Let’s say a Police Department arrests 50 people, holds them for 10 years without a charge, beats them a bit, and eventually the folks are let go. The Police do not even to bother to deny that the folks committed no crime and were unjustly detained. Pretty much everybody in contemporary America would expect the victims to receive a fairly large monetary settlement.
Now say the detainees were a group of 1,000, the Police Department had the express direction of the civilian government to conduct the detention, and the prisoners got beat up a lot, and were held for 50 years. Probably the expectation is that the monetary compensation would be even larger than in the first case.
What if the group detained was 10,000 people, they were beaten and tortured all the time, forced to labor at no pay, and they were held for their entire lives?
What if the group contained twelve and half million people, and the group’s children were incarcerated from birth, and they were held for over three hundred years?
The problem with reparations is that it tasks the current generation to pay for or make up for the sins of people several generations back. No one held slaves for me.
But if you think its ok to visit the sins of the great, great, great, great, great, great grandfathers upon the nation now, why stop then? Logically, you should ask those who originally enslaved them in Africa, they are the ones who took them from their homes and placed them in servitude. Arabs, Africans, a few Europeans etc…. Use DNA to determine tribes and go after their current descendants. Of course, slavery existed in Africa for thousands of years so no doubt whatever tribe was up, was at one time down and slaves themselves. So that whole thing could be a mess.
Going further, using DNA, the descendants of white European slaves could demand reparations from Arab descendants of the Barbary Coast and Turkish Empire as it conquered Constantinople. The current Native Am. Indians are the 3rd wave of immigrants from Asia and they conquered or wiped out the winning culture of the previous immigration. They had a culture of slavery as well. Should the Adenas and Hopewell descendants ask for reparations from the Iroquois? The Serfs of Russia ask for reparations from the descendants of land owners?
And Good Lord, the whole Roman Empire thing. And the Carthaginians. And the Greeks. And the Celts, the Saxons, the Vikings, the Hebrews.
If you follow the line of thought that someone owes me something because of what happened 1619, or 1719, or 1819…then there is NO LOGICAL Reason to stop there. Why not 1019? 219 BCE?
Slavery has existed since Man started organizing into tribes. If not killed, then they were captured and used. Sometimes they would, after a period be incorporated into the tribe. Sometimes not.
It was European culture that first began to question the morality of slavery in an organized way. Began to see people as MAN, not a member of this tribe or that thus subject to enslavement. That idea carried over across the sea and took several generations to gain popularity in the US and work to stop it.
If reparations is even considered in the US, then a flood of demands will come from Africa to the recipients for their cut, to pay up for the sins of the recipients’ forefathers.
Good Luck with that.
Ridge
I will gladly agree to pay reparations to anyone actually held as a slave.
I will strongly oppose any movement to pay reparations to the children of slaves. Since we are talking about not the children, nor the grandchildren, but the great-grandchildren of slaves, there is no fucking way in hell that I will ever put a single dime into reparations.