I don't normally come in Debate, but I accidentally came in and read all the posts. I accidentally came in the other part on purpose because this issue is a big deal to me because I'm a white guy who lives in what is pretty much an all black part of town in the South. Anyways the point is I read Tantz's post and obviously imshard was right, but there are some records. I know my family owned slaves and I know pretty much who they were. We were pretty poor though, still are, they were a gift or something according to our REALLY old Family Bible but we did pay them back. We have the financial records and everything. And the slaves actually got along with my family and choose to stay with us afterwards. We have the diaries and everything. This is kinda a special case and that family has since died off. Bloodline cut off, no heirs, you know what I mean. But in the grand scheme of things a lot of black people live in poverty today waiting for handouts. I don't say that from a statistical point of view, but from the fact that I see it everyday when I go outside. But that doesn't mean that they can't rise above. I also know alot of all black neighborhoods nicer then any most rich neighborhoods. Of all my friends I pick on my black friend, my best friend, for being rich. Hell he nonchalantly bought me several manga and magazines yesterday since I couldn't afford any. Why? Because his family worked hard, his neighbors work hard, their neighbors work hard, to not be a stupid statistic. Seeing what I've seen I really can't say which is right. I know a lot of black people who blame white people for everything, have had it taken out on me personally like I owed them something. One of my neighbors is this old white guy and he lives alone with his senile wife. He was in a gas station and as he was leaving two black guys jumped him and told him they were taking his truck as reparations that he owed for being white and when he asked if they would at least give him his wife's medication since he had just picked it up for her they poured the pills on the ground and stomped them. They said they couldn't get jobs because all the white people had all the good ones. Which is stupid I know, but these guys ACTUALLY felt that way. That's what makes things so sad. Racism isn't dead and no the money won't heal the pain of the ancestors, all it will do is make living expenses easier for them. But that's what welfare is for isn't it? So I really don't know, but if I had to choose I'd say no. Everyone has to work hard. I can't get a job because I have no experience so no one will hire me, a bit of a catch 22. Yet I walked that friend I mentioned before through an application process, told him what to say on each and every answer and then took it myself and he got the job despite the fact that there were several openings. So maybe that's equality there? Or maybe the answer isn't just handing out a big fat paycheck and something else all together that none of us see.

Mister Mxyzptlk

bobhhh
150 years? It wasn't until less than 40 years ago that civil rights laws were enacted, the fallout of slavery lasted well after the 13th amendment, and many of those fun loving lynchers are alive and well. Not to mention the politicians who enacted and supported Jim Crow.

Yeah, lets keep that hate alive! Keep everyone angry and worked up over this! After all, it's only been four generations since slavery ended! Come on, most African tribes kept their grudges FAR longer than that and the Arabs are holding grudges from 1000 years ago!! Are we gonna let a bunch of third world tribes out do us on grudges? Hell no!

Hate whitey! Hate whitey! Hate whitey!

Hate whitey! Hate whitey! Hate whitey!

Hate whitey! Hate whitey! Hate whitey!

Hate whitey! Hate whitey! Hate whitey!

Hate whitey! Hate whitey! Hate whitey!

Boo hoo hoo. bad man say bad things about white people, boo hoo hoo, being white people is hard!!!

Boo hoo hoo, baby made a boom boom in his diapey.

Sidwarrious
I don't normally come in Debate, ...

Wow, that story was heart breaking. You are right, racism is the real problem not financial inequities. Reparations won't solve that, might even make it worse if it was forced on people.

I only want to see some truth surface on this issue, and if I got testy it's because it's embarrassing to be associated with other white folks when I hear such insensitive talk about race. Whether its white rage about reparations, or confederate flags, I just get the sense that some white folks have scorn for even the slightest notion that they might some how be contributing to the conflict. The whole notion that you are totally innocent because you didn't personally flog Kunta Kinte is just missing the greater issue.

It's too easy to pretend that the problems black people have are a result of them being whiners, shiftless and lazy. There is a lot of bad blood on both sides and until we figure out a way to heal all the ruffled feathers, then small band aids like reparations and affirmative action will continue to fail at addressing the larger issue.

First off, thank you for a more rational responce than bobhhh gave...

Ronson
Slavery didn't end when the Civil War did. The system was just slightly altered so that black people lived on the plantation for no pay and worked excessively long hours to cover their room and board. Remember, the minimum wage wasn't created until 1938.

Are you saying every white guy in America was getting far better than that? There wasn't a white guy minimum wage either. The Sharecropper system kept poor white guys in poverty too.

Ronson
One thing is for sure, racism certainly hasn't ended yet.

Yeah, and if the pro-reparations folks have their way racism will never end.

