So money is offered to make people feel better. Great for the short term, but what is your long term solution. After all you must have one for this conversation or you aren’t trying.
We are not talking about “a lot of things”. We are talking about racism.
If you have no money, and then you do have money, do you believe that the qualitative difference which has occurred is that you feel better?
Did you even read the Coates argument, or are you just winging this?
Did you miss this, or just ignore it?
I just can’t imagine a realistic amount of money you could give someone for them to say “yeah, things are fine now.”
I’d rather dedicate a very large amount of money to reducing and eliminating the structural inequalities that exist in the US. Rather than trying to apologize for something that we can’t ever really make right, work on trying to solve the underlying problem that exists today.
So maybe a check every month to keep the good feelings coming.
I think this makes more sense.
OK, so HR40 is specifically a bill that commissions a study group to study, in a quantitative way, the harmful effects of slavery/segregation/etc and then find ways to address them. Cash handouts aren’t specified in the bill, and presumably the study group would be people who aren’t dumb, understand the political implications, and want practical solutions. What’s kind of funny is that there are already programs that try to reduce or elimination the structural inequalities that exist in the U.S. Things like affirmative action, school bussing, etc. They’re already unpopular and are half-measures at best. How do you address a hundred years (continuing right up to the present) of specifically racist housing policy (redlining, GI Bill, loan predation, etc) that has systematically denied black families the primary way that white middle class families built up wealth?
Quote from The Case for Reparations:
In 2005, Wells Fargo promoted a series of Wealth Building Strategies seminars. Dubbing itself “the nation’s leading originator of home loans to ethnic minority customers,” the bank enrolled black public figures in an ostensible effort to educate blacks on building “generational wealth.” But the “wealth building” seminars were a front for wealth theft. In 2010, the Justice Department filed a discrimination suit against Wells Fargo alleging that the bank had shunted blacks into predatory loans regardless of their creditworthiness. This was not magic or coincidence or misfortune. It was racism reifying itself. According to The New York Times , affidavits found loan officers referring to their black customers as “mud people” and to their subprime products as “ghetto loans.”
“We just went right after them,” Beth Jacobson, a former Wells Fargo loan officer, told The Times . “Wells Fargo mortgage had an emerging-markets unit that specifically targeted black churches because it figured church leaders had a lot of influence and could convince congregants to take out subprime loans.”
That’s theft. All things being equal black families should have been able to recover from the depredations of slavery after 4-5 generations. Inter-generational social mobility in the U.S. has been high compared to other countries, but not for black families. Why not? (Hint: it’s not because black people are less capable.) How do you redress policy that plundered specifically black wealth? The Case for Reparations makes clear that this isn’t merely or even primarily about slavery. It’s about generations of literal theft.
Why an apology? Why demand recognition of this? Because, as Mr. Coates writes “in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife.”
This is a good post, thanks.
It’s kind of silly, but I’ll just keep making the point that it isn’t about the good feelings. Maybe you’ll acknowledge that, who knows.
Who’s issuing the apology? Just Americans in general?
This is a good idea, but the biggest single structural inequality is the wealth gap between the median white and black households. I think it’s something like $100k vs $5k. Research shows pretty conclusively this gap exists because of current and past institutional racism and that it is the biggest factor in the different outcomes of black children and lack of economic mobility. So, one way to address that inequality is to address it, i.e. give the black families money.
So you think giving all black families with descendants of slaves $95,000 would do the trick? You think that would solve their problems?
Because I don’t.
Would it make their problems worse, or would it make them better? I guessing the latter. What exactly did you have in mind by ‘addressing structural inequalities’, and what makes you think it would be more effective? Would it cost more or less, and would it solve all their problems?
(Never mind that limiting it to only descendants of slaves ignores the entire point of institutional racism since the end of slavery.)
I can’t help but think you’re being deliberately obtuse, which is a poor way to facilitate discussion. The House passed an official apology for slavery in 2008. What apology represents regarding reparations is an acknowledgment that black families were systematically plundered by the state, that the current state of black wealth relative to whites and black imprisonment and myriad other ways that black folks fall behind whites is by nefarious design and not because of anything intrinsic to blackness.
I… I mean… $95,000 would solve a lot of my problems. Do you really think it wouldn’t help? What a strange thing to say. Given the choice would you refuse $95k?
There’s only about 42 million black people in the U.S., you could give each of them a million dollars and it wouldn’t even be a drop in the bucket compared to billions in taxes going unpaid by corporations and the 1% every single year, not to mentions the billions more going to waste due to poor spending.
So whatever, just pay them.
It’s a weird question, right? You suggested that an apology needed to be made, but normally an apology is issued by someone who had done something wrong.
In this case, there’s no individual group of people still alive responsible for slavery. So we are left with this notion that America as a whole is issuing that apology, right?
But that itself seems problematic, because it creates a feeling that African Americans stand alone, separate from America as a nation. And that’s not right. They’re all just as American as anyone else. So are they apologizing to themselves? That doesn’t make any sense either.
So is it just everyone else in America, apologizing to them? My ancestors weren’t even here in America when slavery was a thing. Am I apologizing for stuff that other people did while my ancestors were back in Europe?
It’s one thing to simply make a statement that slavery was a terrible atrocity… That seems obvious. But to say that an apology needs to be issued, seems strange when you think about it for more than a few seconds. Perhaps that’s obtuse.
Er… I don’t think your doing that math right, dude. 42 million times a million is 42 trillion dollars.
Sure that might sound like a lot, but taxing it will cut the number in half, and spreading payments out over their lifetimes will soften the blow, and reforming our tax laws to better collect from people (and companies like Amazon) that pay $0 every year will offset the annual payouts a great deal.
Not to mention how much more in taxes black people will pay into the system once we stop unfairly imprisoning them, and once they’re afforded more opportunities in life.
Dude… It’s more than ten times the total federal revenue for a year.
It’s more than twice the entire GDP of the country.
It doesn’t just “sound” like a lot. It’s an absurdly huge amount of money.
Sounds like a good reason to go after entities not paying their share.
I don’t think you are going to have a lot of luck finding 42 trillion dollars in evaded taxes.