Five and half years into the Obama Presidency, the problems plaguing black people (and their neighbors) haven't disappeared, and in fact appear to be about the same as they've been on average over the last 40 years or so.
This has created an ever greater demand for ever more detailed explanations for why this is all White People's Fault. Thus, Ta-Nehisi Coates has become the go-to guy for Glenn Beck-like deep dives into old books to explain why History demonstrates that white people are at fault for black people being poor.
The Case for Reparations
Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Please keep in mind, however, that acceptable History is extremely circumscribed. History began in 1619. Nothing about African people in Africa before the arrival of white people is admissible. A book like John Reader's illuminating Africa: A Biography of the Continent is simply not to be considered. Instead, Africans were a blank slate solely written upon by white people.
Also, you may have noticed that liberals, black and white, have dominated racial policy in the United States for the last half century or so. Well, that's not History, either.
For example, much of Coates' article is devoted to Chicago real estate, a topic about which I know a little. But Coates' history mostly peters out about the time liberals took charge of housing policy.
Alyssa Katz, an NYU journalism professor and contributor to Mother Jones, published a fascinating history, Our Lot, a half decade ago that explained, among much else, what liberalism did to Chicago's housing. From my 2009 review in VDARE:
Alyssa Katz` Our Lot: A Liberal Perspective On How Political Pressure To Boost Minority Homeownership Helped Blow Up The Economy
By Steve Sailer on August 30, 2009
Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us by Alyssa Katz, a liberal journalist and NYU journalism professor who writes for Mother Jones, is the best book yet on how the sacred cause of “diversity” merged with pedal-to-the-metal capitalism to bring us the Great Mortgage Meltdown.
The book hasn't garnered the attention it deserves—probably because it makes clear the bipartisan responsibility of both her opponents on the Right and her friends on the Left.
Our Lot focuses equally on the misdeeds of both capitalists and leftists. But I won't give the boiler room boys as much attention in this review because they're a more familiar tale, while Katz`s reporting on the role of her side is compelling “testimony against interest.“
Katz is remarkably frank about how government programs and political pressure to boost minority homeownership helped blow up the economy. She`s particularly good at explicating how leftist housing activists, such as ACORN and Gale Cincotta, the godmother of the Community Reinvestment Act, worked with Democratic politicians such as Bill Clinton, HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros, and Jim Johnson, CEO of Fannie Mae, to lay the groundwork for the Bubble and Bust.
Katz doesn`t devote quite as much depth to the Bush Administration`s culpability (which, to my mind, is even greater). Perhaps she lacked Republican contacts to give her the kind of inside story she got on her own party`s mistakes.
Still, Our Lot makes clear that on housing policy, the Clinton-Bush years form a single continuum with one overarching plan: boost the minority homeownership rate by lowering credit standards. I call it the Era of Multi-Culti Capitalism.
And there's little reason to think that its lessons have been learned yet.
Katz begins her book in 1972, in the collapsing Austin neighborhood on Chicago`s Far West side, where Gale Cincotta was a Greek-American housewife.
Fortuitously for me, Our Lot fills in the political backstory of my own in-laws` lives. My wife grew up in Austin, which had been a peaceful, densely populated working class where small children could play safely on the crowded sidewalks.
Suddenly, in the late 1960s, middle class blacks began buying into the neighborhood.
Friends warned my late father-in-law, a classical musician and union leader, to flee, that underclass blacks would follow. But he and my late mother-in-law, a schoolteacher, resolved to show that integration could work.
After my future wife was mugged twice and her younger brother once, however, my in-laws finally sold in 1970—losing half their life savings. They moved 63 miles out of Chicago, to a dilapidated farm where they lacked running water for their first two years. (And my father-in-law started voting Republican.)
How did this disaster hit Austin? Katz demonstrates that it was the direct result of a 1968 change in the Federal Housing Administration, which set off a bubble and bust in America's inner cities, like a smaller precursor of this decade. As in 2005,
“In 1972, in Chicago and in every other city in the nation, almost anyone could get a home mortgage, including borrowers who didn't earn enough to pay them off, on just about any house, for any reason. … And just like the recent adventure in lending beyond any rational limits, the mortgage disaster of the early 1970s was born from a lofty ideological conviction that enabled the basest of crimes and most foolish of gambles under its cover, insulated from almost any scrutiny until the damage was already done.”
Franklin D. Roosevelt had started the Federal Housing Administration to insure home loans, and Fannie Mae to buy loans from lenders. Together, these agencies created the familiar template of 30-year-year fixed rate mortgages with a moderate down payment that underpinned the growth of home-owning suburbanites after WWII.
FDR's FHA, however, was reluctant to back loans in black neighborhoods—a practice that Cincotta later dubbed “redlining.” Eventually, in 1968, liberal Illinois Republican Senator Charles Percy and the Johnson Administration revamped the FHA in a more politically correct direction. Katz explains:
“The FHA was now, in effect, a front in the War on Poverty. … Under the new regime, homebuyers living in Chicago and other inner cities weren`' just eligible for loans. Lenders who signed up to sell FHA-insured mortgages were asked to do everything they could to make sure the buyers got them.”
Of course, the results of the Federal government encouraging mortgages with down payments of never more than $500 were absolutely predictable:
“Across the country, neighborhood destruction became a booming business, financed by the federal government. In Chicago they called it `panic peddling.` In New York, it was `blockbusting.` … The FHA-insured loans threw gasoline on that smoldering fire. … Indeed, the insurance made it profitable to seek out the most impoverished and unreliable borrowers, since the sooner a borrower defaulted on a loan, the more quickly the lender would get paid back in full by FHA.”
In Chicago, Gale Cincotta started a national coalition of “community activists,” who helped pass the Home Mortgage Disclosure Act of 1975 and the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977. Cincotta remains a heroine to the author, although she can't quite make clear Cincotta's logic. If the feds encouraging lending to minorities had destroyed Austin, how was more hair of the dog that bit you supposed to fix Austin?
Sadly, Austin remains unfixed. On a visit to Chicago earlier this month, my wife drove by her old house. Her former home had no doorknob, just an empty hole in the front door. But at least it was still standing, unlike two large apartment buildings on her old block, which are now just crabgrass-covered vacant lots.
Cincotta died in 2001—across the municipal border from Austin in Oak Park. In telling contrast to Austin, that prosperous suburb that had succeeded in saving its famous district of Frank Lloyd Wright homes (where my father was born in 1917) by limiting the number of blacks allowed to move in through its notoriously illegal but effective “black-a-block“ quota.
Katz notes that Cincotta`s organization of the left, combined with the invention of mortgage securitizing by investment banker Lewis Ranieri in 1983, made possible the disasters of this decade.
Cincotta began siccing her “pushy capitalist radicals” on Fannie Mae, which remained reluctant to buy the dubious mortgages of likely deadbeats. Still, Katz writes, “The reality was that to meet its growth objectives, Fannie Mae needed these poor people as much as the poor people needed them.”
Looking back from 2009, Katz asks:
“How did Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac … turn into the world`s biggest funders of Wall Street-backed subprime mortgages? … It all started with the best of intentions, with … the activists who demanded bank loans for the poor and urban.”
