NEWS: Shouldn’t Have Reneged on the Forty Acres or That Mule

1/64th. They're actually in my family tree. Two great-great-great-grandparents. Pueblo, probably. But my family is Latino via Mexico into Colorado. So it's to be expected.

The Irish were not slaves. The Irish were, about two hundred years ago, really the same time that whole 'Civil War' thing went down in North America, being systematically starved to death by Britain. And later they were treated horribly in America, herded into slums and ghettos, and massively exploited as cheap disposable labor.

My point is, everyone was oppressed at some point. Should we pay the Boers reparations for what Britain did to them? How much does Turkey owe the Greeks? What about Spain and South America, that silver has to have run up a hell of a lot of interest by now. How much, exactly, does France owe the Palestinians for fucking up the Holy Land during various crusades?

All these people are dead, and have been for hundreds of years. Taking money from some people's descendants because they're one color and giving it to other people's descendants because they're another color is ridiculous. It won't set right the wrongs of the past and it won't fix the things that ail society today.

Interesting tidbit: Irish people were actually used as slaves in the Caribbean. Just throwing that in there as a little tidbit, not much to do with the actual topic, but I found it interesting.

Huh. I did not know that. I thought the last time anyone actually bothered to pay for an Irishman was back in the 1000s.

more that "100,000
young children who were orphans or had been taken from their
Catholic parents, were sent abroad into slavery in the West
Indies, Virginia and New England, that they might lose their
faith and all knowledge of their nationality, for in most
instances even their names were changed... Moreover, the
contemporary writers assert between 20,000 and 30,000 men and
women who were taken prisoner were sold in the American colonies
as slaves, with no respect to their former station in life."
Dunn claims in Barbados the Irish Catholics constituted the
largest block of servants on the island. Higham estimated
that in 1652 Barbados had absorbed no less than 12,000 of these
political prisoners. E. Williams reports: "In 1656 Cromwell's
Council of State voted that 1,000 Irish girls and 1,000 Irish
young men be sent to Jamaica." Smith declares: "it is
impossible to say how many shiploads of unhappy Irish were
dispatched to America by the English government," and "no mention
of such shipments would be very likely to appear in the State
Papers... They must have been very considerable in number."

On the other hand, there could coneivably be children of individuals born to slavery living today. Let's say that a boy was born into slavery on December 5, 1865, the day before the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified. If that person fathered a child at 50 (not unheard of at all) his child would be born in 1915. It's not inconceivable that a 91 year old child of a freed slave is living right now.

So it's not like slavery is that far removed from the lives of African-Americans. It could be as close as a generation... *googlegooglegoogle*

In fact, it is.

So there are people now that feel the direct influence of slavery in America on their lives. I'm sure there are even more people living today that knew freed slaves. I would imagine the grandchildren number at least in the dozens, perhaps the hundreds.

My point is that to describe this as ancient history with no connection to the present is pretty disingenuous.

The direct influence of slavery was, y'know...being a slave. The descendants of those slaves undoubtedly had their life impacted in some way by the physical and mental scars their enslaved forebears took away from it, but that's not direct, and it's arguably not that different from the overall experience for black Americans, slave descendants or no.

Obviously it has a connection to the present. Much of the racism and social inequalities present in the last 140+ years are a direct result of a society that had tuned itself to think of these people as objects. As property. And as I said, we should absolutely be doing all we can do to fix these legacies and provide a new, equal, successful future for all races.

I just don't see how paying people who were never slaves on behalf of people who never owned or supported slavery solves anything at all.

It definitely is not ancient history, not by a long shot. My question is: would someone who had a grandparent that was a slave get the same amount of money as a person who had a great great grandparent? Is there a direct correlation between how far removed your family history is and how much you directly have suffered from it?

Wow, 2 pages of white people's opinions on whether or not slavery and racism is still relevant!

Wouldn't it be more constructive to focus this energy toward abolashing the slavery that still exists today? There are 27 million people, though some put the number as high as 200 million, in slavery today, spread around the world. Shouldn't that be our focus?

Wow. A completely irrelevant post not contributing to the thread at all!

Well, I imagine a lot of it has to do with America being unable to (ignoring the Bush Doctrine) directly force non-Americans to do anything. An American law that says Backwoodsiland can't have slavery isn't going to accomplish anything. It's a trickier situation to force change in another soverign nation than it is to enact a law or have a lawsuit.

I am sure there is a point here somewhere.

Man, why you always gotta be hatin' on us Pinkos?

Tocqueville's knowledge of democracy - where it was not based directly on his travels in the United states and his own experiences in the French Revolution - was largely based on Classical sources. This comment in particular was obviously derived from a too-uncritical reading of Cicero and Co., who, it may be fairly said, were the Cheney and Co. of their time (rich, socially conservative, proudly intolerant, and constantly blaming "indolent, greedy, and unvirtuous" poor people for the various problems besetting the state).

The redistribution of resources is a core function of the state, whether it's done openly, as in early chiefdoms, kleptocratic dictatorships, and statist socialist models, or covertly, as in crony capitalism (and I have yet to see another kind that doesn't involve heavy regulation by a welfare state).

Since some kind of state-approved redistribution is clearly inevitable (even for most models of stable political anarchy), the question becomes simply whether or not that redistribution is just or unjust.

I'm not saying that populist abuses of redistributive systems are impossible, but compared to the continuous and egregious abuses by sociopolitical elites that take place in nearly any political economy (including the state socialism of the Soviets), they're a pretty marginal threat - a Red herring, as it were.

With regard to the question at hand in particular, it should be obvious to any unbiased observer that racial equality in this country remains a long, long way away. On at least one occasion, the simple fact that I have white skin is probably the only thing that saved me being murdered by a police officer, and on another occasion, it probably saved me from jail time for "resisting arrest" and "obstruction of justice." My step-brother, however, who is a high-powered LA attorney, routinely gets stopped by police and ticketed for reckless driving, simply because he's a black man driving a Merc (I've driven with him - he's not reckless). That's anecdotal, I'll grant, but there are so many hundreds of sociological studies out there that support the contention that racism continues to be an effective force in American society that I don't even see the point of citing them (especially since I have to leave for work soon).

Whether or not reparations is the best way to counteract this is a debatable point, to be sure. But making out like racism is something that all happened in the past but is over now, or that the experience of black Americans can be reasonably compared to the experience of anybody who can pass for white, is absurd, and must be denounced as such.

Shit, growing up in Colorado in the 'forties and 'fifties, my own father was subject to heavy prejudice and hate crimes from the local "white people" because he was a "bohunk." Who even knows what that slur means anymore? All you micks out there may have been oppressed once, but you're white now, just like us bohunks. And so you have no idea, personally, what it means to be oppressed by the society in which you live.

You're right, we shouldn't talk about it. We should just pretend like there isn't anything to discuss.

The darkies gots it great!

I'm not saying it shouldn't be discussed, it just looks a little weird to see such a large segment of the American population verbally poked, prodded and herded like so many cattle. I realize that many of you have good intentions, but when I see crap about whether or not whites deserve reparations, or how is slavery relevant now...



Some of y'all could stand a bit more real world in your lives.

Maybe all the whites that think this is a good idea should each give $100 to each of the blacks that think it's a good idea. Then we can all be happy.

If you were attempting to be rude, well, you may have succeeded.