Posted on 08/21/2015 9:34:33 AM PDT by Steelfish
We used to count black Americans as 3/5 of a person. For reparations, give them 5/3 of a vote. A cash payout will never work. Here’s a better way to fight the enduring damage of slavery.
By Theodore R. Johnson August 21 Theodore R. Johnson is a career naval officer, former White House fellow and doctoral candidate in law and policy at Northeastern University.
If you want to shut down a conversation about race, just say the word “reparations.” Even black Americans are divided over the idea that money can compensate for the vestiges of an evil institution that ended 150 years ago; only 60 percent think the government should make cash payments to descendants of slaves. White Americans, on the other hand, have reached a consensus: In a YouGov poll taken shortly after the Atlantic published Ta-Nehisi Coates’s viral feature, “The Case for Reparations,” 94 percent were opposed.
Yet a year of protests over disparate law enforcement practices, a decade of particularly sharp income inequality and centuries of imparity in America show that racial reconciliation is impossible without some kind of broad-based, systemic reparations. Recognizing the original sin is simply not enough; we must also make moral and material amends for our nation’s treatment of African American citizens. But if a pecuniary answer can’t fix the structural disadvantage — and it can’t — what can?
Weighted voting.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
This guy can take the short bus to Hell!
As long as black Africans and Dominicans and Jamaicans want to immigrate here, forget reparations.
Blacks were never legally considered 3/5 of a person.
Slaves were - and only for the the purpose of calculating how many Congressional representatives a State would get.
At the federal level, blacks could be free (many were) and whites could be slaves (but there were few overseas markets selling white slaves, you could not enslave someone domestically, and all importation new slaves was shut off by that very same Constitution.
I thought that Blacks have had “voter reparations” There already have been quite a few Black Americans that have voted Dem from the grave.
This falsehood seems to be the left's version of "MLK Jr. was a card-carrying Republican" falsehood on the right. In both cases, they offer no "proof" of their falsehood but deliberately spread misinformation to promote whatever cause they have that week.
The truth is that "black people" were NEVER counted as "3/5ths of a person" in this country.
Rather, SLAVES were counted as 3/5ths of a person, for the purpose of PREVENTING slave owners from having too much clout in government. Slave owners gave their slaves no rights but wanted them counted as "persons" in the census solely to increase the slave owner's representation in Congress.
Free blacks, then and now, were always counted as 100% people.
Problem is the “them” that got 3/5 is not the “them” who would get the 5/3. Different people, idiot. The “3/5” are dead.
People are not equivalent, interchangeable or fungible.
Wow I guess they figured they’ve LOST the 2016 elections already. Nice!
I support reparations. Every former slaveowner should contribute to a fund that will pay every former slave. It will be over quickly.
Really? How historically illiterate do you have to be to write columns for the Washington Post? Is there an idiocy test that these people have to pass to get the gig?
All I know is that if they ever decide to distribute reparations I’m buying stock in Nike and MD20/20.
Blow it out your ear, Ted, you stupid racial bigot.
Or increased it. It depends on your perspective.
The "free" States wanted not to count slaves AT ALL for the purpose of congressional representation. The "slave" states wanted to count everybody equally (slave or free), with the probable exception of Indians (who nobody wanted to count).
I have an answer.
Let's just tar and feather these idiots.
As I understand it, this is what helped solve racism in New Zealand.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X-jVAHAuiS4
Absolutely, the Democratic Party should pay reparations for slavery and Jim Crow and maybe democratic votes should be counted as 3/5’s.
Although leftist, the Washington Post used to at least attempt to show it could publish semi-rational thought. THIS is astonishingly beyond rationality.
Blacks were not considered 3/5 of a person because they were black. It had to do with taxes and representation.
I am 100% for reparations for any and all persons that have been held in the USA as slaves. Please collect your money IN PERSON at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
Such a thoughtful, well reasoned position. I’ve got one just as reasonable, repeal the XV amendment altogether you communist bastards.
“We used to count black Americans as 3/5 of a person. For reparations, give them 5/3 of a vote.”
who is “We”?
pretty sure I wasn’t involved.
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