LEECHES
Posted on 08/12/2002 5:06:20 AM PDT by weegee
Reparations debate heats up
Push for slavery compensation enters political mainstream
By KRISTEN MACK Copyright 2002 Houston Chronicle
Houston lawyer Angela Matthews, 34, was a hesitant convert to the fight for paying money to blacks whose ancestors once toiled as U.S. slaves.
A California native with parents from Jamaica and no known slave ancestors, Matthews had trouble at first answering the question: "How does this directly affect me?"
As she studied the issue, however, she concluded that many modern-day disparities are the legacy of slavery, that years of unpaid labor unfairly shifted wealth from blacks to whites. She further decided that slavery's lingering effects on black America -- such as limited health care, housing and educational opportunities that echo through the generations -- entitle all blacks in this country to compensation from the government.
As she prepares to join an estimated 200 other Houstonians for a planned march in Washington, D.C., on Saturday, Matthews' conversion represents the transformation of the reparations movement from the fringe to the mainstream.
The movement promises to be divisive, as seen July 31 when the Houston City Council voted 8-7 not to support a House bill that would study slavery and the possibility of reparations.
"Very little surprises me in Texas," Matthews said of the vote. "People seem to be living more passive."
But a group packed council chambers the day before the vote to argue in favor of the resolution. And protesters over the weekend picketed the home of Councilman Michael Berry for voting against it.
Kofi Taharka, chairman of the Houston chapter of the National Black United Front, said the movement's tactics are typical of grass-roots organizations.
"It's not unlike many social movements, where it's the African-American press and word of mouth that energize our people," Taharka said. "People get to moving, and the so-called mainstream leaders try to catch up with the issue."
Once championed by fringe groups, the idea of compensating blacks for slavery is gaining support in the establishment realm of law and politics. It is seeing a national resurgence, with high-profile lawsuits filed or planned. The names behind the movement include lawyer Johnnie Cochran, Harvard law professor Charles Ogletree and U.S. Rep. John Conyers.
Some say seeking reparations as a remedy for the United States' racial problem is misguided and a prescription for more racial tension.
But those in favor envision reparations money being used to fund education, improve health care, create cultural facilities and buy and expand businesses.
At the very least, they hope the government will issue a formal apology for the institution of slavery.
Already drawing attention and fanfare is the Reparations Coordinating Committee, an elite group of lawyers, scholars and public officials.
Called upon by Randall Robinson, author of The Debt: What America Owes Blacks, the committee includes Cochran, Ogletree and others who had not previously been calling for reparations.
"It began to give this issue the credibility it didn't have before," said committee member Ronald Walters, a University of Maryland political scientist.
Those against reparations say you can't attribute problems of today to slavery. Besides, they argue the government has already spent a ton of money trying to solve such social ills as poverty and poor education.
If welfare and other social programs have not worked, asks David Horowitz, author of Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery, why would reparations be any different?
Horowitz said seeking reparations will needlessly divide black America from the rest of the country.
"It's become a constant blame game," he said. "We've run out of people to blame."
Still, Horowitz said he thinks it will succeed in either Congress or the courts, because politicians will succumb to guilt and racial paranoia.
Walter Williams, an economics professor at George Mason University and nationally syndicated columnist, disagrees.
"No president or Congress is going to agree on paying reparations to blacks," Williams said. "I find it amazing that black people can buy into the whole notion that someone is going to give us reparations."
To him it is just pushing a handout mentality. Besides, he said, ethnic groups that were not in America during the slavery era should not be held accountable.
Reparations aren't unprecedented. Japanese-Americans who were held in internment camps during World War II received an apology and $20,000 each. To build the case for blacks, advocates also point out redress given Holocaust victims and American Indians.
The difference, opponents say, is that those reparations were for actual victims and not their descendents.
"The rules are changed for everything when it comes to us," said Walters, of the reparations committee. "People want desperately to invalidate the claim."
The group plans to file suit later this year. Walters was mum on the logistics behind building a legal case, such as defining plaintiffs, how to prove specific victims suffered wrongdoing and the statute of limitations.
All are difficult to prove nearly 140 years after slavery was abolished. But proponents hope to have American slavery declared a crime against humanity, which has no statute of limitations.
Organizers also must combat a persistent myth that they are seeking checks for individual descendants. One urban legend alarmingly says individuals would split a $1.2 trillion settlement.
"None of us are talking about that," Walters said. "That's a simplistic notion of reparations. If you make it stupid enough, you invalidate the claim. People will say, `Let's close down the discussion.'"
Instead, the organizers want money spent on rebuilding black communities.
Conyers, D-Mich., has been introducing a House bill that would establish a commission to examine slavery and recommend remedies, including the possibility of reparations, during every session since 1989.
Within the past few years a number of cities, including Dallas, Atlanta, Baltimore, Chicago and New York, have passed or considered supporting Conyers' efforts.
The Houston City Council voted down a similar resolution. Taharka said that if enough pressure is placed on the "establishment" and multiple tactics are used, eventually it will lead to results.
"History," he explained, "teaches us that the way we get it is through struggle."
But a group packed council chambers the day before the vote to argue in favor of the resolution. And protesters over the weekend picketed the home of Councilman Michael Berry for voting against it.
If that's how they choose to characterize it. There were over a dozen phone calls with profanity and death threats lobbed at Michael Berry and his mother. The phone calls were made to his mother's home and she lives over 2 hours away. Michael Berry is pursuing investigation. He gave statements to the FBI (I don't immediately see how they are involved although his brother works for the feds and got a phone trace implemented while the calls were still coming in).
