SLAVERY REPARATIONS

[Duchess]

Color me stupid, but I don't really understand this.

[Jimbone]

I would have thought ending slavery and freeing everyone was compensation enough, but what do I know. Plus now they're tacking on segregation and Jim Crow laws as reasons for reparations to be paid as well.

Elizabeth Warren is also floating that gay couples are entitled to reparations too.

Reparations for everyone!

[Rootilda]

I don't get it either. None of my family was even in this country during slavery and we sure as hell weren't involved in the slave trade.

[Fry Guy]

Fucking ridiculous

[HairOfTheDog]

Color me stupid, but I don't really understand this.

Well, I think you're pretty effin' smart.  

But it's not easy to understand what slavery reparations would look like in the U.S. because the options haven't been outlined in detail in a general population forum.

For me, the concept/goal is easy to understand.  As I see it, reparations would be a means by which:

(1) African Americans are finally compensated for their enslaved ancestors busting their backs to build the economy of the U.S., thereby building the wealth of white American land owners and their white relatives for future generations, and 

(2) economic/systemic discrimination against blacks dating back to those early days of this country can be seriously addressed and minimized in future generations by more leveling of the playing field (primarily in terms of educational and income-earning opportunities).

[HairOfTheDog]

Developing a reasonable, executable, and measurable plan to achieve and pay for those objectives ^ is the hard part, in my opinion.   

So, I'm looking forward to hearing more details and proposals from the politicians coming out in support of reparations.

We discussed/debated the slavery reparations issue here a few years back.  There were some interesting points and exchanges in that thread.  Here's the link:  http://mockforums.net/thread-12317.html

Also, I read an interesting article recently that covered the history of the reparations debate and some options for moving it forward.  I'll look for it and post some snips in this thread for context.

[Fry Guy]

So that would be ONLY the descendants of slaves. That would ONLY come from descendants of slave owners. Where the descendants of slaves are also descendants of slave owners, they would pay themselves. It could not come from taxes because many people who paid that money into the government were either descendants of slaves or not descended from slave owners.

Sounds perfectly workable, reasonable and serious.

[Maggot]

The Democrats enslaved them the Republicans freed them    I say make the Dems give the money back to the pubs. Then it can fund planned parenthood.

[HairOfTheDog]

I found the article, which was published in the NYT last month.  Since the NYT is by subscription, I'm posting the bulk of it below.

What Reparations for Slavery Might Look Like in 2020

Background/History:  If you’re surprised that the issue of reparations for black Americans has taken so long to resolve, blame the president. President Andrew Johnson.

As the Civil War wound down in 1865, Gen. William T. Sherman made the promise that would come to be known as “40 acres and a mule” — redistributing a huge tract of Atlantic coastline to black Americans recently freed from bondage. President Abraham Lincoln and Congress gave their approval, and soon 40,000 freedmen in the South had started to plant and build.

Within months of Lincoln’s assassination, though, President Johnson rescinded the order and returned the land to its former owners. Congress made another attempt at compensation, but Johnson vetoed it.

Now, in the early phase of the 2020 presidential campaign, the issue of compensating black Americans for suffering under slavery and other forms of racial injustice has resurfaced. The current effort focuses on a congressional that would commission a study on reparations, a version of legislation first introduced in 1989. 

Several Democratic presidential hopefuls have declared their support, including Senators Kamala Harris of California, Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Cory Booker of New Jersey and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro.

(continued)

[HairOfTheDog]

What’s the economic rationale?

When James Forman, a civil rights pioneer who later served briefly as the Black Panther Party’s foreign minister, demanded $500 million in reparations in his 1969 Black Manifesto, he grounded his argument in an indisputable fact: Unpaid slave labor helped build the American economy, creating vast wealth that African-Americans were barred from sharing.

The manifesto called for white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues to pay for projects like a black university and a Southern land bank. “We have helped to build the most industrial country in the world,” it declared, at the same time that “racist white America has exploited our resources, our minds, our bodies, our labor.”

Another civil rights leader, Bayard Rustin, responded, “If my great-grandfather picked cotton for 50 years, then he may deserve some money, but he’s dead and gone and nobody owes me anything.”

The question of reparations, however, extends far beyond the roughly four million people who were enslaved when the Civil War started, as Ta-Nehisi Coates explained in an influential essay published in The Atlantic in 2014. Legalized discrimination and state-sanctioned brutality, murder, dispossession and disenfranchisement continued long after the war ended. That history profoundly handicapped black Americans’ ability to create and accumulate wealth as well as to gain access to jobs, housing, education and health care.

For every dollar a typical white household holds, a black one has 10 cents. It is this cumulative effect that justifies the payment of reparations to descendants of slaves long dead, supporters say.

“Equality is not likely to be obtained without some form of reparations,” David H. Swinton, an economist and former president of Benedict College, wrote in the 1990 collection “The Wealth of Races.”

(continued)

[HairOfTheDog]

Who would be paid?

Nearly 47 million Americans identified themselves as black or African-American in the latest census. So who would qualify for a payment?

William A. Darity Jr., an economist at Duke University and a leading scholar on reparations, suggests two qualifying conditions: having at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the United States, and having identified oneself as African-American on a legal document for at least a decade before the approval of any reparations. The 10-year rule, he said, would help screen out anyone trying to cash in on a windfall.

