This relates to the BBC article [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-66596790] which states “the UK should pay $24tn (£18.8tn) for its slavery involvement in 14 countries”.
The UK abolished slavery in 1833. That’s 190 years ago. So nobody alive today has a slave, and nobody alive today was a slave.
Dividing £18tn by the number of UK taxpayers (31.6m) gives £569 each. Why do I, who have never owned a slave, have to give £569 to someone who similarly is not a slave?
When I’ve paid my £569 is that the end of the matter forever or will it just open the floodgates of other similar claims?
Isn’t this just a country that isn’t doing too well, looking at the UK doing reasonably well (cost of living crisis excluded of course), and saying “oh there’s this historical thing that affects nobody alive today but you still have to give us trillions of Sterling”?
Shouldn’t payment of reparations be limited to those who still benefit from the slave trade today, and paid to those who still suffer from it?
(Please don’t flame me. This is NSQ. I genuinely don’t know why this is something I should have to pay. I agree slavery is terrible and condemn it in all its forms, and we were right to abolish it.)
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So, can the Slavic countries claim payments of reparations from the formerly known ottoman empire? Perhaps Jewish people from Asia? Surely the Christians from the Arabs, and the Arabs from the Christians? Not to mention Vietnam from China, or entire Europe from the decendants of the Roman empire.
Or are all of those instances somehow different?
History is full of misery and trying to pay to make amends for somebody else’s actions, today, feels ridiculous. Just as OP, I don’t get it.
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You’re in a community called ‘no stupid questions’ and your response to a question is ‘what a stupid question’? Good work
I can’t wait for my cheques from Scandinavian countries for the Viking invasions, Italy for the Roman occupation, France for the Normandy conquerers, etc!
Also your caveman ancestor punched my caveman ancestor so I’m expecting a payment from you too
Is “tn” not short for trillion (1,000,000,000,000)?
If that’s the case then the actual number is 569,000 per person.
Slaveholders got to build wealth off the free labor of slaves. When they died, that wealth didn’t disappear. It was passed down to the next generation. The descendants of slave holders are better off financially than the descendants of slaves because of that accumulated wealth. The descendants of slave holders should pay back the wealth they now own to the people it was stolen from.
EDIT: I knew this would trigger white people.
There was substantial indentured labour and serfdom in England too. Surely simple redistributive tax based on wealth is fairer?
Anyway how do you determine whos ancestors had slaves, or weren’t involved, or were slaves? You want to start tracing bloodlines?! Should the English pay the Irish?
Lmao as if I am seeing any of that wealth.
You’re welcome to look at my bank statements. If you can find £569,000 that I can pay someone without going bankrupt then I’d be most surprised.
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Which is just because not only those that profited from slavery paid taxes on those profits which improved the lives of all those who lived under the same state, they also individually used those profits in philanthropic projects (schools, hospitals, poor houses) that have benefited the public as well. On top of all these, just the injection of wealth that stemmed from slavery and other exploitative practices into the economies of these countries that practiced them had a positive effect on the growth of those economies the benefits of which (lower unemployment, higher incomes etc.) being reaped by the general public.
All of these have a compounding effect that positively affects the lives of the people living in that place (wherever that is) in the current times so even though they don’t own slaves now or their ancestors have never been part of the slave trade it is fair that they should be a part of paying reparations.
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Aka tax the rich, were all slaves on a spectrum
As far as I know, lot of these aids are wired through NGOs and many of them are more related to the Church who often end up using the money for its Crusade (Conversion & stuff).
They are definately not fair. But fair is not an economic or political quantifyable term. Slavery wasn’t fair either.
What is just or not changes with times and societies. If there is political capital to be made by making reparations then they make sense. If the public disagrees they can and will vote out those responsible. For better or for worse that’s our system.
But I personally do not feel there’s such a thing as Sins of the Fathers. I have nothing to do with the slavers of 300 years ago, the whole concept of owning a human being is repugnant to me. And I genuinly feel that should be enough.
I tend to agree about the Sins of the Fathers, but at the same time, if you don’t inherit their sins why do you inherit their stolen boons?
But, ultimately, the time to address these evils was a century ago.
Hell, at this point it’s impossible to separate “sinner” and victim in many cases. What do you do for the descendants of both slave and slave owner?
