Quote:
Originally posted by MiaBella
Stop. If the reparations were paid when they were first brought up back in the late 1890 and and early 1900s, 40 acres and a mule, the discussion wouldn't be had today.
The Jews got the money from their government less then 20 years after the Holocaust. Descendants of Native Americans also got their reparations and land hundreds of years AFTER the colonization of America. Japanese Americans received reparations 50 years AFTER WW2. You're telling me it would be wrong for descendants of African American slaves to get reparations as well, hundreds of years after slavery? And lets do the math. Slavery ended in the 1800s. That was over two centuries ago. Jim Crow ended less than 60 years ago. How do you justify this?
http://www.npr.org/sections/codeswit...rnment-redress
http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/21/us...internees.html |
I agree, reparations SHOULD have been paid and more should have been done to help former slaves integrate into society. I'm not denying that, but the past is the past. You HAVE to move on at some point. The chance for reparations is long past. No one today is owed them, because no one today went through slavery
I'm not defending how reconstruction was handled, I'm saying it's in the past, WAY in the past, and people need to let go and move on with their lives. What happened was not right, and it should not be forgotten about, but reparations won't fix
anything, and it's impossible to tell who is actually defended from slaves anyways. Beyond that, the reparations were paid to people who went THROUGH the Holocaust and whatnot, not descendants hundreds of years into the future. It's not right, but it IS too late to go back and pay reparations to newly freed slaves, and reparations
don't work on a hand mew down basis. If they weren't given to Person Z, they aren't owed to Z's great, great, great, great, great, grandchildren.
People holding onto anger, bitterness, and resentment for what happened centuries ago and directing it at modern descendants is insanity. I'm not responsible for what those slavers did anymore than you are. You can argue modern descendants have benefited from it, but by that logic, you should be paying reparations too. Your parents beat someone else out at some point; that person's descendants are now disadvantaged while you have an advantage in that area. The world is a fundamentally unequal playing ground in that regard, no amount of reparations will ever change that. It's how it works, even genetically (look at mental disorders)