Posts
114 comments:
If they get reparations and it doesn't work, at least work for anything other than creating a bubble in the crack and Escalade markets, what will people like TNC say or propose next?
Maybe it doesn't matter. I've been saying for awhile that, of the seven billion people on Earth, if only one of them is a straight white gentile man, the other 6,999,999,999 people will all be oppressed minorities.
The unsaid point in this article:
People tried to play by the rules, and the rules kept changing -- because other people saw them as inherently inferior to them.
And yet, respectability politics says that people need to play by the rules and all will be ok.
How is that fair?
Beck talked about Saul Alinsky and the George Soros and got fired from Mox News.
I think Mr. Coates has neatly summarized most of what the majority culture doesn't want to accept about life in the U.S. both historically and contemporarily, because if they admitted these are actual truths, they would have to do something about them.
The reparations that TNC calls for primarily take the form of studying the issue. Just acknowledging, officially, what the price of 400 years of theft might be is a kind of reckoning that the nation has never done. Even the erstwhile government attempts to "repair" (such as they are) have been more comfortable with targeted technocratic transfer payments and pilot programs than admitting the plain truth and counting up the debit.
Keith Richburg in "Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa" is grateful that his ancestors were sold into slavery and brought to America since otherwise he would be in Africa today.
It all started with the best of intentions.....
First of all, it's not so clear to me that they really had the best of intentions, but even conceding that, it's pretty well know that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Leftists seem willing to excuse the greatest of criminals (Stalin, Mao) as long as their intentions are (supposedly) good, but if you have "bad intentions" (Donald Sterling) then even if you achieve great results (employ hundreds of blacks and pay some of them many millions of $) you get no credit at all.
It's really unbelievable. Here you have entire cities (Detroit, Newark, Buffalo) in ruins and large parts of others (Chicago, Philadelpha, etc.) destroyed and life savings lost and victims raped, murdered and assaulted and they just sort of shrug their shoulders and say, well we meant well, as if that forgives everything. Unbelievable.
The most valuable part of the article for me was the effective demolishing of the "culture of poverty" and "black pathology" arguments. I hear a lot that the only way to fix racial disparities is to change culture in black communities, as if culture is some force that exists entirely separately from history and social conditions. It's easy to forget exactly how powerful those forces are, and how brutally they were and are mobilized against African-Americans. I'm glad Coates is around to remind us. I defy anyone to read this essay — paragraphs after paragraph describing the most appalling, systematic, and active racism — and then tell me that the real problem is that black parents don't push their kids hard enough.
I've still got a third of the article to read, but I feel like I have to take a break, as it is a lot to absorb.
The title "The Case for Reparations" is a bit of a undersell, as a better title, I think, would be "The Absolute Moral and Societal Necessity for Reparations."
My favorite bit of the article is the simple formulation that if you want enough credit for US history to celebrate the signing of the Declaration and to be proud of Washington and Lincoln, then you need to take "credit" for slavery and Jim Crow, too. It's a wonderful way to talk about acknowledging history and the way that its ghosts haunt us whether we acknowledge them or not.
As a Rawlsian Social Contract theorist, I have struggled for years with the issue of what to do regarding reparations. It isn't a question of if, but how. How do you make up for 300+ years of mistreatment? How do you make amends and level the playing field to give equal access and opportunities to those who have never been afforded them? How do you get people to not just grasp the complexity and depth of the issues but be willing to do something about them? I don't know. What I do know is Ta-Nehisi's article is a powerful force that can and should move thinking about and coming up with workable solutions for the issue. Perhaps using Rawl's Veil of Ignorance when it comes to credit scores, addresses...anything that can be used to stereotype individuals should be adopted and enforced somehow. Whatever can and needs to be done is going to be a massive undertaking but it is long overdue.
Congrats to TNC. This is the most powerful piece of journalism I've read in a long, long time. My question is what those of us who care about this issue can do to get some momentum behind Rep. Conyers' bill. Let's get some organizational heft behind this thing
Okay, I'm convinced. Let's have reparations. But we have to do it fairly in the sense of determining just how much black people have lost by being in the United States.
So let's do this: Take the average income of a person in a typical slave-source country like Ghana, which is 3718 dollars, and the average income of blacks in the US, which is about 31000 dollars, subtract them, and get -27282, and that's how much white people owe blacks per working year. Take 30 years for a working life, and you get -818460 dollars. Now, they'll have to look at historical figures to determine how much whites have stolen from blacks for the past centuries, but for now, we can just use the -818460 figure.
So, when will J'amal be sending me a check?
Seriously, you've got to wonder if there are many black people who are ashamed of being in a race of complainers. I would be. I mean, when they complain about segregation, what is the core complaint? They're complaining about being around other blacks. That's really sad. No Koreans complain about the racial composition of Koreatown. No Hispanics complain about there being so many Hispanics in the barrio. They like themselves. You're supposed to like yourself.
The counterpoint to the litany of government mistreatment of black people since 1900 is the government mistreatment of Japanese Americans - who are and always have been model citizens.
The Japanese were subject to a constantly changing set of restrictions - controls on where they could buy property, controls on what professions they could enter, widespread hostility and exclusion from society and mainstream business, and eventually internment and theft of all their property during the war.
But throughout it they remained a prosperous, orderly group posing minimal problems to society.
Even the barebones schools they organized in the internment camps probably provided a better education than you would get in today's lavishly funded majority black schools of Newark and Kansas City.
A onetime payment? Think monthly check. And if it doesn't work, that means it wasn't big enough.
It's spiritual poison to dwell on stuff like that. It's bitterness. The irish have it in spades with the English, who did indeed enslave the Irish. It's never done the Irish good to think on this too much.
Sure keep advertising that you are a loser without agency. That's real Alpha of you.
He frames his arguments against covert racism or implicit institutional racism in contrast to overt racism.
Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely
Isn't that the function of MLK day and black history month?
Furthermore, black people get reparations through record entitlement spending and government employment. Nearly 21 percent of the nation's working black adults hold government jobs, as compared to some 17 percent of white worker.
The real estate angle is an interesting one, but this can be lumped under general civil rights, which applies to all people. There exist laws that prohibit housing discrimination under the 1968 fair housing act He mentions that the housing act could be threatened, but the problem is he's evoking the slippery slope fallacy.
The real problem is he's created this abstract definition of reparations that makes any discussion on a singular premise impossible.
"The most valuable part of the article for me was the effective demolishing of the "culture of poverty" and "black pathology" arguments. I hear a lot that the only way to fix racial disparities is to change culture in black communities, as if culture is some force that exists entirely separately from history and social conditions. It's easy to forget exactly how powerful those forces are, and how brutally they were and are mobilized against African-Americans. I'm glad Coates is around to remind us. I defy anyone to read this essay — paragraphs after paragraph describing the most appalling, systematic, and active racism — and then tell me that the real problem is that black parents don't push their kids hard enough."
Nobody here claims that's the real problem...
Did you guys even read the article?
If you are looking for reparations, should you not look first to the people who sold you into slavery? Your ancestor's coastal neighbours made the deals for the guns that led to your ancestors being coffled and transshipped. Second to the people who owned and financed the ships that carried the guns to your slave catchers and then your caught ancestors to the sugar plantations in the beautiful Caribean.
