Reparations

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It's a common concept. We White colonists dragged the Black race kicking and screaming from their home continent and bound them into slavery for generations. Now, many of their descendants are demanding, essentially, backwages for the years their ancestors labored in brutal conditions without any pay, after enduring the harshness of the middle passage.

I can understand their way of thinking, I can. I'm just trying to wrap my head around how they think it might be handled. The concept of slavery was horrendous, but due to muddy records, the inherent difficulty of genealogy in our diverse society, and the absolute lack of recordkeeping on the African side, how would we be able to determine who was owed what? And just how just is it to pay someone simply for being black?

Let me tell you a story in my Mother's family. Her side, a Catskills-bred mix of various Scots, is believed to have begun in this country with a MacGregor who came here after Proscription (When King James VI banned Clan Gregor under pain of death). The story goes that this fella refused to change his name, and went about proudly as a MacGregor, and for this he lucked out. He wasn't killed, but he was shipped off in chains to America. His sentence was 14 to life, to be carried out through hard labor on the plantation of the wealthy New Yorker who bought him of the ship. After serving and being mistreated for several years, suffering whippings, beatings, and branding, before escaping into the mountains, where he lived as a mountain man and took the daughter of a Cayuga village elder as a wife.

Now, I'll freely admit that I'm unsure of the absolute veracity of this story, as my Mother's family, mountain folk of the old school, the lot of them, are prone to tall tales, but given the fact that the story has been passed down, fairly intact, since the 17th century, indicates that it probably did happen in some capacity. White slavery, indentured servitude, and the common, brutal treatment of white servants (Often moreso than blacks, due to the nature of a temporary investment), has been a part of this country since the beginning, and has been well recorded.

As the probable descendant of a man who was basically a slave, and who, had he not escaped, would have spent the rest of his life in slavery for no crime but having been born of an unacceptable clan, would I be entitled to reparations?

I wonder, because throughout history, my people, have suffered under serfdom, brutality, massacre, transportation, and second-class status since at least six centuries ago, whether it be my Scottish kin under Proscription, my Kashubian ancestors under the Prussians, Germans, and Russians, and my Irish family under the English and Scottish, and all three sides suffered as second-class and even slaves in at least two documented cases in America. No one in my family is ever recorded as having been a slaveowner, even those who fought for the South. We were always too poor for that. So by the very arguments put forward by Blacks who are demanding that the American people pony up, I should be entitled to a cut, from at least half a dozen different countries.

So what are your opinions on reparation? Is my logic correct, or by some inherent whiteness am I exempt? How can one race demand special treatment when so many suffered?

Reparations, especially in the case proposed, would be wrong. It's punishing people for the sins of their fathers. I thought we'd moved past feuds? If your great-grandfather stole from mine, it would not make it acceptable for me to sue you for "reparations", since the one responsible, and the victim, are long dead (ish, and maybe you're especially lucky and has a living family going back 4 generations... okay, make them great-great-great grandfathers).

There has to be some sort of statute of limitations in place. Otherwise I could sue the Norman aristocracy for losses incurred by my English ancestors, the English for losses incurred by my Celtic ancestors, and the Celts for losses incurred by the ancestors which lived here prior to 1000BC. Since I'm descended majorly from at least 3 of those, it wouldn't make much sense, but...

How about the Jews sue the rest of the world in that case? Maybe the British could sue America for losses that were the consequence of the American War of Independence.

I wonder who will pay these reparations to you and the Blacks?

Will it be the original shipping company owners or the landowners?
who are now dead by the way.,

Will it be their great great etc grandchildren?, especially those that still retain a measure of family wealth as a result of slavery, the current ruling banking families for instance?

No, I will tell you who will end up paying any reparations, the ordinary poor working class taxpayer who wasn't alive then, and whose ancestors had nothing to do with it at the time anyway, they would have been peasants, living a life not a million miles from slavery themselves.

Whats more, you only have to look at the reparations that have been paid, namely to the Jewish holocaust survivors, to see that only a tiny fraction of the money ever get into the hands of the survivors, most gets eaten up by Lawyers and the big organisations that are behind such lobbies.

So, what would happen if you were successful, is that modern day work slaves, would give their hard earned money to the ruling Elite, making them even richer for their past crimes, would this give you a sense of justice served?

Horse Pebbles! My ancestors did not come to the U.S. until the 1890's. Furthermore the immigrated from places like Russia and Poland, Lithuania which never had colonies. None of my people ever took part in colonializing Africa or Asia. Why should I have to pay reparations?

Also none of the people now alive had anything whatsoever to do with slavery. Slavery ceased in the U.S in 1865. There is not a person of that period now alive in the country . Why should the sins of the fathers and mothers be visited upon the children?

ruveyn

The are no slaves or slave owners alive today in the US.

Everyone from that era has been dead for generations.
No one to pay out and no one to be payed.

I am not responsible for any alleged crimes committed by anyone other than myself.

I am especially not responsible for an institution that was made illegal 90+ years before I was born.

