Whether if you agree or not black Americans are owed reparations

Fuck that nobody owes anyone else shit they don’t earn and deserve. Bad things have happened to every race on earth get the fuck over it and make your own lives better stop depending on someone else to do it for you.

I owe them nothing.

I have a friend who is dying of lung cancer. Every once in a while he gets to feeling sorry for himself, and starts whining about his life. He is a white Italian American.

Two or three days ago, he started in whining that he didn't know what joy was, and just wished he could have spent his life experiencing joy, without the depth of wisdom to understand the extremely ephemeral nature of joy. THEN he started saying BS like, "Why did I have to be a slave all my life?"

I will speak to you with equal stern impatience. You are NOT a slave. You simply enjoy feeling sorry for yourself for your perceived sucky life. You have a lot of opportunities, but you prefer to waste your ONE life, the little you have left of it, whining about coulda shoulda woulda.

No one OWES anyone anything. None of us alive today performed any of the sins you mention. Why should the past be converted into a cynical dollar payoff? Will the descendents of the people who were paid off feel as though they were also entitled...and feel cheated because grandma and grandpa spent all their reparations on booze and pot and crack?

Who will pay the geneticists to determine which percentage of black Americans alive today have more than 25% of original black slave ancestors? How much will that cost?

Who will pay genealogists, (me), to determine which American's ancestors all arrived in the United States AFTER the slaves were freed, thus having no possible connection to that issue? How much will that cost?

The stupidity and blind entitlement here has no solutions to these problems. How will these so-called reparations be paid? Will mulatto Americans be forced to pay a percentage, like 25%, because they are 25% white?

And when you responded, "the government", to the question of who will pay...you ignore the fact that government sucks all of its money from ALL American taxpayers.

Sorry but I’ve never owned a slave and no one black person alive today ever knew a family member who was a slave. A payment for something that ended 4-5 generations ago isn’t happening. If it was a serious topic you’d go to the ancestors of the war lords who kidnapped and sold their own people to the Europeans in the first place. Slavery was a horrible time in American history, that goes without saying. However it was Africans who first enslaved Africans and in some regions of the continent still do to this day.

thats stupid... noone is entitled to anythign cause bad things happend to their ancestors

100% agree. USA should try to learn from Germany about acknowledging cruel history and reconciling it. Start being open about the truth instead of hiding behind patriotism and white washed history books. Sugar coating and embellishing the truth does no good for anyone.

You probably know you’re going to get a lot of racist replies to this question.
If General Sherman’s directive (Field Order 15) had been followed and the emancipated slaves had been allotted “40 Acres & a mule” per family, it would’ve been manageable. Today the equivalent is estimated to be $6.4 trillion.

So I don’t see it happening anytime soon. And if we’re talking about cash, who would they give it to ? Only people who could prove black slave ancestry ?

Some are wealthy now. And some are now classified as “white”. It would be really complicated. But I think making an education affordable through college (or trade school) would be a step in the right direction.

One thing a lot of people don’t know about slavery is that it was illegal to educate one’s slaves. People who taught their slaves to read and write risked prison. So even though many dismiss it now, formal education was always the way up and out.

Okay, I can work with this. I will gladly pay my share of reparations for each and every one of these sins I have personally committed, but only to those I have committed them against.

There, that settles that matter. Now, on to the next issue.

After everything that we have been through and dealt with, yeah I would definitely say that we are owed something much more than just an apology. That just would not be enough.

By the same logic the native Americans are owed more.

"I aIn't GoNe GiVe ShIt, ya hurR?"

Lol stfu with your 1 dollar in the bank. People are always on the defense and leave so very little room to actually listen and understand. Reparations means giving back on lost and stolen opportunities. This can be implemented in so many ways. Funding black communities, allowing black voices in positions of power, changing real estate structures, evening the playing field that still linger and take hold of people without them even being consciously aware.
No one once asked you to grab a penny out of your own damn pockets, they asked for you to listen and to take heed from history and the present, but instead you have the whole "uh just work hard n stuff duh" response.
Gee, aren't you a smart cookie! Working? What an innovative concept.

Many of them have sucked welfare from the government tit for decades that’s payback enough!!

people should accept that the past was backward, the black community has some serious victim mentality, even Kanye West spoke on this

For most of those, I'm in total agreement.
If there was a (say 80%) agreement with that in a national vote, what kind of reparations would work best?
If 13.4% of US citizens are of African descent, how does one distribute the compensation in a fair and egalitarian way?

Who exactly pays?
Do we expect new immigrants to pay, who have never committed a single sin against a Black American?
Is it all citizens irrespective of whether they have ever caused harm?
Is it only the descendants of slave owners and others who committed racist crimes, leaders who enacted racist laws and funded racist practices, teachers who taught racism...?
How much do they pay? How many payments over what period of time?

I am not trying to imply that compensation is wrong. I don't think it is.
But I think perhaps it might be better if it was not a direct financial payout.
Rather, I think the best way would be to put far more funding into much higher standards of free education, medicine, maintenance of public infrastructure, and better, stricter and fairer standards of justice.

