272 Slaves Were Sold to Save Georgetown. What Does It Owe Their Descendants?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2014/06/the-case...
The stipulation would have to be once paid, everyone bitching has to shut up about it forever. I'd donate to that Kickstarter.
But yeah, saying "if X is moral, and if Putin was also moral, then Putin would behave differently, and therefore X must not be moral" is a hilarious argument. I, for one, aim for a higher moral standard than "as good as Putin".
It is incorrect to think the mistakes made over 100 years ago are no longer connected to the realities of today.
Racism is real. It exists in the United States right now – it never went away.
Reparations isn't just about healing the old wounds of the past – its also about closing the gaping wounds of the present.
Re inherited wealth: let's be clear - there is no country in the world where slavery was not practiced at one time or another in Asia, Europe America and Africa. Incidentally it was abolished by the British who then, with difficulty, brought pressure to bear on other nations. As to inherited wealth, in the main, Marx's recommendations in the Communist Manifesto have been largely implemented for most of us (40% tax in the UK above a fairly low threshold).
http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/512/h...
"Unabated", really? So we still have separate water fountains, and things like that recent report on the Chicago Police Department are normal and expected and generally accepted as how things should be?
How will reparations make people less racist?
It is really moral or worthwhile to open new wounds (notably to entirely innocent parties) in the present in an attempt to rectify past injustice? We don't punish the children of murderers for their parent's offenses, let alone the descendants of their neighbors.
I'm not totally sure that's true, under your definition of "punish" (or at least of "cause harm"). If a convicted murderer writes some memoirs, there are laws that prevent them from profiting off their story, and often allow the families of victims to sue for those profits. This applies even if the murderer is personally unable to use that money (due to being in prison, being on death row, etc.) and is just trying to provide for their children.
If the victims' families discover a few years later that profitable memoirs were published, I believe they can still sue to recover that money, even if it means taking money out of an innocent child's college fund.
In certain cases a Son of Sam law can be extended beyond the criminals themselves to include friends, neighbors, and family members of the lawbreaker who seek to profit by telling publishers and filmmakers of their relation to the criminal. In other cases, a person may not financially benefit from the sale of a story or any other mementos pertaining to the crime.
With the advent of the Internet and online sales, many Son of Sam laws are now targeting the sale of so-called "murderabilia". Few courts have yet issued opinions regarding the constitutionality of many of these new laws.
Or, as a simpler example: if I rob a bank at gunpoint and then give the money to my children, the bank can recover that money despite it having passed out of my hands. We don't consider that harming the children, despite them being innocent of my crime. Even if they grew up expecting that money to be available to them for college, it is my crime and my action that made that promise to them. The money can be returned to its rightful owner, and only I am responsible for having promised money to them that I never rightfully had.
The same thinking applies to reparations, although I readily concede that it's much more complicated. If A gained through what we now concede is unambiguously a violation of B's basic human rights, and A passed those gains onto their descendants, and B passed their losses onto their descendants, A's descendants unjustly have a slightly better station in life than they should, and B's a slightly worse station. (Of course, defining how much better/worse over hundreds of years is tricky, but the theoretical basis for this analysis is sound.) To improve the situation for B's descendants, even at the possible cost of worsening the situation for A's descendants, is just: as long as it does not make A's descendants any worse off than they should have been had the crime never occurred, it is not a harm to them to take away a gain they should have never had.
It would help to have an expert legal opinion, but I don't believe this is true, particularly if the sum has been spent (as any and all ill-gotten gains from slavery would be). In civil suits, you can't replevy cash as such.
The question of replevin becomes moot should the item in question no longer exist as an entity, i.e. if it is destroyed, or in the case of a bag of money, for instance, if the money has been spent. For this reason, the item is normally seized by the court when the action is filed and held until the decision is reached to prevent the waste of a legal action over a nonexistent object and, further, to ensure that the item in question is not destroyed, spent, etc., during the action. [0]
I find this to be a terrifying prospect, particularly if it is applied consistently (and why wouldn't it be, if it is indeed just). Great ills have (and presumably will be perpetrated) under such justifications. There are far too many to list, so here are just a few hypotheticals: Title to lands in the Middle East (is X justified to seize it from Y as if it never changed hands?). In the case of the some 16 million odd descendants of Genghis Khan, how do you even begin to undo an empire?. Did they benefit from their status or did they suffer as children borne out of rape (or whatever the case may be)? Do we also attempt to undo past injustices when they result in far greater benefit to the descendants of victims than would have been received in the absence of victimization (e.g. descendants of American slaves enjoying a significantly higher standard of living versus had they been born, or not born as the case may be, in Africa)? Many of these reparation scenarios, (specifically if they effectively "take away a gain they should have never had"), resign people to death.
