California May Bill You for Slavery | Hacker News Reader

California May Bill You for Slavery

wsj.com

47 pointskoolba52 comments

California, which was never a slave state, is talking about taking money from people who never owned slaves and giving it to people who never were slaves.

CA population is cratering for a reason.

To even take it a step further, like me, a lot of people's ancestors we're not even in the US when slavery was going on.

On top of that… many “whites” were oppressed or in servitude in European countries and came to America for freedom.

And many Irish were enslaved in America as well.

Or, a step further, a lot of people's ancestors died in the Union army.

That said. I'd actually be okay with reparations if they did the accounting properly. Step one: Look at the median income in Sierra Leone. Step 2: Look at the equivalent black income in the United States. Find the difference. I'll take cash or check.

Reparations makes absolutely zero sense. You cannot "improve relations" or "make whole" simply by taking money from one nameless, faceless group and give it to another nameless, faceless group.

Real "making whole" happens at a personal level. It involves people dealing with local issues and also an understanding nobody is 100% in the right. We all have problems—we ALL (white, black, brown, etc)—contribute to various societal ills. We all have to be able to look at each other, and openly and honestly bring truth and healing where it can be.

"Racial reconciliation" can't happen at the "racial" level.

> Reparations makes absolutely zero sense. You cannot "improve relations" or "make whole" simply by taking money from one nameless, faceless group and give it to another nameless, faceless group.

It's a coinvent way of burying the issue: Reperations Paid, racism is now over.

No need to make other systemic changes to things like minimum wage or healthcare.

> No need to make other systemic changes

Which, IMO, is the real tragedy of all of this. You're right we do need to make changes. But those changes don't just affect _blacks_. They affect _everyone_. People made it a racism issue, but in many way it's not. There are plenty of poor white an brown folks that deal with many of the systemic issues too. They just aren't politically convenient.

Curious how they are going to handle someone whose lineage includes someone who was brought to the US as a slave on one side and on the other an Ashanti of the upper class who got rich of selling slaves to the Portuguese. Do they only get half the money? Does their ancestors offense offset the payment entirely? Do they have to pay more because they were descended from people who did the original enslavement?

I don't think the type of reparations discussed in the article are an attempt to punish. I don't see any mention of one's ancestors' offenses (or lack thereof) being considered. It's about compensating those who are believed to have suffered.

Your logic is flawed, just who is compensating them?

You can't say there wasn't racism in California, I'm sure there was / is, but it wasn't like the Deep South where Jim Crow make sure black folks couldn't get ahead.

And how about folks who themselves were from a colonized nation?

As a non-american I dont really understand the context here? I get the "CA not a slave state" bit, but is the CA population dropping? and how does this feed into that?

Apparently changed from 39.37 million to 39.24.

"Cratering" is as hyperbolic as can be.

A map where you can track by county: https://www.axios.com/2023/04/07/population-change-pandemic

I agree it's still overstated, but the -7% in San Francisco county is interesting.

COVID would probably have been a huge factor in that one. A city known for tech and expensive living, all of a sudden people don't have to go into an office and can get the same salary and live elsewhere cheaper.

That doesn't tell you that all of those people left the state, though. A lot of SF folks moved to other parts of CA; housing prices in Fresno went crazy during the pandemic, anecdotally because it was all Bay Area folks discovering that they could now remote-work from anywhere.

39.5 -> 38.9

Actually according to census data, CA population peaked in 2020 at 39.5 million, and as of 2022 was at 39.02 million, a drop of almost 500k people.

While I agree "cratering" is still hyperbolic for that change, it's quite a bit more than the numbers you mentioned imply.

I don't happen to agree, but GP is saying people are leaving CA and moving to other US states because they are dissatisfied with the dominance of liberal politics there.

Agree with what? Population is in fact dropping, the data is there for all to see.

The point the parent comment was attempting to make was that there is a perception, perhaps true (or not), that left-wing policies are driving out conservative or moderate voters.