Bill Moyers is asking people to "join the conversation" about reparations.
But when I tried :
http://www.the-spearhead.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/billmoyerslovesme.jpg
Black people should give us reparations. From ruining neighborhoods, lower property values, crime, decadent culture, poor music taste, and for putting up with their stupidity.
If I was to add up all the taxes I have paid since I started working at 15, those taxes have probably supported 4-5 families of 4.
Minorities would have starved without redistribution of resources from whites to non-whites. It is ridiculous, that they still want more. Their greedier than wall street.
They want reparations, we'll I want a refund.
P.S. Steve, it appears some of multi-kultis wandered off the atlantic web site and are mistakenly posting in your comment section.
If the projections about whites being a minority by 2042, and steadily decreasing in percentages after that, are true, then we can just keep dragging this issue for some decades. There'll be too few whites left by then to pay anything in reparations.
I came repeatedly while reading that TNC piece, and I haven't even started reading it yet.
It's that good.
Coates has always struck me as a phony. He's one of those guys who reads books without ever learning anything new. Instead, he grabs a few quotes he can drop in order to sound learned.
Putting that aside, the guy is a coward. He never gets around to saying how much this is going to cost. I'm somewhat in favor of reparations, but the amount is important.
Further, reparations means the book is closed. Blacks have been made whole. They get no more free stuff. No more special deals. I'm betting he is not down for that.
OT,Where Are the Next Golfers?
For Years, the Sport Has Been Confronted by Reports of Declining Participation
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303749904579575983619039634
Maybe, the decline of WASPs and whites = decline of golf?
TNC:"This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River."
Some stats on lynching*:
1954
0
0
0
1955
0
3
3
1956
0
0
0
1957
1
0
1
1958
0
0
0
1959
0
1
1
1960
0
0
0
There's a reason why Till is so famous. Lynching was virtually over when he was murdered.
*Statistics provided by the Archives at Tuskegee Institute.
Are Native Americans not demanding reparations?
Anonymous 2:21 PM said:
"The title "The Case for Reparations" is a bit of a undersell, as a better title, I think, would be "The Absolute Moral and Societal Necessity for Reparations."
Well I have an even better one: "The Absolute Moral and Societal Necessity for Reparations, But Only If Coupled With Permanent, Irrevocable Repatriation For All Who Take The Money." Now THAT would be money extremely well spent!
fredyetagain
I can't be the only one that noticed the flood of pro-reparations comments, can I?
I have to side with the far-Left types in regards to all this talk about "white privilege", "institutional racism" etc - the purpose of which is to transfer blame from corporations (and their executives) to straight white men in general.
"These results are dispiriting, but the crime with which reparations activists charge the country implicates more than just a few towns or corporations. The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them."
Former executives at Lehman Brothers and current ones at Wells Fargo must be laughing their asses off that white people in general are being blamed for their unethical lending practices, not them
TNC:"But out in the tall grass, highwaymen, nefarious as any Clarksdale kleptocrat, were lying in wait."
TNC, TNC, do try to avoid flights of rhetoric. No one is going to mistake you for Macaulay.
TNC:"The neighborhood is 92 percent black. Its homicide rate is 45 per 100,000—triple the rate of the city as a whole."
MMMM, Blacks and high homicide rates. I'm sure that the two phenomena are unrelated.
TNC:"In other words, Chicago’s impoverished black neighborhoods—characterized by high unemployment and households headed by single parents"
Single Parent households, eh? Pretty sure that most of them are headed by women. And I seem to recall reading about West Africa and low paternal investment in children. Something pre-1619 for TNC to explore.
African-Americans would not be here--or anywhere--today if their ancestors hadn't been brought here as slaves. Like everyone else, they owe a debt to slavery.
TNC:"And whereas whites born into affluent neighborhoods tended to remain in affluent neighborhoods, blacks tended to fall out of them."
Regression to the mean in action?
TNC:"The lives of black Americans are better than they were half a century ago. The humiliation of Whites Only signs are gone."
And for some Blacks, they've been gone for much longer than that. After all, TNC, at the beginning of your article you described a Black man from the South who was stationed in California during WW2. You waxed quite eloquently about how he could go into restaurants and get service, not have to avert his eyes as Whites walked past, etc. For that matter, Emmet Till's murder was caused by the fact that he was from Chicago and was not used to Southern mores.
once cultural marxists win all their other battles, do you think they will move reparations onto the main stage as a serious political idea sometime around 2020 or so? with platitudes like "It's time" and "We should do the right thing now".
homosexual marriage was inconceivable only 15 years ago, now it's unquestioned orthodoxy. i can easily see reparations quickly (10 years being quickly in historical terms) going from a joke, to making the transition to "a very, very important matter, that all right thinking people take seriously".
i'm not sure where it lies on the cultural marxist time horizon. somewhere beyond 15 dollars an hour minimum wage and guaranteed citizenship for any schlub who simply walks into the country on foot, but probably before outright communism or the elimination of european people from the US entirely.
all of which are on the agenda. don't think otherwise.
TNC:"Black people with upper-middle-class incomes do not generally live in upper-middle-class neighborhoods. Sharkey’s research shows that black families making $100,000 typically live in the kinds of neighborhoods inhabited by white families making $30,000."
In other words, upper-middle class Blacks have a tough time separating themselves from lower-class Blacks.
Reparations, schmeparations. What about Mark Cuban crossing the street!!!!!!!11!!!!
I suggest you Yanks pay whatever reparations are suggested, on the arrival of the African-American person on the African continent and their surrender of their American passport.
Even at $3M each you can't lose!
Oh and make your top 1% pay it ;-)
Gordo
TNC:"An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color."
And it might not.
TNC:"Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin."
Somehow, I tend to think that Americans of South Asian descent (many of whom are as dark or darker than the African-American mean) are not overly burdened in the USA by their dark complexions...
Lol at the transparent astroturfing in this thread. Hi, Atlantic interns! Please read more articles on this blog!
TNC:"The essence of American racism is disrespect."
So its all about feeling disrespected? "Feelings, nothing more than Feelings,..."
"This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River."
Ah yes, Mississippi did it! It would be hilarious if it weren't so stupid and depressing.
Whenever an individual white harms a black, all us whites are collectively guilty. Of course there's no such collective guilt for any of the thousands of black-on-white murders that have occurred since Tills murder. Funny how that works.
"...Mississippi lynched Emmett Till..."
What a preposterous, cheap little clown Coates is. If "Mississippi" lynched Emmett Till, "blacks", including Coates, are collectively responsible for black crime. Which not even the guys who lynched Till believed. What an evil moron.
Forget reparations. I've been paying them all my adult life. We've been shoveling money at them for fifty years. They've had their reparations.
TNC:"The exchange rested upon an erroneous comparison of the average American white family and the exceptional first family. In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—"
Seriously, TNC? Do you really think that Barack is "twice as good" as the rest of his classmates at Harvard Law? Do you really think that Michelle would even have made it into Princeton if she were not Black? the sad fact is that once a certain threshold of ability is reached, Blacks find it easier to succeed, not harder.
TNC:"and enduring twice as much."
