Eh? How are they any different morally? Someone does something wrong, someone else who didn’t benefits. Why does it matter if the wrongdoer is one person, twenty or a thousand? If anything, wouldn’t societal-level crimes be less successively culpable, given the significantly increased difficulty in proving benefit and the greater numbers moving in and out of the grouping over time?
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…will there be punch and pie?
internet hugs
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Oh, there is plenty of punch.
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So you believe that this was unfairly collected, or immoral? … Uh huh, I think your empathy engine needs a tuneup.
EDIT:
Romain Nadal, a spokesperson for the French ministry of foreign affairs, backed Sparacino-Thiellay’s comments Tuesday, telling VICE News: “It’s normal for the State to take responsibility. It’s a historical responsibility.”
A quote from the article that is hyperlinked.
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A helpful reminder to anyone arguing that poor whites should get reparations if black Americans are going to get them. There are white reparations, it’s called the New Deal and progressive taxation, as well as a slew of other social policies that acknowledge that a purely market/capitalist system is exploitative to the economically vulnerable. Sure, these policies have taken a beating of late, but the are a hell of a lot more people fighting for them than there are supporters of slavery reparations.
Also keep in mind, as Coates points out in the article linked to above (read it, the get drunk enough to sleep, then skim it again in the morning to remind yourself it wasn’t all just a fucking nightmare) black people have historically been excluded from social policies benefitting the white poor up to and including Obamacare (whoo that’s some fresh racism).
To all the pedantic sophists pouring coconut oil on the slope, trying to grease that sucker up talking about ancient spoils-of-war history, we’re talking about recent, institutionalized, long-lived, brutal, treated-as-mainstream-economics, occurring-during-a-time-of-high-rhetoric-about-freedom-and-equality slavery. And please don’t peg the end of the brutality at the mid 1800s. If you’re tempted too, have some hair of the dog and reread the Coates article.
ETA: and if your complaint is “why should i be punished”, this isn’t about you. Nobody even said you would have to pay anything. This is about putting money time and effort into helping people and healing society-scale wounds. Healing these wounds would undoubtedly strengthen the economies, not to mention the psychic health of all involved.
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Played like Stephen Fry 
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Aren’t there some interesting contrasts in psychology comparing the two most widely held “anti-racism” attitudes (I would like to emphasize that neither one is even close to being part of a ‘racist’ mindset)? The two attitudes being: Race Blindness, recognizing and acknowledging skin color and the self perceptions you knowingly or unknowingly create around it vs. Race Cognizance, looking at humans without recognition of race. It seems to me that both of these are furthered as a means to defeat privilege, race based privilege, to be precise, although recently the idea of ignoring race has began to be looked at as ineffective and maybe even as a hinderance to eliminating race based privilege. That being said humans inherently judge on appearance and thus I doubt that Racism in the context of underlying privilege will ever be completely eliminated. The guardian does a much better job of explaining this whole mess than I do though, so I’ll just link off here…
EDIT 1: Just found the wikipedia page on what I was clumsily trying to say, it seems the official terminology for the two perspectives is: Color Blindness or Race Blindness and Race Cognizance. The correct terms have been added to the train of thought above.
EDIT 2: One more thought (tangent), the wikipedia article on Cross Race Effect (Privilege people of a certain ethnicity unknowingly or knowingly give to someone of their same or similar ethnicity) has an interesting section on reducing the effect which highlights recognition of the effect before interactions as the main way to reduce it.
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How about the fact of Jamaica’s sovereign status?
Most other groups being compared are groups that are not/no longer nation states in their own right. While that doesn’t mean they are assimilated, or that they are not still marginalized, because overwhelming evidence says they are still penalized for circumstances well beyond their control, isn’t Jamaica’s claim substantially different by this fact?
Jamaica only gained independence in 1962 & was ill-prepared for it, leading to the inevitable “help” from the IMF & friends including mandatory austerity that stymies the nation in many ways.
Couple that with the incomplete but expanding understanding of just how a people, collectively & to the person, are affected in the long term by centuries of deliberate abuse and neglect.
Then the seemingly complete gesture of emancipation followed a little over a century later with (a sort of) independence leaves little doubt that while certainly better than otherwise, those acts were hardly any sort of settling up with regards to the lost generations of the past and the compromised potential of future generations.
Over 80% of Jamaica was enslaved at the time of their emancipation. Many of the free people left at emancipation, probably in fear of reprisal, so the descendants of slaves surpass 80% of the countries population. The only examples that could compare rationally would be other island states, but none exactly.
So none of these comparatives really hold much water.
Whether or not reparations would do any good is a moot point, but Jamaica’s example stands out from the rest. Cameron denying the discussion is a denial of history which is always a further abuse and practically a tacit admission that the claim has merit. Ruling class Brits love debates they can win and do anything to avoid the others.
FFS it wouldn’t actually cost a cent if it came in the form of debt cancellation. Faery money that has taken the form of a yoke is all that is.
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You said exactly what I would have said if I knew how to say stuff in a coherent manner that makes sense, and you did so without alienating people. You, over all people in this current conversation, deserve one of these:
http://imgur.com/gallery/gZ3A8dT
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Isn’t it always the case that the IMF is the “friend” you always regret calling?
“But they mean well”
“You’re still screwed”
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Also, that was an impressive…
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Racism has a logic all it’s own though, and this transcends economic class.
Why does everyone (well, all white people who are about my age) always forget that very special episode of The Fresh Prince when Carlton gets pulled over by the cops?