Instead, in the now, as a society we should indeed strive to lift up the impoverished. All of the impoverished.
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The argument goes, as a British citizen, you have and continue to benefit from policies that your government made a long time ago. Reparations are not a tax on you, but an expense the government should have paid at the time of the work, but instead it did things like kidnap people from their homes, transport them to where labor was necessary, and force them into work. Now, the people who are the descendents of the kidnapped folks are requesting that the bills their great great grandparents were never paid. To extend that, after slavery ended, many of those who had been enslaved were left disenfranchised, and impoverished to the point that there is almost no possibility of building generational wealth.
As for if this will open the floodgates or not, who knows. An argument could be made in both directions, it’s not as though governments paying one time sums to places is rare, and reparations for wars used to be pretty run of the mill.
I like this answer a lot. Objective, doesn’t answer what it doesn’t know for certain and gives context.
The “floodgates” component of the question is the “slippery slope” logical fallacy.
Consider the present claim in isolation, not its relevance to other claims.
It is not a fallacy to consider it might encourage other claims. If I am in a classroom and I accept to give someone candy publicly, do you think everyone nearby will not be MORE tempted to ask too, compared to whether if I said no?
In both cases, asking costs almost nothing compared to the potential gains.
it might encourage other claims
… which would be considered on their respective merits.
Poor white people whose peasant ancestors were left jobless and homeless due to being unable to compete with free slave labor should pay reparations to the descendants of the people who were forced to work for free, while the rich descendants of the slave owners who dislodged one group while exploiting the other put their blood money in offshore accounts and laugh as the poor people squabble over crumbs.
Nations that were the source of slaves remain on the whole impoverished and underdeveloped.
Nations that were slavers still remain on the whole wealthy and highly developed.
This is not a coincidence, and there is a reasonable case to be made for reparations on these grounds.
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That the wealth they still enjoy was largely stolen. Especially when you add colonialism.
The UKs position today is arguably due more to leading the Industrial Revolution and that was the main factor in the decay of slavery, so you need to balance historic grievances with development i.e. “what have the Romans ever done for us?”
This is so false, slavery was wide practice in Africa already, the “slaving countrys” just bought them for the most part…
What’s your point?
“I’m going to take these slaves and exploit them because if I don’t someone else will”
I’m not sure if you are an ignorant apologist or outright racist but it feels important to comment on this given the number of uovotes this post is receiving. From an article from Slate I will link below:
"But, as historian Marcus Rediker writes, the “ancient and widely accepted institution” of enslavement in Africa was exacerbated by the European presence. Yes, European slave traders entered “preexisting circuits of exchange” when they arrived in the 16th century. But European demand changed the shape of this market, strengthening enslavers and ensuring that more and more people would be carried away. “[European] slave-ship captains wanted to deal with ruling groups and strong leaders, people who could command labor resources and deliver the ‘goods,’ ” Rediker writes, and European money and technology further empowered those who were already dominant, encouraging them to enslave greater numbers. Both the social structures and infrastructure that enabled African systems of enslavement were strengthened by the transatlantic slave trade.
AdvertisementBottom line: Why should this matter? This is a classic “two wrongs make a right” ethical proposition. Even if Africans (or Arabs, or Jews) colluded in the slave trade, should white Americans be entitled to do whatever they pleased with the people who were unlucky enough to fall victim?"
Yeah it existed as a practice. The big slave markets and infrastructure was not there until the North American slave trade opened up.
And? Thats not exactly question…
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Simply not correct at all. Look up the trans Saharan slave trade. It was absolutely enormous business before the Portuguese sailed down the West Coast of Africa.
Lol why is that comment you’re replying to so upvoted, people just like what they want to hear.
Uhh okay. You’re talking about dozens or hundred people or so at a time, thousands of people per year, mostly prisoners of war, traded domestically, deported over a period of 1,700 years.
And it still not half as many slaves as were deported across the Atlantic in only 350 years. Millions of slaves died on the voyage. They built vast trading routes and employed slavers as a business model, building customized ships to transport 600 slaves at a time.
Apples and oranges.
