Reparations

[Gunthr]

The issue is before us.

I bring this topic forward because all Americans will be asked to form an opinion. What is yours?

I will start it off by saying that blacks in this country may have a basis for a legal claim. Think about how an award by the Supreme Court of tax dollars to Black Americans might affect you. Is it morally right? Can we do it and possibally put the racial discrimination problem to rest?

[GtoRA2]

Gunther
Why is this before us?


It is a dead issue. Why should I have to pay these jerks a dime? All my relitives imagrated here way after slavery.

They need to get over the "we were opressed" crap and get on with there lives.


When I say they I mean the people who want this not all Black people. So do not start with your a racist cause you used the word "They"

[Gunthr]

GtoRa2, the issue is far from dead. It is gaining momentum. The movement for Reparations to Black Americans is really not so far removed from Affirmative Action, which is now accepted by about half of Americans - I'm not sure on the number. And there are precedents; Japanese Americans were paid reparations for financial loses during WWII.

[ra]

GtoRa2, the issue is far from dead. It is gaining momentum.

No doubt about it.  And you know all the public schools are indoctrinating kids with the idea that America will never be cleansed of the crime of slavery until reparations are paid.  When these kids reach voting age there will probably be enough support to pass some kind of reparations bill.  The US tax payer gets hosed once again, and no one is better off but some lawyers and bureuacrats.

ra

[Sandman]

Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks - and Racist Too
By David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | January 3, 2001


One



There Is No Single Group Clearly Responsible For The Crime Of Slavery



Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. There were 3,000 black slave-owners in the ante-bellum United States. Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?



Two



There Is No One Group That Benefited Exclusively From Its Fruits



The claim for reparations is premised on the false assumption that only whites have benefited from slavery. If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendants of slaves. The GNP of black America is so large that it makes the African-American community the 10th most prosperous "nation" in the world. American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes in the range of twenty to fifty times that of blacks living in any of the African nations from which they were kidnapped.



Three



Only A Tiny Minority Of White Americans Ever Owned Slaves, And Others Gave Their Lives To Free Them

Only a tiny minority of Americans ever owned slaves. This is true even for those who lived in the ante-bellum South where only one white in five was a slaveholder. Why should their descendants owe a debt? What about the descendants of the 350,000 Union soldiers who died to free the slaves? They gave their lives. What possible moral principle would ask them to pay (through their descendants) again?



Four



America Today Is A Multi-Ethnic Nation and Most Americans Have No Connection (Direct Or Indirect) To Slavery



The two great waves of American immigration occurred after 1880 and then after 1960. What rationale would require Vietnamese boat people, Russian refuseniks, Iranian refugees, and Armenian victims of the Turkish persecution, Jews, Mexicans Greeks, or Polish, Hungarian, Cambodian and Korean victims of Communism, to pay reparations to American blacks?



Five



The Historical Precedents Used To Justify The Reparations Claim Do Not Apply, And The Claim Itself Is Based On Race Not Injury



The historical precedents generally invoked to justify the reparations claim are payments to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Japanese-Americans and African- American victims of racial experiments in Tuskegee, or racial outrages in Rosewood and Oklahoma City. But in each case, the recipients of reparations were the direct victims of the injustice or their immediate families. This would be the only case of reparations to people who were not immediately affected and whose sole qualification to receive reparations would be racial. As has already been pointed out, during the slavery era, many blacks were free men or slave-owners themselves, yet the reparations claimants make no distinction between the roles blacks actually played in the injustice itself. Randall Robinson's book on reparations, The Debt, which is the manifesto of the reparations movement is pointedly sub-titled "What America Owes To Blacks." If this is not racism, what is?



Six



The Reparations Argument Is Based On The Unfounded Claim That All African-American Descendants of Slaves Suffer From The Economic Consequences Of Slavery And Discrimination



No evidence-based attempt has been made to prove that living individuals have been adversely affected by a slave system that was ended over 150 years ago. But there is plenty of evidence the hardships that occurred were hardships that individuals could and did overcome. The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago? West Indian blacks in America are also descended from slaves but their average incomes are equivalent to the average incomes of whites ( and nearly 25% higher than the average incomes of American born blacks). How is it that slavery adversely affected one large group of descendants but not the other? How can government be expected to decide an issue that is so subjective - and yet so critical - to the case?



Seven



The Reparations Claim Is One More Attempt To Turn African-Americans Into Victims. It Sends A Damaging Message To The African-American Community.



The renewed sense of grievance -- which is what the claim for reparations will inevitably create -- is neither a constructive nor a helpful message for black leaders to be sending to their communities and to others. To focus the social passions of African-Americans on what some Americans may have done to their ancestors fifty or a hundred and fifty years ago is to burden them with a crippling sense of victim-hood. How are the millions of refugees from tyranny and genocide who are now living in America going to receive these claims, moreover, except as demands for special treatment, an extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some blacks can't seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others -- many less privileged than themselves?



