I generally don't address straw men, but this is from that ridiculousness I pointed to yesterday:
We all know there is so much white guilt floating around that if you could only transform it into electrical power, America would be freed of its dependence on fossil fuels. But, come on now. Reparations?!
Every time someone talks about white guilt over the past, I have to wonder: just who's making them feel guilty? It's not like anyone is lying about what happened…
And I also wonder, is guilt the only possible response?
See, I don't want white guilt. Guilt and gratitude are both like shirts. Fine and comfy while new, but wear them too long and they get all stank.
But I'm not letting anyone forget the realities of what brought us all to this pass. Especially since I can think of an alternative to guilt.
The alternative is acknowledgment of the truth. And a choice to act responsibly. A choice to live up to your professed morals.
I need to give white folks this alternative because frankly I'm not even considering feeling gratitude because someone decided to give me what I'm owed.
I recall wondering if I might be missing something. Were these people seriously demanding that damages should be paid 140 years after slavery ended? What ever happened to the statute of limitations? What ever happened to common sense?
Yes, you are missing something. Roughly 100 years of Jim Crow, government mandated segregation and disenfranchisement, red lining and denial. Roughly 100 years of socially sanctioned assaults on the liberty and dignity of a people whose efforts fueled the development of this nation and to the degree that the USofA has impacted world history, every nation on the planet.
Think about it… what would the USofA look like without having had the labor of Black Americans to fuel its economy? I'm not talking about that nonsense that pops up occasionally about a Black man invented this or that so they wouldn't exist without us… that's a nice thing to tell children to build their pride, but just as SOMEbody would have invented the light bulb if Thomas Edison's grandmother had died at birth, all those things would have come about sooner or later.
I'm saying without the capital generated by Black labor, this nation could not have industrialized when it did. And as Europe chugged along its historical track, producing all the wars it ever did, all the ethnic purges of gypsies and Jews, there would not have been a nation in a position to intercede in Europe's various wars. More importantly, there would have been no nation in a position to intercede economically after those wars.
A people that important to the history of the world deserves more than to have its concerns summarily dismissed.
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What's funny is these same people claim that affirmative action paints all minorities with a broad "unqualified" brush and they (the minorities) should not have to endure this stigma. Thus affirmative action should be abolished. Now, however you feel about AA, it is quite disingenuous to project your own bias onto a beneficiary of AA. They posit it as the minority feeling some how inadequate and inferior. In reality, these people are basically saying "It is bad that affirmative action makes me feel that all minorities are unqualified, so they need to have that taken away from them so they won't be looked down upon by me." walter
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Northern industrialization and the value of labor expropriated from enslaved African-Americans are basically unrelated economic phenomena. The former was fueled by European -especially British - capital investments In fact, I would argue that the latter retarded industrialization by a couple of decades by diverting American resources into developing Southern commodity export markets and maintaining an artificial, low cash, "yeoman" economy for much of the South's non-slave holding white population ( their indirect benefit of African slavery was a higher standard of living). We can see the political effects for this in 1850's pro-slavery, fire-eater attacks on " Northern wage-slavery " and extolling the alleged virtues of the Southern, slavery-based political economy. The fortunes extorted by white Southerners from Slaves working cash crops were immense I grant you ( the South was the richest section of the nation in the antebellum period) but these profits were not primarily invested in Northern industry ( if it was, the North-South conflict over slavery and the tariff would have been a lot less heated)nor were they held in cash. This edifice of slave wealth was also mostly destroyed in the Civil War and the postbellum world crash in cotton prices circa 1870's. A good book on the economics of Slavery is _Tobacco and Slaves_ by A. Kulikoff You have a much better case ( in terms of proof)economically with Jim Crow laws and de facto practices like redlining than industrialization. (Ultimately you are trying to make a moral argument anyway - one I disagree with BTW - but for that you will need clarity, not complicated economic tables that escape the grasp of most non-economists) mark safranski
