Reparations theater in the House
Just keep going, Democrats. Most of America doesn’t think much of what you’re doing.
The slavery reparation hearings yesterday in the House were all theater anyway; an attempt to shore up the base. The Democrats in charge of this have no idea how reparations would actually work. What the House was actually debating was whether to formally study the idea of reparations—debating whether to debate.
The details of how reparations would actually be done remain extremely obscure because in addition to being a bad idea in general there’s no good way for it to be put in operation. The Democrats would rather do a lot of virtue-signaling and jaw-jaw about it.
Reparations would be difficult to quantify and make practical laws about in order to apply in the real world. One thing we do know, for example, is that there are no people alive who were slaves in the United States, and there are no people alive who owned slaves in the United States.
There are people who are slave descendants, but for some of them, that would be hard to prove since the details of their ancestry have gotten lost. There are people who are descendants of slave owners, but how many of them even know their genealogy in that respect? And some of those present-day descendants of slave owners are actually people who are of mixed race, because the slave owners often had children by their female slaves. So, do people who are descendants of both slave owners and slaves get reparations, too? And what proportion of slave-owner-DNA to slave-DNA would allow such a person to become a recipient of reparations rather than a contributor to the fund?
That’s not an facetious question. It describes a real situation that probably exists for many people labeled as black who are actually around 50% white genetically speaking, or people labeled as white although they have DNA that is 15% of black origin. Any serious reparations law would have to deal with that reality. This points out the preposterous nature of trying to figure out rules for reparations many generations after the fact, and after the races have become somewhat mixed. Do we administer DNA tests and give money on the basis of percentage of black DNA vs. white DNA? It is a repellent thought, but I don’t see how those issues could be avoided if reparations were to actually be taken seriously by those discussing them.
And of course, what about slave descendants who are now wealthy and successful? Do they get payments from a poor white person whose great-great-grandpappy had some slaves and after that the family fell on hard times?
Or will it be that all white people must pay all black people? Are Hispanics exempt? What about recent white immigrants to this country? All my ancestors came here post-Civil War except one branch, and that branch came here in the 1840s and lived in New Jersey, and only one person in that group was of fighting age (very marginally; he was in his 40s) during the Civil War. Maybe he even served in the Union Army; I simply don’t know. Should I pay reparations, without an ancestor who had anything whatsoever to do with slavery?
Are those whose ancestors came here after 1865 not going to have to pay, or if they’re white do they have to pay anyway, just for the unspeakable crime of being white? And if descendants of post-1865 arrivals wouldn’t have to pay, do those people have to prove how recently their families came here? What constitutes “proof”? Do they have to document the arrival dates of all eight great-grandparents or all sixteen great-great-grandparents? What if one great-great-grandparent was already here before slavery ended but the others weren’t? Would reparations be pro-rated?
How about white people who lost ancestors fighting against slavery during the Civil War? Would it matter? Do they get a reparations break, having already paid in blood? What if it’s only one ancestor who died? How many ancestors would have had to die in order to qualify for the exemption? What if the ancestor only had lost a leg? How much of a discount is a leg worth?
I could go on and on, but the absurdity and complexity of the entire enterprise is obvious.
At least Bernie Sanders has come out as being against it. Bu the hearings yesterday were a travesty, and perhaps the lowest point was reached when Coleman Hughes (a black writer) took the floor and was booed for saying things like this:
“Nearly everyone close to me told me not to testify today. They told me that even though I’ve only ever voted for Democrats I’d be perceived as a Republican, and therefore hated by half the country. Others told me that by distancing myself from Republicans I would end up angering the other half of the country,” he said. “And the sad truth is that they were both right. That’s how suspicious we’ve become of one another. That’s how divided we are as a nation.”
…”If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today,” he continued. “We would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors. And we would turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction. From a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants.”…
He used his own situation as an example, saying that even though he grew up decades after Jim Crow in a “privileged household” and attends an Ivy League school, reparations would be allocated to him.
“You might call that justice, I call that justice for the dead at the price of justice for the living,” he said.
As he spoke, people in the room audibly objected and contradicted him several times. After he finished and said the bill was a mistake, he was widely booed.
The chairman of the hearing, Democratic Rep. Steve Cohen (Tenn.), banged the gavel for order, saying, “Chill, chill, chill, chill.”
Cohen then said of the young black writer who spoke of his enslaved ancestors that “he was presumptive, but he still has a right to speak.”
“Presumptive”? Excuse me but—WTF?
The disruptions continued, to include laughter and mocking.
The Democratic members of Congress who did this should be ashamed, but shame is foreign to them.
[NOTE: Another impressive speaker was Burgess Owens. See this.]
I thought Affirmative Action was reparations.
There are people who are descendants of slave owners, but how many of them even know their genealogy in that respect?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-cDAqrywsHE
The Democratic members of Congress who did this should be ashamed, but shame is foreign to them.
Yep. The party of sociopathy. Manju’s right at home.
Francesca:
It was. But no more. The ante has been upped.
And it will continue to be upped. Who for a moment believes that if reparations were actually instituted, that would be enough to placate the left?
If they were honest, blacks in America would echo what Muhammad Ali once said when asked about his visit to Africa: “I’m glad my granddaddy got on that boat”. But no, they are too busy breaking the Tenth Commandment and that leads to frustration and anger.