As she dried her hair from the rhetoric of such nonsense-spewers as Randall Robinson and Cornel West, she concluded that a fat lunch ticket could be at the end of this argument. She further decided that she would legitimize her parasitism by rallying under such noble-sounding rhetoric as "slavery's lingering effects" and "modern-day disparities of the legacy of slavery." She slept better that night having avoided language such as "willful disenfranchisement" and "culture of failure." And the ghosts of half a million dead let her slumber in peace.
Would this be offset by the years of paid leisure that generations of welfare dependency has provided?
What I’d really like to see is reparations to me for the slaves that were taken from the possession of my ancestors without compensation.
Owl_Eagle
”Guns Before Butter.”
Anyone who owned slaves should be forced to pay anyone who was a slave. No sense in berating the decendents for the actions of their grandparents, however.
It may take decades but it will be considered an entitlement (it is even considered to be owed to the woman in this article even though her relatives were not slaves). How about we collect the money from the nations that sold the slaves in Africa? Maybe we get the Dutch to pay out as well for transporting the slaves.
Slavery was already in America before the United States was established. We abolished slavery in under 100 years. Meanwhile slavery continues to this day in Sudan. So much for righteousness...
How about this for starters: no American slaves and no American slave owners are alive today. Further, no children of either of these classes are alive. I'd say that any connection to slavery has, therefore, been cut.
Face it, probably every single person on Earth, the Queen of England included, has ancestors who were slaves. At what point do people have an obligation to "get over it" and move on with life? I'd save that it is when slavery (or some other great injustice) is within living memory. Otherwise, descendants of slaves will be paying descendants of slaves.
How do you determine who gets what? Do all Blacks get equal reparations? What if someone is only 1/4 Black? What if someone is descended from both slaves and slave masters (like "Chicken George" in Roots)? What about those Blacks in this country that had no slave ancestors, but are recent immigrants? What about those like Michael Jordan, Bill Cosby and Oprah who've obviously not suffered any economic harm from slavery (and each of whom is, further, probably only partially of "pure" African descent)? What about the Chinese and Irish immigrants in the 1800's that were treated at least as badly as slaves - do they also get reparations?
What do we pay to the descendants of those who fought to free the slaves, let alone descendants of those wounded or killed in the effort? What case would there be for making those people pay any amount of reparations?
What, besides a payoff, would the advocates of reparations call trillions of dollars paid to Blacks over the past 4 decades via the various welfare programs? What would they call affirmative action, which clearly discriminates in favor of Blacks over Whites?
Now I'll make this more personal. I am Jewish. My ancestors were in Europe and subjected to regular persecutions of various sorts for the entire time that slavery existed in the American colonies and in this nation. I've done extensive genealogical research on my family, and I know of no member of my extended family who even visited the Western Hemisphere before 1887. No direct ancestor of mine entered this country until 1908. How did my ancestors, let alone I, contribute to the misery of slavery, and how can I be held responsible?
Let's take the focus off of me, and expand it to the entire Jewish people. We were held as slaves in Egypt for roughly 400 years. Many of the advocates of reparations are also of the opinion (false in my view) that Egypt was a Black African nation. If that's the case, then I want reparations. I'll settle for a mere $1 for the suffering and toil of all of the Jewish slaves over that entire period, but I insist upon interest (at the extremely modest rate of 1% per year, which doubles the principal in a rather Biblical 70 years). Since the Exodus occurred around 1200 BCE, that leaves us with 3200 years of interest, or approximately 45 doublings. That amounts to approximately $35.184 trillion, or roughly $2.2 million for every Jew now alive. I'll tell you what - those who want reparations can take their share out of my $2.2 million and give me the difference. I'll be bold and say that my wife and child would make the same offer.
Obviously, the last paragraph is pure nonsense - and roughly on a par with the nonsense being spewed by those in favor of reparations. The bottom line is this:
I will be damned if I pay one red cent for reparations. I wouldn't pay a penny if all 16 of my great, great grandparents owned slaves.
I firmly believe (and, to be honest, hope) that any attempt to tax the people of this country to fund reparations will result in the largest increase in the mortality rate of "legitimate" government officials since the Revolutionary War.
You just don't know, do you?
If you want on (or off) of my black conservative ping list, please let me know via FREEPmail. (And no, you don't have to be black to be on the list!)
Extra warning: this is a high-volume ping list.
Would? Try already has. I wrote a critical article, Reparations: TANSTAAFL, on reparations earlier this year.
I've received more hate mail than you can shake a stick at. On the other side of the coin, the article has generated more commentary and e-mail than any article I've ever done. The positive outweighed the negative mail at about a 60-40 split.
Needless to say, this is something that'll occupy the race warlords for sometime to come.
Not only does he not know, but I'm not going to waste my energy trying to tell him, either...
Didn't Jesse envision the same thing and look what happened with that, out of the multimillions he's received only his friends have benefited and only $12,000(?) went towards families he were suppose to help.
Well said.
A simple solution to all problems suggests itself: The US should purchase Sweden, and any AfroAmerican who figures he or she has been harmed by slavery should be allowed to own two Swedes. Everybody in the picture would come out ahead. It's even possible that some modern day George Washington Carver or Booker T. Washington could show the people at Saab and Volvo how to build cars...
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