COL is high and political stunts like this do little to remedy the issues faced by the average person in CA.

>Agree with what?

The reasons why.

Common right-wing talking point: California’s liberal policy decisions are turning it into a lawless, woke, communist hell-hole that rational citizens are leaving in droves for enlightened states like Texas (ed. note: where they can get murdered in one of the monthly right-to-bear-arms rituals).

Sam Altman said that he doesn't like the open-air fentanyl markets either.

I dunno how these ppl avoid catching a heart attack from cognitive dissonance.

Tenderloin got its name because coppers would get extra for working a shift there, allowing them to afford a better cut of meat. It’s always been like that. Same with mid-market. It’s a city. Move back to the valley or whatever burb you rolled in from if it doesn’t appeal to you.

With the high cost of living who can afford to own the libs? $44B seems excessive.

Yes, California's population is in slight decline, the reason is that California did not build nearly enough housing in the past decades, making it increasingly unaffordable to live there.

From what I gather by reading and listening to those who left California this is one of reasons why they left/leave but certainly not the only one and often not even the main reason.

The population decrease has way more to do with cost of housing in that state, the other stuff are side points in comparison.

The cost of housing is a symptom of bad government policy.

Very much so

I wish stories like this would keep people away, but the sad truth is they keep coming regardless. People will continue to risk it all to live with earthquakes, floods, wildfires, and a high cost of living just to get away from oppressive situations. If it doesn’t appeal to you, stay away. It may be the fourth largest economy, but they don’t call it the Wild West for nothing.

Happy to see the state shed some MBA pork. Maybe you’ve noticed an uptick in carpetbaggers in your area? You know you’ve made it when there’s a McLaren dealership.

California should shed all of its politicians instead. The Bay should create tech to make "political intermediaries" obsolete, one of the few social classes that deserve to disappear in the pages of history

I prefer to look gatekeepers in the face as I walk past them.

I was amused by the cleverness of your summary. :) But while what you wrote seems to literally be true, I don't think it's an accurate portrayal of what the article (if not its title) describes. I might have overlooked something, but

1. CA would be taking the money from everyone. (I.e., it isn't intending to punish and doesn't single out who is taxed. For example, a poor person who receives the reparations benefits more than a rich person who does, since the latter would have paid for more of the reparations through their own taxes.)

2. The people who would receive the money are descendants of slaves; while not former slaves themselves, this $ could be thought of as a representation of the inheritance they should have received. (But how they determine these people seems flimsy -- the article mentions people who "claim" enslaved ancestors and it's unclear how such claims may or may not be validated.)

Regarding CA not having been a slave state, the article mentions the harm caused by prejudicial policies in CA, but then it's unclear why affected people who don't have enslaved ancestry wouldn't also be compensated.

Anyway, after (and despite) writing out the above, I think your summary is actually fairly apt (and humorous). But I kind of wish it were less provocative.

(FWIW, I think the course of action discussed in the article is problematic and I have conflicted opinions about the concept of reparations. I think it is a complex topic.)

I think if more people tried to make less potentially inflammatory statements, it would be easier to have productive discussions about contentious topics. This could serve to reduce tribalism, which I feel would be a good thing.

(The article's title is a much stronger example of the inflammatory language that I think should be minimized.)

[Edit: grammatical and formatting fixes; criticism of the article's title added.]

How does holding people responsible for the actions of people who died 100+ years ago lead to less tribalism?

The very idea is inflammatory, regardless of how it is talked about.

If everyone gives money, and some get that money back and then some, those not getting the money defaco paid for it. Same outcome as a fine.

If anything your rephrasing shows the patent absurdity.

> 1. CA would be taking the money from everyone.

Take money from everyone -> give to a subset of people == subset of people not reimbursed are net shouldering the cost.

> 2. The people who would receive the money are descendants of slaves; while not former slaves themselves, this $ could be thought of as a representation of the inheritance they should have received.

