Posted on 02/15/2004 6:33:00 AM PST by schaketo
Should blacks in America receive reparations for slavery? That's the issue Professor Manning Marable will address Wednesday at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside. Marable is a history professor at Columbia University of New York and director of its Institute for Research in African-American Studies.
Marable believes that every black family in the United States should receive reparations, which he calls "compensatory justice," for losses their ancestors sustained as the result of slavery.
He says fair compensation for African Americans would involve a "civic restitution fund" and reparations would not come in the form of direct cash payments, but rather the use of tax money to fund social services for black Americans and scholarships for African-American students and historically black colleges.
Marable concedes that white Americans today are not guilty of enslaving anyone. However, they are the beneficiaries of racism, and as such they have a moral and political responsibility to bear its burden. The historical justifications for providing compensation to the American descendants of black slaves can be traced to the period immediately following the Civil War. The compensation that was promised to ex-slaves was never delivered. They never received their 40 acres and a mule.
African-American historian John Hope Franklin wrote, "Most living Americans do have a connection with slavery. They have inherited the preferential advantage, if they are white, or the loathsome disadvantage, if they are Black; and those positions are virtually as alive today as they were in the 19th century."
Marable points to the Holocaust lawsuits and the restitution Japanese-Americans received as a result of their internment in World War II as models for reparations.
However, people opposed to reparations say America
wasn't solely responsible for slavery nor did it invent slavery. They also say slavery didn't create the socioeconomic gap between blacks and whites.
Attempts have been made to bridge the gap, says Lindsey Scherer, founder of the conservative Web site, "The Right View: Nothing but right." Scherer says the United States has attempted to close the gap "by creating welfare programs, `cultural approaches to education,' and affirmative-action programs, just to name a few, and the end result has only been a decrease in the incentive to work, stigmatized learning, and a decrease in the incentive to excel in the truly bright and talented."
Anti-reparationists also say correlations can't be drawn between Japanese-American and African-American demands for reparations.
Scherer says Japanese Americans suffered direct financial losses because they were interned in concentration camps and couldn't work. Japanese-American internment was different from slavery in the sense that the descendants of the slaves didn't lose money directly because of their ancestors' enslavement, according to Scherer.
Try telling my daughter, who is currently filling out scholarship applications for next school year, that she has a "preferential advantage." She is acutely aware of the fact that if her skin was black or brown instead of white, she wouldn't be strapped with thousands of dollars in student loans to pay back after she graduates.
White, middle class kids need not apply.
How much do Blacks owe the Whites that freed their ass? Many a white man died and millions of white dollars were spent in the effort to make all men free.
You never hear a black man thank the white men that made their live better. Blacks in a American have more "opportunity" than blacks in any other county including the Mother-land. There has never been a great, modern, industrial African society! Blacks should be happy they are part of the great American society!
And you can thank Clinton for all this with his crazy apology binge he was on back in the prestain days. That and the nuclear technology to China that is popping up in Libya today.
Debatable: Should blacks receive reparations for past slavery?
======================
Posted by xxxxxxxx
On 02/15/2004 10:16:53 AM EST #26 of 26
When UFOs Arrive
Posted by xxxxxxxx
On 02/15/2004 10:16:50 AM EST #720 of 720
Therefore, the FIRST STEP in any reparations is for African nations to pay America. Then we'll discuss the rest. Course, at that point, there won't be any further discussion.
I haven't seen any mention of reparations for things like the Trail of Tears, etc.....So even if we DID repatriate everybody, it would not clear up everything.
Plus, were would we "Heinz 57's" go? Would we have to spend a certain percentage of remaining lives in various countries? :-)
Maybe it was unrealistic to think that people who'd been slaves could be readied for freedom by the efforts of the Freedman's Bureau alone, but that's how they thought then. And if we could go back in time and tell them of the "reparations" scam, they would say that the "40 acres and a mule" promise was irrelevant, as it was NOT an official pronouncement of congress and/or the president, and that the work of the Freedman's Bureaus WAS "reparations"...literally, their work at spreading literacy and charity was meant to "repair" the damages done by enslavement.
The argument that whites have a "preferential advantage" is demonstrably false. Admissions points for race, race norming on civil service exams, quotas....Others have brought up these points and no doubt others will, and better than I can.
The "the Japanese and the Jews got reparations, so we should too" argument is so ludicrous it isn't worth while to refute. I would say that anyone who presents THAT as an argument proves that s/he is either incredibly stupid or a con artist who hopes everyone ELSE is stupid. The Japanese internees who got financial payouts were those who were actually interned. Not any and every person in the USA who is of Japanese descent. And "the Jews" who got money were those who were actually in the death camps. The money is NOT being handed to anyone who happens to be Jewish...Even the CHILDREN of those who died in the death camps are not automatically eligible.
Two things : The reparations supporters think that "suffering" and "guilt" are inheritable qualities linked to melanin and blood. That goes against all concepts of law in our society : We don't have 'blood guilt' or 'blood feuds'.
Second : If reparations ever passes ,it won't be because those who pass it give a d**n about blacks...it'll be done as a declaration of war against poor/working class/middle class whites, whom the elite regard as retrograde racist, sexist, xenophobic thugs responsible for all the evil in the world. Therefore, I consider it inevitable that the wealthy (mostly) white liberal Powers That Be in the media, academia, law, and (maybe) the corporations will eventually embrace reparations,and they will do all in their power to make it 'fashionable'.
There is no way a legal case can be built for damages resulting from an institution that ended more than 140 years ago.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.