san francisco slavery reparations

I’m 70 and will be long gone. I feel bad for my kids, grandkids, and on as they will be forced to pay for something they had nothing to do with.

Welcome to the new Amerika.

 

That's been going on ever since we've had taxes. I didn't have anything to do with the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina or thousands, millions of other things that government spends money on.

 

Our lifetimes, though, are brief. The Federal Government remains obliged to repay debts undertaken before either of us were born and that will be repaid for a period well after both of us are gone. This is how the Federal Government is able to function as an entity, because its integrity far exceedes any of us individually. This shouldn't be otherwise wrt to compensating the victims of policies that almost everyone, at least publically, agrees were unfair and immoral.

To be clear, I think reparations are a horrible idea. Once the genie is out
of the theoretical bottle this solution won't be controlled in any rational way, and the bill will increase to infinity. Ironically, Republican politicians like Desantis--as opposed to Republican posters, secretly love this issue while Democratic politicians are the ones dreading it.

 

The graft is real no matter which political Party uses money to "self-exonerate" themselves for other people's actions.

If these politicians feel so badly about it then let them pay these "reparations" with their own pension funds.

And one more thing. If our past GOVERNMENT were the ones that legalized slavery then the government should pay these "reparations" wit their own money, not the tax payer's money. The taxpayer's money IS NOT THE GOVERNMENT'S PERSONAL PIGGY-BANK.

 

I think you are conflating two separate issues. Compensation for a specific harm caused by injustice is a separate issue from remedial measures intended to mitigate the harm caused by the same injustice. These ideas overlap but are not interchangeable.

Jewish victims of the Holocaust still receive checks from the German Government despite, in most cases, not comprising an economically disadvantaged group. If the distinction is that Black Americans are not similar to the victims of the Holocaust in that they were not personally slaves and most were not alive during Jim Crow than 70 years of affirmative action is not not intended to serve the same purpose.

I do agree that political actions which hastily conflate compensation for slavery/jim with institutional approaches to closing disparate outcomes,such as affirmative action, which are justified on a non-restitutive basis, are highly irresponsible. Reparations are designed to partially "compensate" the victims of an injustice--limited by pragmatic constrains--but not to fix highly complex social problems, which, despite assertions to the contrary, aren't easily defined. It may be tempting try because everyone likes free money, just like feeling better instantly by popping a drug. But a palliative is not a cure. And reparations will amount to an indefinitely unpaid bill of unlimited payments that will not foreseeably solve the problem.

 

That is an incomplete description of what Critical Race Theory entails. It's more honest and reasonable than Desantis's definition and, I presume, Plank's definition, wherein CRT proposes a crude ontology that divides Americans, both historically and contemporaneously, into racist and victim. But describing CRT as an attempt to "understand why racially neutral laws often are enforced in a way that has a racially discriminatory effect" ellides the the essence of CRT, which is not limited to empirical claims about the disparate effect of facially neutral laws; but, more controversially, makes ontological and epistemological claims which preclude even a defense of, let alone criticism of, its own own claims from a neutral, objective, perspective.

Instead, it proposes an alternative of competing narratives, told in incompatible languages, without even the possibilty of translation into a neutral third language intellible to an unrelated third party. Even if you agree with the sentiment, surely we can do better than this.

Source:

Critical race theory (CRT) | Definition, Principles, & Facts

 

How about instead of paying them millions in lump sums, we offer them a hand up in terms of opportunity to compensate for slavery, Jim Crow, and the hundreds of years of discrimination? College scholarships, increased education funding for K-12 in those communities, jobs programs, investment, childcare, etc.

Reparations aren't about ending hate. They're about remedying harm. If I injure you in a car wreck and have to pay you $500,000, it doesn't matter that the $500,000 may make me resent you or may make your friends/family resent you. The point of the money is to compensate you for harm.

Like any theory, there are valid claims of critical race theory. But it also makes some interesting points and offers thought provoking questions. Even prominent critics of it have acknowledged as much in recent years. (By prominent critics, I mean serious thinkers, not disingenuous clowns like Christopher Rufo.)
Randall Kennedy on Why Critical Race Theory is Important ❧ Current Affairs

 

A woman in Ohio tried to pay for $1,000 worth of groceries at Target with . . . demands for reparations. The loss prevention officer did not take kindly to that form of payment, asked her to leave, retreated to his office, and when the woman followed him into his office, punched her in the face. So far, so good. Nothing illogical or strange about any of it. WTH? The woman then compared herself to Rosa Parks. I didn't know that Parks unbolted the seat on the bus and tried to steal it.

Woman demanding reparations at Target gets punched in the face by security guard: 'Rosa Parks Moment'

 

Karen. Ivery. With an E.

I’m struggling to overcome the name alone.

 

I remember in the old days when some lady named Karen would call the police just because she could. Sounds like this is a different kind of Karen.

 

Back in the day, did the GOVERNMENT own any slaves or were they all owned by private citizens. If so, why have the government pay? Is that because there is almost no way to get money out of the descendants of slave owners?

 

The slave owners weren’t the only ones who benefitted from slaves.

 

Let's look at this logically (I know people don't like that). Back in 1850, average farm worker got about $100 per year. Average life expectancy of a slave was 25 years. If slaves were paid during that time, each slave would have earned about 2,500 dollars. There were roughly 5 million slaves from the time the US government existing until the end of the civil war. That is 12.5 billion dollars that would have been paid out during the time of the start of the US government and the end of slavery. Is that the total dollar amount we are looking at? If so, that is a rounding error for the US budget. Dividing that up by all the black people in the country would give each one of them roughly 300 bucks. Doesn't sound right but you also just can't pull a number out of your butt to make sense.

 

I don’t think any number makes sense, but that has nothing to do with what I said.

 

And did governments protect the property rights of slavery owners to own other people present within the United States? Why weren't the slave "owners" prosecuted for kidnapping, assault, or murder as appropriate?

 

Already been remedied in my mind with the ability to operate casinos on sovereign land. Did you know that the revenue from Indian casinos dwarfs the amount of the entire LV Strip (granted it's close to 500 vs the 30 on the Strip)?

 

sadly, like oil revenue from tribal lands, it is not equally distributed with many tribes in terrible economic shape

 

Maybe because the government made it legal to own slaves? And yes, the government has much more money than the average descendant of a slave owner. Not that I am advocating for reparations (I think it's a bad idea); I'm just refuting your argument. The gov't should spend more on public education for minorities (in schools that are mostly minorities) than for white children (by 3-5%), IMO. Give them a chance at a better future. That's it. Cash handouts do not "teach a man to fish".

 

Ever heard of something called "inflation"? The dollar is not worth what it used to be worth. The number is not $12.5 billion.

 

The GOVERNMENT may or may not have owned any slaves but it certainly enforced the system of chattel slavery.

On another note and this issue was actually raised by Bill Maher several months ago this is what happens when a single party with no opposition controls a legislative body. In this case it's the loony liberal Democrats who control the San Francisco Board of Supervisors would rather address reparations for the decedents of former slaves than substantive issues of more import to residents of the city. In the case of a number of state legislatures controlled by crazy cultural conservative Republicans who are obsessed with drag performers, the treatment of transgender persons and censoring books that could offend snowflakes who might be offended with the teaching of the legacy of slavery or the availability of books that could touch on sexual issue rather than addressing substantive issues.