You have a profound misunderstanding of the trans Saharan slave trade. Over centuries it resulted in millions of West African slaves being transported into and through the Arab world. This may not even have been the most significant source of slaves out of Africa during the pre-European colonial period. It is highly likely that more slaves came from Central and East Africa via Zanzibar. Millions upon millions of slaves being extracted from Africa before the Portuguese arrived. I’m not saying that what Europe did was even remotely reasonable. Just understand that we didn’t invent slavery, we didn’t start up slavery in Africa out of nowhere. It doesn’t excuse us. But we’re not uniquely evil either.
I don’t see the misunderstanding.
Between 1500 and 1865, more than 80% of enslaved Africans were shipped to the Americas by European slave traders.
I’ve never seen an exact number ascribed to it, any chance you have a source?
Very nice, thanks!
Uh… Yes Traders. They bought them in Africa and shipped them to America.
What are you trying to say?
He’s saying he’s a bigot for anyone who’s listening
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Not at all. There are impacts passed down through generations, which is why we see race-based wealth gaps.
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What do you think an enormous demand for slaves, as the colonial nations building plantations and mines in the americas, does to a the supply of slaves? Supply and demand, friend. It’s not as if all the enslaved people exported to the Americas were already in circulation when the europeans came knocking
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I can’t think of a single ethical framework that considers having someone else do your dirty work as permissible. If you have zero agency, sure. If you have nearly all the agency, like the colonial powers, no. The colonial powers threatened to topple governments that restricted slave trade, like the Kongo.
I’ve never said that it was a good or acceptable thing, im just very very opposed to the idea of reparations for such things.
Clearly. No matter the argument, you’re against reparations. That’s not because you have drawn a logical conclusion. You just believe it.
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“I’m not saying it’s ok, I’m just saying you should never have to take any responsibility for it”
That’s what you just said. Jackass.
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This argument is based on the idea that buying ill-gotten water is equivalent to buying people
Nope, they deliberately made it so that the populations of African countries can easily be enslaved.
Exactly. If anything, this amount of money is way too small.
Occasionally we read a news story about someone who escaped a maniac that kept them locked up for years, forcing them to work and do depraved things for little or no pay. We rightfully think this is terrible and the criminal is inhuman.
Slavery was millions of people in that situation for their entire lives. Whole economies were based on this genocide. We put Nazis to death for genocide. We put other leader on trial for similar crimes. Paying this tiny fine is the least the British (and other European governments) can do. The amount they really owe would bankrupt them.
What amount of money would you exchange for measurably worse lives (education, health, jobs) for you, your family, and everyone who looks like you for generations?
Is it possible that other factors led to the countries being wealthy or impoverished, and this allowed the wealthy to colonise or take the impoverished as slaves?
Guns?
Yes, definitely. But why they had guns is also another question. I recommend the book “Gun, germs, and steel” as a great look into how and why different populations formed as they did.Edit: it turns out the book is a bit contentious: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views/#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22
Germs.
Yes, and even accounting for those, wealthy countries that took slaves still hold an enormous amount of responsibility for what they did
The original OP argument is that those captors or slaves don’t exist anymore. Even the countries barely exist. Is this a matter of descendants being responsible for their ancestors crimes?
I think there’s a strong feedback loop argument here but I’m not sure that’s the point you’re making.
Watch a video tour of the tourist sites of London. Or look what is in the imperial museum. Or the Victoria and Albert museum. The looted wealth of of their genocidal empire is still celebrated as a national treasure. India still has not recovered from British occupation, which only officially ended 75 years ago. And that’s like 20% of the entire current human population.
My comment is not about the validity of reparations. It was a direct reply to the one above it, which seemed to imply that reparations are because of the actions of past people, when in my view it’s about the proceeds of the crimes rather than the crimes themselves.
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I think they can and should be separated.
If they are not, then you are saying that you are making people responsible for a crime that was committed well before they were born.
By separating the crime from the proceeds, you can justify why reparations should be paid, without the defense of the crime being committed by someone else.
Do descendants have the same responsibility as their ancestors who actually owned slaves? No. But do they bear some ongoing responsibility as a benefactor of a system that was built around their ancestors owning slaves? Yeah they do.
All of this is incredibly messy, but approaching it at a governmental level is definitely something I support, because slavery was sanctioned and even encouraged by the government we’re talking about, which has existed continuously
That’s the feedback loop argument, right?
