By (Townhall.com)
Related:
A Modern Taboo: Black Racism
- written by black West Indies woman
"Slavery was good for the black man"- Jamaica Observer
The Clash of Civilizations
The Realities Of White Oppression
Anniversary of Spain’s Expulsion of Moors Draws Demands for Official Apology
White Slaves, Muslim Masters
They Were White and They Were Slaves
Is Colonisation The Source of African Poverty?
Black Slave Owners
The Curse of White Guilt
A Coward Who WILL Talk About Race
Black slavery and Islam
A Brief for Whitey - by Pat Buchanan
In Defense of the White Man (Hating Whitey)
Last month, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed Senate Resolution 26 "Apologizing for the enslavement and racial segregation of African-Americans." The resolution ends with: "Disclaimer. -- Nothing in this resolution (a) authorizes or supports any claim against the United States; or (b) serves as a settlement of any claim against the United States." That means Congress apologizes but is not going to pay reparations, as least for now.
Members of the Congressional Black Caucus have expressed concerns about the disclaimer, thinking that it's an attempt to stave off reparations claims from the descendants of slaves. Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Barbara Lee, D-Calif., said her organization is studying the language of the resolution and Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss, said "putting in a disclaimer takes away from the meaning of an apology. A number of us are prepared to vote against it in its present form. There are several members of the Progressive Caucus who feel the same way."
It goes without saying that slavery was a gross violation of human rights. Justice would demand that all the perpetrators -- that includes slave owners, and African and Arab slave sellers -- make compensatory reparation payments to victims. Since slaves, slave owners and slave sellers are no longer with us, such compensation is beyond our reach and a matter to be settled in the world beyond.
Absent from the reparations debate is: Who pays? Don't say the government because the government doesn't have any money that it doesn't first take from some American. So which Americans owe black people what? Reparations advocates don't want that question asked but let's you and I.
Are the millions of Europeans, Asians, and Latin Americans who immigrated to the U.S. in the 20th century responsible for slavery and should they be forced to cough up reparations money? What about descendants of Northern whites who fought and died in the name of freeing slaves? Should they cough up reparations money for black Americans? What about non-slave-owning Southern whites, a majority of whites; should they be made to pay reparations? And, by the way, would President Obama, whose father is Kenyan and mother white, be eligible for a reparations payment?
On black people's side of the ledger, thorny issues also arise. Some blacks purchased other blacks as a means to free family members. But other blacks owned slaves for the same reason whites owned slaves -- to work farms or plantations. Are descendants of these blacks eligible and deserving of reparations? There is no way that Europeans could have captured millions of Africans. They had African and Arab help. Should Congress haul representatives of Ghana, Ivory Coast, Nigeria and Muslim states before them and demand they compensate American blacks because of their ancestors' involvement in capturing and selling slaves?
Reparations advocates make the foolish unchallenged pronouncement that United States became rich on the backs of free black labor. That's utter nonsense. Slavery has never had a very good record of producing wealth. Think about it. Slavery was all over the South. Buying into the reparations nonsense, you'd have to conclude that the antebellum South was rich and the slave-starved North was poor. The truth of the matter is just the opposite. In fact, the poorest states and regions of our country were places where slavery flourished: Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia while the richest states and regions were those where slavery was absent: Pennsylvania, New York and Massachusetts.
The Senate apology is nothing more than political theater but it could be a slick way to get the camel's nose into the tent for future reparations. If the senators are motivated by white guilt, I have the cure. About 15 years ago I wrote a "Proclamation of Amnesty and Pardon Granted to All Persons of European Descent" that is available here.
MSNBC's Hayes Sees 'Invented Scandal Mad Libs' in Boehner's Critique of
Obama Scandals
-
On the Tuesday, May 21, *All In with Chris Hayes* show on MSNBC, host Hayes
mocked House Speaker John Boehner for calling for the American people "to
...
24 minutes ago
7 Opinion(s):
Who the fuck do these wogs think they are? America has bent over backwards for these retarded fuckers. AA, BEE, lower standards, black history month, MLK Day, you name it, the useless black fucks have got it.
Now they must still "pay" reparations to descendants who have benefited from Americas largess and liberality for a hundred years.