What about blacks whose families migrated to the Americas after the civil war. Are they entitled to reparations just because their ancestors were from Africa???
We could play this game for hours…
But I guess I’m stuck no matter what. I’m descended from Irish stock on both sides (I think) and my grandfather’s uncle (my great, great uncle???) owned slaves back in the day.
The democrats are just trying to buy black votes. I’m all for reparations as long as it includes a one way ticket back to the African paradise their ancestors were taken from. I have been to some African countries, like beautiful DR Congo, and I would not want to live there.
Forget all that nonsense about DNA and the other “how about….” topics. The entire scheme is intended to impose some type of tax on that segment of the population who “benefited” from slavery and give the money to that segment of the population who “were victims of” slavery. Leaving aside who gets taxed and why as an exercise for the student, it’s certain that there will be no such thing as a reparations check for anyone. Instead, the money would flow to groups and organizations which (claim, anyway) to represent and support those “victims”. Basically, a scam and it’s not too hard to fill in the details.
Good old Liz Pocahontas Warren who self identifies as Cherokee can also identify with the Cherokee slave owners who fought under Chief Stand Waite in the civil war. Most all American Indian tribes owned and sold and traded slaves and as for the hispanics, there were ten times more black people taken into the Spanish, Portuguese, and French colonies than were ever brought into what is now the United States. By any standards of any time slavery was not good however it was the norm world wide up through the 1700s and still exists today in some parts of the world.
Roll-aid:
I agree that, if ever actually implemented in the real world, reparations would work in some very different way from what I’ve speculated on here. But that’s part of the lie of the hearings. We are talking about something that cannot be implemented in accord with what most people think it is.
All the news is leaving out the BEST COMMENT!!!!
seriously..
the ex ball player owens
Burgess Owens Says Democrats Should Pay Reparations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odph7rv73GI
basically he WAS a democrat, till he studied history and found out the republicans didnt own slaves… but the dems did, and his point was that only dems should pay the reparations…
At a House Judiciary Subcommittee hearing today focused on Reparations, Burgess Owens called out the Democrats and the Democratic party for years of historic injustices against the black community. Owens said, “Let’s point to the party that was part of slavery, KKK, Jim crow that killed over 40% of our black babies, 20 million of them. State of California, 75% of our black boys can’t past standard reading and writing test. Democratic state. Let’s pay reparation. Let’s pay restitution. How about a Democratic Party pay for all the misery brought to my race…”
Artfldgr:
That article from Red State that I already linked to in the NOTE at the end of the post was to an article there about Owens’ testimony, and it has a video of it as well.
And of course the MSM isn’t focusing on it. It’s too powerfully against the Democrats. He was very impressive.
Lovely topics the Obama era has bequeathed us.
Leaving aside who gets taxed and why as an exercise for the student, it’s certain that there will be no such thing as a reparations check for anyone. Instead, the money would flow to groups and organizations which (claim, anyway) to represent and support those “victims”. Basically, a scam and it’s not too hard to fill in the details.
Remember Mayor Koch’s curt description of non-profit functionaries who were retainers of black pols in New York? Mo’ money for the poverty pimps.
The left has created the idea of a group of people being victims forever, and some proportion of that group has accepted the idea of being victims. I don’t think reparations would end that attitude.
This is the legacy of Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose article in the “Atlantic” a few years back resurrected reparations as a serious issue.
My grandfather was a Coates and it galls me to share the name. I consider TN Coates pretty close to evil for the damage he’s done to America with his writing.
Try reading “Between the World and Me.” It is a short book, light on facts and honesty, Coates wrote for his son and it is pure poison being poured into the ears of his son and American blacks, teaching them they are victims and to hate whites with no redemption possible.
Coates’s personal examples of whites “breaking black bodies” are, with one exception of a rude New York woman on an escalator, blacks acting on blacks — including Coates’s Black Panther father beating TN as a child. But of course, that’s because of systemic white oppression.
Just thoroughly reprehensible. If you want to teach your people to be passive, bitter, hateful and racist, TN Coates is your man.
I don’t get it; when Steve Cohen called Coleman Hughes “presumptive,” did he mean to say “presumptuous?”
The word “presumptive” makes no sense in context that I can discern. The heir presumptive to a monarchy is the person whom everyone assumes will be heir, but there’s uncertainty because the heir hasn’t officially been selected yet.
If the word “presumptive” was used intentionally, then Cohen was asserting that Coleman Hughes was being presumed, uncertainly, to be…something. I’m not sure what. A recipient of the proposed reparations, perhaps?
But if the word “presumptuous” was intended, then the meaning is even worse. By calling Coleman Hughes “presumptuous,” Cohen was asserting that Hughes, by presuming to speak his opinion in a Congressional hearing, was assuming to himself a level of authority, rights, equality, or familiarity that he didn’t really have. In short, the Rep. Cohen (Dem.) was complaining that a black author was “getting uppity.”
Any minute now, the Democratic party will try to re-institute Jim Crow, with the full support of the Congressional Black Caucus.
If I may . . . the entire reparations circus frustrates me to no end. It represents either blatant demagoguery or primal ignorance, and they are not mutually exclusive. Like the misinterpretation of the three-fifths compromise, people who view slavery as America’s “original sin” are historically blind.