Some countries collonised others: crime of ancestor
But those countries used slaves and stole resources, making those countries wealthier. That wealth allowed them to develop better technologies, making them even wealthier.
So the argument is that while the original crime is not the responsibility of those alive today, the proceeds of crime should not be kept - they should be returned. In this case the proceeds are wealth, so a monetary reparation is appropriate.
Is my train of thought right? Because it seems to make sense to me.
Pretty much my take.
OPs position is based on the idea that the reparations are punitive, which they are not.
No one alive in England today was engaged in slaving, but everyone is the beneficiary of the practice.
This is true. Also, remember that some African kingdoms were the sellers of slaves. Modern countries there are not direct analogs, and they don’t really have any money, but they deserve some of the blame.
Disclaimer that I’m not English and don’t particularly have a dog in this fight, and my opinions are a little mixed. On the one hand, I agree on the morality there, a lot of people were damaged in the very long term by slavery. But on the other, even if you can say that it’s an act to attempt to return the wealth to the wronged people, that doesn’t mean the wealth has simply been sitting there for nearly 200 years, waiting for return. That money has to come out of some budget, somewhere.
So where are they going to pull 18 trillion to give reparations from? Certainly, cuts will need to be made somewhere to make it happen, and often, those cuts are usually made along the lines of political agendas rather than things that are objectively bloated.
For example?
The industrial revolution for one.
I recommend the book “Guns, germs, and steel” if you’re interested. I’m not sure it covers this specifically, but it does cover in depth the reasons for different areas of the world being more of less wealthy (it has nothing to do with the people and everything to do with the geographic area, climate, natural resources including flora and fauna, and proximity to other populations).It’s an interesting read, even if a bit heavy.Edit: it turns out the book is a bit contentious: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views/#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22
I read it 10+ years ago. As I recall, its main point had to do with differences between Old World and New World populations.
Since Africa falls into the Old World along with Europe, I don’t think the book actually supports any conclusions about this topic.
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This is great to know, thanks!
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Isn’t that basically saying “might makes right”?
Group A was wronged by entity B. Group A goes to court to seek restitution from entity B. Courts rule that entity B did in fact cause damages to group A and must be held liable.
That’s all reparations are. Entity B is your government. It’s the same legal entity as it was 190 years ago, regardless of the composition of the population it represents. If a group was wronged by their government, this is their only means to legal restitution. Unfortunately since the primary form of income for some governments is taxation, it means people complain about paying for things when that’s not exactly what’s happening.
The alternative is to say that if a government “runs out the clock” and is able to avoid responsibility until the population turns over, then they can no longer be held liable for anything they did prior to that point. That’s not a very good position, in my opinion.
If entity A is the UK and entity B is those hunted and sold to slavery by entity C, why does A have to pay C for stealing labour from B? Compensate B for stolen work and damages.
Because of supply and demand. The transatlantic slave trade created demand for slaves much higher than what existed before that point. That creates an environment where being a slaver is rewarded, and therefore not being a slaver was punished. If, for example, a republican billionaire says “I’ll give 10000$ to anyone who kills a democrat” they can’t just claim they’re innocent when democrat death rates go through the roof.
Yes, a lucrative market for a hideous crime was created, and the guys who hunted other groups in order to get paid in that market wronged the enslaved too. (I’m not sure it was all like this all over Africa too, but e.g. in the Congo, it seemed to be the case)
PS: and about the 10000£ bounty analogy: if there is proof that some dude killed because of an illegal bounty, they certainly are not going to be compensated for being “tricked” into killing, wtf?
Yes, but the thing is: The states that actually sold slaves basically don’t exist anymore thanks to colonialism, and even those that still do lost any wealth they had to colonialism. Can’t really accumulate generational wealth when you’re busy farming rubbers or whatever for your colonial overlords.
Yea, colonialism is yet another compensation for yet another historic crime (invasion, to start with) But, I think all this is going to be peanuts compared to compensation for global warming, this one is going to break every bank and nobody can agree on anything…it’s like these debates times 1000.
I have no idea why you made that idiotic comment about Republicans considering the involvement if Democrats in slavery.
That creates an environment where being a slaver is rewarded, and therefore not being a slaver was punished.
