Congresswoman Hopes Reparations Bill is Path to ‘Repair Some of the Damage’ Caused by Slavery (Reagan, millionaire)
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Again... just b/c someone didn't use it, doesn't mean that it wasn't available to them. It's like comparing a neighborhood w/ a fully staffed and supported public library to a neighborhood that didn't have one.
You can't compare the education opportunities of the neighborhood w/ a library to the one w/o it just b/c some kids in the first neighborhood didn't use the library. There's all kinds of residual benefits from being in the group w/ access to resources. Maybe that kid didn't go to the library, but he was best friends w/ the kid who went every day. Or he was tutored by the kid who learned from that library. Or he had a chance. for a job that would've required him to get a book from the library and he passed.
All of that are opportunities that NO ONE in the library-less neighborhood would have benefitted from.
There was no library available to my grandmother, who had an 8th grade education and had to stop schooling to help support her impoverished family. Yet, less than 30 years later, her children had all graduated from college.
As far as my other grandmother, same story. There sure was no library in her little impoverished village in Eastern Europe. But she came here as a poor teen with nothing. Never owned a property. Yet her son earned a graduate degree and ended up in a lovely, upper-middle home.
There's a difference between life being unfair and life being stacked against you via gov't mandate. The former is just the way things shake out. The latter is an injustice that should be rectified.
We don't need to eliminate or seize the gains that non-Black people made to settle the score. We need to gift the same opportunities that were robbed from Black people AT THE SAME COST it was given to non-Black people. Housing & education were my go-to. We gifted non-Black people decades of free education & subsidized housing cost and training, while at the same time we robbed generations of Black people of the same opportunity to improve their lot for themselves, family, and community. That's the direction reparations should go, and that's not going to be accomplished from a giving campaign on GFM or NPR.
What specifically are you referring to with the bold?
I don't think we can gift the same opportunities at the same cost. This is a different world today. And there is no guarantee that people would take advantage of those opportunities if it ever happened.
And hey - lump sum payments provide opportunities.
As if reparations will solve the problems created by slavery? Even Lincoln was aware that freeing the slaves would not end the long-lasting problems it created, and he could think of no solution.
The problems created by slavery? You mean like a 13% black America population that would've otherwise been born in Africa? That's a problem I'm glad to have.
I can't control African kings and chiefs who sold my ancestors to Europeans, but I'm sure as hell glad they landed in America instead of Haiti, Cuba, or Brazil. I'm not making light of slavery, I'm framing it in the proper context of Black Americans being the winners of the African Diaspora, which we are.
The prosperity of African immigrants have already proven that we black Americans don't require any reparations.
Huh? You think Jews didn’t suffer from oppression? In the 40s, antisemitism was so pervasive that Jewish boys couldn’t even get a job. There was plenty of real estate “steering” (including when I could remember it), and other restrictions.
As far as Jewish immigrants having communities here to help them, yes....it’s true. Other Jews would form ulpans to teach the new arrivals English. They had a variety of support type groups.
And blacks can, and do, the same. Let educated, middle class black men serve as role models to boys with no (or a bad) father. Build rec centers so they can stay out of trouble after the school day ends. Have massive drive to make unwed birth highly undesirable, and drug use just as bad. (And I’m not saying this isn’t being done....but apparently it needs to be done more.
If Jewish immigrants who had come here 10 years earlier helped the new arrivals, then more established blacks can help those blacks who need support, as well. And whites help with this too. We fund community college for poor people via Pell Grants. We give an extra boost to college applicants through affirmative action. There’s a lot of emphasis on giving blacks positions of authority at work. We are already giving a lot.
Regardless of how much discrimination Jews faced in America, none of it was codified to the extent that it was codified for Black Americans. That's the obstacle that Jews never had to overcome in America to get their perches. You might have been discriminated against, but you were legally allowed to pursue the things you wanted. And worst case, you were allowed to blend in w/ society at large to fake your way into it. History is full of Jewish success that came after denying they were Jewish, again something that almost no Black people would've been able to pull off.
So even if you say successful, established Blacks could help out other Blacks, that was meaningless b/c both groups were equally disenfranchised from society at large. At the end of the day, regardless of how successful Madam CJ Walker was (America's first female millionaire [Black]), she couldn't do anything for a gifted Black person who wanted to be a scientist or writer or maitre'd at a fancy downtown restaurant b/c she was a barred and disenfranchised from those institutions as the everyday Black person.
