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.
It is largely the Caucasian and Asian people who are being discriminated against today.
Not the folks who are most prominent in seeking ‘reparations...” indeed, they mostly belong to the racial group that is benefitting from all sorts of racial preferences.
Wrong plaintiffs, gang. Wrong plaintiffs.
I think I should be paid a couple million dollars because my great-great grandfather died in the Civil War fighting to free the ancestors of these folks. It can be deducted from the black reparations and paid to me instead.
Fair is fair.
How do you say pound sand in ebonics?
not one thin dime.....not one thin dime, ever....
Can’t say what they can do instead of getting reparations on this board.
If they’re not careful, they might find out what the “white man from town” can do.
How about inviting some black folk to your vacation homes as a start?
The editors of the Cape Cod View are far too busy attending gay romps to host black folks.
the question recently occured to me— how will the govt know who is paying the reparations. There is no seperate bank one for white taxpayers and one for black taxpayers. Black taxpayers will be funding their own reparations!
The problem at this stage isn’t bigotry. Its too few Christians per square mile.
Yay! I’m for reparations!
Starting off, lets consider paying my family for the wrongs my ancestors endured under the rule of Longshanks. Then we can proceed to sue the Crown for our losses following the Jacobite Rebellion.
OK, you been supported all this time, what do you have to show that you have done with it? Not a damn thing? Pissed it all away and did nothing but breed more thugs?
Give a damn about you inner city negros, I do not...............
Exactly.
^^^This^^^
I actually knew a guy named Cromwell.
Not surprisingly, he was a lying, cheating POS.
Must be genetic.
Speak for yourself.
However, all of those who DO own slaves should be fined $1 million per slave, with each slave then being awarded $150K as reparations.
The federal government will retain 85% of the revenue to cover administrative costs -- as it does with all other welfare programs.
This is complete horsepucky. Neither they nor their (recent anyway) ancestors has been denied anything, materal or non-material. That’s the problem. Where does the author (if you can call him that) think these jackasses acquired their entitlement mentality?
Their crime makes an undeniably convincing argument for the need to discuss slavery reparations.
It most certainly does no such thing. If anything, it argues powerfully for just the opposite: an end to the coddling of the African race. They need to learn to live, compete, struggle and strive just like the rest of us - or face the consequences, just like the rest of us.
Period.
The only one I support, and do so with wild enthusiasm, is a one time one way ticket to any destination in Africa.
Did this moron author think for a second that maybe, just maybe, the store had already been stripped clean of liquor and narcotics?
Looters have priorities, you know.
And Froot Loops ain't one of them.
I want reparations from my oppressors the Romans, who enslaved my family in the past, Pizza for life.
For reals? As is my practice, did not go to the article.
You do have to wonder, just how many negros are wandering down the streets in Cape Cod, let alone living there?
But then, exposing the hypocrisy of the liberals is like an unexpected volcanic eruption. Violent, but great fun to watch.
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