I was fine with the reparations to Japanese Americans put in internment camps because it was to the people who it was done too.

This is not the case anymore so I agree with the President reparations would not work.

Instead lets strengthen the safety net and give affirmative action teeth again.

And who gets these reparations, all descendents of slaves, or just black people? I mean Rebecca Hall is 1/8th black, does she get a cut? Or how about Wentworth Miller?

There are plenty of people with slave blood running around who are, for all intents and purposes, white.

And if I get money because my African ancestors were enslaved by the Dutch, the English, the French, the Spaniards and the Portuguese, then I should also pay money because my Roman (Italian) ancestors enslaved the Dutch, English, French, Spaniards and Portuguese. Should Italy pay reparations to the former Roman world?

Or, for that matter, should the Chinese pay up for what Atilla the Hun did? Should the Turks pay the Eastern Orthodox church for what the Ottoman Empire did to Constantinople? And, for that matter, should African American pay the Native Americans as reparations for what the Buffalo Soldiers did?

Nobody owes me shit. And I don't owe anybody (other than the credit card companies and I owe my weed dealer $20) All people have been screwed over at one time or another in history. Such is life.

Jen,
Alas, they won't. Reparations will not happen in our lifetime or later. Like Obama, I am against them. I read Coates' article. Eurudite and poignant. But, only the descendents not the actual African-American slaves themselves would be eligible. And, even that would be difficult to determine.

Obama himself won't qualify because at least he isn't a direct descendant of an African American slave. Weird as it sounds, he is a descendent of a slave holder on his mother's side.

Also, I disagee with Coates on 3 points. I wrote these on another posting:

First of all, I disagree with this statement:

"From the White House on down, the myth holds that fatherhood is the great antidote to all that ails black people. But Billy Brooks Jr. had a father. Trayvon Martin had a father. Jordan Davis had a father. Adhering to middle-class norms has never shielded black people from plunder."

It is not a myth. Fatherhood means an extraordinary amount to an overwhelming amount of families black, white or any other race. The account of a freedman trying to get his sold wife & children back was most moving.

Two other points I am at odds with. Regarding the reparations paid by Germany to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust or actually, Israel isn't comparable. Genocide & slavery while both horrific are two different crimes with the former far more recent than the latter. A better example would be to use say, Brazil a country that outlawed slavery in 1888 and discuss whether or not slavery reparations were paid.

Mr. Coates makes no case on how to administer reparations. That would be an extraordinary undertaking to say the least. Who gets it? How much etc.?

Finally, I don't believe at all reparations will unify us more as a nation. Matt Yglesias makes a case that reparations are workable and affordable. However, at the end of the article he too concedes:

'Could you really rectify centuries of racial injustice this easily?

Sadly, no. Even if the racial gap in median wealth were eliminated, it would still be the case that there's a substantial racial gap in median income. Lurking behind that gap is a gap in educational attainment. Unless those were rectified, the racial wealth gap would reemerge over time."


Although a very good piece, reparations while remotely feasible in the end won't I believe, promote better race relations. I believe Coates has some points. I glad I read the article and viewed it features.

Checkout this retort too:

http://thefederalist.com/2014/05/27/a-ca…

@1, I think you have the honest solution and the solution that everyone should be able to support

I thought the whole point of the article was that reparation in and of themselves aren't a the point. A national conversation and reckoning on the subject is. I think the kneejerk reaction that "this could never work" just proves how much we need to have the conversation. Sure, it (or any results at all) may be hard to imagine, but as cliche as this Gandhi quote is “First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, and then you win.” it's true.

@1 - I like that. Affirmative action has such potential to be an equalizer through opportunity (and in its heyday it benfitted so many deserving people, not even just African Americans), yet it's getting gutted all over the place.

I wonder how many of these commentators(and Boswell) read the piece, and understand the only specific piece of policy that Coates advocates for is funding a study of what reparations would be or look like. Anyone arguing against studying the issue I think doesn't want to talk about this becuase they make it feel uncomfortable.
And Boswell, you of all people should fucking read that piece. I thought libertarians cared about property rights? Reparations isn't *just* about stolen wages, its about stolen horses, houses, taxes, health, etc. These items of property were stolen within the last 100 years. Their theft was sanctioned by the american state. The Hunnic/Roman/Dutch states no longer exist. When leftist introduce any sort of social amelioration program, libertarians are quick to scream about state-sanctioned property theft, but when it comes to undoing theft, you drop any defense of your common man. Your comment is actually pretty enlightening- libertarians only care about stockholders and weed.