According to these criteria, Oprah Winfrey, who has traced her DNA to slaves captured in West Africa in the early 19^th century, would qualify. Former President Barack Obama, the son of a white American mother and a Kenyan father, might not. Mr. Darity estimates that roughly 30 million Americans would be eligible.

As for taking account of current wealth, a reparations program could link potential payouts to income and asset levels.

(continued)

[HairOfTheDog]

How much would recipients get?

Over the decades, some economists have tried to come up with a quantifiable basis for a fair sum. Mr. Swinton, for example, estimated in 1983 that 40 to 60 percent of the difference between black and white income could be attributed to past and continuing discrimination, and put the figure at $500 billion.

Some economists evaluated labor’s share of the slave system’s profits in cotton and tobacco. Others have looked at what slaves would have earned if they had been paid wages plus interest, after subtracting housing and food costs. 

One study looked at 20^th-century statistics, estimating how much less blacks earned because of decades of discrimination. Another examined the value of black wealth lost or destroyed after slavery ended, through practices like redlining that denied lending or insurance to African-American communities, or organized riots like the 1921 rampage that leveled the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, known as “Black Wall Street.”

A recurring theme has been to return to that first official action promising 40 acres and a mule. Sherman drew up his order after posing this directive to a group of black ministers and leaders: “State in what manner you think you can take care of yourselves.”

(continued)

[HairOfTheDog]

What would Sherman’s promise be worth today?

Mr. Darity has been mulling that question for years, and is writing a book on reparations with Kirsten Mullen, due out next year. He begins with the cost of an acre in 1865: about $10. Forty acres divided among a family of four comes to 10 acres per person, or about $100 for each of the four million former slaves. 

Taking account of compounding interest and inflation, Mr. Darity has put the present value at $2.6 trillion. Assuming roughly 30 million descendants of ex-slaves, he concluded it worked out to about $80,000 a person. To get a sense of the scale, consider that the United States budget this year is $4.7 trillion.

Thomas Craemer, an associate professor of public policy at the University of Connecticut, used the same starting point — 40 acres and a mule — but a different method in a study published last year. 

He used the current average price of agricultural land and figured that 40 acres of farmland and buildings would amount to roughly $123,000. If all of the four million slaves counted in the 1860 census had been able to take advantage of that offer, it would have totaled more than $486 billion today — or about $16,200 for each descendant of slaves.

(continued)

[HairOfTheDog]

What form would payment take?

Compensation programs can take many forms. In the United States, after a congressional study, people of Japanese descent who were forced into internment camps during World War II received $20,000 in 1988 and a formal apology.

Since 1952, Germany has paid more than $70 billion in reparationsthrough various programs, primarily to Jewish victims of the Nazi regime, and continues to deliver hundreds of millions of dollars each year. Payments vary from a lump sum distributed to individuals to a monthly pension based on years working in a slave labor camp. Money is also given to organizations to cover home care for older survivors or for grants. A small portion goes for research, education and documentation.

A reparations program in the United States could likewise adopt a single method or several at once. Families could get a one-time check, receive vouchers for medical insurance or college, or have access to a trust fund to finance a business or a home. Mr. Darity argues that “for both substantive and symbolic reasons, some important component must be direct payment to eligible recipients.”

Other scholars have emphasized different features. Roy L. Brooks, a law professor at the University of San Diego and the author of “Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations,” has reservations about what he calls the “settlement model,” a legalistic approach that looks backward to compensate victims for demonstrable financial losses. He prefers what he calls the “atonement model,” emphasizing longer-term investments in education, housing and businesses that build up wealth.

(continued)

[HairOfTheDog]

What would the economic impact be?

According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Consumer Finances, the median wealth of black households is $16,000, compared with $163,000 for whites. 

Reparations are not likely to eliminate the racial wealth gap, but could narrow it somewhat. Low-income families, with the fewest assets, would benefit the most.

The biggest economic objection is that any meaningful program would be unaffordable. Like other government spending, reparations would ultimately be paid for by some kind of tax or fee, or borrowing, say, through government bonds. Such a program would almost certainly require increasing the federal debt and be structured over time.

Those less worried about a growing deficit could argue that reparations would be a boon over the long run — lifting people out of poverty, and improving their earning potential and buying power.

Source for posts #9 through #15:  https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/busin...avery.html

[BigMark]

How about you start slaving away on my belly?

[Maggot]

How bout they build some Casino's and not have to pay taxes? They could pull together in a civil group and come up with a peaceful group willing to work hard and accomplish what the Indians did without fighting.

[HairOfTheDog]

How bout they build some Casino's and not have to pay taxes? They could pull together in a civil group and come up with a peaceful group willing to work hard and accomplish what the Indians did without fighting.

If African American individuals had been given the 40 acres of land they were promised as compensation after being freed from slavery, some kind of reparation through tax free status to businesses operating on the land might be a consideration.

But, they weren't and they don't possess sovereign land upon which to build, like Native Americans do.  African Americans also haven't received financial reparations from the federal government to kick start such a business venture like Native Americans have.

But, something along the same lines isn't out of the question, I guess.  For example, perhaps  U.S. land with good marijuana growth potential could be allotted to African Americans to start businesses, with government training and start up funding.  The African American owned businesses would keep the profits and pay some tax, which would go to funding economic development and educational opportunities for impoverished African Americans.

[HairOfTheDog]

How about you start slaving away on my belly?

Not unless your belly be black.  

I'm getting into the spirit of reparations here.  

I've already rubbed my share of white hairy bellies. 

[BigMark]

Crap, i'm black from the waist down.