Enduring twice as much what? As near as I can tell, the only thing that Michelle had to endure was a wounded ego when she learned that she wasn't the sharpest knife in the drawer at Princeton.
Using this same logic
Not being an aspie obsessed with parsing every statement to its most ridiculous extreme, he doesn't say, "Gee, Africa sucks, so that means slavery was awesome!" It's more like, "You know, I'm not saying slavery was a good thing; but I can't help but reluctantly recognize the silver lining that at least I got to grow up in mid-20th-century Detroit instead of this hell-hole."
TNC:"If George Washington crossing the Delaware matters, so must his ruthless pursuit of the runagate Oney Judge."
MMM, that's the second time TNC has used "runagate" in this article. I think that he's just learned a new word. Good for him.
""""""""""""""Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal."""""""""""""""""""""""
These two historical periods overlap one another. TNC's obviously counting Jim Crow era (ca. 1865-1954) AND separate but equal (1896-1956) as distinct when they're not, they're part of the same era. That's called piling on, or else TNC's a very poor historian.
And you thought Tawana Brawley hoax/hustle was bad.
AGAIN. I repeat it here:
"Mr. Coates, are you saying that IF we fund reparations, that therefore we can repeal and rescind ALL Federal, State, and Local AA laws/jurisprudence; stop all welfare payments except at the bare minimum level; rescind all federal payments to questionable new programs (Rescind/repeal Head Start; Repeal My Brothers Keeper; etc)??
In other words, to equal out the books, NO MORE Federal/State/Local Programs directly aimed at minorities? AND, no no more FUTURE programs?
Affirmative Action would be TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY RESCINDED. No more busing; This would include Repeal of Fair Housing Act, completely repealed.
Obviously the 13,14,15 Ammendments to US Constitution will stay, as well as '64 Civil Rights Act and 65 Votiing Rights Act. Every single piece of legislation beyond that, is henceforth repealed and TOTALLY defunded.
Fair is fair, and justice is justice.
WHAT are Blacks will ing to give up in order to receive gimme gimme gimme dat stuff a la Reparations? What are you willing to have repealed in place of Reparations?
It works both ways.
Rough estimate of ALL Federal/State/Local programs since the mid 60s in kind transfer payments to blacks has been over 500Billion dollars and continues to this day.
This will ALL be totally eliminated and in return, you'll get your one time lottery payment Reparations.
But then, once that money is over. It's over. Kaput. No more coming back in 15yrs when the out of wedlock rate is 90%; the incarceration rate is about 70%; the standard deviation (SD) in IQ has risen to a full TWO SDS, and claim, hat in hand "Well.....we now need another one, a new shot in the arm of reparations because...........UH...............Well..........CAUSE WHITES ARE RACIST, AND ITS ALL YOUR FAULT FOR WHY OUR COMMUNITIES ARENT ANY GOOD! S o gimme gimme gimme more more and more of that stufff!"
Nope. Once you agree to take the reparations payment, its ALL and TOTALLY OVER. No more federal programs, and Affirmative Action is forever off the law books as enforceable legislation. From now on, it will be a totally color blind society.
ARE YOU PREPARED TO MAKE THIS FINAL AGREEMENT?
TNC:"To proudly claim the veteran and disown the slaveholder is patriotism à la carte."
Isn't that how most people do it? Last time I checked, the British love to pat themselves on the back for the Somersett Case while simultaneously downplaying Britain's acquisition of the Asiento in 1713.
"I think Mr. Coates has neatly summarized most of what the majority culture doesn't want to accept about life in the U.S. both historically and contemporarily, because if they admitted these are actual truths, they would have to do something about them."
Do what? And then what? What sort of reckoning are we talking about here? I beg the left to deal with this issue in a positive and definitive way. At least take a bold stand on what you all think should be done.
I personally believe that addressing America's past mistreatment of black people and acknowledging black people's limitations are not mutually exclusive. If reparations are seen as compensation, then have a ball; I'm sure black America would appreciate it. But, if reparations are approached as yet another attempt to uplift black Americans to the next level, then the entire enterprise will fail miserably to accomplish the goal.
I've read the article, and as moving as it is, I think Coates underestimates just how much of Black America's ongoing suffering is self-inflicted, and that includes the rejection they face from white Americans.
A little PS to white liberals: if you feel strongly about reparations, then you should lead by example in your own lives instead of going on and on about something while doing absolutely nothing about it.
TNC, thru faulty logic, wrote: "In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—"
""""""""Seriously, TNC? Do you really think that Barack is "twice as good" as the rest of his classmates at Harvard Law?""""""""""""
I'm not sure that's what TNC means. I think its more, Barack and Michelle have won by being at least twice (perhaps three times) as good as the majority of BLACK familie(s). (remember, its familie(s), as the out of wedlock rate for blacks is on the cusp of 80%).
Btw, technically, Obama is not African-American as the term is commonly used and defined. He's Kenyan-American, and the American part comes by way of his Nebraskan white mother.
"""""""""TNC:"The essence of American racism is disrespect." """""""""""""
Ok, TNC, if you're feeling so disrespected, then who's the creepy ass cracker keeping you down?
Oh, its all of white America, of course.
My bad.
Reparations are fine by me. However, we should make them contingent on REPATRIATION. And the cost, which should cut our losses a million fold, should be born by supplementary taxation on the liberal/conservative scumbags that have contributed to and profited from this whole mess.
Reparations now!!!
Of course the majority of people even in the Jim Crow South who were sharecroppers were white. In the late 1930's, there were 5.5 million white and 3 million black sharecroppers in the Old Confederacy. I don't exactly think the bankers and financiers of the City of London and Wall Street were the ones running this system, nor were the independent farmers of the rest of the country. Even during the Antebellum period the majority of whites in the Confederacy didn't own any slaves.
I also fail to see how blacks destroying neighborhoods after pushing white people out is the fault of white people and large corporations who simply realized that a neighborhood full of poor people wasn't going to buy anything and shut their doors. How does he attribute the decline of the areas after white people left to be the fault of white people? I can't believe this is the case this guy is making. Of course there is no good evidence to support his case for reparations, so he has to pin blacks destroying their own communities as the fault of white people who are not living there. Incredible, like Steve once said: Political Correctness Makes You Stupid.
TNC:"The urge to use the moral force of the black struggle to address broader inequalities originates in both compassion and pragmatism. But it makes for ambiguous policy. Affirmative action’s precise aims, for instance, have always proved elusive. Is it meant to make amends for the crimes heaped upon black people? Not according to the Supreme Court. In its 1978 ruling in Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, the Court rejected “societal discrimination” as “an amorphous concept of injury that may be ageless in its reach into the past.” Is affirmative action meant to increase “diversity”? If so, it only tangentially relates to the specific problems of black people—the problem of what America has taken from them over several centuries."
TNC gets at something here. Blacks have been uniquely* victimized in American history. No one can deny that. If we are to have affirmative action, it should be reserved for Blacks. No one else should qualify.
* Amerinds offer a similar case, but their experience was quite different, seeing as how they were both more hated (Blacks never faced the possibility of genocide)and more respected than Blacks.
All this race pimping needs to be brought to an end, it's gotten stale and sickening. It's just a cover for their inherent incapability to gain traction in a modern country. The trolls seem to have decided to coordinate their appearance on this blog with their predictable gibberish.
