Who taught you history, Tenny? You're telling me the backwater country of the United States in the 19th century was more influential than the "Sun Never Sets" British Empire?
All I know is that the British went from owning mass amounts of the world to being the size of Michigan. Meanwhile we have grown and innovated ourselves in to world dominance.
After we ended slavery and gave women the right to vote? We scooted past every nation after we abolished slavery. Easy sailing.
That wasn't until much later after the end of slavery. Take the L, you made a dumb statement and got burned. Now you're just creating a bigger mess trying to fix the original mess. The cover up is always worse.
Nah, what you mean is there has to be interest in doing something at some point. Why do anything when you can trot it out every election cycle? It's like the GOP and abortion or the Democrats historically with Social Security. Why kill the golden goose? Personally, I'm for this compromise as a solution. I don't really agree that even one single thing actually needs to be done, but in the case I'm wrong, this is a quite palletable idea.
And honestly, it wasn’t until the LATTER part of the 20th century that the US became what it is/was... WWII was the catalyst that propelled the US into superpower status. The Industrial Revolution put us on more or less equal footing with the rest of the world and WWI certainly helped put us in the “upper crust” but our arrival as a true superpower was only realized by late 1944 when it was pretty obvious that WWII was won, and the US was essentially the only combatant country not left in shambles.
It’ll never happen, but even if it did, the payment of reparations would cause more problems than it solves.
1. The idea that America deserves praise for ending slavery is onion worthy. 2. I look at reparations for slaves in a similar way I look at the UK paying reparations for colonialism, in that I don’t really think it’s workable, but that doesn’t mean that reparations aren’t owed.
That’s not at all what reparations are about. It’s about the government atoning for a wrong, not blacks needing subsidies. Even if black people contained a proportional amount of wealth and power, that wouldn’t change the fact that, for the vast majority of American history, they were treated like second class citizens, and for a significant portion of that, treated like cattle.
While certainly not to the same extent/duration that blacks suffered, if the bar for getting an “apology check” has dropped from actual slavery to the government atoning for folks being treated like second class citizens at best and like common property and being used like animals at worst, the Chinese ought to be ginning up their claims too, along with a few other people groups... what’s the cutoff?
Oh, there are plenty of reasons why it isn’t workable. There is also the fact that the ancestors of significant portion of White Americans were still in Europe long after slavery was ended. Hell, many of them were treated like shit when they came over, too. How do we justify asking them to pay?
Also, if this were ever to actually happen and the payout was more than $25k, do the Japanese who actually DID get settlements from the internment get to come back and demand their cases be reviewed for an increase?
Truth be told, I do honestly believe something ought to be done by the government in a high profile manner to acknowledge and apologize for what transpired generations ago (and work harder to hold those accountable for current wrongs... ***looking at you, police departments all over the country!***)but I’m not sure cash payouts are the way to go.
I agree. The black population is too large for a cash payment to be workable. It would be either too low and insulting or too high and crippling.
I couldn’t imagine how much money would be sufficient to truly compensate for what was done back then... if the government were to waive student debt for qualifying recipients I’d be ok with that for starters. Defining what constitutes a “qualifying recipient” could be problematic though...
This is true. Unfortunately, the 1800s, especially, is littered with the United States running roughshod over the rights of and treaties with a lot of people. We got rich of the backs and properties of others. Europe, too. Of course, neither us or Europe wants to truly recompense what they stole, since it probably would bankrupt or severely damage their countries (kind of similar to the state they left the countries and/or people they exploited). So, it's not really workable, nor would there be the stomach for it. However, there is a precedence of a sort with the Sioux being awarded compensation by Supreme Court decision of what is now over a billion dollars, which the Sioux has refused.
Do a test run. Give every poor person in a housing project some free cash. See how it works out. They had no chance due to slavery 200 years ago anyway