Slavery came into being in the Akkadian Empire (present day Iraq) around 2500 B.C. Prior to that conquered people were routinely murdered. The Jews, of course, were slaves to the Egyptians and Babylonians, the Greeks and Cathaginians were slaves to the Romans, and throughout human history most conquered people have known slavery. The point is that by 1776 A.D. slavery had been standard operating procedure throughout most of the known world for almost 4300 years. So African peoples have no unique claim to being victimized by slavery, they are just the most recent.
The point here is that the founding fathers were the first group to recognize that slavery was contradictory to the nation they were trying to establish rather than a standard operating procedure. Rather than pointing a finger at the founding fathers and accusing them of the original sin of slavery, we need to recognize that they were looking at a 4300 year old tradition and thinking out of the box! This was not a nation founded on slavery, but a nation founded while slavery still existed, and those ideas are two completely different things. In fact, since 4300 year old institutions don’t disappear overnight I offer that to have slavery in the United States disappear within 150 to 200 years is a remarkably rapid historical achievement for which the founding fathers and the U.S.A. itself should be given credit.
T — even older than that. The Akkadians didn’t invent slavery, it existed long before them. We know that because primitive peoples who never came in contact with peoples from Mesopotamia, e.g., the Siberian-Americans and Africans, all had slaves. We also know that from oral histories which became literature after the invention of writing, e.g. Homer and the Bible, that slavery of conquered people was ubiquitous, particularly of women.
An interesting book is “Out of America”
Written by a black journalist who went to Africa to check out his roots.
He was so appalled at the lack of respect for life along other things that his conclusion was the same as Mohammed Ali’s . . . thankful his ancestors came to America as slaves which eventually led to freedom and opportunity for prosperity.
Props to Bernie for his anti-“reparations” stance. Regardless of his personal motivation (which I have no particular reason to suspect of being ill). I never thought I’d see the day!
Doesn’t turn me into a Bernie fan, but credit where it’s due. Good for him!
The Left demanding reparations for blacks from whites is just one more way they seek to divide Americans and, it’s working.
The Left is a societal cancer and as that cancer deepens in its obvious malignancy those who enable it are increasingly complicit in its sins.
At some point a malignant cancer must be either destroyed, cut out of the body or it will destroy its host.
Regardless of how sincerely deluded, the path the Left pursues and that liberals enable will lead to unimaginable suffering. Suffering on a scale not yet seen, though Orwell imagined it very well.
R.C.:
I looked up the meaning of the word yesterday when I heard him say it. The definition I found at the top of the Google list included as a secondary definition “another term for presumptuous.”
I think it’s presumptuous to use presumptive as a synonym for presumptuous, but I guess that’s presumptuous of me.
huxley:
Please see my previous post on Coates.
Neo,
I did a “dictionary: presumptive” search on Bing, and got the same thing at the very top. But a few lines down, there is the Merriam Webster link, i.e. a real dictionary, that says,
Definition of presumptive
1: based on probability or presumption
“the presumptive nominee”
2: giving grounds for reasonable opinion or belief
3: being an embryonic precursor with the potential for forming a particular structure or tissue in the normal course of development
“presumptive retina”
as usual, I’m late to the party and there’s lots of other great comments about the real purpose of “reparations” and who will actually get them, but, … another category to consider:
are we “punishing” individuals ? And, if this isn’t a general wealth transfer, how do you do that w/o punishing not just mixed race marriages, but North-South marriages, i.e., where one partner is from the North (with the lineage to prove it) and the other from the South (again, provable)? Clearly the Northerner is going to get hit by the penalty on the Southerner.
Coates’s personal examples of whites “breaking black bodies” are, with one exception of a rude New York woman on an escalator, blacks acting on blacks — including Coates’s Black Panther father beating TN as a child. But of course, that’s because of systemic white oppression.
A manosphere writer once offered of Kay Hymowitz that she lacked the competence to offer a social-scientific perspective on her subjects and lacked the insight to offer a humanistic one.
Coates generates a great deal of verbiage in order to avoid acknowledging the following truths:
1. By any cross-sectional or historical scale, black Americans are an affluent population, just less affluent than non-black Americans.
2. Problems of a severity peculiar to the black population fall into roughly four categories: problems public authorities cannot do much about without vastly exceeding what just about anyone would adjudge a valid exercise of state power; problems which are most efficaciously addressed through deterrence, punishment, and incapacitation; problems which are best addressed by adjusting economic incentives; and problems which are best addressed by local government.
3. Placing blacks on patronage distorts incentives and distorts the social life of institutions.
4. Regulation of mundane human relations across the color bar by legal process has had unfortunate side-effects which call into question it’s advisability.
5. Blacks are not an aristocratic caste, nor are they retainers of an aristocratic caste.
6. The distribution of political preferences of black Americans is not a reaction to white racism. We have reason to believe they are a manifestation of an abstract hostility to whites among blacks.
7. Accomplished blacks in public life are few in number and not particularly honored by what might be called ‘official organs’ within the black population. Robert Bowser and Anthony Williams are examples of this. OTOH, there’s a commemorative statute of Marion Berry, who was a gruesome failure.
presumptive = uppity
To quote many many Italian laborers in New York City: “I got your reparations RIGHT HERE!”
i looked all day and no news on Burgess Owens…
Which makes him quite right and sort of proving the point as his people wont see him
on an aside..
john cusak does stupid, adds a bit to stupid
but then Shemtov on fox 5 goes off saying for what he did he should not be in Hollywood or work again, etc… kind of proving his retweeted by mistaken point…
Why not cloud the waters a bit with two people from history (erased/stalinized) disremembered by progressive education…
Watch how i REALLY screw up the narrative from the first paragraph on!!!!