Gimme gimme gimme, me me me, send mo' money.
Good article, but the drivers of the subprime disaster was not the GSE's but the private label market.
"We find that the growth of the subprime mortgage market was largely a non- GSE phenomenon: it occurred outside of the normal mortgage origination channels and was funded by non agency or “private label” securities (PLS)."
http://research.stlouisfed.org/conferences/gse/Van_Order.pdf
Not that it has to do with the general thrust of the post. And not that it makes that much difference.
PS. Slavery was bad. There are plenty of people in the South that will NEVER get over the Civil War, but I have never heard them say that slavery was a good idea. The entire 'Lost Cause' argument is that the Civil War WASN'T about slavery.
TNC may be an idiot, but arguing that slavery was a good idea ????
TNC:"The crime indicts the American people themselves, at every level, and in nearly every configuration. A crime that implicates the entire American people deserves its hearing in the legislative body that represents them."
The entire American people, TNC? Are you arguing that Black Americans are somehow also to blame for slavery? Or are you implying that Blacks are not Americans?
In the US, the slavery issue is front and centre almost all the time, an apology would seem almost silly at this point. As an outsider I've become convinced that Blacks and Whites just *can't* live together. Some individuals certainly, but as groups it doesn't seem to work, particularly in the US given its history and mythology of equality.
At one time I thought it was just a matter of whites not being nasty toward blacks - everything would eventually work out, but I've started to think the real problem lies with blacks themselves....there is no apology that will help...any payment would be counter productive because blacks are already far too dependant on white largess.
I've thought about a 'Marshall plan' for black education, but I get the sense that blacks don't have much interest or aptitude for education, and those who are capable already have ample opportunities.
The fact is whites don't dislike blacks because of thier skin color...there's just an unbridgable difference in culture. Black attitudes towards sexuality and family are at the heart the issue. White heterosexuals want a society based on a degree of sexual restraint, with stable 2 parent families, blacks seem unable or unwilling to conform to this European norm.
The absence of black fathers creates a self perpetuating cycle of dysfunction, particularly for black males. You see the same thing in US and Africa... An almost Clownish desire to show off and be the 'Big Man'. It's a child screaming out for the non existing daddy.
It's the nature of African people, I don't think whites can help even with the best of intentions, so Im very pessimistic.
I think this issue will be the downfall of America.
Lol at the transparent astroturfing in this thread. Hi, Atlantic interns! Please read more articles on this blog!
Indeed. Welcome conventioneers! Stay a while. Don't forget to grab some swag on the way out--maybe something from the "Sailer classics" column on your right. Perfectly safe in here of course, but careful on your way back to the suburbs, it's kind of a "shady" (wink-wink) neighborhood out there.
One big problem with reparations is that blacks will never agree that they have been fully compensated. Even if they were given the entire country they would still claim that it was not enough and keep demanding more. I really do not believe whites owe them for slavery any more than blacks should pay a royalty for using a light bulb or an airplane but I might consider it if I knew that I would never be bothered with them again.
I hate to ref bad movies, but black Americans asking for reparations is kind of like when the Blues Brothers go to collect their pay after a gig and find their bar tab has burnt right through it.
So I'm supposed to pay J'Shizzle for something that didn't happen to him that I didn't do?
Speaking of the progressive's lack of historical context (indeed, typically lack of any context), it struck me earlier today when I came upon something about Wilburforce and the anti-slavery movement: where were the Africans?
I honestly don't know--perhaps there was a similar organized abolition effort coming out of Africa. One thing's for sure--after the North Atlantic slave trade was abolished African nations continued to prosper by it. Maybe they should chip in too.
300,000 Union dead. New amendments to the Constitution. Reconstruction. A decade of Civil Rights. Bussing. Equal employment opportunity legislation. Disparate impact legislation.
Nope. America hasn't done any soul searching whatsoever about the legacy of not picking their own damn cotton.
"I'm not sure that's what TNC means. I think its more, Barack and Michelle have won by being at least twice (perhaps three times) as good as the majority of BLACK familie(s). (remember, its familie(s), as the out of wedlock rate for blacks is on the cusp of 80%)."
Yes, TNC probably does mean twice as good as a white person in a similar position. Sayings such as "you have to work twice as hard to get half as far" are common in the black community. It's difficult for me to believe he's contrasting Obama with other black people.
It's kind of ironic that anyone should think so highly of Barack Obama. He's only president because liberals thought a black president would be a nifty idea for 2008. His sole qualification was the fact that he was a black man who could be taken more seriously than someone such as Jesse "stay out the Bushes" Jackson or Al "them Greek homos" Sharpton.
He is not a particularly good president at all. The principal reason he isn't the disaster Bush was is that he isn't allowed to be. Bush had a free pass for Afghanistan and Iraq. Obama would have led the country into Syria, but the American people had grown wise by that point. Of course, he still has the remainder of his second term to go, so watch out.
The TNC article discredits itself in its opening quotation from the Bible.
The reason that every 7 years slaves were freed and debts forgiven was the same reason we have a statute of limitations today: at some point, you just have to move on with your life.
Courts (and society, since Coates appeals to society as such) can't get involved in these ancient disputes and unravel all the actions of the players involved and somehow come up with a solution that makes everything ok.
To the extent that the final accounting shows white people owe blacks something (even that is highly doubtful), justice is better served if people just move on.
TNC, thru faulty logic, wrote: "In the contest of upward mobility, Barack and Michelle Obama have won. But they’ve won by being twice as good—"
""""""""Seriously, TNC? Do you really think that Barack is "twice as good" as the rest of his classmates at Harvard Law?""""""""""""
Anonymous:"I'm not sure that's what TNC means. I think its more, Barack and Michelle have won by being at least twice (perhaps three times) as good as the majority of BLACK familie(s). (remember, its familie(s), as the out of wedlock rate for blacks is on the cusp of 80%)."
Possibly. On the other hand, "twice as good" is a familiar trope in the Black community, so I tend to think that he is saying that they had to be twice as good as their White compatriots.
TNC just doesn't get irony. From Todd Solondz' Storytelling:
SCENE: A family around the dinner table.
SON: Well, I'm supposed to watch Schindler's List for homework. The movie's like almost four hours. And then I'm supposed to write a report on survivors.
(to DAD)
You know any survivors, Dad?
DAD: Hmmm...Do I know any...personally...?
MOTHER: Well, technically your Zeda is a survivor.
SON: He was in a concentration camp?
MOTHER: Well, no. But he had to escape the Nazis.
SON: But I thought he came over to America before the war.
MOTHER: Well, he did. With his family. But his cousins, they had to stay and they were all killed. And if he'd stayed, he would have been killed. So in my book he's a survivor.
SON: Even though it was only his cousins that were killed?
MOTHER: But that could've happened to him. Or to me, if I'd been alive. Or you.
LITTLE BROTHER: Or me?
MIDDLE BROTHER (a ne'er-do-well): You mean, then, we're all survivors?
MOTHER: Well...yes. If it hadn't been for Hitler, he wouldn't have had to leave Europe. We would have been...European.
MIDDLE BROTHER: But then, in a sense, since you would never have met Dad if your family had stayed in Europe...if it weren't for Hitler, none of us would have been born.