Ronson
Slavery didn't end when the Civil War did. The system was just slightly altered so that black people lived on the plantation for no pay and worked excessively long hours to cover their room and board. Remember, the minimum wage wasn't created until 1938.

True, but were they really worse of than the Yankee who wasn't paid in money, but in tokens for the company store, where everything was over priced just out of his reach, forcing them to "sell" generations of his family to the same company?

One thing is for sure, racism certainly hasn't ended yet. As a result of racism up until Equal Opportunity and Affirmitive Action, minorities have been firmly entrenched in the lower classes. EO and AA address the issue, but have only started changing the way things were.

Now, of course, we are looking at class warfare. Race isn't as important as economic class, and a very wide gap between the rich and poor is only getting wider, and the middle class is disappearing.

Well, the lower class if firmly entrenched in the lower class. A lot of these problems I find to be the difference between "urban poor" and "rural poor".

imshard
I don't think anybody in their right minds could honestly deny the travesties of the past. Neither could any sane person truly think they can make up for them in the here and now. The only way I've ever found to heal a hurt or wrong is to forgive it, and move forward. We have enough troubles in our own time without drudging up the mistakes and crimes of the past. Let us remember what happened to ensure we never do it again. Bickering over it though is harmful to our progress as a species.

that was the point I made before. I don't think I could ever deny the past happened, that's just stupid.
I just don't think money will make everything all better. Just making an effort to move away from such injustices by making everything more equal will do that.

Aurora Moon
I just don't think money will make everything all better. Just making an effort to move away from such injustices by making everything more equal will do that.

Oh but remember "it wasn't until less than 40 years ago that civil rights laws were enacted" and "many of those fun loving lynchers are alive and well"!

Keep the hate alive! Never forgive! Remember the lynchings! Focus on the past!

I am an american, but lived for five years in Canada, where I met and married a Canadian-born Native American. In Canada there are Indian reparations, and like most things, Canada seems to have a better grasp on handling things than the States.

The point of reparations is not to give a bunch of assholes with entitlement complexes a big wad of cash and then watch them blow it all on cigarettes and lotto tickets.
The idea behind reparations isn't a financial one, it's a social reparation. America is a capitalist government, and no matter how much we may hate the "fat cats" making millions on the backs of slaves, making money off the backs of lesser people is part of capitalism.


Reparations should take money from taxes and allocate that money into programs aimed at undoing the negative situation that years of oppression or unfair practices have caused. In short, rather than taking money from the rich and giving it to the poor, we as mature people must take responsibility for the mistakes that others before us have left for us.

In Canada, if you are an Indian, you don't get a S.S. check, you have the chance to get a full-ride scholarship to any school, so long as you keep your grades up. Reparations money doesn't go into the pockets of Native Americans, it goes into funding addiction counseling and vocational education.

An example of reparations in the United States would be the "Big Tobacco" scandal a decade ago. Tabacco companies got busted for unethical advertising practices, including marketing their products to minors. The money taken in the settlement didn't get given back to everyone who could prove they had bought cigarettes before they were 18, the government funded millions of neighborhood after-school programs, and anti-smoking advertisements.

Mister Mxyzptlk
Are you saying every white guy in America was getting far better than that? There wasn't a white guy minimum wage either. The Sharecropper system kept poor white guys in poverty too.

Yeah, I know. And factories and mines were practically slave systems in everything but name only.

And remember, I am not for reparations - except in the sense that romulux just spelled out. The assertion that we should turn our backs on the past as if it were no longer relevant is just wrong though.

I see that attitude in a lot of threads posting in debate forums. Not necessarily about this, but about all sorts of things ... the war, torture, abortion debates ... the list goes on.

The lessons we thought we learned about these things decades ago are being ignored because some flim-flam artists have convinced people that THIS time we'll get the perfect war, or we'll do torture the humane way, or that anti-abortion legislation has no down sides.

I listen to people still insisting that the attack on the World Trade Center was caused by people who hate our freedom, and not because of the 50 years prior of interracting with that region.

Ignoring history is a mistake, because it really can predict national trends.

You think pro-reparation people prevent equality? How about people who want forget the lessons and mistakes of our history in regards to slavery? It had a horrible affect on both the victims and the population in general.

It has an affect to this day, and while healthy debate on how to reverse these affects is worthwhile, denial is dangerous.

Why is that people against reparations seem to decide that the victims "had it coming?" I hear that from lots of people.

"They were lazy"
"They were uneducated."


Its just weird. I think reparations in many cases are impossible. I do agree that forgetting the past seems to be what people against "reparations" are about.

If we wait long enough, we'll make sure that all those civilians that are getting killed in Iraq was "so long ago" that we won't think about reparations there, either.


This tactic seems to come out called "stall until you can absolve yourself of blame"

Do we have any responsibility for the Vietnamese who get poisoned with Agent Orange?
What about the Iraqi civilians dying now? Do we owe them anything? Or would they be better off slaves?