What about racism towards those without slave ancestors? Example Chinese people. Example Irish immigrants who sold themselves into indentured servitude and were historically discriminated against.
What about people with fractional African DNA? Like for example, I could test myself and be 1% of African descent, even though I'm lily white. Or what happens if you are mostly, say 7/8ths, of mixed Mexican descent but 1/8th African descent?
Besides we are being very selective about historical injustices. Do we want to restore the Roman Empire too ? That certainly didn't end in a legal and just manner. The same can be said for essentially any empire. Should we lock all muslims into the one place where they spread without an army, Medina, and restore the Jewish states surrounding them ?
"Justice" is just providing more legal rights for whomever screams the loudest, threatens the most violence, ... that sort of thing.
In general yes, except in this case it is a particular institution with a particular list of names of people. Not just some abstract group -- but specific 272 names.
So if GU can trace what happened to those people, it seems reasonable to do something.
Another interesting thing in the article was the relationship about organized religion -- Jesuits and slavery. How priests "... required their slaves to attend Mass for the sake of their salvation, but also whipped and sold some of them."
It was perhaps a bit like the Declaration of Independnce (all men are created equal with inalienable Rights) vs slavery for another 100 years after it was written.
I find something interesting about institutional hypocrysy. It always exists, and to some degree and can be thought of as a benchmark of sanity or health of said system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_slave_trade
Historians estimate that between 650 and the 1960s, 10 to 18 million people were enslaved by Arab slave traders and taken from Europe, Asia and Africa across the Sahara, the Red Sea, and the western Indian Ocean.
Between 1525 and 1866, in the entire history of the slave trade to the New World, according to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World. 10.7 million survived the dreaded Middle Passage, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean and South America.But no matter - even if it was worse somewhere else, the point is that American slavery was, yes, something especially terrible - and, importantly, with consequences still felt today - that should definitely be viewed through "special lens".
One of the Wikipedia page's sources is "Islam's Black Slaves" by Ronald Segal. He estimates the total number of African slaves shipped to the Muslim world at 11.5-14 million. Raymond Mauvy estimates it at 14 million shipped.
I wasn't able to find a good estimate for total number ever enslaved for either the Americas or the Muslim world.
Honestly not going to go in depth with that argument as I'm a long-time lurker here and I've seen just how defensive people are on this forum (not to even factor in the typical defensiveness that white people in america exude the second the topic of slavery is brought up). What i will ask, as a matter of fact what i specifically made this account to ask, is why I never hear any such musings of common sense and equality of suffering when the subject of Jewish reparations for the Holocaust is brought up?[0][1]
My personal opinion is reparations won't change the fact that racism is still real in America and prevalent. Reparations won't undo the fact that we as a country shipped these people across an ocean just to subject them to unmitigated atrocities - yes plural, the fact that they were slaves wasn't even 1/10th the worst thing that happened to them as some of them were actually slaves back in their own lands, it's everything that came as a consequence of what it meant to be a black slave in the United States. As a consequence, whether or not reparations are being asked for, I don't care. What i do care about is this blatant double standard that we put on show whenever our heinous activities are brought to discussion, and just using the Jewish as an example, other atrocities are simply black and white to the point where we reached peak Nazi/Hitler porn and just kept soaring.
Supposedly an atrocity that was caused mostly by intentional neglect and mistreatment of an entire class of people based on their ethnicity is only completely morally repugnant if we're not the ones committing them.
Just my own 0.02. Gonna go back to ignoring op's comment
[0]http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v17/v17n6p19_reparations.html [1]http://www.jta.org/2015/10/01/news-opinion/united-states/oba...
Completing the telling of the story of our shared history would likely alter the thinking and comments several have written, which seem to say, "get over it," or "I"m innocent, I wasn't there." The reality is nothing would please me more than to live in a country where "over it" was the climate and current behaviors and practices reflected a more complete knowledge of United States history.
That world wide slavery is a reality still, is an indication we are not ready to not have that be the case. That is an indictment of all humanity.
I'm completely opposed to the idea of enforced "reparations", but a University voluntarily building a monument to honor a specific group of people it feels it harmed improperly and perhaps establishing a scholarship fund for their descendants seems like a reasonable and honorable thing to do.