Originally Posted by decastro;1939528
i'm not even really dwelling on the moral side of this, I just believe its really simple, if you owe somebody, pay them. theres nothing more american than that, we've always been capitalists. not being sure about what the implementation would look like is never a good reason to not do something. if the father is dead, pay the son. and so on and so forth. my thoughts on this are exceedingly simple. maybe i'm being naive but there has to be a reasonable way to do this, something that accommodates both families, whether it be paid installments or a cap on how much you have to pay back based on your current net worth. Money is amoral, i'm not talking about uprooting a familys way of life to punish them, I don't think anybody wants that. But if the families of those who owned slaves aren't paying the bulk of reparations, then whose gonna pay it? Your average white citizen? lol yea right. there isn't a direct precedent for this, but analyzing what america did with native americans could provide some insight. Honestly if i were white and I knew my family benefited from slavery I would take the initiative myself and make it right. My thoughts on this issue are also informed by everyday american life. e.g. I've worked hard to get my credit score to a good place but i still get calls from debt collectors about shit that they forgot i paid already. A friends father passed away and he still gets mails in his fathers name about old credit card balances. My point is, money doesn't die, debt doesn't die, we are reminded of this every second of every day, and with technology being what it is, everything is quantified, records don't get washed away. now more than ever it wouldn't be difficult to apply the same vigor to collecting old debt from slavery as they do to collecting debt from student loans.
I'll end with this, both you and Stavros have alluded to a kind of futility in reparations ability to erase racism in america. I can't speak for all blacks, i'm not al sharpton, but I can tell you that nobody I know thinks fixing racism in this country is even a remote possibility anymore. We haven't for a long time, even the most optimistic Black people I know. At this point, we just don't want our kids to get shot in the street like dogs, or run down by white supremacists trying to make a point, or shot in the back by police officers. Lol the standards are pretty low. I should honestly just be happy that neither of you are denying that slavery happened. For a while now, I've thought that Malcolm X's idea of giving a state or states to blacks was probably the right way to go, as sad as it is to say. In any case, The MLK dream has been dead for a while now and nobody I know even cares that much, its just watching unarmed people get killed by people who are supposed to be protecting them thats getting old. Getting killed over traffic violations. But i'll digress. At the end of the day, Reparations is really just about people getting what they're owed, its the principle of the thing. Like how The Dude just wanted his fucking carpet back. And I would support it, no matter the circumstance, if the roles were reversed, if blacks owed whites in some alternate reality, if humans owed aliens(in the future) if mice rose up and demanded damages for all the experiments we did on their relatives, I would support reparations for mice. If you provide a service for someone, you should get paid for it, from now until the end of recorded civilization, time shouldn't be a factor as long as time exists because Money does not die.
P.S. Ive gotta thank you Stavros, I burst out laughing when you wrote "White people were denied the opportunity to work on the plantations". I hope you let me quote you on that, I've never heard it put quite that way before.