Mister Mxyzptlk
Hate whitey! Hate whitey! Hate whitey!

Hate whitey! Hate whitey! Hate whitey!

Hate whitey! Hate whitey! Hate whitey!

Hate whitey! Hate whitey! Hate whitey!

Hate whitey! Hate whitey! Hate whitey!

Irrational outbursts deserve irrational responses.

Ronson
And remember, I am not for reparations - except in the sense that romulux just spelled out. The assertion that we should turn our backs on the past as if it were no longer relevant is just wrong though....
I listen to people still insisting that the attack on the World Trade Center was caused by people who hate our freedom, and not because of the 50 years prior of interracting with that region.

Ignoring history is a mistake, because it really can predict national trends.

That's really all I was saying as well. It's too easy to pretend that the past dosen't matter anymore, and that anyone who thinks so is a whiner looking for a handout.

SpANG
I know a lot of people will disagree with me, and keep in mind, this is just an opinion.

I think black people SHOULD be paid reparations. Why? Because it WAS a horrible thing many of our forefathers did. Because black people still, after all this time, are not represented fairly by this nation. Look around the senate and congress floors, hell, even the White house and you'll see old, WHITE men. So, if reparations is a way for black people to be on 'even ground' with white people, I'm all for it. Black people will get more of a say in the government, and I would think that the money would mostly be absorbed back into the national economy in some form, anyway.

I'm sorry, I don't see the logic. I think the best thing to help African-Americans would be for them to live in a constitutional United States with a healthy, robust economy, instead of a doddering socialist utopia that throws taxpayers' money around by the billions at every imaginable problem.

SpANG
HOWEVER, if this happens, no more NAACP, no more United Negro College Fund, no more affirmative action (at least for black people). If we are all finally 'on the same page' financially (and in many cases, black people will advance white people financially), then these organizations (and ones like them) will lose legitimacy. It would be like an organization opening up that just helps white people.

"No more" how? Don't these groups have a right to express themselves, and call themselves what they want?

mapaghimagsik
Why is that people against reparations seem to decide that the victims "had it coming?" I hear that from lots of people.

"They were lazy"
"They were uneducated."


Its just weird. I think reparations in many cases are impossible. I do agree that forgetting the past seems to be what people against "reparations" are about.

No, I'm just against reparations because it's a bad concept.

I don't think we should ignore history; we should often reexamine it. But why are individuals responsible for what happened in tragic events they had nothing to do with? If I could step in the time machine and go back to 1776, I would have been a slave abolitionist like my idol, Benjamin Franklin. I'm not responsible for what happened in Vietnam in the 1960s, either, nor for the waste of human lives in the last two Wars in Iraq. If anyone had asked my opinion, I would have told them Iraq was a mistake back in 2003.

TitanOne

mapaghimagsik
Why is that people against reparations seem to decide that the victims "had it coming?" I hear that from lots of people.

"They were lazy"
"They were uneducated."


Its just weird. I think reparations in many cases are impossible. I do agree that forgetting the past seems to be what people against "reparations" are about.

No, I'm just against reparations because it's a bad concept.

I don't think we should ignore history; we should often reexamine it. But why are individuals responsible for what happened in tragic events they had nothing to do with? If I could step in the time machine and go back to 1776, I would have been a slave abolitionist like my idol, Benjamin Franklin. I'm not responsible for what happened in Vietnam in the 1960s, either, nor for the waste of human lives in the last two Wars in Iraq. If anyone had asked my opinion, I would have told them Iraq was a mistake back in 2003.

Exactly. I dislike how people who are against reparations are painted as "evil people who's intent on labelling black people as idiots who deserved Slavery" by the people who are pro-reparation.

I just happen to have a boyfriend who's black. Yet I don't think him or his anscestors are idiots who were better off as slaves or being underneth white people. I happen to find him a very clever person who can pretty much excel at anything he wants to. If I felt the opposite, I wouldn't have a black boyfriend now would I? Yet his color isn't that important to me....

And you know something? I told him about this thread, and he AGREED with me that just throwing money at the problem wouldn't really solve the problems in the world that we had right now.

I believe such a situation needs to be handled and managed in some other way.... such as being handled in a simlar manner as the above scenerio that romulux listed.

What about we folks who are descended from immigrants, who never owned a slave in their life? Why should we have to pay for someone else's crime? There's a lot of us, you know.

TnTComic
What about we folks who are descended from immigrants, who never owned a slave in their life? Why should we have to pay for someone else's crime? There's a lot of us, you know.

They shouldn't as far as I'm concerned.

Just raid a Confederate day celebration or a Conferedarte flag rally and start taking names! :)

ps just kidding folks.

