And this is a fantastic argument why 'The West' owes reparations to the descendants of the West African Slave trade. The genocide in Rwanda, the WW2 Jewish Holocaust (to name but two recent atrocities); these were over within a handful of years. Every single second of it was worse-then-horrible and equally shows the worst of humanity. They nonetheless ended.
The West African Slave trade lasted for HUNDREDS of years. "Chattle Slavery" only ended in name and one needs only look at the Prison system in the United States to see the still evident policies and procedures that continue to this very day to continually harm the descendants of slavery. This is an ongoing crisis, that must be resolved.
What tortured damage lingers in the DNA of these descendants? We have proof that Rwandans, and Jews have suffered damage and harm; is it too hard to imagine that we owe a debt and an obligation to healing these injuries?
That slavery was horrible, nobody debates. That reparations are the best way to address it is a different story.
Pinker's book Better Angels of Our Nature documents, among other things, how ethnic conflicts have been successfully dismantled around the world. A key part of the successful recipe is a final round of partial justice whereupon only the most egregious crimes get addressed, the aggressors accept the truth of what they did, issue full apologies, and all claims are extinguished. There is no attempt at real justice, but it does end conflict and leaves everyone better off.
By contrast cries for justice have historically resulted in a new round of conflict, which creates a round of retribution, and a continuation of conflict that leaves everyone worse off.
The USA went through this effort after the Civil War. All claims to reparations for slavery should be considered long extinguished. And as much as you don't like it, the US descendants of slavery are massively better off than their ancestors were, and are likewise both better off and happier than most of their relatives in Africa.
It is clear that injustice is not done. I fully support an end to the Drug War, a reduction of prison sentences and a similar round to end the ongoing and current conflict over the same. Not based on long past claims to victimhood based on the slave trade, but based on current injustice.
However we have a lot more examples today of how to successfully end ethnic problems in countries as diverse as Northern Ireland, Timor and Liberia. There is clearly a right way to do it, and that is what I would want us to do now.
Very notably it requires a focus on closing the books on past history, a final round of forgiveness/redemption, followed by a better path forward. Which is the exact opposite of the kind of justice that the reparations crowd is asking for.
> Very notably it requires a focus on closing the books on past history, a final round of forgiveness/redemption, followed by a better path forward. Which is the exact opposite of the kind of justice that the reparations crowd is asking for.
We in the US are saddled by a thriving grievance industry, whose basic motives and goals are contrary to reconciliation.
We do something much simpler, we re-distribute based on income. And periodically adjust up or down (via the ordinary democratic process) how much we do this.
Would it be better to set up a separate parallel system to adjudicate precisely who deserves what? If you had a rough childhood because your dad was in prison, he got 10 years when now we'd prefer a sentencing guide which would give him 2, we're going to credit you with tickets for 8 years... and your neighbor whose dad simply died in a car-accident with zero? Create a Department of the Deserving Poor? Maybe we should just try to make things better for anyone who had a rough start, through no fault of their own.
You probably don't want to bring up Jews while making this argument, given that their outstandingly high status and wealth in society kind of demonstrates that group social outcomes are more driven by internal characteristics than external circumstances.
They are the people who suffered the worst oppression, literally losing half their people to murder very recently, and who are still the most targeted victims of hate crime. Yet somehow they also ended up comprising >17% of global billionares despite being 0.2% of global population, are massively overrepresented at top schools, in leadership positions at all levels of society, government, and law.
It's hard to argue that outcomes are driven by external circumstances (as opposed to internal characteristics of people) given facts like that.
If trauma had strict generational effects, Jews would be in ghettoes now and Israel would look like Burundi.
Articles like the OP need to make some explanation for the counterexamples like the Jews. Otherwise they're just hammering on their own confirmation bias - seeking examples to confirm the theory, instead of grappling with examples that seem to refute it.
There was indeed such a slant, in who got out. But whether this explains jewish success in the post-war world... you are in essence proposing a one-generation artificial selection event as the explanation. I haven't worked the numbers but I am pretty sure the effect won't be nearly large enough.
I am saying that Jews in Eastern Europe were mostly poor. There is no richness "despite oppression". There was suffering and lack of means. Also that they were almost all killed, except those with means to survive and great deal of luck. Also that the storiés of rich Jews are mostly nazi and other anti-semitic imagination.
I took his point to be that trauma doesn't determine outcome. Jews have been traumatized, but are successful. Thus the economic outcomes of other traumatized groups may be strongly influenced by factors other than trauma.
> Yet somehow they also ended up comprising >17% of global billionares despite being 0.2% of global population, are massively overrepresented at top schools, in leadership positions at all levels of society, government, and law.
Do you have any sources on this? Because it sounds like typical "Jews control the world" antisemitism.
You seem to be interpreting "yet somehow" as disingenuous conspiracy-theory provocation. But the author was responding to another comment, and from that context (and the lead-up in the comment itself) it's clear that "yet somehow" means "in spite of the ethnicity-level setbacks and targeting that Jews experience", as a counterpoint to the parent comment.
Yeah, it turns out that conversation is somewhat complex, and we have to listen to the people we're conversing with. There are plenty of canards and dogwhistles about all sorts of issues, but evaluating whether a claim is antisemitic has to go deeper than just noting that it discusses Jews and wealth.
That comment, for example, was arguing that the disproportion could be taken as evidence of Jewish superiority, and yet here you are calling it antisemitic.
"Would you use the same superiority argument on white people?"
Are you meaning to imply that the previous poster argued for Jewish superiority? I don't see that. They mentioned a hypothetical argument as a counterexample to disprove any notion that these observations are intrinsically anti-semitic.
These are simply claims of fact about the world. One can easily investigate their veracity and see if an error has been made. There is nothing anti-semitic about acknowledging Jewish success.
We also need to pay attention to this line from the article:
>> ..but how they face adversity is also a factor, speculates Dr. Shrira. “After all, the transmission of trauma is also the way the story is told.
I dont mean to diminish past events, or the lasting effects. But at the same time, we need to find ways to remember the lessons of history without reinforcing those effects.
The West African Slave trade lasted for HUNDREDS of years. "Chattle Slavery" only ended in name and one needs only look at the Prison system in the United States to see the still evident policies and procedures that continue to this very day to continually harm the descendants of slavery. This is an ongoing crisis, that must be resolved.
What tortured damage lingers in the DNA of these descendants? We have proof that Rwandans, and Jews have suffered damage and harm; is it too hard to imagine that we owe a debt and an obligation to healing these injuries?
And for healing to begin, the damage must stop.