White Guilt Monetised

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I know I could use a few bucks!

I believe at least some of my forebears were killed in the Pogroms of Russia. And they were certainly persecuted for being Jews.

I am fortunate that I probably have no relative who was killed in the Holocaust.

Once they came to the US, all the girls had to change their names to a more Anglified name, courtesy of Ellis Island.

There was job discrimination, and the usual bullying--being beaten up, being called "k*e," "Hebe," "Jew Bastard," stuff like that.

The job discrimination could lead me to be eligible for reparations

Some people here have brought up the cycle of poverty that a lot of minorities are trapped in based on prior generation's setbacks. My question on that, wouldn't some of this money be best put into boarding schools so that some of these kids can be separated from the social norms that are doing the damage? Mind you - I get that the social norms are largely a secondary effect of poverty, just that braking the vicious cycle is partly in breaking bonds with the cultural feedback loop and it typically has to be done when a child is young enough for them to develop differently at a core level.

no, that's suppression. which, regardless of intent, will be felt and effectively employed as oppression. it's a recipe for increased tension and conflict

any formula for breaking vicious cycles has to be based on adding rather than subtracting. drawing people towards something positive rather than pulling them away from something negative. for instance, if kids are doing drugs and you want them to stop, you offer them interesting things to do that give them purpose in life and a moderate sense of autonomy. if you just take away their drugs, nothing will change. not for the better, at least. you'll just be fueling rebelliousness instead. at best

come to think of it, your idea sounds kind of orwellian...

be careful what you wish for

If it's a bunch of old white military guys chomping cigars figuring out how to experiment on them and send them into war out in front of white men? Sure. If it's teachers by and large of the same minority groups who are interested in aiding inner city kids at getting away from an environment where they have to think about surviving the behavior of other members of the community way out in front of their grades?

It's interesting how and where imagination can lead us when every last detail of an idea or concept hasn't been clarified.

it is. and if i thought of it so easily, someone else will too. and given favorable circumstances for it, i can see people buying into it. someday, somewhere. possibly in our lifetimes, hopefully not

your idea still sounds unrealistic to me though, for those reasons i already mentioned. i think they still apply even in the scenario that you did picture. if not so much for oppression, than suppression. anything that invalidates people's identities (cultural or individual) tends to backfire, even if it's only invalidating the negative things about it. i can't picture any school system systematically based on boarding schools really working as voluntary thing in reality. in practice it amounts to "telling people what to do / what to be" in one way or another. tension and conflict

Truthfully I don't mind disagreement at all so long as people have what they're disagreeing with me on sized according to what I meant - so I'm glad we clarified that.

Really when topics like this come up, ie. reparations, I think of it like this; there's no reason to give a set tithe at this point for slavery 150 years ago. What would make sense is building institutions and implements that can help people get out of poverty. We tend to focus on the black/African American side of it because they not only started with the same kind of economic basis that the white Appalachian company coal slaves had but they had the additional problem of, once being emancipated, very few opportunities to get educated or make significant financial gains because the world at that time was still that serious about race that it did quite truthfully bar them out. There was a glimmer of hope in the 1960's but then something just as sinister happened with the Great Society - ie. the wiring of the bill to destroy the black family, either in one of the most disastrously absent-minded moves ever made by legislature or possibly more cynical reasons - I'd really hope it was the former rather than the later. Daniel Moynihan of course paid the political price for calling that one out front as people quite often do when being right is also very politically undesirable.

What bothers me is that I so often see people talking about throwing money at single parents and whatever else, I really think - to help lift those in poverty up and out of the present situation - you need to have structures in place being funded that contribute to those ends effectively. After school programs, vocational programs, community and civic groups aimed at being meaningful alternatives to gangs, etc. etc.. I'm sure all of that is being tried to some extent but I think that's the side of things that should be empowered. The reparations thing (you may well agree with this) is really a political token that buys a little bit of good will for whatever politician or party is heading the push for it, if it were the Democratic party why bother - they already have 92% or upward of the vote. Better to make sure those dollars are empowering rather than palliative.

the bottom line in political issues is always the same: nobody in politics cares about long term. and that is the root of a large part of all the social problems in the world. systematic and unabashed opportunism. whatever people will be buying into, that's what they'll be selling. reason be damned

how to fix this though, i do not know... it's one of the most frustrating questions in the universe

I think it furthers the problem. Part of the problem-- a big part-- is an entitlement mentality. And it's not limited to any demographic. "I should have..." BULL. Everyone should have food to eat, a place to get out of the weather, and the same right to use services as everyone else.