Idk about this line of reasoning. One thing being rewarded doesn’t necessarily mean the absence of the thing is punished. An olympic race has a winner and the winner is rewarded with a medal, but the losers aren’t typically punished, they simply “aren’t rewarded.” It isn’t like you get put in the boo box for coming in 4th, and I wasn’t there but I doubt they put anyone in the boo box (or any “punishment”) for being “a doctor not a slaver.” (Dammit Jim. Couldn’t resist.) At best some slaver dad got mad his kid wanted to be a composer instead of take up the family slaving business, but what else is new?
That’s true in general, but we’re talking geopolitics here. States that participated in the slave trade would conquer their neighbors and sell them as slaves. That’s the punishment I was talking about.
They have a warped view of supply and demand.
I understand what Britain did was wrong and requires corrective measures, but personally I just think financial reparation is not a very bright idea. For
- How do you ensure the money actually goes to victims in foreign countries
- If its given to their govts, what assurances UK has it’ll be used to improvement of victim’s life
- It can very well be used to fill the pockets of rich politician
- Even if ignoring all three, UK gets money in hand of ech victim personally, still doesn’t help the fundamental problem of marginalised community, money will run out so far in their hands, they’ll have no real impact.
I my opinion a 100 fully paid scholarships to university specifically for victims is a way better way to help them then just handing cash.
Now explain how you came up with 100 as a good number of scholarships before defining the word “victim” to not apply to anyone currently alive.
One I meant to say 1000 and two I meant to give a random number not a speicifc number. I’m not qualified enough to do that kind of assessment. But handing cash to solve one particular injustice rarely solves problems across the world.
Also defining victim would be a bigger Challange as well. I’m not saying I have all the solution, I’m just saying giving scholarships of value of whatever amt smarter people have agreed is what UK should pay for their past, is objectivly better than handing out cash.
(Pssst, he “came up with it” by “forgetting the % sign.” Read it again.)
Lol someone downvoted but you’re right, he obviously forgot the % sign. That comment is downvoted too even though it’s entirely reasonable. Fucking commies on here.
The guy literally said he meant 1000. Either he misspelled twice, or… you’re wrong.
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I mean that, and also the fact that countries that were plundered for slaves basically lost on a lot of progress due to that, and countries that got slaves were built off of that, basically for free. Sure, it’s not exactly fair to say that the plundered countries would have gotten to where slaver countries are today without that, but it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to see that Europe basically fucked Africa for a century, Africa is worse off for it, Europe is not, and they probably should be giving back not just for their conscience but as what it’s called: reparations.
What I’m trying to get at is that after WWI, Europe (and especially France) decided now-germany did a lot of damage to them, and it wasn’t fair that they could get to bomb your country to hell and not pay to fix it. So Germany had to pay reparations (which was a factor for WWII but we’ll not get into that), as a way of helping those countries build back what they had bombed.
Of course, all the economic rationeles are valid.
They are also not very compelling. If slaver Europe fucked over Africa for a century, should we compensate them only for stolen labor? How about stolen resources? Caused suffering? Lost progress? Lost standing? Lost lives?
How about all the exploitation that has happened since, due to slaver Europe having the upper hand? African labor and resources are still valued lower than in richer countries as local working conditions are still poor and exploitative.
Also, could paying reparations as a lump sum ever measure up to the slow development of infrastructure, knowledge, culture and national pride/trust/stability that comes with building your own wealth?
We have plenty of experience with aid getting stolen by warlords, and grants commonly get lost to corruption, cronies and other misappropriation, even without the warlords.
For the fiscal compensation to make sense, we’re talking orders of magnitude larger sums, and they would have to be given together with labor, knowledge, supportive relations, etc. over decades. And also with much fewer strings than our current economic system allows.
I find that there is no satisfying way to fiscally compensate for a century of exploitation, suffering and oppression, and have found that the sums and arguments are more compelling as an absolution. It’s about the slavers wanting to clear their conscience more than making it right.
It’s not the most noble reason for it, but it seems do do more for that than for the exploited people. Either change what we’re talking about, or face that your reasons are about you, not them.
I am against reparations because it trivializes the immense harm that was done, and makes it seem like it can be made up for with a cash payment, like when someone wrecks your car. I feel the harm was so immense that the guilt can’t properly be bought off in indulgence payments, and any attempt to try will fall short of the goal, while cutting off all further debate in the topic among overly transactional people. After the reparation payment, some people can say “See, racism is over! We paid it off and are debt-free!”
