Comment by jacobwilliamroy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jacobwilliamroy | Hacker News Reader

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jacobwilliamroy

A reparations law suit would most likely involve a court of law in which victims and benificiaries are identified, damages are calculated, and assets change hands. This fantasy where you just have to give up your personal property for no good reason is just a fantasy. It's not the way the law works. There will be a reason, it will be documented by a trail of papers and professional judges and attorneys will agree that it is fair.

If there is no paper trail saying that you are a beneficiary of human trafficking, you will not pay reparations. In order to understand this, you and also the justice system need to evolve to see the world more granularly than just "race". Slaves had names, they had families, they had descendants. Those descendants have legal standing in the most basic sense: they have been deprived of property. Justice demands that those stolen assets be returned to the rightful, legal owners.

Forget "resolving racism". That's a red herring. Just return the stolen property to the rightful owners. That's a much more concrete, actionable goal.

Edit: please post response instead of downvoting. Why should this comment disappear?

How does this work when no one alive today stole any of the property? When none of the people it was stolen from are alive?

What is the (broadly consistent) legal doctrine for expropriating living people's property on the basis of their ancestors sins?

How do you draw the line around legitimate grounds for litigating a criminal grievance from the past? How do you establish the appropriate damages?

I ask these important contextualizing questions not to imply that reparation aren't possible or are necessarily a bad idea, but rather to illustrate that the attitude of "this is easy, just do the obvious thing" is not going to be sufficient here. And when the comment begins with asserted speculation about what enacting reparations "would most likely" involve... I get very suspicious.

You're thinking about the situation upside down. First we find the stolen property, then we return it to the legal owner. One cannot legally own stolen property. The law is very clear: no one gives what one does not have. If for example "Leslie" inherits assets from human traffickers, those are not Leslie's assets; they are stolen assets. Leslie is not a criminal being prosecuted for crime. No one is being punished. Stolen property is being returned to the rightful, legal owners. This has nothing to do with sin, or morality, or emotion, or even race. This is just about accounting and following the law. It really is as simple as it sounds.

> benificiaries are identified, damages are calculated, and assets change hands

The assets changing hands will be the federal government paying descendants some sum of money taken from its tax base. And federal taxes are paid by everyone, even those of us whose families arrived after slavery and Jim Crow was abolished.

This is why some people are adamantly against reparations.

I already told you that's just a fantasy. There is clearly a strong opposition to that, to the point where it would never make it through congress. A real investigation is needed to separate beneficiaries from those who were uninvolved.

If reparations for slavery ever happen in the US, it will be a political decision, not one resulting from a lawsuit. That isn't to say they courts won't be involved at one or more points, as you can certainly imagine challenges, but for it to happen it will have to come from Congress first.

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