I say that if there are payments, the recipients must be returned to their countries of origin, and have their American citizenship revoked.
The average kaffir in America is a HUNDRED times better off than his African bruthahs. Their ancestors won the lotto. They should be paying America for the fact that they were taken there as slaves.
The WHITE Americans owe the NIGGER Africoon-Americans NOTHING. They have already given more than their fair share to the useless eaters.
FUCKEMALL!!!
Very sad day. This author raises all the right questions, though. what would compensation be for? loss of earnings??
One of the reasons slavery was abolished in the US because it was cheaper to hire European immigrants who began arriving from the 1850s. Irish communist James Connolly recounts an apocryphal story about a slave owner who tells his black slave to climb to the roof of his house and repair some damaged slates.
The slave replies "I could do that for you, but if I fall and die, you'll lose the $50 you paid for me, you'll then have to pay to bury me and take care of my family. If you pay that Irish labourer 50 cents a day instead, and he falls, he costs you nothing and you can get another one tomorrow!"
Viking, if it were cheaper to hire European immigrants in the 1850s than to use slaves in the U.S., then you would expect to see that some of those immigrants were taking over jobs formerly done by slaves. That's simply not the case at all.
In fact, the U.S. economic history here is entirely backwards, and bears no relationship to the standard economic histories of the period.
Slave-produced crops, most notably cotton, were bringing the southern U.S. states fabulous wealth in the years before slavery ended.
While this economic system did leave the U.S. south an undeveloped, agrarian society after slavery ended, it actually made possible the industrialization of the U.S. north.
In other words, those rich, northern states Williams cites–Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts–actually gained their wealth because of slavery. Their colonial economies thrived in large part because of their trade with slave plantations in the South and in the West Indies. After the Revolution, Philadelphia, New York and Boston grew rich from their involvement in southern slavery, providing most of the financing and transportation for slave-produced cotton. Finally, the North industrialized through the cotton textile industry, which depended for its existence on cheap, slave-produced cotton and the capital from slavery and the slave trade.
@James
you make some excellent points.
You don't see immigrants taking the slaves' jobs though because after they were freed they were probably just re-hired to do the same jobs!
Its quite an education to drive through America's poorer states and see how little has changed since those days in some cases.
What's better than an African-American professor writes and speaks against reparations, right? I have not made up my mind on this issue as to whether I am for or against it. I think the proponents need to expand the discussion to the things that occurred AFTER slavery was repealed. I am referring to Jim Crow laws, the lynchings, denial of voting rights in South through violence, etc. James is right - the northern states and thus entire U.S. grew rich off what slave labor produced. Viking - the key difference between immigrants and slaves was that immigrants were free to leave their jobs, at least technically in terms of the law. Various socio-economic circumstances probably tied immigrants to specific places for a while, but eventually many of them went west - to Oklahoma, the Dakotas etc,. That's where final dispossession of "Indians" comes in as we discussed in another post. If you think about it, at least now that I have, that is not that different from some Afrikaner farmers who by early 20th century became quite poor in South Africa. When there were not enough good-paying jobs in farm areas for the Afrikaners or "Boers" they were free to move to the towns, without having to fear police harassment for contraventions of influx control laws that blacks had to deal with. From what I understand in SA influx control was never too successful in fulfilling the goal of keeping more than a handful of blacks out of the cities, whether before or during apartheid because SA's employers wanted the cheap labor which whites, even poor whites, would not provide. I suppose that is a topic for another discussion.
What's better than an African-American professor writes and speaks against reparations?
Answer: An Afro American that could have paid for himself to fly an Apollo rocket to the moon.
Well you've made an interesting point, Black Coffee. The labour problem was always a big one in South Africa, and in many ways one of the biggest problems with apartheid, economically speaking, was the need for black labour. Originally, cities like Johannesburg were founded by working class English people, Welsh, and Scots, etc. The government then encouraged Chinese and Indian coolies to settle and carry out labour that they were unwilling to let blacks do, which was very unpopular at the time. Eventually the Africans flooded to the cities and the demand for labour was so great that denying the workers any rights became untenable. It's hard to see how else things could have turned out.
Post a Comment