duh... duh...Well, if WE must pay reparations they should be paid in Confederate Dollars.
My ancestors came here in 1850, and never owned slaves. Why should I have to pay one dime? They never benefited from the labor of slaves, because to my knowledge not one drop of slave sweat was ever spent in the arid Mountain West from slavery’s inception in the U.S. and its official “demise” after the civil war.
The whole concept of reparations paid on the basis of race is ridiculous and it only gets taken seriously at all due to the horrors of slavery and the abstract nature of applying the idea to the past. But if the concept of groups of people with similarly colored skin sharing some collective responsibility were even a remotely logical idea, wouldn't it make sense to apply it first to actions in the present, not the past? So, for example, there could be a tax, based on your race, to pay for the costs of incarcerating whoever happened to be in jail who had the same skin color as you did. But that's obviously a ridiculous idea, and shows just how silly the whole concept of race based reparations is.
To be fair he should point out that the ability for the abolitionists to succeed in 1808 was written into the Constitution by the founders in 1789.
Alex Haley, author of “Roots” was purported to have said that every black American should get down on his knees , thank God, and kiss the ground for their ancestors being brought to the U.S. as slaves.
No one ever mentions the fact that many free blacks owned black slaves before the civil war. Wonder how they would work that into their formulas for who would get reparations.
placemarker
As a northern white Republican I demand payment from the Democrats for my ancestors who were killed saving blacks from Democrat sponsored slavery in the Civil War.
Has Gates gone Uncle Tom, Oreo, etc. to make up for his racist stupidity with Officer Crowley, or is he just telling the truth?
The day reparations start getting distributing, will be the day I take myself to another country.
Which means that when Eddie Murphy came to America to find a queen, the royal ancestors of the princess he found were enslaved by his royal ancestor
Obama said that reparations would not be given directly under the name reparations.
I think things like this student loan, and this health care are forms of reparations in his mind. They will be designed to put minorities first.
Many/most of these slaves would have never been enslaved by their bruthas if the white man wasn’t there buying them. The slaves were not give to whitey for free. Whitey created a market for them and the African slavers got recompense in.....I don’t know. Axes, knives, swords, metal spear and arrow tips and steel implements and clothing are a good place to start. How about matches to start fires? Steel pots to cook with and cook missionaries in (/joke)
So Henry Louis Gates big revelation (look how nuanced I am!) means nothing
So just what does Professor Gates want President Obama to do — who "favors reparations in theory?"
Thomas Sowell — in Intellectuals and Society — sheds some much needed light on slavery and reparations issues:
Slavery has been a pervasive evil around the world for thousands of years but confusing morality with causation — and seeking a localization of evil — has led to the history of slavery being stood on its head throughout our educational system, as well as in the media and by the intelligentsia in general. Thus slavery has been depicted as if it were a peculiarity of white people against black people in the United States, or in Western societies. No one dreams of demanding reparations from North Africans for all the Europeans brought there as slaves by Barbary Coast pirates, even though these European slaves greatly outnumbered the African slaves brought to the United States and to the thirteen colonies from which it was formed.A fact of the matter rarely considered is that African tribes routinely made war on each other, and sold their captives into slavery, a business facilitated largely by Arab merchants. It was a great way to "make money" and get rid of tribal rivals.Because the West has not been immune to the evils, errors and shortcomings of the human race around the world, the intelligentsia have been able to document these failings in a way that makes them look like peculiarities of "our society." In the case of slavery, what was peculiar about the West was that it was the first civilization to turn against slavery, beginning in the eighteenth century, and that it destroyed slavery around the world, beginning in the nineteenth century, not only within its own societies but also in non-Western societies it controlled, influenced or threatened. Yet there is virtually no interest among today's intelligentsia in how a worldwide phenomenon was ended after a thousand years, for it did not simply die out of its own accord, but was forcibly suppressed by the West in campaigns around the world that lasted for more than a century, often over the bitter opposition of Africans, Asians, and others who wanted slavery preserved. But that story seldom makes it through the filters.
What is highlighted is that the West had slavery, as if that was peculiar to the West. What is also highlighted is that black people were enslaved by white people in the West. But, even in the West, white people were enslaved by other white people for centuries before the first African was brought to the Western Hemisphere in chains. The very fact that these Africans were called "slaves" reflected the fact that a white group which had been enslaved for centuries before were Slavs — since the word for slave was derived from the name for Slavs, not only in English but in other European languages and in Arabic.
So Prof. Gates and TOTUS think it feasible to "extract" reparations from me, just because I'm a white American (who is half Slav)?
Seems to me they'd have to spin a pretty tall tale to sell that idea....
Obviously those African leaders who acknowledge the African role in Black slavery are “race traitors” and “Uncle Toms” (like the people of Uganda whose opposition to homosexual rape makes them “racist rednecks”).
BTTT
thanks neverdem.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/2029044/posts
http://www.trinicenter.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1154