The Trouble With Reparations

Some Yale students recently documented the fact that slaveholders and proponents of slavery, along with abolitionists, figured prominently in the university's 300-year history.

Few significant American institutions with a history stretching back well before emancipation are without connections to slavery.

Early presidents were slaveholders, and scholarship has made clear the extent of slavery in the antebellum North as well as in the South. As an African American student at Yale more than 30 years ago, my own studies made me well aware of these facts.

I have a dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

As a Yale board trustee, I know the university is doing what many people would no doubt suggest: ensuring that any qualified student of color, regardless of means, is given the financial aid to attend Yale;

What happened to Dr. King's dream? Are racial quotas really what you think he meant?

Kurt Schmoke graduated Harvard. He was one of the best educated and absolutely worst mayors that the city of Baltimore, Maryland ever had.

He took over a city in a renaissance and turned it into a third world hell hole with soaring unemployment, white flight, a "clean needle" program and a ballooning HIV/AIDS and Drug Addiction statistic.

He managed to undo in two terms what had taken previous mayors fifteen years to establish.

Regards,

This reparations thing is the latest attempt by those liberal nutcases. This country, sad to say, is never going to get over slavery. Jesse, Louis, Al, Julian and the rest of those extremists use it to their advantage. Everything's an excuse and it's selfishness and a feeling of entitlement. People are too timid to challenge them on their own racism. The argument for reparations has problems 1. because those African nations that were so "wronged" were themselves largely to blame and involved with selling their own color into slavery 2. slavery has been going on so long in this world, and the African enslavement extended beyond the creation of the U.S. as an independent country and involved many countries in the conquest of the Americas. 3. does anyone have true info on how many colonists/white Americans actually owned slaves, it is safe to say not every white owned a slave in this country-would it even be close to half the population? 4. the Civil War and the bloodshed- where's the appreciation to the whites who gave their pounds of flesh for the blacks? 5. the recent black immigrants to this country, that have no ancestors who were American slaves? Why do they deserve reparations? 6. Blacks with white blood in them, and had they had an ancestor who was a slave holder-do they shoulder the blame too? It's all ridiculous and not logical.

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