And then we get a situation like exists in much of the US South right now, where the Supreme Court pronounced racism over and ended the Voting Rights act, then State GOP Majorities picked right back up doing a lot of things that the act prohibited.
The debt won’t truly be paid until the descendants of those slaves are truly treated as equals to the descendants of the slave holders. A cash payment simply isn’t enough, we need to improve society. Investing that money into education, and ensuring that regressive policies don’t infest our local education system, is a start.
I don’t know exactly how to answer you, but the effects of colonization and slavery are still felt today in many former colonies. For instance, a lot of countries were created on a map with a pencil and a ruler without any regards for ethnic groups or culture, which is why there are so many straight lined borders all around the world, this created instabilities and conflicts within the countries. Many of them were also decolonized, pretty much overnight (the colonizers left, without organising elections or handing over the country to newly formed local authorities), which left them completely disorganised. I don’t have an opinion specifically on reparation, but colonization and slavery left durable scars in countless countries around the world, and they are still felt to this day, with very little chance of ever healing.
I don’t think they are. Since the Late 1960’s the US has had a war on poverty. Almost trillion dollars has been poured into disadvantaged house holds. According to it’s standards, poverty has been reduced from 19.5% to 2.3%. The numbers via ethnicity are not giving with certainty, the fact is total poverty has been greatly reduced. I would argue that is significant reparations.
Isn’t most of this due to India and China?
China’s poverty rate fell from like 88% in 1981 to basically nothing today.
The poverty rate in the US fell because of China and India? Damn that was nice of them.
18,000,000,000,000/31,600,000 = 569,620
Don’t want to be that guy, but it definitely changes the picture somewhat.
Here’s a way to think of it:
If I steal all of your money and invest it to grow over time then I’ll end up with even more money while you don’t benefit from the growth that should have been yours. Now we have children and pass on our wealth. You pass on less because it was stolen, and I pass on more because of what I stole. This multiplies over the generations and a disparity is maintained. My offspring will have better educations and better opportunities because of the wealth they had access to, and yours will have fewer opportunities because you don’t have the money to spend on them.
The goal of reparations is to attempt to correct some of this disparity. It tries to provide opportunities for people who don’t have it but would have if something in the past weren’t stolen.
For an example that’s easy to see: In the US, black people are less likely to know how to swim. This has nothing to do with them being black, but what opportunities they had access to. This is for many reasons. One part of it is that most places had community pools, but they had restrictions for people of color. When this was outlawed, they instead just closed the pools or added memberships that required payment.
People also built up wealth over time through property, but black people were prevented from getting loans to buy property except in redlined places. This prevented them from building up generational wealth like white people were allowed to do. (This is ignoring the whole slavery thing…) It causes ripples through time where their children have less opportunities, which then causes their children to have fewer, and so on.
The problem I have with this viewpoint is this.
Where does it start and where does it end?
World history is full of atrocities, crimes, war etc.
Additionally, many of the things which we now consider atrocity or crime might not even have been one in the past.
Fabricating such artificial claims is the same as Putin is doing by using the history book for creating claims on Ucraine.
This has always been an issue I get stuck on. If we hold current people liable for the crimes of their ancestors, how far back do we go?
The trans-atlantic slave trade was abhorrent, but slavery didn’t begin or end with it.
Do Egyptians owe Jews reperations due to how they were treated? Should the Italians compensate half of Europe and North Africa for what the Romans did? Should Arab nations pay the UK and Ireland for the people kidnapped by the Barbary Pirates?
The Ottomans were still keeping slaves until the early 1900s, long after the western European powers had ended the practice, why aren’t we seeing calls for reperations from Turkey to Slavic nations?
we go as for back as needed to achieve a somewhat just society.
Let’s take your example of the Jews in Egypt (other than the fact that the source for Jewish slavery in Egypt is just religious texts without any archeological evidence ever found): is there some great opportunity divide between an Egyptian and an Israeli? no, so we obviously don’t need to worry about that.
or for the Ottoman-Slavic question: do Slavic peoples have less opportunity than those of modern day Turkey? no, so we don’t need to worry about that.
and yes, Italians (and many other parts of Europe) do send different types of aid to Africa for these reasons
Do Black people in the USA have massive opportunity differences in comparison to the WASP population? yes, they do, thus it is right to conduct these reparations. You may not be the only people to have committed slavery, but you sure still wear it proudly, and you are still a deeply systemically racist nation.
