You can also give poor people money, but changing the subject to poor people instead of black people is an instant smokescreen.
And most of cotton generated by slaves went to Britain, whose textile mills also captured most of the profits off of that industry. Should the USA therefore demand reparations from Britain?
But we could go the other route, and tax the descendants of the slave owners. Unfortunately, the largest and most easily identifiable group of descendants of slave owners are blacks themselves! (You can thank a common practice of raping slaves for a lot of that.)
The best solution that we ever came up with for this mess was school busing. Since we got rid of it, the black-white income gap has been rising. But nobody wants to talk about it. Instead, let's focus on the token gesture of affirmative action, which never made a difference in the lives of most blacks. And which tainted the success of blacks whose success was not because of affirmative action.
https://www.historynet.com/the-day-new-york-tried-to-secede/
Getting into the weeds of defining who is and is not deserving of wealth redistribution is just going to waste society’s resources by pitting tribe versus tribe, and ironically mostly helps those at the top.
“Poor” is easier to define and rectify, and at the end of the day, I think the goal should be to provide a floor to members of society and maximize opportunities to all.
South Africa is also a good example of what happens if people decide to go back and reopen that box (and tbf, when it came to money the initial movement was quite short-lived, the current President of South Africa got very rich very quickly).
Staple an endpoint on it then move on. The trick is doing SOMETHING meaningful and country wide is whats missing.
Instead, just offer free college to everyone.
I'd argue that slavery made a small % of influential plantation owners very rich at the expense of the suffering of a large number of people, and less importantly the economy.
Places in the U.S. that didn't have slaves are richer today than places that did.
There is a lot of research on this subject but it is worth remembering that slaves were capital that had a price too. So it wasn't "free labour" in any sense.
Most plantation owners didn't end up rich either, there were economies of scale and the price of cotton collapsed over the 19th century.
Over the long-term though, slave labour has typically inhibited economic development.
American slavery in the U.S. South was threatened more by the invention of the cotton gin and the global floor for cotton prices dropping. This was diversified away somewhat with Tobacco, but still a major factor in the economics of slavery.
The sad part is that the US South was fearful of this economic reality - up to runaway slaves and illegal slave trade decimating the profit margins - which meant the powder keg for revolt was ready. But as we can see from the Southern "Tax" men stealing from the citizenry, the French less incentivised because of global cotton prices; the future in American slavery was futile.
Just last week, a woman was arrested in Germany for practicing slavery whilst living back in Syria. It shouldn’t be hard to find news about people being sold on WhatsApp in the Middle East. BBC did a special on it. This isn’t even going into the obvious slavery, and the market for it, that persists even further East.
There are plenty of books on this subject, I think "Capitalism and Slavery" goes into this well, but it's pretty well documented. Slavery was a huge part of the southern economy, it wasn't just a few individual slaveholders getting rich; it was embedded in the very way of life in the south. It's akin to saying "America isn't rich because of Apple, there's just a few wealthy executives at Apple" - it totally ignores how embedded Apple is in our economy - from the app store, to digital payments, to the entire businesses that live on that platform. It's not controversial at all to say the country was made richer because of slavery.
It's not to say that every plantation owner was massively wealthy, or America was a super power due to slavery, but America's implementation of chattel slavery was incredibly vast and was one of its major economies until the industrial revolution.
The part you’re leaving out is that, as a direct consequence of this practice, the South was a backwards and impoverished part of the country for that entire period.
> America's implementation of chattel slavery was incredibly vast and was one of its major economies until the industrial revolution.
That Industrial Revolution started not too long after American independence, but it only happened in the North, not the impoverished slave economy of the South. That’s one of the fundamental reasons the North won the war. Slavery didn’t make America richer; it made America significantly poorer. And the Northern capitalists knew it at the time, which is why they were a major part of the antislavery coalition that ultimately formed the Republican Party.
The part that you're leaving out is that they were backwards and impoverished BY CHOICE. They could have automated just as much as the North did. They chose not to, because it was politically advantageous for land owners to keep their slave populations, which effectively also kept wages low for non-land owning white folk.
The abolition of slavery was economically good - if not for the fact you freed up a massive labor pool out of what was essentially farming into working in factories. But that initial suppression, combined with with the continued discrimination that led to plenty of African Americans (and Natives, and arguably the earliest asian settlers) to be regularly robbed of whatever the could build contributes directly to the reason that we are still circling around the reparations concept today.
Even if you don't believe slavery was "that bad", the effects of slavery prevented the entire demographic from building wealth; and a lot of was stolen in a government sanctioned manned, e.g. the Tulsa bombings in 1921, 50 years after the abolition of slavery.
Also,
> Even if you don't believe slavery was "that bad"....
What on earth gave you the idea I would believe such a thing? That's the exact opposite of what my argument would imply.
Or conversely if a large nation today enslaved a substantial portion of it's population do you believe that their GDP would increase or decrease?