Anthony Johnson
So right there africans mostly preyed on africans and rather than kill their enemies as they used to do, they learned to sell them…
and to whom did they sell them? to white slavers? no, Arab Muslim Slave traders… who, ALSO dealt in business of capturing white women with blonde or red hair, and blue or green eyes… those lacking were cheaper… it got so bad that slaves were so common and so cheap the populations skin lightened, and they started to be used as kind of coinage… [check out some famous paintings from long ago]
indentured servant is another problematic issue for the narrative
does ANYONE point out that the slaves of the founding nation were mostly white… and most of the black slaves were also indentured. (this was rather than be slaughtered outright back home!). but I picked Anthony for a reason..
i now will start slamming the general assumed narrative left and right over and over.
poor slave, nearly whacked by attacking peaceful victim Indians reclaiming German, i mean Indian lands for Indians… etc… lets just say the history of the Virginia Algonquians is not puritanical.
and another point that’s often missed.. the few hundred years BEFORE British rule and overthrow by colonists… oh, and EVERYONE in the common sphere, seems to have forgotten what the Dutch were like before they were all cool with the music, the legal prostitutes, dutch seed farms, and high quality “high” for the tourist and local alike.
quick recap: Guy gets caught by neighboring peoples, instead of being killed, gets sold to Muslim slavers, who indenture him to a company, who then feed and send him to the US…
Did i mention that he was the FIRST slave in the united states? oh, that’s coming.. but rifht now, he meets the woman of his dreams and they stay together…
well now we can easily understand WHY many blacks fought in the revolutionary war beside other colonists… how long had they been here already?
you try to make a historical factual movie about Mr. Johnson, and no one would believe it given the current assumed narrative (which when fleshed out is as complicated as a silent movie)…
finds his wife, finishes off his indenture and gets 250 acres (and today people thing a half million for 1 acre is good, if his family held on to that land to today, how much would it be worth? only look to the location and check out the rates)
Basically, the british saw him as a settler. A headright is a legal grant of land to settlers, and was given to anyone who was brave enough to cross the Atlantic!!! But there is a catch… you had to afford slaves!!! Headrights were granted to anyone who would pay for the transportation costs of a laborer or enslaved people.
So now we have the first black slave in the US work to be free, gets married to another, they get 250 acres, and become – Slave owners!!!
you might think god put Anthony on this earth just to bust the current narrative.. 🙂
cause this is the gift the keeps giving!!
if you look up headright in wiki, they get it wrong, and Anthony busts that point too
By giving the land to the landowning masters the indentured servants had little or no chance to procure their own land. This kept many colonials poor and led to anger between the poor enslaved people and wealthy landowners.
the person who wrote the wiki obviously didn’t know that the indentured servants once free became masters themselves!!!
part II next post.. as i said, his is the story that keeps giving.
I am so glad you wrote about this issue and brought up Coleman Hughes. He was interviewed by Dave Rubin (Rubin Report YouTube-excellent) and Hughes is a incredibly wise, articulate and insightful young man. He is only 22 years old and his maturity made Cohen look only more small and childish. It is a travesty!
So, they have their day in court…
This is the evil oppression that the US was build on from the very first BLACK slave (Anthony Johnson) onward?
but things get interesting in the Casor suit… (if you didnt think above was interesting enough)
Basically Casor was running away from Johnson…
Johnson sued Parker in the Northampton Court in 1654 for the return of Casor. The court initially found in favor of Parker, but Johnson appealed. In 1655, the court reversed its ruling. Finding that Anthony Johnson still “owned” John Casor, the court ordered that he be returned with the court dues paid by Robert Parker.
First BLACK slave, free, gets land, has slaves, one runs away, he sues in court to get him back and loses, he makes an appeal and wins… getting his ‘property back’
the catch here was that Casor’s indenture was ‘for life’…
“Presumptive”? Excuse me but—WTF?” neo
Lewis Carroll in “Through the Looking Glass” provides insight into the mentality;
And, just like Humpty Dumpty those on the Left are headed for a fall.
Coleman Hughes isn’t totally against reparations. While he said “paying reparations to all descendants of slaves is a mistake”, he also said this: “What we should do is pay reparations to black Americans who actually grew up under Jim Crow and were directly harmed by second-class citizenship—people like my Grandparents.”
As my daughter once said while she was going to Columbia and before she became utterly Zinnified: “Everybody knows that you don’t give the ghetto a check.”
i screwed up the blockquotes.. darn
anyway…
i noticed something else in neos point.. she did not list whether slaves who became slavers get money?
the point is not to say she forgot, or missed it or not, but that we are in a dialogue a narrative, and her points were from that narrative, and so, it would be hard to conceive of Johnson if you didn’t know the details of the history
and if you thinkg John Punch was the first… then what would you think of
So what would have been if punch was killed rather than be an indendured servant? like having a heritage of a criminal in australia, look who also has a similar twisted pedigree?
so, if they get reparations, does he have to give the Nobel back? [sarcasm]
and check out the history of these people!!!!!!!!!!!
