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Oh, you mean the way America robbed blacks of wages for their work in building this country for several centuries?
Their is a reason the poorest part of most cities have a high black population. America stole their wages for centuries. Now the right wingers blame them constantly for their situation while having a high and mighty attitude about how its not right to take things away from people who work hard.
I don't automatically support reparations and have no idea how it would work out reasonably fair. But its fair to say that America wouldn't be the world superpower it is without slavery, and a massive amount of income was never paid to a large portion of the country who built it working under often brutal conditions while having their families torn apart.
Permit me to portray what most Americans feel about this............yawn.
Why does the black community need reparations (still)?
They got affirmative action, in MA their children had access to the METCO school program, they have access to welfare system, Section 8 and SNAP programs. They also got Obama as a president for eight years.
And money doesn't fix anyone's problems. Just look at what happens when someone poor wins a lottery. They **** all their winnings away and end up poorer than before... because they've blown through all of their cash plus taken on debt obligations from buying cars and real estate.
And if reparations are intended to fix the broken parts of the black community, then what needs to be looked at is their messed up macho ghetto rap thuggie culture and work to get rid of that.
Otherwise, what should be studied and documented is having records of all slaves, their work history, and then their descendants. Reparations should not be some set amount for every black slave descendant. Instead, figure out what they should have been paid for their work back then, then take that amount and factor in inflation and divide it out by their descendants. Just like any inheritance, the amount inherited would get smaller and smaller as the number of descendants increased. So hundreds of years later, today's slave descendants would be lucky to receive a $100 from a slave's estate. And btw an unskilled farm labourer doesn't get paid very much, just ask the migrant farm workers that come in from Mexico.
And I imagine some of my black co-workers would be upset to not be part of the reparations package because their families came from Haiti and Jamaica.
#1: Affirmative action also applies to other minorities.
#2: Access to welfare system, Section 8 and SNAP programs are not reparations since again any American can use those programs too.
#3: "They also got Obama as a president for eight years"...What the hell is this supposed to mean? That they should be satisfied because a black man got elected President mostly by whites? Somehow that is a form of reparations?
I remember the black families in my rural area being intact families. One or both parents worked. Our school cafeteria worker and janitor were husband and wife. Their kids were grown and they wanted to keep busy and make a little extra money. They were liked and respected by the community. The black kids in school were well behaved. Black farm workers were the norm. I don't remember any black crime. There were many black churches in the area. As a child I always marveled at how the women looked so fashionable coming out of church.
When welfare was 'invented' that all changed. Welfare destroyed black culture and the black family.
I don't think welfare destroyed the black family. Keep in mind that the rate of out of wedlock births increased from less than 5% for whites, in the 1950's, to nearly 30% today. The rate of out of wedlock births for blacks, being multiple times higher than whites, HAPPENED BEFORE WELFARE!!!. Even if you argue that WELFARE was the culprit, poverty put blacks into welfare at higher rates than whites. Therefore, what created poverty rates that were much higher for blacks than whites? After slavery ended, the vast majority of blacks were impoverished, thus, the legacy of slavery was much higher rates of poverty among blacks than whites and Jim Crow laws helped to CONSERVE/PRESERVE those higher rates through legalized discrimination. If black rates of poverty had never been multiple times higher than whites, then the black family would have been no more "victimized" by welfare than white families.
What people need to consider is that the traditional role for men has been provider and protector. Gender roles has been the GLUE of traditional marriage. The women's rights movement greatly weakened that glue. If women could earn good money and provide for themselves, then there was less need for marriage as a source of provisions for women. Women did not have to simply "find a man" in order to "make it". Women no longer needed to groom themselves as suitable mates for men. Women no longer had to put up with abuse, if she can provide for herself. The old way made women DEPENDENT upon men. That dependency, right or wrong, was part of the glue of traditional marriage.
As it relates to race, black men were suppressed where they could not provide for their women like white men could. Ergo, RACISM had already weakened the glue of marriage in the black community by making it hard for black males to be providers in this society. Also, black males, after slavery, were purposely mass incarcerated as a plan to continue to use them as a free source of labor via prison labor and chain gangs, especially in the south. Black women, thus, often became the providers out of necessity. They had to work in the homes of white women taking care of white homes and children as domestic workers. What were white women doing that they could not care for their own kids?
Marriage is stronger among groups where the males incomes and ability to provide is the highest, because that preserves the traditional role of the male being the primary provider. Groups where the men incomes are closer to being equal in relationship to their women, have lower rates of marriage. There used to be a saying among black women "I can do bad all by myself". Why marry someone if they cannot provide? Most men who can't provide or where the women is the primary earner, don't want to get married because they feel less than a man.....that is the way things used to be.....I don't know about the current generation of people under 40, but to be a man was to be able to provide and the way racism stunted the black man, which they feared the most, it greatly weakened the black family.
Welfare is said to weaken the black family because it became the provider for poor women, but only if a man was not around. Well, equal rights for women did the same thing to marriage....because it gave the women the ability to provide for themselves (which was right). That is why culturally marriage rates and out of wedlock births have been on the rise in America in general. Gender roles have changed and as a result there is less "shame" in having children out of wedlock and women can provide much better than they could when women basically had little rights.
#1: Affirmative action also applies to other minorities.[/b]
Not to Asians. Again, as a Chinese American, I owe NOTHING at all in reparations to those with slave ancestors.
I would support the purchase of a one-way ticket for any slave descendant who would like to return to Africa... and I can't think of any African American who would take me up on that offer. Even Obama's Kenyan aunt who overstayed her visa and was living in MA, refused to return to Africa.
Shiela Jackson Lee, quite possibly the most stupid elected rep there is. I normally won't attack someone's intelligence, but Lee is at about the same level as Forest Gump maybe a bit lower. The idiot wanted to know why the Mars rover didn't take photos of the flag the Apollo astronauts planted on Mars. She makes Trump's look like a genius.
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