California about to be the first state to administer reparations!s

[Foxaèr]

I'm already a slave, to the elderly.

By the way, this slavery discussion brings to mind a story about work where a black aide refused to help a resident because the woman had a cotton flower in her room.

[Angrboda]

Instead of monetary reparations, why not provide passes which make one eligible for free education, training, healthcare, child care, pre-natal services, and so on?

[onlinebiker]

Oh, look, another thread about race from Huggy.  The only topic he can talk about.

He' s looking for a paycheck.....

And hey - if he gets one the IRS should get their cut, right?

With penalties dating back to 1863...... With interest he probably owes a great deal already......

[Fireball]

I have a suggestion. Instead of cash payments or the like, reparations could take the form of indentured servitude. Every Black American who can establish that they are the descendant of an enslaved person would be paired with a White American who can be determined to be descended from a slave owner or slave trader or a lawmaker (at any level) who fought against emancipation - in short, anyone who supported or directly benefited from slavery.

For a period of time to be determined (I'm thinking two years), the White person would be required to work for the Black person - clean their house, tend their garden, raise their children - for no pay beyond room and board. The Black person would be able to punish the White person for not performing these duties satisfactorily. The form and frequency of the punishment would be solely at the discretion of Black person. During the period in question, the White person would not be able to vote, attend school, marry without permission, and could be assigned to another Black person on a whim. White families would not necessarily be paired with Black families as a group.

Maybe two years of indentured servitude would shut up some of these waterheads who keep claiming that slavery 'wasn't that bad'.

Boru

 Channeling Jonathan Swift, are we?

[The Architect Of Fate]

It's worth noting that the chart Huggy included in his most recent post includes, amongst the results of lawsuits from America's fuckups and settlements to small American Indian tribes who probably aren't that much better off economically after the payments than they were before is Germany's Wiedergutmachung, the money they've sent to compensate victims of the Holocaust. In addition to the compensation provided to the victims, which is, to be honest, miniscule on an individual level (one survivor reported that her years of servitude under the Nazis only netted her a couple grand, so small she only ended up picking it up to help a grandchild go through college, and a 1988 law to compensate Holocaust surviors for life only provided $290 per month, and also worth noting, It doesn't really apply to their descendants), they also spent a LOT of money (the majority of that $90 million, in fact) providing for the state of Israel. For just one example, my therapist talked about how she went to Israel, and found a LOT of German cars there. She's Jewish, so seeing this was kind of off-putting. And seeing them in the Jewish Homeland just baffled and disturbed her. Then she found out that they were so common because German manufacturers were practically giving their cars away to Israel as part of their reparations. And this helped fund the nation's infrastructure and make up for the fact that, unlike their  neighbours, they didn't have any oil money to bank off of.

This is the sort of reparations I (and most of us who are criticising this plan) would gladly support: an ongoing program (or set thereof) that helps support black people who have been economically effected by slavery (which would be the vast majority of them) and bring them up to the same even economic level they should have been on 150 years ago.

It might be nice to imagine the government giving you and all the other black people a big lump sum, but, let's face it, for that to have a lasting effect, the owners of said checks would have to invest it in something that's going to keep the money growing. And I suspect that in a world where a sizable number of wealthy people think blowing over $300,000 on a monstrosity like this (hidden because, frankly, Bored Apes are fucking hideous, even if I did pick one that looks vaguely like me):

---

And note, over $300,000 is fairly cheap, especially since there's one that's apparently worth more than 4000 times the global GDP.

---

is somehow a good investment, I can't be certain that a massive aggregate of people who are disproportionately poor are going to be savvy enough to use whatever money their check has to bring themselves out of the hole the white man has created for them. Hell, I probably couldn't pull it off for myself with all that I know. I've taken business and accounting courses and if you asked me what companies could yield a good return on your investment, I couldn't fucking tell you.

Plus the fact that some tribes were compensated means little really. A check really doesn't make up for cultural genocide and contenential scale land theft

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

I have a suggestion. Instead of cash payments or the like, reparations could take the form of indentured servitude. Every Black American who can establish that they are the descendant of an enslaved person would be paired with a White American who can be determined to be descended from a slave owner or slave trader or a lawmaker (at any level) who fought against emancipation - in short, anyone who supported or directly benefited from slavery.

For a period of time to be determined (I'm thinking two years), the White person would be required to work for the Black person - clean their house, tend their garden, raise their children - for no pay beyond room and board. The Black person would be able to punish the White person for not performing these duties satisfactorily. The form and frequency of the punishment would be solely at the discretion of Black person. During the period in question, the White person would not be able to vote, attend school, marry without permission, and could be assigned to another Black person on a whim. White families would not necessarily be paired with Black families as a group.

Maybe two years of indentured servitude would shut up some of these waterheads who keep claiming that slavery 'wasn't that bad'.

Boru

 Channeling Jonathan Swift, are we?

Not really. Swift was a satirist, whereas I’m dead serious.

Boru

[brewer]

Oh, look, another thread about race from Huggy.  The only topic he can talk about.

He' s looking for a paycheck.....

And hey - if he gets one the IRS should get their cut, right?

With penalties dating back to 1863...... With interest he probably owes a great deal already......

Sovereign states don't pay taxes.

I'm moving to Huggyland!

[Huggy Bear]

Instead of monetary reparations, why not provide passes which make one eligible for free education, training, healthcare, child care, pre-natal services, and so on?

Stop it, money can purchase all of that, funny how when it comes to other groups, no one has a problem with cash...

California city to give transgender and nonbinary residents up to $900 a month

[Rev. Rye]

Instead of monetary reparations, why not provide passes which make one eligible for free education, training, healthcare, child care, pre-natal services, and so on?

Stop it, money can purchase all of that, funny how when it comes to other groups, no one has a problem with cash...

California city to give transgender and nonbinary residents up to $900 a month

And do you still have enough money to actually take care of a lot of those things? If the answer is yes, are there still a lot of black people who don't? And, to be perfectly blunt, doesn't Western Europe cover a lot of the things Angrboda suggested as a baseline for everybody? And is there a good reason America can't do the same, with the possible exception of "because the Republican Party is vehemently opposed to using the government to actually help people, except maybe if we can somehow produce utopian results almost instantly with minimal effort, and even that's a huge maybe"?

[Thumpalumpacus]

@Ranjr

I wouldn't say that reparations are "help", reparations is what the U.S. owes for forcing a group of people to build it for free.

I don't often agree with you, but I think you hit it on the head here.