Everyone has had that for a long time now.

I know the ghetto mentality. I'm from the Great White Ghetto-- the only differences are the population density and how violent the crime is. Ghetto muhfuhs shoot people, and pillbillies shoot out peoples' windows.

If somebody wants to pay me reparations for the fact that Appalachia has been treated just like dark-skinned America and the reservations, yeah, sure, I'll take that.

Sarcasm. No I won't. You know why?? Because I'm a hillbilly, not a pillbilly. They don't owe me anything, not even basic human decency. I want someone to be decent to me because I'm decent, not because it's owed.

I took the resources I had-- the Old Ways and access to a crappy public-school education-- and didn't become a pillbilly. If I can do it with my stupid autism and all my mental illnesses, anyone can.

I think it's a great idea. Blacks are owed billions of dollars. They built this country on their labor and were never compensated.

You know, while reading your post, it occurred to me, that most kids don't get to choose how they're raised, or generally, much to do about any aspect of the environment they live in. So all those things, like family, schooling, family, neighborhood, family, IQ, etc., that all of us have hopefully had, are not well had by some. Some have only seen a few or the worst of these things.

I think, if this is true, we could cut these slackers some slack....what do you think?

P.S. I'm not talking Bernie Madoff here.

they're all dead though. kinda complicates it a little bit

just ask yourself this simple question: should jay z get a monthly allowance from the government?

The only thing I can think of outside of political solutions is in-depth mutual benefit societies like the variety that were popular in the 18th and 19th century (Masonry, Kiwanis, Rotary Club etc. being some of the better known ones now). Seems like there's something about television and the internet where you have a lot of people interested in a lot of things but it's rather rare type of person who actually goes out, joins things, and shows up regularly anymore. There also seems to be a meme in the air as well against taking anything seriously or, godforbid, putting in work to get a thing done. Rather sadly if someone actually does want to go out and do things they have to find more of that same breed to work as a team with others. Anyone else would probably just up from their Candy Crush or Pokemon Go for a second, "Dude, you're a little weird", and goes right back to video games.

That last part seems to touch on the other abysmal thing here - we don't really have a culture anymore. It really just seems to be defined as a leapfrog from popular product to popular product, popular TV show to popular TV show. That's a big one that also needs some kind of intervention.

Yes, he should, like all other African-Americans. Are you complaining? He pays a fuckload more in taxes than you do.

The descendants of those slave laborers would have benefited greatly from an inheritance, maybe their parents or grandparents would have started a successful business. You can see how they were injured by slavery and racist practices even afterwards. We as a country owe them, even if we paid in lives during the civil war, which I would agree (if you had brought it up) is a mitigating factor.

well i'm not, i'm just saying it's absurd. i imagine jay z probably would complain about it though if you suggested him the idea. it's demeaning. he's filthy rich already, and he made his own fortune. and apparently he's not even an a**hole (which is quite a feat for a successful rapper). which makes me believe he would probably tell you "are you out of your mind? get this handout out of my sight. there are people out there who need it. i don't"


he sure does. i pay zero taxes to your government. why that would be relevant in the slightest, i have no idea


first: "you as a country owe them". them? are they not americans themselves? second: what about the nearderthals? i believe i have some neanderthal dna. my race was exterminated! . if you don't have hobbit feet, that means you owe me. your species killed mine

that's extremist capitalist thinking. that notion of "rightful ownership" of things through time and time immemorial. there's no such thing. people take things for themselves, from nature or from other people. that's how ownership happens. ownership laws exist only to make that process slightly less contentious

where would you ever draw the line? who exactly qualifies as black and who doesn't, anyway? you need to understand this: race is a cultural construct. and as such, it is fluid

it's because of that kind of thinking that there are people in places like israel (and many other places on earth really, it's just that israel is pretty obvious) fighting each other forever because "it's their land". that's just crazy

Last edited by anagram on 04 Aug 2016, 10:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

The idea about sending minority kids away to boarding schools was already tried on Native Americans during the nineteenth century.

@aspe:

here's an idea. we should demand reparations from the descendants of the clans who captured people from their competing clans and sold them as slaves to the british

"oh but africa is poor"

don't care. they're responsible for it