TnTComic
What about we folks who are descended from immigrants, who never owned a slave in their life? Why should we have to pay for someone else's crime? There's a lot of us, you know.

For that matter, there were lots of folks in the Antebellum South who never owned slaves. What about the townsmen and railroad workers and sailors and coal miners and hardscrabble dirt farmers who barely had enough to feed their families? Why do their descendants owe someone something for a social injustice they never participated in?

The biggest problem with "social justice" is it's--well, unjust.

There's so many reasons that it doesn't make sense, and I've yet to hear one that does.

Is there someone saying throwing money at the problem will solve it, or is that just a straw man.

Also, I'm not sure whether a black person's views on reparations really matter any more than a white person's views. We in the US enjoy a very nice lifestyle from stepping on a lot of people or ignoring a lot of people getting stepped on.

mapaghimagsik
Is there someone saying throwing money at the problem will solve it, or is that just a straw man.

That's what reparations are. Throwing money at the problem.

TnTComic

mapaghimagsik
Is there someone saying throwing money at the problem will solve it, or is that just a straw man.

That's what reparations are. Throwing money at the problem.

So you disagree with these guys , then?

How does that disagree?

TnTComic
How does that disagree?

Your definition and webster's doesn't jive. Is that because you're only looking at one facet of reparations? I think narrowing the definition down to just one way of making amends is a bit of a strawman, unless you're saying one should never make amends.

mapaghimagsik
Is there someone saying throwing money at the problem will solve it, or is that just a straw man.

Also, I'm not sure whether a black person's views on reparations really matter any more than a white person's views. We in the US enjoy a very nice lifestyle from stepping on a lot of people or ignoring a lot of people getting stepped on.

I don't know if you noticed, but a lot of people here was talking about money and blacks mainly... because of how most people tend to focus on one facet of history, especially of black slaves. That's what most people think of when somebody mentions "America's past wrongdoings". As if that was the only one thing America ever did wrong.

also, in the first post of this thread, money was brought up. especially in the video.

So you could say we're talking about a type of specific reparation, not just all reparation in general.

Aurora Moon

mapaghimagsik
Is there someone saying throwing money at the problem will solve it, or is that just a straw man.

Also, I'm not sure whether a black person's views on reparations really matter any more than a white person's views. We in the US enjoy a very nice lifestyle from stepping on a lot of people or ignoring a lot of people getting stepped on.

I don't know if you noticed, but a lot of people here was talking about money and blacks mainly... because of how most people tend to focus on one facet of history, especially of black slaves. That's what most people think of when somebody mentions "America's past wrongdoings". As if that was the only one thing America ever did wrong.

also, in the first post of this thread, money was brought up. especially in the video.

So you could say we're talking about a type of specific reparation, not just all reparation in general.

I appreciate you clarifying the definitions being worked with. I think reparations in general are important. I do also agree that money alone doesn't make the damage done "right".

I'm coming from this perspective: The US occupation of the Philippines killed hundreds of thousands. Many of the atrocities are the same type of atrocities as those being done now in Iraq, including the very cute double speak of "protected zones".

And I'm sure the people who sat back and shrugged their shoulders while so many were massacred felt they weren't responsible for the eradication of Native Americans, and that the idea of "reparations" was too hard, and that they all knew or had heard of some Native American saying how they thought reparations weren't necessary.

And then we just go and do it *all* over again, right along with the excuses. I don't think the Philippines ever really asked for reparations. They just wanted you to stop messing with our leadership and let them pick their own leaders.

I think the best reparation the US could do is just not do it again. But I'm sure that's even too much to ask.

Aurora Moon
I just happen to have a boyfriend who's black.

Just out of curiosity, does he look like this?
[en.wikipedia.org]

You can click on the picture to learn more about this American folk hero.

....

i don't get it.

so your saying everyone should agree with their race's ideology, if they disagree, they must be a self hating their own race?

subcultured
....

i don't get it.

so your saying everyone should agree with their race's ideology, if they disagree, they must be a self hating their own race?

*Exactly* my point. You win teh intertubes.

Shame on you for saying Uncle Ruckus is a self-hater. He just realizes the natural superiority of the white man.

Sounds like you're hatin' on Uncle Ruckus.

mapaghimagsik

TnTComic
How does that disagree?

Your definition and webster's doesn't jive. Is that because you're only looking at one facet of reparations? I think narrowing the definition down to just one way of making amends is a bit of a strawman, unless you're saying one should never make amends.

Its not my definition, when people talk about reparations they are saying that we should give money to black people now to make amends for slavery. I didn't create that definition, but it most definitely IS throwing money at the problem. If, instead of money, they sent Halmark cards instead of money, I would say they're throwing Halmark cards at the problem.