But genius Ta-Nehisi Coates argues for reparations in the American context, isn’t this even more like the case of Germany and Israel, where reparations were paid out until relatively recently?
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Whilst i’d fully back official apologies for a countries past misdeeds, reparations for generations long dead are another matter entirely.
If you’re going that route, that essentially validates one of the most vile concepts ever: That descendants can be held responsible for the actions of their relatives taken before they were even born. That is a galaxy-sized can of worms of it’s own right which would need to be tackled fully before reparations like this could be considered.
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I don’t know. I typically dismiss the idea of reparations immediately because no one has ever had any kind of workable plan beyond yelling “Reparations!” as if it was that simple.
Should people in California, Hawaii, Alaska, American Samoa, etc. pay reparations even though they were always free states or became states/territories after slavery ended?
Would you just collect money from white folks or would you actually make everyone including Asians pay these reparations? If everyone, how do we deal with black slave holders or worse, black slave holders whose parents might have been slaves? What about white people with black ancestors (over 10% in parts of the South)? What about black people with white ancestors (most of the black population in the US)? Would someone who is 50% black and 50% white just pay themselves?
Would the person paying reparations have to have had ancestors here since the time of slavery or would you force say, an immigrant who just moved here to also pay up?
Would the reparations be a flat fee from every American or would it be progressive where the 1% effectively pay all the reparations? If it is just the 1%, then would that really count as an apology from the immense number of poor people who wouldn’t contribute even though they had ancestors who were slave holders?
Would the reparations themselves be specifically for slavery or just racism in general? If it is racism in general, would you include all the other groups that have suffered racism?
Do the lives of any of the 150K union soldiers who died during the civil war worth anything towards the payment of these reparations?
Do policies put in place to counter the systematic racism count at all (affirmative action for instance)?
Do all black people get the or just descendants of slaves? How do you prove you were a descendant of a slave? Does the treatment of your ancestors matter?
Would we demand reparations from Britain as well considering they are responsible for a very large number of the slaves?
Historically, have reparations actually ever made anything better to the lives of those who received them? How much was necessary? Was everything forgiven at that point? Did wounds heal?
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List all the times reparations have actually been tried comprehensively.
I’m sure there is a name that I don’t know of the debate tactic of “Explain how this would work in full detail with a full plan before we can explore the principle behind an idea.”
If someone lives as a member of an underclass in a possibly broken society because of the circumstances in which their ancestors were kept as slaves (as many if not most in Jamaica do), people could argue that they, the descendants, are still suffering under the injustices done against their ancestors, which were never righted. “Here, you’re free now!” doesn’t fix things, as most black people in America found out after the Civil War. No education, no jobs, no opportunity, red lined into certain neighborhoods, only allowed access to certain kinds of jobs, etc. Repeat for a few generations and then folks can complain that these minorities just don’t work hard enough since they’ve been free forever.
As Coates’ points out in his last memoir, you can be the most successful middle-class black American it is possible to be and a cop can still stalk you, shoot you in front of your house, and walk away scott free even though you were never committed of a crime. It happened to a friend of his from college whose mother was a doctor (head of radiology!) and whose family was well to do. We still haven’t figured out how to fix any of this.
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I am not dismissing your observations or viewpoint. Seriously I am not. But I will present an alternate viewpoint.
Since countries are things, and they are collections of people, and the economic detriment of oppression is arguably measurable, I don’t think it is unreasonable for the larger entity to make good.
No, it isn’t fair. But shit, human oppression and continued generational nepotism ain’t fair. Gah, Unicorns.
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So many people want to point out how hard reparations would be to carry out, how unfair it would supposedly be, how undeserving some of its recipients might be, and on and on. Nevermind that many scholars and public policy experts have proposed numerous entirely workable possibilities. The real, biggest problem is white resistance, ignorance, and indifference to the centuries-long generational transfer of inequity.
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“But I never oppressed anyone! Hell, I’m just a working class person and I’ve never benefited from racism. No one gives me entitlements!”
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The huge number of posts by two or three people in this thread is a good example of why commentators, especially dudes, need to practice “step up, step back.”
Re: anti-reparations sentiment, keep in mind that Jamaica didn’t achieve independence from the UK until 1962. Nobody can deny the situation of racial inequality at that time, or in preceding years, but it seems quite popular for apologists of white supremacy to creatively imagine that history perished in the '60’s, and everything afterward sprung out of the ether without connection to the (shockingly brutal) past.
One aspect of any reparations movement (be it one to address war crimes or slavery) is always the fundamental acknowledgement that the current social and economic order is not only an outcome of past crimes, but a structural continuation of those crimes. Hence the worldwide dominance of former colonial powers over postcolonial countries, and the incessant changing of the currencies of power. (In the US, it was slavery, then segregation. Now it is de facto segregation and mass incarceration.)
Reparations movements are a step in the right direction, because they attempt to introduce a crisis of legitimacy into the dominant order. They fail to do so for many reasons, not the least of which is the widespread assumption held by their opponents that, for the first time in history, every individual starts in the same place, with the same resources, facing the same challenges, in a society where all power is benevolent, no matter how grotesquely lopsided or ill-gotten. Even this predicament represents a kind of best-case scenario, as it simply avoids dealing with the vested interest that many parties have in continuing centuries-old power structures predicated on the domination of one group by another, with the neoliberal proviso that both groups remain fractionally semi-permeable.
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Neither- it’s direct compensation to actual victims. Even if it wasn’t it wouldn’t be immoral, just not a moral obligation.
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