Okay, okaaay, I guess the blood guilt thing was a bit… strong.
I am still extremely suspicious of the whole reparations issue coming up when it would cause considerable damage to the nascent rebirth of the left. Somehow, in someway, when class and poverty start being debated racism and white privilege mysteriously do also. So white privilege and those horrible deplorables are mentioned when poverty and oppression is mentioned especially if the white population is too.
I remember when Republicans would start talking about “class warfare” whenever the increasing numbers of poor, or just struggling, Americans were mentioned about twenty odd years ago. Tax increases, social programs, just talking about the problem and the designated “conservative” would mention the designated “liberal’s” class warfare.
We can debate and agree, or disagree on reparations, but it is no accident that now reparations is a hot issue. That is just reality. There is no real intention to make it happen and if it did it ultimately would be used to destroy reforms and enrich the already wealthy for we are a very corrupt society run by incredibly wealthy elites. It is being used as a distraction. A political weapon upon which to beat the left and its reformers. Or for that matter, the right and its reformers.
There are plenty of reformers across the political, racial, class, and religious spectrum who hate the corruption, the greed, and the misery growing in this country. There are also many who want to prevent these reformers from uniting.
When one is hungry one does think all that clearly and when one’s family and suffer all the talk about fairness loses meaning. Perhaps if reparations had been done in the 1870s or even the 1970s it would have worked. That is no longer true.
Our society is under increasing stress and being increasingly transformed into a society of a large population of the poor, an extremely modest servant class, and a tiny ultra wealthy ruling class. I am not joking about the possibility of violence, which will happen if too many lose hope. We are on that edge just as we were in the 1850s when increasing numbers of Americans becoming hostile to the owning of human beings and a smaller population increasingly insisting that their “peculiar institution” was not only “a positive good,” but should be expanded.
So reparations are either DOA or will cause further oppression, poverty, and probable civil war unless and only if it is used simultaneously as reparations for the entire bottom 80% of Americans regardless of race. A modern successful version of MLK’s Poor People’s Campaign. One can demand that the centuries of racism be acknowledged and understood only when society as a whole is being helped. Then maybe, just maybe, we can have that dream fulfilled.
