DB Roy wrote:I'm not in favor of reparations. Unless, you personally lost your business, your property, money or freedom then why should you be paid back for what you didn't lose?
If slavery was the only wrong that reparations attempted to compensate you
might have a point. But reparations would also attempt to correct other massive injustices in American history and current society. One broader injustice is the theft, prevention, and destruction of wealth accumulation in the black community. As one tiny example, consider the famous Homestead Act of 1862, where the government donated 160 acres of land to families in exchange for building housing and farming it for five years. The government was willing to give away massive amounts of land, but not one square inch to black people. If they had that opportunity, black families could have accumulated significant wealth from farm income and real estate values over the past 157 years. American society precluded infinite numbers of wealth accumulation opportunities from the black community over the past 400 years.
Enormous amounts of wealth have been stolen from the black community. Our multi-tiered justice system ensured nothing could be done to prevent confiscating property or money from trumped up fines, etc. Ongoing bank loan practices, employment discrimination, separate but unequal segregation, and our education system were also set up to steal wealth. Back to slavery, consider the incredible amount of wealth that was extracted from the black community over a 250 year span. That was not very long ago: slaves who lived to be 100 could have seen the 1960s.
Patriotic Americans also destroyed vast amounts of wealth in the black community. Race riots were one of many types of destruction. There have been quite a few in our history, but consider just one in Tulsa OK 1921 - black soldiers in WWI returned to this.
The attack, carried out on the ground
and by air, destroyed more than 35 blocks of the district, at the time the
wealthiest black community in the United States. More than 800 people were admitted to hospitals and more than 6,000 black residents were arrested and detained, many for several days. The Oklahoma Bureau of Vital Statistics officially recorded 36 dead, but the American Red Cross declined to provide an estimate. When a state commission re-examined events in 2001, its report estimated that 100-300 African Americans were killed in the rioting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot
All of that wealth - prevented, stolen, and destroyed - has not been able to accumulate in the black community over the past 400 years. Perhaps America will begin to get an inkling of what that means as the costs of college increase. Children can no longer afford college on their own; graduating with $100K in debt is not sustainable. Education used to be a way out of poverty, not a road to it.* Only families with accumulated resources to draw on can send children to higher education.
*Sarah Kendzior
Other extreme injustices include the obvious fact that blacks in the South did not obtain freedom after passage of the 13th Amendment in 1865.
Slavery by another name continued until very recently. This is where a black person was charged with a minor infraction such as vagrancy, penalized with a fine they could not pay, then chained up in mines or manufacturing companies for years as they worked off that false debt.
This system continued into the 1960s. Domestic terrorism included slave patrols (pattyrollers), KKK, lynch mobs, rape, and the casual rage encountered hourly from most whites. It was open season on black women; nothing could be done to prevent or prosecute those crimes.
A truly massive debt is owed to the black community in the US, but it will never be paid. Our racist education system, where "black history" is taught separately from "American History" and relegated to historically black colleges prevents any serious consideration of these matters.