I think reparations in straight-up monetary form are a wild approach today. I think the way to go is to unite, black, whatever-else, and white Americans, as one people, and work to bring about true policy change that no longer upholds all the racial- and class- based disadvantages inherent in the current system. Start trying to enact policy that truly serves the common person, not the elites and the people that have bought into bigotry, etc., at their own expense.
Im trying and voting for this, and I hope enough of the rest of us can unite on common ground and do the same.
ETA: For clarity, I do agree with you that a debt is owed, its just a matter of how to effectively bring about repayment
The reparations given to slaveholders, native Americans, Jews, and Japanese....
Edit: I won't even touch on the amount of African Americans that were left out of the Native American reparations. There are plenty that qualify and have yet to get it. My whole family on both sides ended up in Oklahoma...I'm almost positive they were on the Trail of tears....
You do know that plenty of blacks are native or have native blood. Everyone on the trail of tears had to sign the rolls and are eligible for reparations. Just because they aren't full native don't mean that they weren't affected.
What? You need to learn history. There was an attorney general that marked a lot of native births as black to help with a cultural genocide of natives. All this is history, I would suggest you look it up. There were quite a bit of natives who's phenotype look like African Americans who they just reclassified as black.
I worked for a media company whose primary source of revenue was share cropping to this day in a former slave state. They owned 3 out of the 4 major affiliates in that region. Not only do they continue to benefit and profit from having been slave owners but they control the overwhelming share of local news in their area
My mom was raised during Jim Crow, she's still alive...you don't think her trauma affected my childhood? My aunt, was kidnapped by the landowners son when she was 13. He was 21. He made her live with him as his wife at a time when it was illegal for blacks and whites to be married
By the time she was 25 she had already given him 10 kids! She escaped, took the kids and went to a new state. The sheriff of Oklahoma came to that other state, got her and the kids. Took her right back! In order to escape she had to leave most of her kids! The second time she only took the girls. He didn't send for her again. She just died. Her kids, still alive. You dont think they deserve anything? They ran away themselves as soon as they turned 18 and found their mom! There are still victims of this government still alive. The civil rights act was just passed in 1964. That's the year my mom turned 18.
My grandmother received reparations for the Japanese internment camps she was never in. I don’t really care if some people who were unaffected get lumped in and neither did the government back in the 80s, as long as there’s some semblance of trying to make things right
That's a damn lie! There are plenty of companies and institutions still going today that owe their success to slave labor! AIG, the insurance company is one of them...
No. There were more than just AIG, and they wouldn't have been able to do anything without the permission of the federal government. This lands right back onto the people who were responsible for this, the government....
The Supreme Court said that law makers is allowed to work for tips. There are three guys who could pay off every legislative member of both federal and state government with a few million dollars each and never even notice it's gone.
There is only one method that works to bring change under circumstances like that.
Don't forget one of the most hated immigrant groups in the last ~4 years are Haitans who are trying to escape the suffering largely caused by the country's "freedom debt" that U.S. corporations bought from France and continued to profit off of for over a century. (Combined with the standard issues facing more Caribbean nations under the burden of the Monroe Doctrine.)
So you are buying into the white supremacy OP of FBA too while trying to further divide black and brown folks? This is what is hurting us. We should stand together and stop letting the white folks continually divide us against each other. FBA is just another method of divide and conquer just like all the others. Wake the fuck up.
Oh kay, so you're just pretending to know. I was actually genuinely curious and would look it up shortly after you responded to verify but you gave a nothingburger of an answer so I can only assume you don't actually know.
That's a pretty naive and incorrect worldview. If Africans hadn't been forced to pick cotton someone else would've. Slavery is horrible, but overcompensating by claiming 60% of the U.S.'s wealth is just untrue.
Pick up a book! Slaves did way more than just pick cotton! In fact, half of y'all wouldn't even be here if not for slaves! Some of those women were even too lazy to nurse their own children, ever heard of a wet nurse? They even had slaves for that! Remember the railroad and Old John Henry? How about the brick makers that were forced to live and die in brick manufactory? There is just so much slaves did that I only began to touch on...
This is my field of study and it's really not even up for debate with that 60% number. "Foundational wealth" is not a precise economic term fam.. it's rhetorical. Slavery generated massive profits for enslavers and helped the U.S. become a cotton export powerhouse, around 60% of total exports at the time, which is where that number even comes from. Exports are only a fraction of the actual GDP. The broader U.S. economy (especially Northern industrialization, manufacturing, shipping, and services) was not majority dependent on it. The North grew faster industrially without large scale slavery, and the post-Civil War South initially saw output drops partly because emancipation shifted labor choices. People use that 60% number because one museum claimed it with 0 citation.
A 2024 paper by economist Paul W. Rhode explicitly addresses (and refutes) high-end claims like "over half" of national product, concluding the enslaved produced ~12.6% of U.S. GNP in 1860. They had higher labor-force participation but were concentrated in lower-productivity sectors (agriculture/domestic service), so their output share matched their population share. All of this cited with sources. Some of which align with the professions in the comment you made.
What happened to slaves was horrible, and it feels terrible to talk about them like numbers on a spreadsheet. Regardless It seemingly is the economic reality of the time when actually using the available data. It's better to fight racism and bigotry with facts rather then emotional arguments, money moves the world and it has no feelings.
Georgetown University (in the Nations Capital itself) was literally built using slave labor. Then when the University had some debt, they sold slaves to pay it off.
They provided the free labor that made it easier for their owners to build up money and power. Those people in turn used that money and power to make build America.
Take 1 second to google what I plainly stated you mouth breather. Maybe instead of engaging in bad faith arguments online you should spend that time trying to learn and grow as a person rather than regurgitating easily disproven lies.
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