Then we'd have to address every single group that has been discriminated against in US history - including Japanese, Chinese, Irish, German, Mexican, and more.
Turns out - every group has been discriminated against at some point in history.
So the very idea of reparations for one particular discriminated group - out of all the rest - is racist in and of itself. Additionally, it solves nothing except give people a temporary shopping spree.
You cannot right history's wrongs by throwing some money around.
Let's, collectively, put on our grown-up pants and work together to ensure the future holds equal opportunity - not equal outcome - for all.
This is staggeringly incorrect.
> we are able to sustain several Government Bureaus and Departments, and accommodate Tribal Autonomy, Courts, Casinos, and more as some small measure of respect
In no small way are these "tokens" responsible for the unacceptable conditions many native Americans endure today. In so many ways, these tokens turned out to be the most cruel act against these people.
> Reparations can be non-monetary too
They are always monetary demands. There is no reparation available that restores any injustice, nor does not punish those who had absolutely nothing to do with any injustice perpetuated in history.
Reparations are about buying votes, exactly in the same way dangling student debt relief buys votes. It's pretty simple... and in non-trivial ways is discriminatory in itself.
if you think that's true, then do it, instead of complaining that another group of people are compensated for past wrongs
it sounds like a "perfect solution fallacy" to me, anyways: we don't actually need to, you just personally feel we should as a result of your one individual sense of morality
relevant, I don't think so, but again, you're free to advocate for whatever for whomever, nobody is stopping you, as long as you aren't cynically using discrimination against 1 group to justify not dealing with the discrimination against another
otherwise, again, that sounds like a perfect solution fallacy: 'we can't fix everything at once so we should do nothing'
If anything, this is an argument against reparations. Slavery has been around and accepted since before the Bible was written; we just keep finding ways to redefine it. An entire war was waged in which people died fighting to restore slaves' freedom. The debt has been paid.
What reparations should be paid out for is the systemic effect of abusing the justice system to keep blacks in cages long after slavery ended. The war on drugs, the war on crime, the wrongful convictions from both, BLM...that much is extrajudicial and occurred in our lifetimes. They really get/got fucked by the system in a not-so-legal way, which merits correction.
It does not matter how long slavery has been around. What matters is that the nation accrued gigantic collections of material wealth on the backs of American slaves. The American Civil War was NOT fought to restore the freedom of slaves. The Civil War was started because the South decided that they had "state's rights" to slavery. It was never fought to "end slavery." It was fought to put down a rebellion, the same way that Washington put down multiple rebellions during his tenure as POTUS.
No debt has ever been paid. Those union soldiers were never fighting to end slavery. They were fighting to maintain the union. Those are fundamentally different objectives. Your perspective is not held by any scholarship on the matter past jingoistic elementary school textbooks.
> The Civil War was started because the South decided that they had "state's rights" to slavery. It was never fought to "end slavery." It was fought to put down a rebellion, the same way that Washington put down multiple rebellions during his tenure as POTUS.
You just made the argument that the South seceded over a single issue-- slavery. The North responded by declaring war on its own countrymen (it was the North that declared war, remember)-- and not because they wanted to keep slaves, but because the South was out of line.
Were that the case, we could have avoided the bloodiest battle in American history by simply negotiating an outcome where the South was allowed to keep its slaves. We don't care about ending slavery, anyway, so who gives a fuck? Keep your goddamn slaves. Surrender your arms and apologize.
At any point during the war, the Union could have ended it by making the same concession-- they didn't care about ending slavery, right? We'll just keep throwing our sons at the problem and have them shipped back in neat little boxes though.
Once the rebellion was over, the Union could have packed up and went home and still let the South keep its slaves (because it was never about slavery!), or left the slaves to their fate as abandoned property, but instead they were emancipated and had their personhood recognized by the Union that you claim only got involved to big-dick the South.
So the Civil War was entirely about preserving the ego of a bunch of Narcissists whose progressive social values and efforts in abolishing slavery in their own backyard somehow translated to a lack of interest in going to war with a clique of rebels that refused to adopt the same principles, until someone cucked Honest Abe. That much could not stand. We were totally cool with letting the South continue having slaves-- they just needed to be taught a lesson in respect.
Come on. This isn't how politics or statecraft works. The situation is more nuanced than either of us is getting into (economic advantages to war, slavery, etc.) but this is more histrionic than history.
The Union soldiers could and did fight for both things. I reminder that this one one of the most popular marching songs for Union troops at the time:
John Brown's knapsack is strapped upon his back!
His soul is marching on!
His pet lambs will meet him on the way;
They go marching on!
They will hang Jeff Davis to a sour apple tree!
As they march along!
Now, three rousing cheers for the Union;
As we are marching on!
I would rather no one bear the economic burden of the myriad of diverse injustices committed by our society in the past than that only specifically the descendants of those enslaved in the past be freed of the economic harm of that particular injustice, even if its effects could be fairly isolated, computed, and compensated.