Posted on 04/29/2015 10:37:29 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
A photo published in The Baltimore Sun on Tuesday showed young black men gleefully, almost hysterically, dashing out of a looted Baltimore CVS store that would later be set ablaze.
One was clutching a box of Froot Loops and half-gallon of ice cream, and one had a couple 50-ounce bottles of Arm & Hammer Laundry Detergent, dermatologist tested, for sensitive skin.
The mob mentality that existed at that moment prompted them to grab items worth less than $20. It was a criminal act warped by the African-American experience in the U.S., where they and their ancestors have long been denied the staples of daily life as immediate as food and as abstract as opportunity to participate in the American dream. Their crime makes an undeniably convincing argument for the need to discuss slavery reparations.
The concentrations of black populations in urban centers are the result of generations of racist policies on housing, banking, education, employment and criminal justice. These cities absorbed people freed from a 250-year-old slave economy that required a civil war to end it. The truth is, the bigotry and commercial exploitation of African-Americans that enriched the nation’s earliest industrialists still exists and continues to funnel black communities into dead ends from which escape is difficult, to say the least.
Those young men with their ice cream and laundry detergent have the choice of seeing their neighborhood as valuable, nurturing communities, or as traps built by the power structure that has determined this is where they belong.
The police, who should be serving and protecting, too often rule by intimidation, meting out punishment beyond the charge of their office. This is not about police going into neighborhoods and straightening out black-on-black crime. It’s about men being afraid to go to jail for not paying child support, making eye contact with a police officer or selling loose cigarettes. These aren’t criminal behaviors, they are responses to living under intimidation.
Looting, violence, vandalism and crime are no solution. They are unjustifiable. They are wrong. They are deplorable. But should they be unexpected any less than infection follows an untreated wound? Two wrongs don't make a right, but until the wound is healed, how could we expect to prevent the infection? Reparations is a way to treat that wound.
The reality of life for the urban black American is heartbreakingly present in the instruction the mother has to give her son regarding police interactions, in the student who isn't even aware that her chances for success are less than those of her more affluent peers. But for so many other Americans, these lives are viewed over one electronic device or another and become reality for what amounts to a few moments in the world of media.
U.S. Rep. John Conyers has in every session of Congress since 1989 filed a bill that would begin a discussion on reparations, but it never passes. This discussion must take place. We must understand why black lives matter, and why in 2015 it's necessary for so many beautiful Americans to be walking through city streets to remind us of that.
What form reparations might take is unknown, but we know that all the policies imbued with racism mentioned above need repair. That might be the place to start.
President Obama said from the White House on Tuesday, "If our society really wanted to solve the problem, we could; it's just that it would require everybody saying, 'This is important; this is significant.' And, that we don't just pay attention to these communities when a CVS burns, and we don't just pay attention when a young man gets shot or has his spine snapped, but we're paying attention all the time because we consider those kids our kids."
Let’s remind Congress that “This is important; this is significant,” and remind ourselves of it, while we’re at it.
This is simply the best!!!
After all, the English sold over 300,000 Irish into slavery into the West Indies in the 1600s when they were "pacifying" that unfortunate Isle.
What about the thousands of blacks who were slave owners.
Many blacks today do not realize that their ancestors owned slaves and some were even slave breeders.
I will work diligently to fund reparations for blacks under the following conditions — all expenses paid repatriation to an African country of their choice and renunciation of US citizenship.
My great-great-great uncle was killed at the Battle of Plain Store in Louisiana at the age of 18, fighting in part to free the slaves. Do I get money for my loss?
With our borders? No deal.
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAT!!!!!!!!!!??????????
I really thought this was satire at first.
“What form reparations might take is unknown, but we know that all the policies imbued with racism mentioned above need repair. “
Maybe I shouldn’t give them any ideas, but I am pretty sure the end game of reparations is white slavery. Are we there yet?
Black lives have to matter to black people first.
So Al Sharpton is actually part of the pilot program?
Thats already happening. Just called things like “stimulus” rather than “redistribution”
The issue is that with the national debt now being greater than annual GDP, and a good portion of that debt having been monitized (Fed prints money, uses it to buy debt) we’re at the point of running out of other people’s money.
Add to that the reaction an IOU-filled Social Security “trust fund” will have to the coming explosion of Baby Boomer retirements (not even mentioning other entitlements like Medicare) and ... well, you get the idea.
Therein lies the basic reason why the government is so interested in this. See how it works? The government pays money it collected in taxes (that is, money that’s already been taxed) then, after giving it to a gibsmedat who did not to earn it, taxes it again.
No, they are the result of white flight to the suburbs, to avoid crime and substandard schools.
HA!!
Yep, Everyone who owns a slave needs to pay that slave reparations! It’s only fair, now...
No person living today was a slave nor is the child of a former slave. Those who might ever have been entitled to reparations are long gone. No one living today is entitled to reparations on behalf of others.
I agree that reparations should be discussed. It should take about 20 minutes.
Lead and Copper.
Payable in 168 grain increments.
MOLON LABE
My first battle here first month in 2000 was with Memphis Belle over that very notion
She was zotted eventually
Scratch the skin of a race lib and you’ll find full blown social libtardedness festering all putrid and filled with pus underneath
Slavery reparations started with LBJ and the Great Society. They are currently being paid out every month in the form of welfare, Medicaid, EBT cards, Obamaphones etc.
President Cruz will enhance the borders.
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