In my will, I have left everything I own to the Gunditjmara people to compensate them for the crimes of my ancestors.
To be honest, there is no way to compensate for the murders, rapes, theft of land, children stolen and sent into slavery, or the destruction of languages, beliefs and cultures. The horrors of it are so great that no amount of money could compensate.
And the work of healing, though it has begun, will take many generations.

I wasn't aware of the CIA causing the crack epidemic.
I would believe it if I saw the evidence.
Crack is a problem in Australia too, but here it's almost exclusively a white addiction.

I have actually learned a lot from this thread. Usually when I hear reparations it's always "give me monetary compansation" (which is why I didn't really take this thread serious as I figured it was more a throw money at them conversation)
But I have always disagreed with that. Not that I don't think they deserve it but because it won't actually do anything for people.
I'm of the mind of give a person a fish they will eat for a day, teach a person to fish and they will eat for a lifetime. So reparations need to be in programs that help to lift people out of their situations. Throwing money at people won't do it. But throwing money at social programs could help.
I thought I was the only person that thought like this. But a lot of people on this thread are saying similar stuff and so I feel better.

Oh fuck off. You owe me for the bike that I had stolen by some black thugs when I was 14.

Most people don’t even know what reparations would look like. It’s more complicated than simple payouts. It’s about making thoughtful investments in education in under-represented communities.

It’s about real estate investments and support for minority owned businesses beyond loan support.

If not done properly, government profit seekers will abscond with significant portions of the investments.

Reparations sound nice, but it’s far more difficult than most will admit.

This is going to require a lot of work.

You ain’t owed shit. Get over it. Nothing that is going on now is going to advance the cause.

No, they are not.

Most black Americans alive today didn’t experience those things or are too young to remember. Also, many black Americans immigrated here directly from Africa or the West Indies. Should they get reparations too?

Which black people? Only those whose ancestors came directly from Africa? What about those whose ancestors came from Africa via Caribbean nations such as Jamaica and Haiti? What about those whose ancestors were free and not slaves? How would it be proven who is who, and who's just coming forward for a money grab? And who owes it to them and how is all of this to be paid for? Do you want your taxes raised to cover it?

why should the present taxpayers suffer because the actions of dead people?

As long as the Africans that captured and enslaved their neighbors are going to be the ones to pay for it.... it's cool with me.

What about the Irish that were likewise exploited... Oh, and the American Indians too.

Take it up with the DNC

I agree, let's implement universal healthcare, universal pre-K, partial basic income, and universal housing, plus increase federal funding to public schools to help right these injustices. The best reparations are investments in impoverished communities that'll last. 🔥

Just a little FYI I have several friends and acquaintances that are African Americans, they have worked hard to make good lives for themselves. That includes going to school working to pay for their education then becoming all they ever dreamed of being. They are not all rich by any means but have all made good lives for themselves and are raising wonderful families. When the topic came up about BLM, reparations, and other racist related topics this was the same sentiment that echoed from them. They had worked hard to get where they were and didn’t want to be degraded by people who didn’t speak for them. They told me, We aren’t owed a darn thing other than what we work for in our lives. It was our choice (their words) to make something of ourselves and aspire to dream and make our dreams a reality. So think hard about that because these are friends of mine, that came from not good backgrounds, nothing was handed to them to pave their way to success. Remember nothing is FREE! And not everyone is responsible for everyone else’s mistakes or problems.

And all that was done by Democrats who instituted Slavery, started the Civil War, founded the KKK, fought against MLK and the Civil Rights Movement, fought against Blacks getting the right to vote, instituted Segregation, killed hundreds of Black Americans in Tulsa and burned their neighborhood to the ground just because they were self sufficient. Let the Democrats pay for it.

Not all black Americans. Only the ones who were directly harmed. Otherwise its stupid, its like me wanting reparations from England for the persecution of Irish Catholics in the 1600's

Been paid back well with the welfare system.

@Zenyatta well I left those out for several reasons. The most important one is what the majority of the radical left want for reparations is slavery. As for your comments on experiments on medical practices I’d invite you to read up on mental/insane asylums of the early to mid 1900s which were almost exclusively white, I’d invite you to read up on Irish immigration during the mid 1800s to the early 1920s, educate yourself on the crack epidemic because it was the black gang leaders who developed it and the sold it to the Mafia in NYC. Anything else I didn’t address?

Funny how some people on here who I assume are White think they owe black people money when that’s the U.S. government’s responsibility.

Giving handouts to descendants hardly seems like a solution.

My ancestors on my mom's side were in Europe until the late 1800's. I imagine the same holds true for those on my dad's side. So, no sale.

As usual I think @bijouxbroussard has a good perspective on this issue. We’re not talking only about distant historical wrongs here. I like the idea of reparations in the form of things like educational and job opportunities. And frankly those kinds of investments, independent of one’s view on race and reparations, tend to be good economic policy.

The fairest solution I suspect is not to just give out money but to redistribute money from police militarization to increase affordable housing, psychological care, social workers, job training, health care, and stocking food shelves.

And Native Americans?