Originally Posted By utahjosh It's going to take many more years of multicultural education, and more importantly, individual experience with different races before things get better.
Originally Posted By TomSawyer This isn't about reparations for slavery. The US hasn't practiced slavery for 150 years. Everyone who was a slave is dead. Reparations for the internment during WW2 was appropriate because there were people still alive who had property and income taken from them without just cause. And part of that was being able to define how that damaged the people involved had they never been interred. And, watching the news out of Africa these days, are the people whose ancestors were brought here against their will better off or worse off than they would be if they lived in Darfur or Somalia? No one here has to worry about an entire school of their daughters being taken for slavery, or to face genocide when traditional enemies take over the government. This is about dealing with the institutional racism that still exists in the US today, and that is a much more complex issue than paying for lost wages and property. How do we guarantee housing that isn't filled with lead and mold? How do we make sure that schools have the resources they need to teach, and how do we make sure that students and families are taking full advantage of the opportunities offered to them? How do we change an entire culture so that African-Americans are viewed as an integral and important part of our society? How do we change an entire culture so that African-Americans view themselves the same way?
Originally Posted By ecdc >>This is about dealing with the institutional racism that still exists in the US today, and that is a much more complex issue than paying for lost wages and property.<< Exactly right, which is why the author of the piece in the OP actually spends very little time on slavery. What's at issue is the residual effects of government policy decisions. At its simplest: white people created the ghetto. White supremacy created the mess we have *today*. To reinvoke Coates's analogy, white people beat black people nearly to death with a tire iron, then walked away. And now the white response is to congratulate ourselves and talk about how far we've come and how awesome we are because we stopped the beating. Then our response is to lecture the person on the ground bleeding and tell them to pull themselves up, quit whining, wipe off the blood, apply bandages, and while you're at it, turn down the rap music and get a real job. We should not be congratulating ourselves, we should not be lecturing people, and we should be doing the exact opposite of the Roberts' court right now and looking this issue square in the face instead of saying racism is pretty much over. We should be creating structured policy changes to address the fact that a black woman with breast cancer is far, far more likely to die than a white woman with breast cancer. Or policies to address the massive wealth gap, the de facto segregation of neighborhoods, the insane arrest and incarceration gap, and the education gap. If there is a better way to do that without reparations, I'm certainly fine with that, and I suspect the author is too. What he is saying, and what I agree with, is that viewing reparations through this lens of years of policy decisions and white supremacy creating the current status quo is in fact not the far-out, whacky, extremist position so many people immediately portray it to be. It is a reasonable proposal that could be the *beginning* of a broad policy shift in the United States that addresses a myriad of complex issues. Portraying reparations as dumping money in someone's lap and then walking away is a disingenuous representation of what is being argued.
Originally Posted By Tikiduck Until someone comes up with a workable solution, and there appears to be none, the point is moot. How do you justify sudden preferred treatment, financial or otherwise, on a massive scale, toward one group without causing extreme resentment in others? That is a hard sell. Will the taxpayers support it? Hell no! Japanese American reparations numbered in the thousands, as opposed to multiple millions of African Americans. The numbers are staggering, and when the American Indians get involved, (and they will) the numbers are impossible. Just because someone disagrees with the social and economic practicality of reparations, it does not make them ignorant, or a closet racist, as some of the rebuttals here seem to imply. I see it as a matter of practicality and realism over the romantic passions of,(to borrow a phrase) white liberal guilt.
Originally Posted By ecdc >>Until someone comes up with a workable solution, and there appears to be none, the point is moot.<< Except that's just the point, people *have* come up with potentially workable solutions and the bill that is routinely introduced and routinely killed is a bill that would explore workable solutions, not just mandate reparations. I'm not accusing anyone of being a racist, just of being intellectually lazy. You are starting with several false assumptions and then working backwards from there. Those assumptions include that there are no workable options, that the experience of Native Americans and black Americans is essentially the same--or enough so that they would both have to qualify for reparations, and that proponents of reparations are somehow advocating a big money dump and nothing else. You are responding to strawmen based on ignorance of the topic instead of addressing what is actually being said and what is actually being proposed. It's no different than saying, "There's no workable gun control solution." Of course there are several, but if you have a bias against gun control, you would be inclined to insist there's no workable solution.