The following is a list of historical people who were enslaved at some point during their lives, in alphabetical order by first name. Several names have been added under the letter representing the person’s last name.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_slaves
like
Elizabeth Key Grinstead (1630–after 1665), the first woman of African ancestry in the North American colonies to sue for her freedom and win. Key and her infant son, John Grinstead, were freed on July 21, 1656, in the colony of Virginia, based on the fact that her father was an Englishman and that she was a baptized Christian.
then there is..
White slavery, white slave trade, and white slave traffic refer to the chattel slavery of White Europeans by non-Europeans (such as North Africans and the Muslim world), as well as by Europeans themselves
where blacks enslaved whites before whites enslaved blacks…
By the mid-seventeenth century, the English colonies in the New World consisted of: New England, Virginia, Bermuda, Barbados, half of St Kitts (the French owned the other half), Antigua, Nevis, Monserrat and Surinam. Jamaica was only captured from the Spanish in 1655.
Such a trade necessitated a steady flow of labour to meet the demand for production. Between the 1630s and the 1660s, the colonists acquired black slaves from the Dutch, but the use of these white servants as field hands was considered a viable alternative system.
no one is upset at the dutch.. heh
The official definition of a white indentured servant was a man or woman who would emigrate after signing an agreement to serve a planter in the colonies for a period of five to seven years. The contract guaranteed that their passage would be paid, and they would be maintained at the expense of the planter. When their term of contract expired, they would either receive ten pounds sterling, sugar or a piece of land equivalent in value. In the 1650s, an estimated 72,000 individuals, the majority of them indentured servants, went from England to the New World.
so do they get anything? what about those like johnson who after working for 7 years got 200 acres?
if neo thought it was complicated by her points, add the rest of the missing history and its a colorful swirling LSD trip poster of complexity
I think it’s time for everyone who graduated from the Ivy League or who has an ancestor who graduated from the Ivy League to pay reparations to the rest of us.
It’s only fair.
Double reparations for Harvard and Yale grads!
America was built on the backs of its non-Ivy citizens, while the Ivy grads grew fat and powerful and passed their advantages down to their heirs.
It’s a historic injustice which needs to be, nay must be righted!
And not just historic. The cruel oppression of Ivy grads continues today. If anything it has grown stronger and more cruel.
Get your Ivy League boot off my neck!
Okay, I had a many times great grandmother who was accused of adultery in the 1640’s in England kept in Newgate for two years and then the accusers were find for not showing up to bring charges, she was released on the conditions that she would go to the New Would as an indentured servant. On the West side of Concord Massachusetts she became a wife and mother around 1649 and had a bunch of children and descendants who went on to fight in about every war, I guess up until the sand lot wars.
At the same time I have family who were in Virginia prior to 1720 who owned slaves and made barrels, they were cooper living between the area of Madison and Jefferson and they owned slaves and there are still black people in the U.S. with the same last name, I hope they are doing well and being raised by people who were dirt poor after the civil war who worked hard to do better during reconstruction I don’t think we, today, owe them anything except a decent chance at an education and fair equitable respect for living a good life.
The South took about a hundred years to recover after the war of Norther Aggression and just when we were bringing everyone on board the Democrats found out there was power being aggrieved blacks instead of successful blacks and from 1965 on they went to work on all of us, both black and white.
I am old, I was there and I saw them tear us apart.
OldTexan: After lunch my sixth grade teacher had us take turns reading aloud from a book for a half-hour. The one book burned into my memory was “Carry On, Mr. Bowditch,” a Newbery Award winner, about a real American, Nathaniel Bowditch, who was forced to leave school to work in the family business as a cooper. That went bad and at the age of twelve he became an indentured servant aboard a ship for nine years.
I was horrified. That a child could become something like a slave just because his family was poor had never occurred to me.
The inspiring part of the book was Bowditch self-studied math, astronomy and Latin, rose through the ranks on ships, and became a international figure in nautical navigation.
Bowditch was eventually awarded an honorary degree from Harvard, which puts his descendants at risk from my Ivy League reparations program, but since he was also an indentured servant, I guess it cancels out. There’s the rub with these reparations scheme, I must admit.
Still, I think my plan deserves a Congressional hearing.
Reparations was in blood and treasure, followed by assimilation and integration. Then the Democrats losing ground, had an epiphany, and ran amuck with the diversity racket including affirmative discrimination, witch hunts, warlock trials, and other PC things. That said, reparations to the human rights leaders who stood, not kneeled, to confront slavery. Reparations to their Posterity who stand against diversity, redistributive change, and political congruence.
Artfl, your history is fascinating and its territory is completely unknown to me. Can you recommend books or other sources that present this material?
Thanks!
An African-American “scholar” testified that:
https://pjmedia.com/trending/witness-at-reparations-hearing-white-people-are-ignorant/
At least she didn’t say “crackers” are ignorant. Thanks go to BHO and the Democrats for the education in racial comity.
Four of my great grandparents immigrated from Eastern Europe escaping the Pograms against Jews in the latter part of the 19th century. It is certain that none of them or their ancestors ever owned or trafficked in black slaves. Does that mean I am exempt from paying reparations?
As a genetic Jew (I don’t actually claim to be Jewish. I practice neither the faith or the culture.), it would seem that Egypt owes me reparations based on the biblical history.
As for assignment of guilt, how about the Arabs that raided the villages in the interior of Africa to take slaves and march them to the coast? Those are the people who should really be liable fo reparations.
Can we even begin to measure the absurdity of this discussion?