Long pause.
FATHER: Get the hell outta here!
MIDDLE BROTHER: (rising to leave) Man, it's just like, conversation.
Mr. Coates needs to ask himself whether, at long last, he wants to go on being an American or not. If white racism is universal and irremediable, then we should part ways before things get ugly again. The more whites do for blacks, the angrier and more demanding they get. The madness has to stop eventually. It's been said before in this forum, but blacks who want to go on bearing an eternal grudge against whitey need to find somewhere else to do it. Will they go away for $100K each? How about $50K each plus we give them a big chunk of Texas?
TNC:"Two hundred fifty years of slavery."
Not quite sure where he's getting that figure. Elsewhere in the article he invokes 1619 as the beginning of slavery in England's North American mainland colonies. Since slavery was abolished in 1865, that gives us 246 years, a somewhat less pleasingly round number.
TNC also seems to regard 1619 as a kind of year zero, the point of genesis for the African american people.Hence, in tabulating what is owed, he begins counting in 1619. This is odd, as far more Black Americans trace their origins back to the 18th century. From 1620 to 1700, only 21,000 Blacks were shipped to mainland British North America, as compared to 189,000 from 1701 to 1760.
Steve, why not post the Penn and Teller: Bullshit episode on reparations?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDMCltumWIc
It deals with Indians, Africans, and Japanese.
They are against it in general, except for Japanese internees.
No one points out that the black experience in the US (13 colonies) was peripheral to slavery.
Look yee now to Brazil ! There be the motherlode of sufferinks!
In a way, black Americans seem to have one foot on the gas and the other on the brake, pressing down on both pedals as hard as they can.
They simultaneously believe, absolutely, both that white people are the bane of their collective existence AND that spending as much time as they can with white people is their one ticket to paradise.
Has anyone else noticed this? Most people who believe they're oppressed try to spend as much time away from their oppressors as possible. Blacks appear to be a first in this regard.
"""""""""""""""""""TNC also seems to regard 1619 as a kind of year zero, the point of genesis for the African american people.Hence, in tabulating what is owed, he begins counting in 1619. This is odd, as far more Black Americans trace their origins back to the 18th century. From 1620 to 1700, only 21,000 Blacks were shipped to mainland British North America, as compared to 189,000 from 1701 to 1760."""""""""""""""""""""
That's it! And let's not forget that prior to the early 18th century, technically most blacks were not slaves but indentured servants, as were many poor whites who immigrated to the colonies.
A good sizable portion of the 'talented tenth' or free Negroes came from this original portion of indentured servants since they were freed earlier than their later 18th/19th century counterparts.
"""""Yes, TNC probably does mean twice as good as a white person in a similar position.""""""""""""""
Still not sure about it.
1. Lets not so quickly forget that Obama has never fully been viewed by blacks as being "black enough". Remember, he lost his first election to another black for this very reason.
2. Collectively, there simply aren't enough blacks that are twice as good as whites. Since, even the highest economic level of black's children tend to score lower on IQ and educational tests (e.g. GPA, SAT, ACT etc) than the lowest economic level of whites.
Oops.
""""""Sayings such as "you have to work twice as hard to get half as far" are common in the black community.""""""""
Yes, it's a common phrase, but frankly, blacks have to work way harder than twice to compete (from an IQ standpoint) with over 90% of whites, Shermans included.
More like they have to work 3-4 times harder. And, don't forget, those that already outsmart them, they're working at full throttle themselves.
One reason why the gap never closes.
""""""It's difficult for me to believe he's contrasting Obama with other black people."""""""""""""""
But, in the real world, that's what it would have to mean.
FACT: Average IQ for blacks = 85.
In his post, 'How smart is Obama anyway? About as smart as G. Ford', Steve posited that Obama's IQ is around 125, or roughly 40pts above the average back a la Rachel Jeantel (who actually IS quite representative of majority of today's blacks).
FACT: If anything, Obama's at least three times all that and a bag of chips vs the vast majority of African-Americans.
Obama himself is part white, didn't forget did you? His dad's side is from Kenya. Technically he's not authentically 'African-American' as the term is understood.
A better comparison would be Michelle Obama, whom no one doubts is an authentic African-American and has a somewhat lower IQ than Obama.
So, perhaps the full phrase should be "Maybe you have to work twice as hard, but Affirmative Action will carry you the rest of the way."
You don't make up for sins of the past by making the present pay for them. You only breed hatred and resentment. Look how affirmative action - like forty acres and a mule after the Civil War - has worked out. It is a form of reparations from the Civil Rights Acts of the sixties.
Iknow, I know, money speaks louder than actions. Pay reparations? More than a century and a half after the fact. How absurd! How unnecessary and kowtowing to a vocal minority - a mere minority of less that 15% of the population that sucks the oxygen from any room. Preposterous.
If we fall for this boondoggle, then we will fall for the next and the next and the next, for enough is never enough to the greedy.
I mean, today, the most a man convicted of a serious crime in this country has to suffer is measured in years, not centuries.
Oh, I almost forgot, We could call it another 'stimulus' package with a few black leaders and organizations reaping the windfall.
Love how TNC gives a lengthy discussion of German reparation payments to Israel. The subtle implication, of course, is that Black Americans could be just as successful as Israeli Jews. They just need reparations. Sure, TNC, sure.
Interesting to note, though, that TNC doesn't attempt to invoke the Israeli precedent as an argument for an independent country for Black Americans. I suppose that, on some level, he realizes that if Blacks were given, say, Mississippi as their own nation to rule, the results would not be very pretty...
Has anyone else noticed this? Most people who believe they're oppressed try to spend as much time away from their oppressors as possible. Blacks appear to be a first in this regard.
In fact, it is Jews who appear to be first in this regard.
300,000 Union dead.
And 300,000 Confederate debt, lest you have forgotten them.
Well, it's been said before but there's no harm in repeating some facts.
According to the U.S. census of 1860, only 1.4% of the whites living in the entire United States owned slaves. And the majority of slaves were owned by a few big land holders.
I personally reviewed the data from every census from 1860 to 2010 and calculated the rate of growth of the population due to immigration and births for each 10 year period. The results show that roughly half of all whites living in America are descendants from immigrants who had arrived here post Slavery.
How is it that race hustlers like TNC can lump all whites in together? Can hold them all accountable for the behavior of a few? How could a farmer in 1895, working his forty acres in Minnesota with the aid of his sons and daughters possibly have been in a position to have intervened in the voting policies of Mississippi? And so on and so on with every small tradesman or wage laborer in the North and West.
Naturally he ignores statistics and every argument he presents is anecdotal. In this he demonstrates once again what is just so characteristic of blacks in general, which is to believe that what occupies their small minds is by virtue of that alone, of universal significance.
"""""""Love how TNC gives a lengthy discussion of German reparation payments to Israel. The subtle implication, of course, is that Black Americans could be just as successful as Israeli Jews. They just need reparations. Sure, TNC, sure."""""""
Funny thing just how TNC is behind the times with this whole issue. In Tim Story's 2002 film Barbershop, the topic (among others) of Reparations came up down at the ol' shop, and most of the leads were vs it, basically among other reasons such as Cedric the Entertainer [paraphrase]"It's no good! Because, if you give Reparations, that will just make Cadillac the number one car owner in the country!"