Easy problem to solve - if you're black and genealogists can trace your lineage IN AMERICA to the 1870 Census, then you get paid reparations, if you're black and your family came after that, you DON'T get reparations. You guys are turning this into rocket science, when it's NOT.
what if they were:
a. freed before the Civil War
b. never a slave in the first place?
btw, the official US government never passed a law giving them 40 acres and a mule. Sherman came up with an order and (supposedly) Lincoln approved it. I guess like an Executive Order. An unconstitutional one (creating new states out of existing states).
no, like it or not, slavery was legal until the 13th Amendment. That doesn't mean the US Government doesn't owe Blacks something for actions that were taken since then.
Jews and Asians arriving in America had the benefit of communities who were already established in the America (Jews and White immigrants) or had their own communities that weren't systemically targeted for oppression (Asians). The outcomes of these groups is incomparable to what Black Americans had to deal with in order to establish ourselves.
All things being equal, an Asian or Jewish immigrant had to do less to extricate themselves from the bottom of the social ladder than a similar Black person. An Asian or Jewish immigrant had ZERO hurdles to overcome besides securing their money to get themselves into a nicer neighborhood to raise their family.
The effects of that discrimination didn't stop just b/c policies were erased. There were a long-tail outcomes that came from that discrimination -- denied housing, denied loans, real estate "steering," lack of funds to reinvest in communities, housing discrimination, etc. There's decades of negative repercussions from that ONE policy decision regarding housing.
That's not even counting the lost opportunity from other policies like the GI Bill or War on Drugs.
So explain how so many in the black community have thrived, even those who came from very poor families. I personally know a LOT of black men and women who are highly successful and doing better than most of the white folks I know. What advantages did they have that others did not? How do you explain their success despite all of the policies, discrimination of the past?
Reparations should come for the treatment of Black people STARTING with slavery and continuing THROUGH Jim Crow America and whatever's legacies were left behind after the CRM.
Black people were literally barred from accessing the biggest source of American net worth for decades, and that's a debt that might even be a bigger financial hit than the generations of slavery Black people lived through.
What is the CRM?
Black people were not barred from buying homes. They were barred from buying in many neighborhoods, and they could not access mortgages the way that white people could.
I don't know what the present value of 40 acres and a mule would be, and applying it to the apparent 40,000 families that qualified for it.
We do know that ~45% of Blacks are homeowners today. We do know that about 74% of whites are
Maybe similar to how it has worked for other groups.
What group of 44 million Americans ever received reparations? You think Congress would pass this? Congress can't even pass 10K student loan forgiveness and $15 min wage hikes.
What specifically are you referring to with the bold?
I don't think we can gift the same opportunities at the same cost. This is a different world today. And there is no guarantee that people would take advantage of those opportunities if it ever happened.
And hey - lump sum payments provide opportunities.
GI Bill for education. Gov't backed housing loans that led to establishment of suburbia. USG loans to rural & farmsteads. All programs that offered opportunities to Americans to improve their lot, but denied to Black Americans by policy or de facto.
It is a different world today, especially for cost. Those some same programs today would be significantly more expensive to pay for. And that's part of the penalty for delaying action.
We didn't give lump sum payments then, it doesn't make sense to give lump sum payments now.
Depending on when you grew up, it could be as simple as "I want to move to that nice neighborhood w/ the good school."
Regardless of how poor a White person was, that was always a goal that was only limited by how much money they made. There were ZERO obstacles beside the bank balance.
A Black person in that same time... had to deal w/ banks denying them loans, real estate agents telling them the couldn't show them the property, deeds saying that property couldn't be sold to a Black person, HOAs blocking the sale of the house, and White flight crashing property values ON TOP of just securing a job that they weren't discriminated against in order to secure the cash to pay for it.
Are you sure you had the same obstacles b/c you were dirt-poor and White?
You clearly do not know what you are talking about but wouldn't expect you to because you've never been white so how could you know about the kinds of obstacles white folks have.
Further, the discrimination in denying loans, property, etc have been gone for a very long time so they are no longer obstacles for blacks. What you refer to as "white flight" couldn't possibly be because maybe those white folks worked hard in order to move to better neighborhoods and schools now could it? Black folks do the SAME thing as they work to improve their situations.
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