TLDR: it’s not about revenge, but righting wrongs.
You seem to be operating under the assumption I’m American, I’m not.
none of these targets Americans, you can make the exact same arguments for England and their colonial holdings (the thing OP was referring to), to Russia and the rest of the Soviet, or Russia and the rest of Russia, etc…
Even currently in some rich Middle East countries, there are technically slave workers - construction & household to name 2.
Exactly, maybe we should worry more about ending it now than what happened two centuries ago.
We can do more than one thing at once.
Well considering the last slave (coerced labor) was freed in the 1940s, it’s still extremely recent. These are people’s grandparents and great-grandparents. The velocity of money is very real.
this is why the slippery slope fallacy is a fallacy
“if we punish people for murder, what about self defense?”
or
“if we arrest people for selling meth, it’ll end up making the state arrest people who drink coffee”
you can legislate for a specific instance and not have it spiral out of control into insanity.
Maybe some people would try to seek reparations for ridiculous stuff. It’s exactly the purview of the law, politics and diplomacy to navigate that.
This isn’t a slippery slope fallacy. Nobody’s saying “if we let the gays marry the next thing that will happen is people will want to marry animals!”
What people are saying is, okay if this is being done in the interest of fairness, who else needs considered, and is it practical to consider them? Are we ever actually going to be able to achieve something close to fair?
In the US a great example in this discussion is native Americans. Do they get more or less for having their entire society destroyed, land confiscated, being driven on death marches to far away land, repeated treaty violations, decimated by smallpox, and many of the other tournaments?
I have native American, German, and Scottish ancestors that never owned a slave. I don’t have “African”, Irish, or “Asian” ancestors.
Do I get a check, do I get excluded, or do I pay for the sins of someone else’s forefathers? And then because… despite all the struggles my ancestors endured themselves, I lived in a country that’s trying to reconcile past sins of slavery they had nothing to do with directly (and hopefully were opposed to)?
Fact of the matter is, native americans suffered horribly, they just don’t exist in any kind of numbers to make a stink about it, and many of them bred into the white population.
We’re never going to get to “even” and we seriously need to consider if more unfair government wealth distribution is the solution to previous unfair government wealth distribution.
Hell I’m a full on Democrat and I strongly believe this will only make race relations worse. Like by a factor of 100 if they did that here. Two wrongs don’t make a right, and there’s no way sufficient time money and resources will be spent to actually make anything resembling fair happen here or in the US; you can’t do that when you’re trying to score political points.
Governments should be trying to help people from where they are now, not trying to reverse history and retroactively remedy history spread across hundreds of years.
Honestly, it should never stop. There should be wealth, inheritance, and estate taxes that even out advantages and disadvantages over time. Poor people shouldn’t be paying for it because of their race, rich people should because of their advantages.
This is just communism. Distribute wealth until everyone is equal. You don’t even need to bring race into the equation to achieve the same results as being proposed here.
This is not communism.
Communism wouldn’t even have a need for money, so distributing wealth wouldn’t exist.
This is also why affirmative hiring and admission isn’t “racist against white people” as people see it as. It’s actually leveling the playing field.
A program that white people are excluded from isn’t racist?
Before implementing things like affirmative action or reparations, do any of us have any idea in mind for when reparations will be done making things “fair”? Or is the intent to have it go on forever? I’ve never heard this argument before and I’ve never heard of anyone having a set date for the end of affirmative action and the like, so it sounds like a slippery slope to future discrimination. This is probably what at least some of the “racist against white people” (and asian people) crowd are complaining about. I know I would be miffed if I lost an academic or career position to an objectively lower quality candidate due to something like government mandated diversity, regardless of how much I support civil rights. Obviously, ideally, everyone should have equal access to these opportunities and no one should be unable to get the education they want but that isn’t the kind of world we live in (at least in the USA).