The asumption there is that skin colour ispo facto defines that you missed out on an "inheritance". Certainly previous discussion didn't define proof of lineage. The inverse is that other skin colours ispo facto have some financial benefit. Which would make all white people wealthy. Which isn't true.

The bit you also fail to discuss is the reality. These policies based on reductive marxist ideology, flawed since it's formalisation. Designed specifically to generate false predicates of victim-hood so as to take money and assets from other people. It is i'm afraid that simple

Wasn't it just a little while ago that looting was supposed to be a form of reparations?

These talking points are giving me whiplash.

https://archive.ph/g6GT2

There were an estimated 410 billion hours of enslaved labor contributed in the United States between 1619 and 1865.[0] There are about 41 million African Americans in the United States. That would be 10 hours of labor per person. This does not even account for the fact that many self-identified white people are also descendants of enslaved persons.[1] If we multiply by an order of magnitude to arrive at an estimate, 100 hours of labor at a wage of 100 USD per hour would be around $10,000 per person living today, or about $410 billion for the entire United States, but that estimate is also low, because $10,000 today would not even begin to make up for the disparities that are observed even today even in the narrow area of health outcomes. This solution seems fraught, as financial compensation for slavery alone would be a lower amount than most expect and does not compensate for the legacy of racism that persists today. In the end, that would leave all parties dissatisfied. I think a better solution might involve something like what Desmond Tutu did in South Africa to address the legacy of Apartheid. I think any real solution would take several decades at least and would involve multiple anti-racism interventions at scale, including implicit bias training.

That said, redresses like the return of Bruce’s Beach to the original family are laudable, and in line with existing patterns of legal justice.[2]

References

0. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7716878/

1. https://www.vox.com/platform/amp/2014/12/22/7431391/guess-wh...

2. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-09-30/newsom-s...

Double check your math. That’s 10,000 hours per person.

You are right. That would be around 1 million dollars per person at the rate I mentioned. At $16 dollars per hour, that would be 160,000 per person. Yes, that might make a difference. Though I think still with the terrible legacy of enslavement in the United States, and the treatment of First Nations people, there is a need for more than just payment for repairing structural injustices.

Rupert Murdoch wants WSJ to be the new FOX.

"May"

How else would this clown world scheme be paid for?

A couple things:

1. This headline is clickbait garbage meant to elicit a click/emotional response. The concept of reparations (whether you agree with them or not) are way more complex than simply saying "will bill you for slavery".

2. California Gov Newsom, who's relatively centrist (especially compared to what's further left in CA), has been rumored to be eyeing a presidential run at some point for a while now. It's not a coincidence that this kind of proposal aims to garner brownie points with voters who are further left than him.

The clickbait is even a bit more sneaky than usual.

Reparations are about a national crime. They are meant to bill everyone for slavery, a crime that the entire nation committed, and for which the descendants are still suffering.

But this being the WSJ editorial page, their goal is to take the focus off of a serious discussion of the current impact of historical problems. They want to jump straight to the defensive. "It's not an 'us' problem. It's certainly not 'me', so I'm going to opt out of it."

I don't particularly support California doing this on its own -- not because California didn't benefit from slavery, but because it confuses the issue of a national problem. California happens to be where a lot of wealth ended up -- wealth that took place in a post-slavery era that was heavily structured by centuries of slavery.

That applies to the whole nation. We delayed compensation for the crime the nation committed, and now the Wall Street Journal would like to pretend that just evaporated. But the people didn't evaporate, especially since we continued explicit, legal oppression for over a century.

This is a hard question, and it's not made better by WSJ jumping straight to paranoia.

> a crime that the entire nation committed,

Quite impossible as literally no one involved is still alive. Quite impossible because many contemporaries had nothing to do with it. Quite impossible because many contemporaries fought against it.

If your father committed a crime are you liable? If your father broke the speed limit before it was introduced, should you be fined for it given it was later introduced?

Parts of my family moved from Ireland to the USA in the 1790s to found abolitionist churches - am i exempt?

Newsom is in no way a centrist.

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