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

[Rev. Rye]

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.