Y'all are missing the point. It's not about affirmative action. The federal government didn't just "enforce" housing discrimination, it invented it. Redlining was a federal program. And mortgage discrimination was the very motivation for the invention of zoning and is as old as the concept of mortgages -- mortgages as a banking instrument were created with the guidance of the federal government for the express written purpose of giving white people an advantage over black people.

This isn't being disadvantaged; it's having the whole foundation of your economy and society built on the subjugation of others. And, as for "all people have been screwed over", all of those screwed-over people have been permitted to become white, except black people.

Seriously, read the article. READ THE ARTICLE.

@6, affirmative action for most of its history was given exclusively to white people at the expense of black people. The GI Bill was for whites. Social Security was for whites. The only reason the New Deal ever passed was because racist Southerners said "we will only support it if you help us put the nigger back in his place". So they did.

This has always been true. The country was built on a foundation of theft of black bodies, black families, black wealth, and black lives. This country could never have existed without those things.

READ THE ARTICLE.

The point of the article isn't "we should do this, that or the other thing." It makes no prescriptions. Y'all are jumping ahead without knowing what the topic is.

#2 obviously didn't read the thing - he's making all the wrong glib, stupid arguments.

@2- Oh, Uncle Ruckus, tell us again about slavery times...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrZZQzyhp…

@ 8 I read it but still don't think its feasible, this way at least can make good progress. These can be very good programs if enforced.

@ 7 - Thank you.

Ta-Nehisi Coates calls for a study into the issue of reparations, without staking a claim as to what those should be. The idea is to acknowledge that reparations are just, and study if there's a way to implement them. Voting for the study would commit the Congress to nothing except talking about the issue seriously. People who oppose that are just opposing even having the conversation.

I don't know if it's feasible, but I'd like to find out. I don't know how you take care of reparations to African-Americans without also providing reparations to American Indians, but maybe it's possible to do both. Or maybe it's possible to create a basic standard of justice for all Americans, with a bit more of a leg up for those who are dealing with a multi-generational legacy of racist government policy. Like maybe you could quantify the full economic effect of discriminatory policies starting with slavery and continuing to what happened in the recent housing crisis, and then create a plan to adjust Social Security payments to make up the difference. Maybe we could have a minimum guaranteed national income, with adjustments for some classes of people. The key is to address the injustice and not just let it lie.

Reparations, if they were to happen, won't work. When the slaves were freed they got (or were at least promised) 40 acres and a mule. Property and money are no good if the recipient doesn't know what to do with them.
Strengthen the safety net, improve public education, drop the price of higher education, and promote the trades for all. If you weren't the actual victim, this is not justice. It's just a payoff that will be wasted on many without the knowledge necessary to turn it into something other than a short term relief from the mess our nation has made of itself.

Go ahead and send out checks to everybody. I don't care. I just don't think a one-time payment is going to make much of a difference to curb systemic racism.

So, this guy is saying the US government should spend tax payer money on a study on reparations. He also believes the US government should take money from one group of people (everyone) and give it to another group (African Americans) for something that non-government agencies did (plantations)

And yes, the US has and continues to engage in racist policies. No one is denying that. But one such policy is the minimum wage. Why is it alright to call the Montgomery GI Bill racist (it may have been, I don't know because I haven't researched it) but it is wrong to call minimum wage racist, even when it has a history of being used to fund state sanctioned white supremacy? http://www.thecommentator.com/article/27…

And no one answered the question: would someone with 1/8th African American blood get reparations? How about African immigrants?

And no one ever asks Africa to pay reparations. They were the ones who sold the slaves in the first place.

Want to talk about who deserves reparations? How about Vietnam and Iraq. Our government destroyed those countries and owes them for their arrogance.

@10
If you are a racist, as you clearly are, why not just be open about it?

So my belief that Africans are a proud, beautiful people and that the African American community does not need government to help it thrive makes me an "Uncle Ruckus"? Okay.

Sorry, but this is one African American who refuses to live on the ideological plantation of liberal dogma. I refuse to be your dancing slave, so eager to Bojangle around to serve white liberal "massa".

African Americans can and will thrive when the imperialism of big government, run mostly by wealthy white liberals, is gone. You believe that we're too stupid to survive without big government. You are the white supremacist, and the enemy of African people as are others like you.