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I think that you are wrong on this mark. The North was deeply involved indirectly in the slave trade from building ships to insuring the "cargo". walter
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No, I don't think I am. A large portion of America's industrial revolution was financed by the Brits and the Dutch ( we did not emerge from being a debtor nation until WW I). " Foreign" money power became a political issue for the Populists, Alliancemen, Wheelers, Free Silverites and other 19th century American radicals. I'm curious why the emphasis is not on Segregation rather than Slavery. The harm of the former is directly demonstrable ( closed educational and occupational opportunities among others) the records are abundant, the firsthand victims number probably in the low millions, it's within living historical memory and generally acknowledged as unconstitutional. It's a far truer analogy to the reparations for Japanese-American internment and the government entities that perpetrated and enacted Jim Crow can be held accountable. mark safranski
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I guess we will have to agree to disagree. I still don't think that you can deny that a good portion of the North's wealth came from the misery of slaves. What the % was compared to European financiers is a debate for another day. Since I am not a reparations activist I will leave that to others. I will agree with you on more of a focus on Jim Crow though. walter
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I could support a Jim Crow based effort and so could a lot of other people who wouldn't on Slavery because the logic of that (Segregation) justice is more linear mark safranski
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The slavery thing is always brought up so I respond to it on the level it's given to me-rhetoric. But a Jim Crow based reparations case is exactly what I suggest. Check out the first Startin' Stuff Week post to see my basic position on what reparations should be based on. This post goes into the moral position of reparations for Black folks, particularly in the comments. And this post has a link to the particular ass hole post I quoted in the post attached to these comments. Read them all and see if the entire picture I'm painting makes sense. As to your other comments, even though there was a great amount of foreign investment in northern industry, the raw material they worked with was in large part generated by slave labor, and therefore available at lower material prices than would have been otherwise. They saved on transport costs too, of course, but that's not attributable to slavery. Northern industry was largely funded by European investment but its tremendous profitability was only made possible by slavery. Prometheus 6
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I think there are elements of truth in the above, but the *effects* of slavery, and the grave injustice that is has done has lasted right up until recent times. Why did Martin Luther King have to organize in the sixties? Why were so many black people disqualified from voting in Florida? Yes, there should be reparations and it should take the form of better education for everyone, but in addition there should be a means of paying back black people for the enormous help they have been in building America. Perhaps not only in monetary terms, either. Larry Lurex
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Larry: I'm working on the practical tip here. The things you mention can be the basis of a reparations case without a rhetorical tie to slavery, though we know the causative tie is there. That gives the opponents one less target to shoot at and doesn't weaken the case at all. Prometheus 6
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Ok Prom, I read your links, let me try to clarify all the apples and oranges before this debate gets too tangled up. First, arguing the morality of slavery and the mechanistic economic aspects of calculating the costs are two different debates. I'm not arguing the first. Slavery had an effect on aggregate American wealth, definitely. It also as you pointed out, distorted labor markets and wages. The degree to which this was true regionally varied tremendously Investment in industrialization and accumulated wealth in this period are apples and oranges. The former requires liquidity ( funds raised in the City, the Bourse and Wall street and relaxed credit by printing Greenbacks during the C.W.). Most wealth was held in illiquid form in the 19th century - chattel goods and land ( and importantly in the South, in slaves). This is one reason why the slavery paid for industrialization argument does not fly well. Another reason is the gross differences in not only agricultural economy between the North & South in colonial and antebellum America by in the use of forced labor itself. Southern forced labor always tilted heavily in favor of slavery from the inception. In the north the use of forced labor was very limited and even then it was divided between indentured servants( mostly Scotch-Irish and later German), landless