An African-American “scholar” testified that:
She’s had a curious career. She was awarded a doctoral degree from MIT in 1980 (in economics). Her dissertation was on a topic in labor economics. After that, she appears to have lost interest in the subject. GoogleScholar picks up 179 articles she’s penned since 1973, most of them in a publication called Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. You’ll find that publication in college libraries, but it’s not a scholarly publication (though I think it does have endnotes in its articles). She’s published in other journals, like The Black Scholar and Review of Black Political Economy, but you won’t find one research project in that set of articles, even a literature review. Her only publication in the field of economics picked up by the GoogleScholar velcro is a book chapter published in 1984. That’s it.
Someone with her credentials in a serious subject like economics should have landed a satisfactory position in 1980; with the melanin, she’d have had her pick. She had a position at one of the Cal State schools 35 years ago which might or might not have been a tenure track appointment. Otherwise, she’s just had visiting positions, and appears to have done almost no teaching in more than 25 years. (By her account, she’s had visiting positions at four schools. Two were prior to 1993 and one since was just a lecture series).
So here we have an ‘economist’ who has published almost nothing since completing her dissertation, has never been awarded tenure, has never had a consequential position in a commercial company or public agency, quit teaching a quarter century ago, and hasn’t had regular employment in the field since 1985.
om, Art Deco: That’s Dr. Julianne Malveaux and that sure is a checkered resume!
Reminds me of Obama’s career after he graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law with a stint as law review editor. Obama should have been golden after that and been offered a Supreme Court clerkship or grabbed by a high-profile law firm on his way to Bigger and Better. Instead he drifted with minor legal work and non-tenure professor positions.
As it happens, a San Francisco girlfriend of mine ended up with Malveaux’s apartment after Malveaux left San Francisco in the mid-80s.
A blawger of my acquaintance says law degree recipients who have no interest in practicing law are quite common and the production of law degrees is such (in relation to the number of available positions at any one time) that one can infer that about 1/3 of those who receive them fail to build a career in law or do not care to. The Obamas were in that set, though his degree of indifference does strike you.
Now, in academe, it’s not unusual that a newly minted PhD cannot find f/t work on a faculty. The thing is, economics is not a problem field in this regard and you have lots of options outside of academe that literary scholars and historians do not have. She didn’t last long as a f/t academic (the timing of her departure from San Francisco State suggests she may have failed an interim review, which would be consistent with her almost complete failure to place scholarly articles in that era). There are colleges who require very little in the way of publication to be retained, but she’s never landed a position at one. She’s never been a corporation or government economist, either. To top it off, she’s a childless spinster. A great deal of bluster comes out of this woman, which distracts you from serial personal and professional disappointments.
The genesis of this is simple. The bad idea has been around for decades, but as long as the Democrats weren’t worried about their lock on the black vote, they didn’t need it . Now, their policy solutions haven’t worked for blacks and Trump’s opportunity economy is showing the hypocrisy of Democratic rhetoric, weaking their hold on the black vote. The only thing the Democrats have is their ability to promise free stuff. This is the ultimate free stuff for blacks.
Acknowledge that the premise is both logically and morally flawed as well as impracticable.
Grant that it is ridiculous, ill conceived, incoherent and impracticable … as well as essentially immoral. But suppose for the sake of supposing that some kind of cash payment could be made.
Just ask yourself one question: “Will the people paying the reparations then be issued a firm, eternal, comprehensive and irrevocable once-and-for-all quit claim deed back to their own lives?”
Will the payee then grant that: “I’ve been paid all that is owed me for having the good fortune of now being born in a place your ancestors or people like them, once had control over; and you have now rendered to me all you humanly owe me or will ever owe me for your having had the misfortune of having been born on the same landmass and in the same polity as me. And I therefore, in recognition of this settlement do solemnly swear and bind that I and my heirs will now ‘eff off forevermore with my claims, and never trouble you again. And you may justly treat any further claims uttered by me or my heirs as simple assault”
Because, even if we had to tear this country down to its roots, to “strip the cathedrals and melt the candle sticks down”, empty the bank accounts, and sell off mom’s silver in order to get enough money in order to throw a onetime cash payment in Danny Glover’s jabbering face and say to him : “The debt you imagined is paid, all former agreements, assumptions … and bets … are off. “; then, it might almost, it … just …might …almost … be worth it.
Because war is almost better than continuing to live like this in a land where the insane make every day a lunatic experience.
send the bill to african nations that enslved their own people and sold the surplus
“presumptive” is probably “woke” for “uppity”
Julie near Chicago on June 20, 2019 at 11:42 pm said: Artfl, your history is fascinating and its territory is completely unknown to me. Can you recommend books or other sources that present this material?
in terms of THIS subject. your better off having a whole lot of fun doing the kind of research i loved as a kid… oh, family secret about to be spilled..
when i was a kid, my parents would take us to the library every week… we kind of lived in a bad area. they put in registered slip that allowed me to read anything in any section, including adult, and any subject…
so i would go to the card catalogue, and say.. “whats interesting?” and i would pick a subject person, etc… and go to the card catalogue… and find the section, and go over and look aver all the books selecting usually the fatter ones… then when reading, if a really cool person or such was in there, i would jot it down, and it would be my next book….
the beauty of this system is that we got to meander around the best stuff that anyone ever wrote… cannon, whats that… canon, wahts that… a list? wahts on the list? oh, platos, republic… whose plato… hey aristotle was cool, but the roman who wanted him was intersting too…
and they dont know how to motivate kids to learn? 🙂
ok.. so for THIS subject of slavery, you hunt for the diamonds!! and unravel threads… your in your mystery van looking for gemstones!!!
and as a loose framework to learn and find things, yes, wiki is GREAT.
why? because as you read more and more of the obscure, but more accurate ones, you get to figure out whats wrong with the more common and less accurate ones..
the part i have yet to impress on people is that i am understanding things in ways they dont because i have spent my life filling in the blank spots of the tapestry accross the whole things… to give a sense of whole, and a sense of proportion and a sense of what really matters or not..
you asked the best question, you get the best answer!
