous post. I'll blame that on Apple.

We already do pay for them. It's called welfare, ebt cards, and bogus disability.

The history of slavery in the United States justifies reparations for African Americans,

Does the history of (racial-based) slavery elsewhere in the New World justify the same therein? Or is the US (like Haiti) someone different because a war was fought to end it?

Maybe reparations are also due from (say) the UK, as many of slave traders were based there.

Africans themselves have already commented that they bear some blame too, for getting rich (relatively) off selling their brothers.

Anybody would think life was paradise in Africa when the slaves were being taken to the USA, more like from one hell-hole where early death and disease was normal to a rather less hazardous future in America.

Was the life of a black slave in the USA worse than that of an Irish native during their famine years?

A Ukrainian during Stalin’s ‘Holodomor’? a Chinaman during Mao’s murderous regime 58-62 where about 40 million died of starvation - or a Cambodian during the Pol-Pot era?

Nothing like that happened to blacks in America, under the likes of Stalin, Mao and Pol-Pot, the blacks would have been exterminated when slavery became non productive.

As brutal as slavery and colonialism were, those whose ancestors endured the brunt of it, now have much better standards of living and opportunity than those in the countries they left. There is something to be said about the British education system.

Flying Fancy wrote: I think you have responded too hastily. Do you want to continue living in a country that is constantly being berated about something that happened years ago, by people no longer alive? Something that nearly everyone in the country sees as embarrassing and terrible? No.

I don't know about the percentages in the country, but a significant fraction of the people in this thread appears to think that slavery was a positive thing for this country and for American blacks. That is why this is an ongoing discussion. If slavery was considered embarrassing and terrible by everyone in the country, reparations would have been seriously considered long ago.

More from the crazies wrote:

You can rationalize all you want. Keep living in denial...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2016/09/27/u-s-owes-black-people-reparations-for-a-history-of-racial-terrorism-says-u-n-panel/

Look Who's Talking wrote:

Well, yeah, except that The UN DOES NOT demand and HAS NOT demanded that the US pay reparations for blacks.

Other than the fact that the central point of your rant was INCORRECT it was a really good one. Keep it up!

So, if I may summarize your position, basically you are saying that the term "recommend" and the term "demand" are synonymous.

Perhaps you would like to rationalize your confusion regarding these terms.

I didn't say "demand"... the OP did. Also, the Washington Post headline for this story, is structured in a way that suggests "demand", as opposed to "recommend". Regardless, these are politicians that are saying that reparations are appropriate. This is insanity.

You're grasping at straws in your denial-filled world.

More from the crazies wrote:

I didn't say "demand"... the OP did. Also, the Washington Post headline for this story, is structured in a way that suggests "demand", as opposed to "recommend". Regardless, these are politicians that are saying that reparations are appropriate. This is insanity.

You're grasping at straws in your denial-filled world.

Well, yeah, I can understand that. Comprehending the English language is something that is beyond you, so for you it certainly would seem like grasping at straws.

Maybe if you worked through a remedial English class you wouldn't feel so intimidated. Certainly it couldn't hurt.

When you have nothing, just revert to 'you don't understand' tactics. You know, this is a very common trait of manipulative individuals.

Fair reparations would be to give each of them a boat ticket back to Africa.

"Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than that these people are to be free. Nor is it less certain that the two races, equally free, cannot live in the same government. Nature, habit, opinion has drawn indelible lines of distinction between them." - Thomas Jefferson, Autobiography