@13
I'll be okay with congress talking about reparations if you would be okay with a congressional study on the effects of ending income taxes entirely and talking seriously about that. Deal?

Fascinating how quickly this conversation turns ugly. The racism expressed here is like the monster in Alien, just under the skin, desperate to break out and bite.

@14 "Property and money are no good if the recipient doesn't know what to do with them. "

Stunning. Truly stunning.

@16: I read the article you linked to. It's a load of tripe. How so?
It claims that the minimum wage prevents market forces from punishing prejudicial hiring practices. A comparison is made between a racist employer under the minimum wage and a non-racist employer with no minimum wage. This is a bad comparison because it does not control its variables!
The article claims that a lack of any minimum wage will allow discriminated-against workers to undercut those not discriminated against in order to be hired at equal rates. So what the article is advocating is this:
"Black people should be against a minimum wage! The minimum wage stops them from having to earn less per hour than white people just to get hired!"

Do you see the raging contradiction here?
It is ridiculous to expect market forces to do the job of punishing racist hiring practices. Capitalist theory works on the assumption that people will pursue their own self-interested profits. A racist hirer puts his own prejudices ahead of his profits, hiring people based on the color of their skin rather than their potential to bring in money. In a perfect world, and in a perfect free market, we wouldn't need government to step in and enforce non-discrimination. Unfortunately for all of us, and for the validity of your arguments, we do.

Also, did you seriously claim that slavery was the fault of plantation-owners, not the Southern state and federal governments of the time?

@20
You completely missed the part of the article that shows how racist governments, from South Africa to the US, acknowledged that minimum wage was racist and passed them as white supremacy laws. In South Africa: "The Minimum Wages Act No. 27 of 1925 gave the Minister for Labour the power to force employers to give preference to Whites when hiring workers."
-Source: http://africanhistory.about.com/od/preap…

Look at it this way: if the value of money doesn't change when the minimum wage goes up (no inflation, which I highly doubt) than the price of labor increases and employers suddenly want more for the money they are spending.

If employers have to pay $15 for one hour of work, and there are two applicants, one from a nice white school and another from a failing black school, who is going to get the job?

But, if there was no minimum wage, and a less skilled applicant made the case that they would take the job for less and work their way up, that less skilled applicant would at least have a chance.

Who would hire a non-English speaker at 15/hour? At that rate, you could hire a college graduate.

And you're right, free markets do work against racism. How much of a racist MUST YOU BE to not want a profit? But, minimum wage is an anti-free market program.

Look at an African American from a failing school or a recent immigrant from Latin America. Both, because of NO FAULT OF THEIR OWN, have low skills at the moment (not to say they can't increase their skills later on) They can't offer an employer skills or experience and their ONLY SELLING POINT is that they are willing to work for less to start off (to start off mind you, as they can always get a raise after learning from the job)

A high minimum wage removed the ONLY SELLING POINT many unskilled workers have. Suddenly they cost just as much to hire as a high skilled white. So who's gonna get the job: an African American from a failing school, a recent immigrant who doesn't speak much English, or a white college graduate?

It has been WELL DOCUMENTED that minimum wage is a racist policy. African American economist Walter Williams has written extensively about this subject: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RUBK9_4O…

And yes, African Americans, who thanks to the racist public school system, have less skills on average than whites would be better off if they could be hired for less. Why? Simple math:

$0/hour vs $6/hour. Which pays more? A low wage job or no job at all? And who the hell are you or anyone else to tell someone that they should accept being unemployed and unemployable rather than accept less money as starting salary in the hopes of working their way up later?

As for slavery, the government was complacent in it. But we have to keep in mind that before the Civil War the Federal Government was a lot weaker than it is today. Slavery was not a federal government issue but a state government issue. An argument might be made that Southern, slave states should pay reparations, but that's really it. And it would be a weak argument too. That, and many states didn't exist. Why should a Norwegian-descended family living in Alaska be taxed to pay reparations when both their state and their family wasn't even in America at the time?

@20 & 21,
Interesting and informative exchange. Seriously, I'm learning a lot.

Thanks to both of you, VL & CS.

@22
Civility is rare on this board, and I admit I can be a douche at times as well. I am happy you got something out of our exchange *tips hat*

I'm more than a little surprised at the people who are praising the Coates article for not being prescriptive, when that's what I thought its biggest flaw was. He proved that racism exists, but that's not anything that we didn't know.

There are more than enough proposals for reparations out there to make an informed decision, and for Coates to ignore that shows he's not really as interested in the "solution" as he is about talking around the problem.