[i am best in quesiton and answer format… otherwise i am literally 100 places at once thinking… peoples heads hurt when they talk too long about things with me, i have no contemporaries… 🙁 ]
first give yourself a framework, something to connect the pieces, not look at them as separate things, this will help when debating, as thats how to find it too
Radical Republicans
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Republicans
is a good first place to start.. .but actually anyplace is good to start…
its juist that people dont bother and they dont figure out an enjoyable way to do it
right on the right of the page in the banner are key people..
see someone you dont know? someone who you vaguely remember?
click open another page and take a peak…
so you see Founded 1854 Dissolved 1877
a better word would be they replaced the republicans due to their success..
even though there are always those that disagree in a group.
as you read you read a sentence like this one:
kind of disjointed there, isnt it? good place to look… as the more you read the more you find out that the radical republicans wnated more, and got less, but they were the energy to move the rest of the republicans or regular republicans do do more of whats right.
so if you wonder what was that reconstruction plan?
The Wade–Davis Bill of 1864
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wade%E2%80%93Davis_Bill
and if you dont know them? you found a blank spot to fill..
soon you get into the habit of feeling blank spots and admitting them!!!
why?
because then you find gems a lot faster instead of walking past a wall with a hole in it and not seeing the hole opens up into a vast panoply of stories and people greater and more interesting than any playwrite with a limited life as of today writes!!!!!!!!!!!!!
[and you can become more intersting at cocktail parties… ]
over time, and reading and not 2nd hand stuff… from historians, but first hand stuff..
because down at the bottom, you have a place that gives you sources, and you can follow those too..
this is what you do when you have tons of sides vying for your attention and belief!
you ignore them, read best sources you can… records, diaries, testrimony, etc..
then come BACK… and learn who was doing or trying to do what to you and others!!!!
your not going to find the book of truth other than finding truth in the separate books..
you may find one that is 100% truthful, but with so many lairs around, how would you tell?
Julie
one super sized big blue diamond of a gemstone i found was a best history of the hayes tilden election
you really really really want to see the difference between actual history AND today? ‘
well, first go to the hayes tilden wiki… ie. get your starting framework… knowing that its a swirl of truth, rumor, half truth, and outright lie… and repeated liesd seen as truth, and so on… such is the game time plays even if evryone is honest as can be
remember. your just getting a framework.. in this case.. a basic understanding of how we see that incident today.
1876 United States presidential election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1876_United_States_presidential_election
search the page… for pink you wont find a single mention of it!!!
try one more just for good measure:
The Hayes-Tilden Electoral Commission
How Congress settled the disputed electoral count in the presidential election of 1876
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1893/10/the-hayes-tilden-electoral-commission/523971/
cant find pink at all…
and yet, wiki is supposed to be as ‘source’ and the atlantic is a long winded op ed that tries to be a source… but what do they leave out… WHY do they leave things out
last check
Compromise of 1877
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compromise_of_1877
what made them compromise? what was done?
now go to archive.org 🙂
Full text of “The Hayes-Tilden disputed presidential election of 1876”
https://archive.org/stream/hayestildendisp00unkngoog/hayestildendisp00unkngoog_djvu.txt
now you can read waht they been washing out for 150 plus years!!!!
just like the newspapers during the vietnam war carried more nistory of the time in them, so do history books closer to the period (With the caveate that secrets will be found and corrected later… or buried later!)
now search for pink in that document!!! 😉
the first thing that comes up is this:
But this evidence was as nothing to that given by the next witness, Eliza Pinkston. Attended by a woman with restoratives, Mrs. Pinkston was borne into the • room on a chair by two stalwart negroes.
the mystery is on…
[for the record, i wrote about eliza, later a church in the south made her a patron and sent me a letter i lost (damn digital) thanking me… ]
when you read this book you see the full flower of the democrat party as it was, as people knew them and as brutal and open the people of the time were for truth compared to today… makes it easier to undertand why things could get deadly
now, what else does it say?
this is important… because you can verify how much people accross the country knew of this CONGRESSIONAL TESTIMONY… (later i found out that this section of the library was lost… they found it under a staircase… so research was nullified for a long time on it in the library of congress… but not with the papers!!!)
well, one thing you just found out is that women and black folk could vote before the amendment allowing them to vote… 🙂 without that knowlege, you might not have a reason or a point to look to see what they did to stop them from voting!!
you find out that the KKK was not as feared as the rich mans version, the knights of the white camelia… why where they erased? (the kkk was lowbrow…ie. poor, and so forth… the knights were military, and professionals, and lords… ie. the elite.. who erased their own complicity, and left the rest of it on the kkk only)
remember, sulzberger of the times recently commented deflecting the history of this stuff and their actions in FORGETTING it conveniently over the years. (which you will see very shortly)
they basically tortured her husband, drowned her baby, cut off one breast and sliced up the other leaving her for dead, and she didnt die..
