the case for reparations

[bcbm]

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case-for-reparations/361631/

this is a long article but also an important one that succintly lays out the foundations and operation of white supremacy in this country.

[Firebrand]

The ideology of reparations seems to me to be based on the idea that people should be rewarded or punished on the basis of the actions or suffering of their ancestors, or the ancestors of people who happen to have the same skin colour as them, or people who happened to live in a similar geographical area a number of years ago. It reinforces, nationalism and other divisions between sectors of the working classes and is fundementally lacking in true justice. The victims of the transatlantic slave trade are dead, most of the jewish people who were in concentration camps are dead, nearly every actual victim of most of the atrocities for which reparations are being discussed are dead. So give the money to their descendants people say, but what makes the descendent of a slave more deserving than the descendent of a slave owner, what if someone is both (that happened a lot), last time I checked people were not responsible for the sins of their ancestors. I can pretty much guarantee that everyone alive in the world today has more than one ancestor who has committed terrible human rights abuses even by the standards of their own times. Instead of trading money back and forth for the sins of generations past, we should be fighting for the human rights abuses being perpetrated now, by governments we elected, by countries we pay taxes to, to be ended.

[bricolage]

So give the money to their descendants people say, but what makes the descendent of a slave more deserving than the descendent of a slave owner
The article isn't just about slavery, and it says as much in the sub-heading: Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy

And it isn't just about money either: What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.

It's fair to have criticisms of the article, but it's worth reading it before you do.

[Psycho P and the Freight Train]

The article isn't just about slavery, and it says as much in the sub-heading: Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy

And it isn't just about money either: What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.

It's fair to have criticisms of the article, but it's worth reading it before you do.

Yeah, but the definition of reparations is "money given to descendants of certain ethnic groups from past crimes done to their ancestors, given by the descendants of ethnic groups whose ancestors oppressed the other group in some way."

So if the article talks about a national reckoning to realize the injustices and inequality directed towards, say, black people, then it isn't really talking about reparations is it? That's basically saying, let's end racism and inequality which is totally fine. What's not fine is making monetary payments to random swaths of people given from one "race" to another.

[bcbm]

i thought the points above were addressed quite well in the article:


Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.”

A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.

“It’s because it’s black folks making the claim,” Nkechi Taifa, who helped found N’COBRA, says. “People who talk about reparations are considered left lunatics. But all we are talking about is studying [reparations]. As John Conyers has said, we study everything. We study the water, the air. We can’t even study the issue? This bill does not authorize one red cent to anyone.”

That HR 40 has never—under either Democrats or Republicans—made it to the House floor suggests our concerns are rooted not in the impracticality of reparations but in something more existential. If we conclude that the conditions in North Lawndale and black America are not inexplicable but are instead precisely what you’d expect of a community that for centuries has lived in America’s crosshairs, then what are we to make of the world’s oldest democracy?

[bcbm]

Yeah, but the definition of reparations is "money given to descendants of certain ethnic groups from past crimes done to their ancestors, given by the descendants of ethnic groups whose ancestors oppressed the other group in some way."



the making of amends for wrong or injury done


last time I checked people were not responsible for the sins of their ancestors

last time i checked this isn't just about slavery but about the consistent and ongoing oppression and exploitation of blacks in the united states. ongoing to this day, and certainly with consequences stemming back to slavery to this day. this isn't just 'in the past,' this is now.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Yeah, but the definition of reparations is "money given to descendants of certain ethnic groups from past crimes done to their ancestors, given by the descendants of ethnic groups whose ancestors oppressed the other group in some way."

So if the article talks about a national reckoning to realize the injustices and inequality directed towards, say, black people, then it isn't really talking about reparations is it? That's basically saying, let's end racism and inequality which is totally fine. What's not fine is making monetary payments to random swaths of people given from one "race" to another.well, tax money isn't "white people's money" - only tea parties think that. I think that pretty much all the tax cuts and deals over the last generation, while generally being a transfer of wealth and priorities to the top of society, have more specifically been a theft from black workers first. The article goes through really pretty well (a mainstream journalist basically describing the effects of racism in similar terms as revolutionaries and militants have for the last generation) how this is less about the past than it is an ongoing inequality.

But at any rate I don't think the author makes a case for a specific reparations scheme and if he did make a specific case for individual repartition (everybody's cut a check of equal amount) then I think it's more simply impractical but also politically misdirected, but not for the reason of "giving people money is wrong". If magically instituted from the top it would basically be a payoff used by the government that doesn't challenge color-blind ideology or individualism. The ruling class could still victim-blame, the institutions could still engage in systemic oppression and then victim-blame and say, "well we paid you off, so it's really a 'level playing field' now".

But I do think reparations are worth talking about and something revolutionaries should organize around if it becomes a more common demand. First, I don't think it would magically be instituted from the top, it would take either outside pressure or massive pressure from below for the u.s. State to make this reform. So we'd basically need a massive reform or anti-racist movement with revolutionary wings. I think in such a context it would be easy to make a case that reparations need to be collective-oriented, not individually-oriented. Oprah or Obama might still face anti-black bigotry, but they are not dealing with the same kind of systemic oppression as most people and Obama and some guy who lost his house don't have the same need or use for a reparation payment. But that money could be used instead to rebuild black neighborhoods of Detroit, rebuild urban schools, fund decent public housing, and this approach would put the focus back on the class and systemic dynamics of racism in the u.s. It would also potentially help win poor whites, Latinos, Asians, native Americans and immigrants who share the same problems with schools and jobs and housing to solidarity in fighting against anti-black racism.

U.s. Reconstruction raised all sorts of dramatic questions and possibilities for the way people thought society should be. Reparations could be something like that where a huge transfer of wealth from the top to millions of workers and millions of oppressed people, opens up class fissures in society and raises all sorts of questions about who actually creates wealth and why people are kept down and repressed and controlled. But IMO, it's all abstract and hypothetical without a militant labor or anti-racist movement, because the u.s. rulers have no internal reason to do so and their class rule and power has traditionally been held together through the control and repression of black people.

[Hagalaz]

I know that many black nationalists preach separation of the races as the only way to at least start reparations.
Interesting but I've never seen how that could be practical.

[Dr. Rosenpenis]

The victims of the transatlantic slave trade are dead, most of the jewish people who were in concentration camps are dead, nearly every actual victim of most of the atrocities for which reparations are being discussed are dead. that's certainly questionable. i posit that racial inequality today is directly rooted in slavery, meaning that all victims of anti-black racism today are in a way victims of the transatlantic slave trade.
So give the money to their descendants people say, but what makes the descendent of a slave more deserving than the descendent of a slave owner, what if someone is both (that happened a lot), last time I checked people were not responsible for the sins of their ancestors. it doesnt have to do with merit tho