@21: Just because the Apartheid regime was in favor of minimum wage laws doesn't make minimum wage inherently racist.
The solution, in my mind, to the problem you pose is to improve our educational system so that minorities and the urban poor are no longer in that unenviable position. Simply get rid of the minimum wage and you make it easier for such persons to find work...at the costs of lower pay for them and (presumably) lower-quality service for their employers. Additionally you open the door to employers exploiting their workforce, which is why the minimum wage was implemented in 1938. If you instead pour funding and research into improving school systems and providing opportunities targeted at supporting minority communities, you solve both problems at once. It's a question of tolerating versus fixing problems, if you ask me.

As I explained, there's no such thing as a true free market in reality. Not only do individuals often act (unknowingly, in many cases) against their own best interests, but companies have an alarming tendency to fix prices, collude to alter wage standards, and generally tamper with their workforce. The only way to fix that has been through government regulation, which admittedly constitutes a further encroachment on the market! It is entirely pointless to worry about what the free market does or doesn't do, or what reduces the freedom of the market, because no such thing can exist on a macroscale.

Finally, I do NOT support simply paying reparations, as I have mentioned previously. It is far better to aid African-Americans after the fashion of "teach a man to fish" than "give a man a fish". An example would be that which you hate perhaps as much as you hate the minimum wage: affirmative action.

@25
First, I am not completely against affirmative action. My only issue with it is that it can hide government failure in education. Example is that if a public school graduated black kids who have received a below standard education the students usually wouldn't make it to college. But if you have affirmative action the students get into college anyway and the school can act like their is no problem. A better solution would be to fix the public schools so affirmative action isn't necessary at all.

But I'm okay with some government enforcement of discrimination laws. I would simply like to see their punishment for it, as well as things like labor abuse and environmental damage, be prison time and not fines. A company can just write off the cost of the fine as a cost of doing business...I don't think a CEO would write off jail time as easily.

And minimum wage has racist outcome, that can't be denied. Again, at 15/hour, who will hire someone who doesn't speak fluent English? A better solution would be the free market solution of letting unions handle wage negotiations. Let the workers organize themselves and government involvement would only have to be minimal.

As for free markets, they can exist and in a free market system large companies would be helpless to stop smaller competition from rising and challenging them. In today's society, however, corporations are usually the ones sponsoring regulations because they know government regulations work in their favor while they work against small businesses who can't hire a team of lawyers as easily.

But we won't get to a "freed market" in America any time soon so the best we can hope for is reducing the regulations and the bailouts and letting people run their own lives and letting communities run themselves.

@26: Your argument against a minimum wage is an argument for a race to the bottom. You're saying that we should accommodate people with low skill by paying them extremely low wages. This drives down the cost of labor, hurting more-skilled workers as well.
Minimum wage doesn't punish minorities; it punishes the unskilled and untrained. Instead of apportioning blame correctly to the institutionalized racism from which this country suffers even today, you insist that minimum wage laws are at fault.

You demonstrate ignorance of affirmative action programs. Affirmative action does NOT encourage schools to admit minority students who do not meet their admissions standards, but rather forces them to select from the pool of qualified students according to larger population demographics. Before you bash the program, at least learn what it is.

Your claim that "regulations work in their favor" with regard to big business is utter nonsense. The reason that industry was regulated in the first place was IN RESPONSE to rampant price-fixing, collusion, abuse and exploitation of workers, and other such misdeeds by industry leaders! You can complain about the bugbear of oppressive regulation stifling small businesses, but that was and continues to be a fiction in near totality. If big business benefits so much from regulation, why are big businesses consistently so strongly against regulation of industry? Answer me THAT.

I do, however, agree with you that punishment for industry abuses should allow for imprisonment rather than simply fines. The current state of affairs encourages businesses to violate laws if they think they'll make up the fine.

Venomlash surely by now you've come to realize that Collectivism_sucks is blind to a simple truth. "Life in the state of nature is poor, nasty, brutish and short."

Collectivism_sucks dreams of a Utopia wherein; Life in the state of nature everyone joins hands and sings Disney tunes.

Once upon a time he apparently thought he found that Utopia in a misunderstanding of Marx. Now he thinks he's found that Utopia in a weird combination of Anarchism and Libertarianism. He'll continue to spew nonsense until he drops his Utopian yearnings.

That said, Venomlash I praise you for your ability to suffer fools gladly.