the rest of that section of the book you can see the dems disparage her from being poor, not speaking well, being illiterate, being stupid. and more..
om on June 21, 2019 at 12:40 am said: At least she didn’t say “crackers” are ignorant. Thanks go to BHO and the Democrats for the education in racial comity.
actually the term crackers is misused…
and has little to do with racism
comes from Florida cracker
and just to show you this…
It has been suggested that white slave foremen in the antebellum South were called “crackers” owing to their practice of “cracking the whip” to drive and punish slaves. Whips were also cracked over pack animals, so “cracker” may have referred to whip cracking more generally.
so its like “rule of thumb” for the feminists…
ie. a northerner visited and didnt know the local usage of the words
Frederick Law Olmsted, a prominent landscape architect from Connecticut, visited the South as a journalist in the 1850s and wrote that “some crackers owned a good many Negroes, and were by no means so poor as their appearance indicated.”
even Darwin
In On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin quotes a Professor Wyman as saying, “one of the ‘crackers’ (i.e. Virginia squatters) added, ‘we select the black members of a litter [of pigs] for raising, as they alone have a good chance of living.”
Conspicuously absent from the current debate is what percentage of the reparations should be paid by the descendants of people who sold the slaves in the first place.
Artfldgr:
The scholar could also have used the term “red neck” whites but that would be expanding her vocabulary?
Artfldgr,
That is amazing! It’s going to take me quite awhile to even scratch the surface. I can’t thank you enough!
Your description of yourself as a young lad in the library reminds me of me. I was (am!) crazy in love with books, and trips to the library were like trips to … I dunno … the whole world and heaven beyond, I guess. Only I had a hard time staying focussed enough on one topic to read the whole book before going off in 14 interesting directions all at once. That, unfortunately, is still a problem. :>((
Thanks so much, yet again, for taking the time to write up all that stuff. I hope you enjoyed writing it as much as I will in following up on it.
😀
… cracker …
One of the more ridiculous things Althouse has come up was her interpretation of Trayvon Martin’s characterization over the phone of George Zimmerman (yes, that old business) as a “creepy ass cracker.”
Now, if one has lived in the south, one knows that white people may be characterized, and may even self-identify, as “crackers.” Furthermore, “ass” can be used as a nonsense suffix for emphasis. So the natural comprehension is “creepy-ass cracker” as in “creepy white guy.” Note hyphen.
However, Althouse had one of her big brain flashes, since she’s so smart, that what Martin really meant was “creepy ass-cracker” (note hyphen) as in gay rapist. No one could tell her different and she spent some time slapping herself on the back for that one.
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2013/06/rachel-jeantel-made-it-sound-like.html
Althouse managed another self-pwn in this line the other day.
https://althouse.blogspot.com/2019/06/i-wouldnt-have-cared-in-slightest-about.html
Taylor Swift has a dreadful, auto-tuned, semi-hip-hop hit video, “You Need To Calm Down,” which shows a bunch of ragged, ugly, snaggly-toothed crackers protesting a same-sex marriage of beautiful, multiculti people. Fortunately, Swift is on hand to set the ugly people straight: “You Need to Calm Down.”
Althouse just couldn’t get what a bigoted, belittling portrayal of flyover people that was and entirely contrary to the embrace of humanity the song is supposed to communicate. Enough people slammed Althouse hard and she stopped responding.
Taylor Swift attempted to stay out of the culture wars but the SJWs eventually got to her. She has made her choice. It’s only a matter of time before Swift is exchanging sloppy French kisses with Miley Cyrus in a video.
“How about white people who lost ancestors fighting against slavery during the Civil War?”
That’s a good question! But, also ask how about those who didn’t survive the civil war to have children? What are they owed?
I ask, because my grandfather’s grandfather fought for a NJ regiment in the civil war. Clearly he survived to have descendants (my siblings and I are proof of that); but, his brother who joined up with him died fighting in the war. He has no descendants. How about “reparations” for him?
Obviously, a strictly academic question since there are no descendants to give reparations to. But, it does seem that those who clamor for reparations tend to forget the sacrifice that others gave to end slavery. And, in my opinion that is reparations enough.
In the words of Frederick Douglass:
“What should be done with the American Negro if emancipated? Our answer is, do nothing with them; mind your business, and let them mind theirs. Your doing with them is their greatest misfortune. They have been undone by your doings, and all they now ask, and really have need of at your hands, is just to let them alone.”
Better words on the subject cannot be spoken or written.
T on June 20, 2019 at 4:42 pm said:
…This was not a nation founded on slavery, but a nation founded while slavery still existed, and those ideas are two completely different things.
* * *
Well said, and not well enough recognized.
The idea of reparations is nonsense. It involves taking money from people who didn’t do it, and giving it to people it wasn’t done to.
It’s been more than repaid by the blood of about 500,000 Union soldiers who died fighting against slavery.
It creates a “victim class” (so enamored of the Democrats) – you’d only get it if you were a victim of some sort.
And who would be eligible? Clarence Thomas? Oprah Winfrey? Magic Johnson?
It’s nothing more than scandalous pandering in order to get more votes.