laborers and slaves. To give you an idea how limited forced labor in the North really was; in the 1650's, in Essex county Massachusetts ( N.E. most advanced farming region) male forced farm laborers accounted for approximately no more than 5 % of the population. Again this figure combines indentured servants and slaves. ( source Clark, Chris _The Roots of Rural Capitalism: Western Massachusetts 1780-1860_ p. 106) The reason for this disparity is the agriculture economy of the North was what economic historians call a " Household economy", much later morphing into commercial foodstuff agriculture. Farms were small, families were very large, the goal was self-sufficiency and material comfort. Surpluses that translated into ready cash were small and that cash was saved to purchase more land for the sons, dowries for the daughters, to pay taxes and merchants. Most transactions were " book debt" between neighbors -i.e. barter and service favors. The South by contrast developed cash-crop agriculture - indigo,rice, tobacco,sugar, cotton - for export . Farms were quite large by English or Yankee standards. These crops ( except for tobacco) are heavily labor intensive. Even yeomen farmers set aside acreage for a few bales of cotton. In areas that are labor rich but poor in arable land ( the South, Egypt, Russia, India) the recourse is to using forced labor. Profits are ploughed back into labor and indentured servants did not make much economic sense for planters except when in the late 17th century they were unusually cheap compared to African slaves. This anomaly soon ended and importation of slaves began in earnest mark safranski
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Aaaaaaaaagh, I lost the second half of my post...I guess I'm too wordy..oh, well, I guess the gist of my point is there...the two economies North & South were poorly integrated and reparations advocates generally overestimate slavery's contribution to the former. mark safranski
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Good point Prometheus. There's a good article in today's Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,999979,00.html *Just* history. I think you are right to concentrate on the practicalities. Larry Lurex
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Mark: I hear you, know and understand all that. But its a simple truth that the Northern industrial economy benefitted by the distortion created by slavery. I grant also that a confluence of other forces, Industrial Revolution and whatnot, joined with that distortion to empower the Northern industrial economy. This is why I do not use slavery as a justification when I discuss reparations. Though the benefit was real it was sufficiently indirect to make using it as the root justification in an ethical discussion very problematic… as you suggest (and as I actually do) Jim Crow and the various legal impediments that continued into the 1970s—I include in this Southern attempts the wriggle around the Civil Rights act that made the Voting Rights Act necessary—is a much more direct and documentable case. Prometheus 6
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Jean-Jacques and the Guilt Watch
It seems to me that the question of guilt, as you say, is entirely beside the point. When you do something that you believe to be wrong, with wanton disregard for the consequences, it is entirely absurd to refer to your feelings after the fact as guilt. It's nothing more than embarrassment. Guilt is another emotion all together - and it is an emotion - a fleeting state that is neither marked by permanence nor suggestive of resolution.
Rousseau was explicit.
Damn - I see we have
Damn - I see we have discussed this more than once !
This was very early on in
This was very early on in our interaction...earlier than our discussion of the education program your friend runs.
You got my respect, and earned a lot of leeway with me...even more for never having to had to use it.Â
Thank you very much Earl, I
Thank you very much Earl, I appreciate that !
And since you brought it up, Project Excite is now in year 7 and having demonstrated that by doing things right, from the start instead of trying to jerry-rig deficits after the fact, you get a growing critical mass of student success that becomes the student's normal k-12 experience. Total cost was $500,000 which sounds like a lot but not when you a) spread it out over 7 years and b) thousands of students and c) multiple school districts and a university.
Excite is now being considered for very serious grant money and expansion to other places.Â
Jim Crow = Slavery's child
Slavery gave birth to Jim Crow and the very things that made Jim Crow were forged in Slavery.  You can't get any more direct and causative than that.
Keeping in mind I'm saying nothing about morality or ethics here
In law, I suspect the judgement would be that slavery was legal and crimes against humanity had yet to be defined so there's no legal basis for reparations based on slavery.
However the moment the 14th amendment was ratified, the legal basis was established.
Murder, rape, theft, kidnapping..
Were illegal... and all such brutality.
