Insurance Policies on Slaves: New York Life’s Complicated Past | Hacker News Reader

Insurance Policies on Slaves: New York Life’s Complicated Past

nytimes.com

Also see "dead peasant insurance": http://www.snopes.com/politics/business/deadpeasant.asp

Just because everything in the past was horrible doesn't mean we need to burn it all down.

We definitely don't need a culture of victimhood where anyone with documented ties to the past gets vilified.

I think in stories like these the human tendency is to let rage from any number of personal experiences or perspectives blind us to real lessons that could be gleaned.

One lesson, we inherit complex worlds -- we work at corporations with dark histories, attend institutions built by slaves, use devices and wear clothes made by people who live their lives in horrid conditions.

Maybe we can't change that, but maybe we owe ourselves the human responsibility to grapple with those questions.

It would be nice if we could have a correct understanding of the relevance and proportion of these questions, though. So a corporation made some sliver of its annual income selling insurance policies to slaveowners over a hundred and fifty years ago (the "dark history" you are referring to.) How, precisely, is that relevant to policy in the modern day, as opposed to an element of historical trivia?

At some point in the middle of the 19th century most people alive today will have had 64 great^n-grandparents. It's hard to imagine any significant portion of those ancestors weren't terrible people of some sort or another.

Who said that? The company seems to acknowledge the past and I don't see anyone calling for blood.

Just because everything in the past was horrible doesn't mean we need to burn it all down

Spoiler: this is where a solid libertarian argument for universal basic income begins. Since we know just about every distribution of property/wealth in the present day traces back to a use of force or fraud in the recorded past, but just about everybody has cause against someone, it would be impossible to equitably settle every case individually in order to create a clean slate on which to build a libertarian society. It would also be impossible to just declare "libertarianism, starting right now" and lock in the current known-inequitable distributions of wealth and property. Adding a universal basic income, given to everyone and funded by taxation of everyone, offers a way around this conundrum.

No it doesn't. There's no immutable law of nature that requires that the use of force against distant ancestors is at all relevant to contemporary judgments of equality, justice, and fairness.

And there's no immutable law of nature that says a universal basic income would excuse any current or future disputes regarding equality, justice, and fairness. Indeed, UBI could even exacerbate feelings of unfairness in myriad, unpredictable ways.

The fundamental issue is that concepts like equality, justice, and fairness are highly dynamic and often far removed from most objective measurements of well-being.

That's not a critique against those concepts. Our need to feel treated "fairly" is innate. But the reality is extremely messy. The meaning of "fair" is constantly evolving, from the perspective of each individual, each community, and society-wide. And it rarely if ever means the same thing to any two people or groups, and hardly ever means the same thing to the same person across time or other context.

"Fair", to a libertarian, has an objective definition. No force, no fraud, contract freely entered by all parties. If that definition is not met, then it's not fair.

Insightful. But still problematic.

Why wouldn't those injured seek any due recourse?

Who was injured that is still alive today?

Injury is heritable. Just as the gains from it are.

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Because this kind of stuff continues to divide us. Anyone who's black in America, today, still has to deal with 'this stuff.'

White supremacy didn't go home just because a few people put their signatures on the Civil Rights Act.

Can you give examples of how (in 2016) "white supremacy" is affecting "anyone who's black in America"?

I'm late to seeing this but it needs a moderation response.

Whether you intended it that way or not, this amounts to trolling. It can lead to nothing but flamewars and ideological battles that are completely unwelcome here, so please don't do it again.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13216240 and marked it off-topic.

Racism in 2016, in Healthcare: - Black scientists are systematically underfunded - Black Women Are 40 Percent More Likely To Die From Breast Cancer Than White Women - Facilities treating African-American population are associated with a decrease in the availability and use of surgical services and an increase in emergency visits - Republican governors’ ongoing resistance to the optional Medicaid expansion disproportionately harms African-Americans - minorities are seriously underrepresented in health care professions

In education, - Black students trail White students with respect to educational access, achievement, and attainment

- White teachers teachers predisposed to have lower expectations of Black students and a lack of respect for the students’ families and primary culture

- When racism is taught in schools, its often presented as an individual problem, not an institutional one. This leads many white Americans to believe that discrimination occurs in a vacuum

...the election of Trump?

Yeah I know it affects way more than "anyone who's black in America", but still...

How about a country where a president is elected after a long campaign of denigrating immigrants, women, and people of color? A country where a movement needs to exist that states that black lives matter. A country where people will defend a cop who kills unarmed black people and is cleared of all wrong doing. A country that discriminates against hiring, providing housing opportunities for, and passing legislation to protect groups of people that start out behind because decades of racism has kept them out of job centers, meaningful employment, and economic stability.

Visit the south some time, talk to some black people that aren't as wealthy as you are, please just go out and get some perspective. I've always liked cornel west's (if you haven't heard of him, do yourself a favor and look him up! He's a brilliant thinker and a lot of fun to read) reading that leaving the conversation on race alone is counterproductive neoliberal thinking and that you need to step back and look at all factors, including class, emplyoment, the penal system, war etc. What you will find is that a lot of these oppressive factors tie back to race, have histories in discrimination, or have magnified consequences for people of color. This does not discount that there are a lot of white people struggling with the same circumstances, but it helps frame and contextualize how these issues play into race.

America is the land where you can fly a flag of slavery and excuse yourself under the false guise of "heritage," but in the national conversation when people want to talk about how this heritage is inherently tied to hate, racists get up in arms.

Sorry this was a huge ramble, key takeaways are

1. Get outside your filter bubble

2. Read prominent black voices in philosohpy

3. Never stop learning

For example, if you want to read further than cornel west, maybe check out some lectures from Bell hooks and learn how these issues of class and race tie into gender and identity. It's a big world out there, take it all in!

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