Eight



Reparations To African Americans Have Already Been Paid



Since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and the advent of the Great Society in 1965, trillions of dollars in transfer payments have been made to African-Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences (in contracts, job placements and educational admissions) - all under the rationale of redressing historic racial grievances. It is said that reparations are necessary to achieve a healing between African-Americans and other Americans. If trillion dollar restitutions and a wholesale rewriting of American law (in order to accommodate racial preferences) for African-Americans is not enough to achieve a "healing," what will?



Nine



What About The Debt Blacks Owe To America?



Slavery existed for thousands of years before the Atlantic slave trade was born, and in all societies. But in the thousand years of its existence, there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians - Englishmen and Americans -- created one. If not for the anti-slavery attitudes and military power of white Englishmen and Americans, the slave trade would not have been brought to an end. If not for the sacrifices of white soldiers and a white American president who gave his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks in America would still be slaves. If not for the dedication of Americans of all ethnicities and colors to a society based on the principle that all men are created equal, blacks in America would not enjoy the highest standard of living of blacks anywhere in the world, and indeed one of the highest standards of living of any people in the world. They would not enjoy the greatest freedoms and the most thoroughly protected individual rights anywhere. Where is the gratitude of black America and its leaders for those gifts?



Ten



The Reparations Claim Is A Separatist Idea That Sets African-Americans Against The Nation That Gave Them Freedom



Blacks were here before the Mayflower. Who is more American than the descendants of African slaves? For the African-American community to isolate itself even further from America is to embark on a course whose implications are troubling. Yet the African-American community has had a long-running flirtation with separatists, nationalists and the political left, who want African-Americans to be no part of America's social contract. African Americans should reject this temptation.



For all America's faults, African-Americans have an enormous stake in their country and its heritage. It is this heritage that is really under attack by the reparations movement. The reparations claim is one more assault on America, conducted by racial separatists and the political left. It is an attack not only on white Americans, but on all Americans -- especially African-Americans.



America's African-American citizens are the richest and most privileged black people alive -- a bounty that is a direct result of the heritage that is under assault. The American idea needs the support of its African-American citizens. But African-Americans also need the support of the American idea. For it is this idea that led to the principles and institutions that have set African-Americans - and all of us -- free.

[SaburoS]

LOL, here we go again....

[mietla]

Originally posted by Gunthr
I will start it off by saying that blacks in this country may have a basis for a legal claim.

No claim whatsoever.

Think about how an award by the Supreme Court of tax dollars to Black Americans might affect you. Is it morally right?

No, it would a theft.

Can we do it and possibally put the racial discrimination problem to rest?

No, those race pimps will never go away. If anything, giving them anything will just encourage them to demand more.

[weazel]

Main Entry: rep·a·ra·tion

Pronunciation: "re-p&-'rA-sh&n

Function: noun

Etymology: Middle English, from Middle French, from Late Latin reparation-, reparatio, from Latin reparare
Date: 14th century

1 a : a repairing or keeping in repair b plural : REPAIRS

2 a : the act of making amends, offering expiation, or giving satisfaction for a wrong or injury b : something done or given as amends or satisfaction

3 : the payment of damages : INDEMNIFICATION; specifically : compensation in money or materials payable by a defeated nation for damages to or expenditures sustained by another nation as a result of hostilities with the defeated nation -- usually used in plural
............................. ............................. ............................. .........
The basis of the push for reparations is based on the following:

In 1865 General William Tecumseh Sherman made the infamous promise of forty acres and a mule to thousands of freed slaves, a promise which was promptly rescinded by Andrew Jackson when President Lincoln was assassinated.

O.K.,  the government should calculate the total number of slaves present in the US in 1865, multiply that number and the cost of forty acres and a mule in 1865 and divide the pot between all descendants of slaves present in the country now.

They can each buy a Coke with their 50 cents.....after all, fair is fair.....right?

Almost sounds like a Bush "stimulus" package.  

[john9001]

my family never owned slaves, and did not become rich on the "free" labor of slaves, that is why i am poor today, so i figure the govt owes my family money because we never took advantage of "free" slave labor and amassed a fortune, i think my familys loss is about $783,294.27....., more or less.

[Innominate]

I feel that everyone decended from someone brought from africa as a slave deserves an optional 1 way first class ticket back to the african naiton of thier choice.

Nobody deserves to be rewarded or punished for things that didn't happen to them, or that they didn't do.  However, I do feel that those over here through no fault of thier ancestors should be allowed to go back to africa, paid for by the US Govt.

[Turdboy]

Yawn!

Old argument!

The same people who claim we owe them something because we are white and they aren't are the same ones that claim we won't let racism die.

I put it in the same category as the people who are suing McDonalds because their kids are fat.

[NUKE]

I want reparations doled out from all the families that have ever had a member committ a horible crime.

Even though I myself havent been the victim of a major crime, I need reparations for my ancesters that have been victimized by criminals in the past.

I expect compensation for my great grandfather being murdered by a Mexican immigrant.

[funkedup]

Geez not again.

[Eagler]

maybe the distribution of reparations will be the platform the dumbcrats run on in 04

"we promise you More in '04"

[Thrawn]

Hmmm, so it looks like no one is for reperations on this bbs...again.