Also, why can’t there be other ways to level the playing field in terms of environment, such as funding better schooling or housing for disparaged individuals, regardless of race? Despite black people having to fight an uphill battle in life, these things that uplift across the board without racial or ethnic discrimination would naturally end up helping them out more than others before leveling out as equality is achieved. The only problem, as always, is the bureaucracy involved.
There were families that made Bezos-class money at the height of slavery, and those families’ descendants are still rich today.
At the very least, these families shouldn’t be anonymously rich, they should be infamously rich, notoriously so. Even if a truth-and-reconciliation process is ‘too much’, let us at least have the truth out, and loud.
I don’t know. Plenty if other groups arrived much later in western countries, often with little or nothing to their names and feeling persecution, and have done much much better.
I’ll give you that the specter of discrimination still haunted western institutions until quite recently. But blacks were not the only group that faced discrimination.
I used black people as an example, not to say they’re the only group, because it’s obvious to see. Literally everyone has been exploited by the rich.
I am not black or white. I can offer a perspective of an immigrant who isn’t white. Looking at how blacks were targeted for arrests and the disproportionate amount of arrests while being brought up in economically challenging environments, it is very hard to “move up”.
I immigrated to a western country with qualifications and with a good sum in my bank account and still it was challenging. I cannot imagine how generational oppression will do to a persons psyche and their worldview.
This is hard for me to commit to an opinion on. I totally understand the argument that systemic injustices of the past have impacts today on the opportunities presented to descendants of affected individuals, therefore proactive steps are required to achieve equity. But solutions like requiring blanket reparations from one race to another seem to take for granted that everyone of the first race has been equally privileged by historical injustices, while everyone of the second race has been equally disadvantaged.
This obviously isn’t true. People of color are disproportionately likely to be disadvantaged, but there are people of color who lead highly privileged lives, and there are white people who are highly disadvantaged due to coming from low socioeconomic class, poor health, lack of access to education, etc.
The concept of reparations being paid on a basis of race necessarily involves the government forcing disadvantaged white, Asian, Latino, and other non-black people to become more institutionally disadvantaged, so that a group that contains highly privileged people of color can become more economically advantaged.
Something absolutely needs to be done, we need to be actively fighting for equity, but it’s hard for me to accept an argument that that should be done on the basis of race instead of addressing the causes of class-based inequality that will benefit disadvantaged black people along with disadvantaged people of other races.
For example, instead of seeking to improve the intergenerational income mobility of POCs in a system that restricts the income mobility of those without wealthy parents, we should fix the system and ensure a level playing field between someone who is born to high-school drop outs, and someone who was born to Ivy League graduates.
This is how I tend to view it too. We should be raising all poor people up and target wealth equality for everyone, regardless how they got there. I suppose reparations to POC would be a step in that direction but it by nature excludes people who might need help now. Idk, it’s a hard subject for me to form a solid opinion on too but I think social safety nets need to be prioritized for all.
sure, but now you are a godless commie who hates America.
Meh, fuck the people who think that. They don’t contribute to a healthy, functioning society
That’s what it always boils down to, which is why I am now actually a communist.
I don’t know who implied paying it would be based on race. It should be based on class. Rich people are rich because they had advantages and exploited people. They should be taxed and the money should be used to raise up people who weren’t as advantaged or exploitative.
That’s not reparations for slavery, then. That’s just redistribution.
The entire concept of reparations for slavery is that non-black people will be forced to pay black people money, either as a one time lump-sum payment, or an open-ended pseudo-UBI. Some suggestions include mandated documentation of ancestral slabery, but the most popular ones don’t. The vehicle for this payment would be either increased taxes, or redirection of taxes.
If you’re not talking about race-based redistribution of wealth, you’re not talking about ‘reparations,’ which is what this thread is about.
That’s not a reparations issue, it’s an unfuck the cities that were fucked by Robert Moses and his buddies as well as funding public schools better, making hospitals public instead of privately owned, and changing the punitive justice system to a proper rehabilitation justice system.
Otherwise you’ll just see short term happiness and provide arguments for “we’re equal now, we paid reparations! What else do you want?”
I’d say both are required, and also reparations should never end. The rich should be taxed for their advantages and exploitation and money should be used to help raise poor people up. The problem can never be fixed. There will always be advantaged and disadvantaged people and exploiters and exploited people. Implying it should be a one time payment for a one time thing I think is missing what is trying to be solved.
