"Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person 10 times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only we don’t look."
Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Case For Reparations http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/05/the-case...
You can use violent language to sensationalize it, sure. But its always seen as a stretch to me, to use ancient history to explain the current generation. Native Americans are jobless and alcoholic? Must have been those Indian wars 200 years ago. African-American folks uneducated and over-incarcerated? Blame slavery.
Everybody is born into their own life, and make of it what they can. Some change their position dramatically, some sit where they started. How do we explain that? "My parents were poor and uneducated because..." is just an excuse for one's own failures.
I understand that culture can strongly influence outcomes. But do we really believe that ancient wrongs have so warped a demographic's culture to the point they are doomed? And need 'reparations' to make it all right again?
I favor the process in the parent post - help those in need, sure, who demonstrate a willingness to use that help (send the poor to college etc). Blindly. That's important because people game any system, and others use quotas and officially-sanctioned profiling as further proof of whatever bigotry they already harbor.
> But its always seen as a stretch to me, to use ancient history to explain the current generation.
Calling it ancient history is disingenuous. History does repeat itself, and as any historian will tell you "If you don't know history, you are a doomed to repeat it".
> African-American folks uneducated and over-incarcerated? Blame slavery.
You are reducing it into something much less believable than:
"Blame the current people in power (white) for African-American folks having a harder time because there are still racist effects, cultural ideologies, subconscious denigration, uncaught biases, and traditions passed down from their great-grandparents who were slave owners."
Sorry, I meant blame-throwing is an interesting exercise, for a sense of history if nothing else. But 'reparations' means payment for having wronged someone, usually a group. Using historical precedents of harm seems very indirect to me, to justify handing a check to someone born a century after that harm. Clearer?
That "ancient history" includes discriminatory subprime mortgage practices and redlining that are currently going on. Ferguson is not ancient history, and neither are the disparities in policing or the school-to-prison pipeline.
Ancient history merely tells us how we came to be at current history. We can not possibly begin to fix these ongoing injustices without admitting that "ancient" history had an actual impact that must be repaired.
Right now, black men with the same college degrees make far less than their white counterparts. A resume with a white-sounding name gets far more responses than one with a black-sounding name. No amount of "helping people in need" is going to address those problems.
As for the article you've linked to, I don't think it's a bad idea to repair past injustice, but you need to do it in a good way. For example, I see denationalization (which happened after communist countries of E. Europe adopted capitalism) as something positive (if done in a transparent way). Likewise, if the US government decided to pay out all descendants of slaves, I'd be ok with it. But it has to be specific, intentional, for a specific cause. In contrast, racially biased college admissions are just that, racially biased.
I was responding to "I personally consider any institutionalized discrimination bad and immoral. Grants for black students are bad, IMO. On the other hand, grants for poor students (the majority of which will be black (in the US), but not all of them) are good." That would do nothing to reduce existing injustices and could make racial gaps worse, since white people would get a greater benefit from race-blind programs.
If you read the article, it describes how the racial injustices of this country weren't limited to slavery and didn't end with the civil war. There were ongoing government-sponsored, terrorism-enforced race-based programs that were targeted at people who are alive today. The article isn't calling for any specific response: he simply wants a committee to be convened to investigate possible reparations for the harm done.
> That would do nothing to reduce existing injustices and could make racial gaps worse,
I guess it depends on what you consider to be the greatest existing injustices. I personally think that the rich/poor gap is much more unjust, inexcusable and even dangerous for the future of the society than any race gaps. Also, I think that if the social gaps are made narrower, race gaps will by definition follow.
> since white people would get a greater benefit from race-blind programs.
Why is that bad? I see no reason why a black student coming from a rich family should have an easier time getting admitted to a good college than a white student coming from a poor family. Sure, it's less benefit "for the black", but wouldn't it be totally racism to demand higher test scores for admitting (poor) white students, just because they're white?