Originally Posted By TomSawyer I don't think anyone is leaving the beaten man on the sidewalk and telling him to get up. We've had affirmative action programs in education and employment, equal housing laws, anti-discrimination laws, targeted funding for schools and districts, scholarship programs targeting black youth, social programs that offer everything from subsidized child care to food and shelter, voting rights enforcement, mandatory school desegregation, integration of the military and government, and countless other programs that have thrown hundreds of billions of dollars at the problem of institutional racism over the last sixty years. The person wasn't left lying on the pavement. We held our hands out, helped him up, paid for his hospital bill, and checked in on him to make sure he was okay. The person who was beat wants justice, but unfortunately the people he wants justice from are not the people who beat him to begin with.
Originally Posted By RoadTrip <<Except that's just the point, people *have* come up with potentially workable solutions and the bill that is routinely introduced and routinely killed is a bill that would explore workable solutions, not just mandate reparations.>> I realize that you are speaking of options other than cutting everyone a check. But I have ZERO confidence in the government's ability to come up with a comprehensive program that would substantially improve the situation. That nasty "Law of Unintended Consequences" always kicks in and the program creates almost as many problems as it solves. As I said in a prior post: <<It is a murky swamp when you start trying to "help" a class of people. Have Reservations helped Native Americans or hurt them in the long run? I think you would have to say the latter. The same is true of many low income programs... which have served to make single parenthood somewhat less economically disastrous; thereby trapping many in a permanently lower class lifestyle... both black and white. Plenty of impoverished single parent white families down here in hillbilly-land.>> I know liberals think that a large enough government program can cure anything. I don't. That is probably why I consider myself a left-leaning moderate and not a liberal. I prefer smaller more tightly targeted programs that actually stand a chance of accomplishing what they attempt. Like with healthcare... the ACA comes up with a massive plan that in one way or another impacts every American alive. By and large, virtually NO ONE is completely satisfied with it. Instead they should have gone with a far simpler and more targeted program dealing with the primary issue... people denied coverage by private companies as being un-insurable. All the government has to do is provide coverage for these people at a subsidized cost (similar to medicaid but not free) and the problem is solved. No one is forced to participate in a program they don't want to.
Originally Posted By TomSawyer There have already been huge government programs and we still have the problem. Until you can change attitudes, no government program is going to be anything more than a band-aid.
Originally Posted By Dabob2 "Until you can change attitudes, no government program is going to be anything more than a band-aid." But that's kind of the point of the study that the author is advocating. To change attitudes, by making people aware of what they may not have ever thought about before.
Originally Posted By Tikiduck In a country that has an ongoing debate over such things as teaching evolution in the classroom, good luck in translating the sympathetic facts of the African American story to the general public.
Originally Posted By ecdc Here the lottery unhappiness myth is debunked. Turns out winning the lottery is just as awesome as you'd expect. Not that it's an argument for reparations, I just thought the timing of the article was amusing. <a target="blank" rel="nofollow" href="http://nyti.ms/SNFcfS">http://nyti.ms/SNFcfS</a>
Originally Posted By RoadTrip It doesn't really debunk anything. It just comes up with different conclusions than prior studies. Happens all the time in research. I do believe that happiness following a lottery win depends entirely on if you have the knowledge and background to seek the legal and financial help you need, and how to tell legitimate professionals from the scam artists that will come out of the woodkwork to 'help' you. I think in the case of cash reparations, those needing the help most would have the least ability to knowledgeably seek it. Sure, the pro athlete or network personality making millions per year would be able to handle it with no problem. But those needing it the most would probably not. Once again, they would end up the victim of scam artists (probably white ones).
Originally Posted By ecdc >>It just comes up with different conclusions than prior studies. Happens all the time in research.<< Sigh. You just like to argue lately It comes to a different conclusion than a single study that looked at 22 lottery winners--a miniscule sample size over a tiny period of time. That's not a "study," that's an anecdote. That "study" was replaced with multiple long-term studies that analyzed hundreds of lottery winners from different countries and came up with roughly the same conclusions: the first year is stressful, then happiness increases significantly, and most people are good about investing their money and being careful with it. Again, none of which is an argument for reparations, but it does suggest that the comparison made earlier isn't a good one, and that people can be given a large sum of money and behave responsibly with it.
Originally Posted By RoadTrip <<Again, none of which is an argument for reparations, but it does suggest that the comparison made earlier isn't a good one, and that people can be given a large sum of money and behave responsibly with it.>> Apparently you've never met my son... ;-)
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