I have "owned" no slaves, African or otherwise, ever in my entire life.

Anyone who thinks that I owe them anything for what one of my ancestors may (or may not) have done to one of their ancestors is just trying to justify an undeserved handout by citing the myths of "Inherited Accountability" and "Racial Guilt".

Nobody owes anything to any descendents of America's antebellum slaves.

Agreed. It's just a guilt trip. No-one is alive from either U.S. or UK involvwlement in the slave trade. Various types of slavery do still exist, but none of us directly have anything to do with them.

Consider also the fact that many African slaves were kidnapped and sold into slavery by other Africans, and you'll understand how hypocritical the whole "Reparations" scam really is.

Europeans usually bought enslaved people who were captured in endemic warfare between African states. There were also Africans who had made a business out of capturing Africans from neighboring ethnic groups or war captives and selling them.

References

Austen, Ralph (1987). "African Economic History: Internal Development and External Dependency". London: James Currey. ISBN 978-0-85255-009-0.

Chaunu, Pierre (1969). "L'expansion européen du XIIIe à XVe siècles". Paris.

Rodney, Walter (1972). "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa". London: Bogle L'Ouverture. ISBN 978-0-9501546-4-0.

Thornton, John (1998). "Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (Second edition)". New York: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-62217-2.

I agree as well. Largely, I was making a facetious argument, however, that there was nothing in particular that the Blacks suffered that many Europeans did not suffer, whether through indentured servitude, transportation, or through slavery via either the Roman/Greek system or through feudal serfdom.

I'm trying to understand where they get off guilt tripping people or demanding money, since no African-American still alive suffered through slavery, any more than I suffered like my ancestor.

Yet, if I make this argument, that my people suffered as much as theirs, then I am called racist, usually accompanied by some variation of cracker. Also, on an aside, why can I, as a white man from what is arguably the south, be called cracker, or honky, or white bread, but I am forbidden from using equally offensive words, despite cracker having as long a history as the N word as a derogatory word for poor whites, usually former or escaped indentured servants, who set up in the backwoods of the southern colonies...

I'm curious why, for a society that speaks to egalitarianism and equality for all races, why is it that the African-Americans get a history month, despite that the Native Americans, or Irish, or Japanese never did, why is it that many consider it just to pay them reparations, why is it that they can claim affirmative action, and so on. It's not a politically correct question, but it's one me have to consider, as thinking people in a supposedly egalitarian society.

It is, I suggest, uncritical to equate "reparations" with "damages."

Damages are something that I owe to an injured party in respect of actions for which I am liable.

Reparations, on the other hand, are based not on a principle of legal obligation, but rather on the larger policy question of the legacies of enrichment and loss that have flowed from historical actions.

Personalizing this discussion makes it subjective.

I am of Irish descent. The Irish in new England were denied jobs, housing, and treated like third class citizens. I want reparations too.

When you can demonstrate that Americans of Irish descent are systemically worse off, then I will listen to your case for reparations.

This article turned up earlier this year.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/ho ... 08358.html

Personally I'm not surprised by the pay offs. What the government had done was make a person's legal property no longer their legal property, those former slave owners could have made things difficult for the government unless some action was taken. I see it as a lesser of two evils.

I doubt any legal action will come out of this generally. I wonder how many possible cases would have have the records available to prove that an ancestor of a person today was legally responsible for the ancestor of another person being enslaved.

It's a point against reparations. It's not so much that any particular ethnic group suffered. It isn't that one continues to suffer more than the others. Poor american blacks have a raw deal, I'll freely grant. Growing up in the ghetto, with bad food, bad schools, bad medical care, and bad job prospects is a rough go of it. Poor american whites living in a trailer park, with bad food, bad schools, bad medical care, and bad job prospects has it just as bad off.

Blacks died in slavery. Whites did so under indentured servitude. Blacks have been kept in poverty. Whites also. Overwhelmingly, poor whites and poor blacks and poor latinos and poor everyone die in wars that in virtually no way serve them, and do everything to serve the wealthy class. A black lawyer whose great granddaddy was screwed out of his forty acres and a mule might be sitting across the table demanding reparations from a white lawyer whose granddaddy died at Blair Mountain.

This guilt encouraged by society, this demonizing of whites and outsize sympathy for blacks serves to help neither party. It gives blacks a standard with which to rally, a standard that scares the hell out of white workers, who often can barely afford to send their own kid to college and over whose kid an equally accomplished black kid might receive preference. It serves primarily to stoke tempers between the various races of workers, each wanting to take or defend what he perceives as his. What we should be doing is enabling the working poor of all races to advance themselves, based on individual merit, rather than encouraging poor whites to feel guilty over crimes that they, and most likely, not even their ancestors perpetrated.

If anything they're systematically better off. Not all Africans are equal though. I would think that a descendant of an African slave should receive more reparations than someone who's parents migrated from Africa in the 1980s. Mortgage and employment discrimination is a whole different thing when compared to slavery and if you're ancestors weren't in North America to suffer from that slavery why should you receive the same reparations as the descendant of an African slave?