But an interesting point is made nonetheless: In the film, they use the comparison to the Holocaust as in: How come all the Jews got free money? And the answer, correctly, was "Jews didnt receive money, only the holocaust victims received a payment." [paraphrase]
So, interesting that Cedric the Entertainer and Ice Cube have more common sense on the issue than card hustling smell a buck TNC of the NYT.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RczW1gIRBjY
Jews in America and Israel should be grateful that their ancestors were gassed and roasted by the Nazis. Whoever survived got to live in these free modern countries instead of being cooped up in Eastern European shtetls
Most American Jews' ancestors emigrated to the U.S. between 1880 and 1920, i.e. before the Nazis.
Do current citizens and political leaders of China and Russia endlessly soul search, or allow themselves to be lectured to and harangued about the treatment of members of their countries during the rules of Mao and Stalin? Anyone there been paid any money for the ill treatment of their ancestors? Just wondering.
I support reparations, in principle. Paying people for work done is the decent and honorable thing to do. "Getting away with" not doing so, seems low. Rectifying a past injustice is a good thing.
The just solution would be to add up the work done, over the centuries, subtract the excessive/additional benefits (affirmative action, per capita welfare above the US mean) from this figure and distribute the remainder among the descendants and heirs of those who had been forced to work against their will for free. I imagine this will be a massive stimulus to the parts of the economy. Then, end affirmative action. Naturally, people such as Obama who are not the heirs of slaves aren't owed anything, just because they have dark skin.
In some ways this situation reminds me of what happened in post-Communist Poland. Past injustices (people having had their lands or assets stolen by the Communists) were rectified by having the property returned to the heirs; if the property could not be returned (an airport was built on someone's farm) monetary compensation was provided. In many cases the person receiving the money or property didn't even know the relative who had originally owned it, or that he was even an heir of that person. The point is that stolen property or, in the case of slavery, labor, ought to be returned to the heirs.
-Dr. Preobrazhensky
In an earlier post Steve wrote:
...the Democrats ought to fear being identified in the minds of Hispanics and Asians as the Black Party. Where the rubber hits the road, most Hispanics and Asians would rather ally with self-confident whites than with blacks, ...
Won't the reparations issue be a problem for the democrats and threaten to crack their coalition? I can't see Asians or Mexicans supporting a policy that gives the biggest piece of the spoils pie to blacks.
Of course the GOP could continue to be the stupid party, take up the reparations issue, and let the democrats off the hook like they are doing with amnesty. It really isn't hard to see it. All the MSM types who are so concerned about the electoral future of the GOP, due to the dwindling white vote, will suggest that the GOP endorse reparations as a way to make headway with black voters, similarly to their suggestions that the GOP accept amnesty to attract the hispanic vote.
Soon Boehner, standing next to his son in law, will start to cry on camera and demand the GOP support reparations. He will be joined by McCain and Graham who will denounce as raciss anyone who disagrees. And another 5 million whites will skip the next election.
The worst thing about being poor is having to live amongst poor people. THC should start there.
He hates the police. Hates white people. Hates the *system*. And then, hates how poorly all the above have served him and whoever he claims the right to be speaking for.
There'll be too few whites left by then to pay anything in reparations.
Being a minority, Whites will find it politically very hard to resist demands for "reparations". In other words, they'll become the golden goose of the future dysfunctional, non-white majority, to be plundered to the max.
Did you read the article? DID YOU read the article? ...........Apparently that's the go-to-comeback from the TNC groupies over at the Atlantic.
And after much reluctance, I bucked up and went ahead and read the thing.
And apparently, mistreatment of blacks didn't end with slavery but, believe it or not, continued into the mid 20th Century with things such as red-lining in the housing markets. .......Honestly, that seems to be the big reveal of this reputed tour-de-force, must-read article.
I went to a crappy college and hung out in college with other working-class/lower middle class students who mostly never read a book unless it totally couldn't be avoided, and I'm pretty sure almost everyone of them have a pretty good awareness of what red-lining was and when it occurred. So, so much for the big reveal!
(But other than that, to give plaudits where deserved, TNC is at least a pretty decent English stylist.)
The prevalence of repeat teen births varied by race/ethnicity, with the highest prevalence in 2010 among American Indian/Alaska Natives (21.6%), followed by Hispanics (20.9%), non-Hispanic blacks (20.4%), Asian or Pacific Islanders (17.6%), and non-Hispanic whites (14.8%). The prevalence of repeat teen births also varied by state (Figure). The highest prevalence (22%) was found in Texas, while the lowest prevalence (10%) was found in New Hampshire. In eight southern and western states (Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nevada, Oklahoma, and Texas,), ≥20% of all teen births to females aged 15–19 years were repeat births. Conversely, in seven mostly northeastern states (Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Vermont, and Wyoming) <15% of all teen births were repeat births.
Si, Texas is the highest in repeated Teen births there, no wonder they have a growing economy and still high poverty.
Anonymous:"And apparently, mistreatment of blacks didn't end with slavery but, believe it or not, continued into the mid 20th Century with things such as red-lining in the housing markets. .......Honestly, that seems to be the big reveal of this reputed tour-de-force, must-read article."
Re-lining is an issue that TNC only recently started to investigate, and he is quite fascinated by it.
Steve has compared TNC to Glenn Beck, and the comparison is apt. Both men are fairly uninformed* (I almost said ignorant), but they do possess a burning desire to learn more about the world. Of course, being uninformed, they tend to assume that what is knew to them is new to everyone. Hence, TNC's lengthy account of the Chicago housing market.
*How ignorant/uninformed is TNC? Well, a while back he got into an internet back and forth where Augustine's doctrine of the Just War was raised. TNC quickly acknowledged that he did not know what the other guy was talking about.More recently, he asked his followers to explain some rather elementary points in Marxian doctrine to him (he's been reading Applebaum's IRON CURTAIN and Judt's POSTWAR, and he was mystified by Soviet ideology).
How tough was it for the typical Ghanan to get a mortgage in 1950?
Terrible review; if the sum of your review is that "just remember liberals were racists" then you're missing the point of the article and creating a partisan strawman to hack at. Coates certainly isn't claiming that liberalism is the solution, as you falsely imply. White supremacy in the US is an American problem, not a liberal or conservative problem, and an institution that has been perpetuated under the full gambit of political banners.
It's too funny that TNC' marxist fellators flash mob iSteve.
I support reparations, in principle. Paying people for work done is the decent and honorable thing to do.
What people do you wish to pay for "work done"? The slaves? Because they've been dead for a very long time.
Of course technically you don't want to pay anybody for anything - you want other people to pay money so that you can feel good about yourself at no cost to yourself. There's nothing stopping you from writing out a check for $5,000 to the next black person you meet if you really feel guilty about something.
.. eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till
Really, "Mississippi" lynched Emmett Till?
I suppose we should be grateful he did not claim that "America lynched Emmett Till".
Blacks have been uniquely* victimized in American history. No one can deny that.
I deny that. It's easy to argue, and I will argue, that black have been uniquely favored in American history. White people fought a very bloody way on their behalf. White people have spent the century and a half since that war twisting themselves, their culture, their law, and their Constitution into a pretzel in a futile attempt to make blacks "equal". There's no precedent in human history for one group of people adapting another group of people as their wards in this fashion.
Much of the white attempt to "help" blacks was well-meaning, but disastrous. Blacks have been royally screwed by the welfare state and the "war on poverty". In many respects they were better off before the white liberals decided to help them.
the Democrats ought to fear being identified in the minds of Hispanics and Asians as the Black Party.
Both low and high ability minorities are joined in the common endeavor of looting whites and they'll continue to loot whites until there is nothing left to loot. The idea that Jews, Asians, Hispanics would care about being associated with the Black Party is naive to the point of being touching. HBDers being as pretend dense as their conservative counterparts, and for the same reason - fear. Didn't the last election teach anything?
In 2002, Jeb Bush, a Hispandering Republican if there ever was one, married to a Mexican citizen, barely squeaked out a majority (56%) of the non-Cuban Hispanic vote in Florida, running against Bill McBride, who was only in it because he barely beat the horrid Janet Reno.
When at least one Republican shows he can win a majority of any non-white group's vote without having numerous other advantages, being an honorary citizen of a foreign country, and promising to give up the store to them, then maybe we can start talking about how the GOP should court their votes.
Until then, it's just the Democrats and their media friends playing Br'er Rabbit, trying to sucker Br'er Fox (R) into throwing them into the briar patch of Democratic voter strongholds.
Anonymous said...
Has anyone else noticed this? Most people who believe they're oppressed try to spend as much time away from their oppressors as possible. Blacks appear to be a first in this regard.
In fact, it is Jews who appear to be first in this regard
====
Assimilated jews in particular, right ? I'm thinking of the 19th century Mitteleuropean jews who were at the same time envious and contemptuous of the goyim.
""""""""I'm sorry, but this is sheer nonsense. I am not in the least sentimental about Blacks, but I do acknowledge the fact that they have a history of bad treatment in this country: slavery, Jim Crow laws, etc.""""""""
But to be consistent, finish the sentence. Slavery ended in 1865. Jim Crow has been removed from the books for well over half a century.
Therefore, with all the trillions given over to blacks in the form of Affirmative Action and other set asides quotas, etc. the debt to blacks has more than been repaid and then some.
Time to turn the page and say that the books of justice have been balanced, and a long time ago at that.
Turn the page, lets all move along now, and stop asking for freebies a la "gimme gimme gimme more of that stuff and if you don't ya'll racists, know what i'm sayin'?"
TURN THE PAGE ALREADY, TIME TO MOVE ON!
AND AGAIN for those just not getting the message,
WHAT ARE BLACKS WILLING TO GIVE UP? WHAT ARE THEY WILLING TO GIVE BACK TO SOCIETY AT LARGE FOR ALL THIS HELP THAT THEY'VE BEEN GIVEN FOR DECADES AND DECADES NOW?
Sign of immaturity: The world "owes" them everything while they owe everyone else, nothing.
Life doesn't work like that.
"And who said that life was fair?"---JFK
How about repatriations?
Explain why pre-european contact subsaharan Africans have so much more in common with current ss Africans than post European contact? Seems like subsaharan Africans have always acted the same regardless of external influences. :(
Perfect answer!!!!!!!
If blacks get reparations, it will be a great boon to Cadillac manufacturers. 90% of the money will be spent overnight and go into the pockets of businessmen.
You need to read the article again. There's nothing abstract about it
Good analysis
That is not why till is famous.
Part of the settlement MUST be that every useless black mid-/lower level government affirmative action hire be cashiered so government has the remotest chance to function properly.
Of course, paying them off and closing the payment window means 70% of the government bureaucracy goes away.
I'm sorry, but this is sheer nonsense. I am not in the least sentimental about Blacks, but I do acknowledge the fact that they have a history of bad treatment in this country: slavery, Jim Crow laws, etc.
Slavery and Jim Crow laws were quite different kettles of fish. I see no injustice in the Jim Crow laws that is not also now in effect (changing only who it favors and who it punishes) in the current "Anti-Discrimination" and "Affirmative Action" regimes; they are the same crime, only the identity of the victim has changed.
TNC:"This was 1947, eight years before Mississippi lynched Emmett Till and tossed his broken body into the Tallahatchie River."
This lie, in particular, drives me crazy because even the "official" story contradicts it. Till was killed in an act of PRIVATE vengeance by his putative victim's husband and a few accomplices. It was done in private for a personal reason. It was not a lynching, much less a lynching "by Mississippi".
The Duke lacrosse team frame-up, the George Zimmerman frame-up, and other such lies inform us that there is no reason we should believe anything the mass media said or says about the Till/Bryant incident.
For all we know, Till received the same punishment, for the same reason, as his putative father, who was executed by the US Army for crape in Italy.
>>ben tillman observed:
"""""""""""For all we know, Till received the same punishment, for the same reason, as his putative father, who was executed by the US Army for crape in Italy."""""""""""""""""""""
In Philippe Rushton's 'The Mismeasures of Gould', Rushton shows that Gould disparaged modern criminology Cesare Lombroso's hypothesis that many criminals "were throwbacks to man's evolutionary past, and that 'natural born killers' could be identified by anatomical signs of primitiveness."
In other words, it is possible in some cases that crime is genetic and that criminals beget criminals.
But since Gould knows all regarding evolutionary development this concept was completely out of bounds.
The Japanese families were never broken up on the slavery auction block.
LOL @ the broken black families thing. Black families are "broken" in sub-Saharan Africa today. Black families were "broken" in sub-Saharan Africa back when the black conquerors were selling the black conquered to white (and Jewish, and Arab, and black, and mulatto) guys with ships and money. And black families were "broken" again not long after emancipation and the receding of white disapproval of emancipation. And black families are "broken" today.
Black families are just "broken." Nobody has to "break" them, they come that way in the box.
Japanese girls were never raped repeatedly by men, their sons, etc Japanese people had it a lttle better thank you. And even tjeur abuses were by white people. Own it
Japanese were never greatly elevated by white largess, either. Or elevated from a cesspool like sub-Saharan Africa to a first world country like the USA.
Blacks, on the other hand, are still treated to violence, rape, and depravations of every kind...by their fellow blacks. The more blacks there are around, the worse it is for everyone, blacks very much included. Nobody treats blacks as poorly as blacks do; the death rate of the Rwandan Genocide easily exceeded that of the Holocaust.
Reparations?
People, the United States is broke.
It's broke because it spends money on things it can't afford. Such as black people, who are f***ing expensive.
Blacks consume far more in govt. "services" than they contribute through taxes.
Blacks have thus been receiving reparations for decades.
Not only that, the US -- like a deranged junkie for ebony -- is still importing large numbers of blacks (we now seem to acquired Nigerian and Somali "communities" none of whose ancestors ever labored in Massa's cotton fields but who also all consume more than they contribute). All of these "imports" and their descendants (such as Obama) will also be eligible for reparations.
All Mr Coates' shucking and jiving cannot overcome reality.
Blacks have drained the USA dry.
The US cannot afford reparations.
The US cannot afford black people.
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