Seems to me, much of the Holocaust was "legal." That's just what they do. Pass law to decriminalize their criminal acts and put it all under the rubric of a "compelling state interest" or something.
This isn't going to make you
This isn't going to make you happy, but it wasn't considered murder, theft, kidnapping from a legal perspective any more than it would be when you round up wild mustangs.
Legally speaking. The rape thing put the lie to all the denials of African humanity.
Yes, much of the Holocaust was legal. Yes, the technique is to pass laws validating the intent they always had. That's why one MUST keep in mind that "law and order" ≠"right and wrong."Â
Law & Whose New World ORDER?
... That's why, on moral grounds, to talk about how Slavery is less compelling than say Segregation is problematic. It concedes too much and plays on a limited field.Â
But you can argue like our ancestors were property. Maybe you like that.
But you can argue like our
Is that what you read me to say?
I'm saying they were seen as property (which you know to be true). I'm saying that's the morally incorrect view, but morality is not the basis of law.
I know Black folks want an acknowledgement that slavery was wrong. My issue is I have no problem with the fact that some of my ancestors were enslaved. It just doesn't trouble me at all. What I have a problem with is the damage from that legacy the community bears that will be carried forward if we don't intercede. So what I want from reparations is of a "going forward" nature.
If you don't mind: if you could get the same reparations over slavery as over segregation but you had to pick one case, which would you pick?
Unable To Engage...
You resort to meaningless hypotheticals. You can hope all you want. Wishful Thinking can be good, I suppose.  Taking people at their word, too. Yep! Reparations for Segregation. Holla at them Oklahoma folks then magnify that nationally given the actual landscape and not what you wish...
Sorry, if you want to talk about law... I don't do Kangaroo.Â
Like I said, it concedes too much.
If you WANT to engage
Actually, you've answered the question.
Oh, I'm WELL past that point. There's not a lot of benefit of the doubt going on right now.
What else you got in the USofA when dealing with race? Me, I'd rather see a successful case based on...well, based on whatever, than ram my head against an unbreakable wall.
And I'm not trying to change anyone's mind, except maybe about disputing people over their choice of words when you share goals.
Let me try this: what do you want from reparations? I don't mean how much or what kind. I'm asking how success in the reparations case will affect you or whatever it is you want to affect.
To me, the goal is for Black folk to become stronger, more capable. I'd support a reparations settlement that does that regardless of the reasoning that supported it. I just prefer being able to build a solid, unimpeachable case.
Well, asking about...
Asking about what I want in terms of Reparations, what kind... then there isn't much of a case that's gone to get made for that anytime soon. That is, unless you know something about the democratic coup that's bound to happen - to reshape from the ground up, American Democracy, with a dash of that Iraqi governmental proportionality or that Native American arrangement, consociated or the like.
But it's not about me. My evidence is anecdotal (lol) though pretty strong. Indeed, it's exactly because this ain't my first rodeo and I've also argued for Reparations for Jim Crow and yet only to the tune of more Kangaroo.
But you're a trusting fellow. Much more trusting than I. In word, though, Reparations, IMO, has to have some set and permanent structural Black self-governance (i.e. self-determination) both as a restoration and a means to make Reparations meaningful. Beyond that, IMO, Reparations should be about instiutions. Building on existing ones and new ones.Â
So, as much as I'm cool with Peter Iron's take on Jim Crow's Children and a Marshall Plan for inner-cities, at least in my opinion, I feel there is something more substantive to be sought. Gotten and kept. I don't do Kangaroo because it would invariably screw up that self-determination mojo. Can't be negotiating that. That would take 4 crucial letters off, conceding too much.Â
But I'm down. Make your case, bruh.Â
Asking about what I want in
Well, that's why I specifically didn't ask about that.
To me, anecdotal evidence from reliable people is more useful than rhetorical juggling, particularly as regards racism. Racists have learned to hide their hands pretty well. Because I know that I am biased toward accepting the victim's word.
nah. Especially at the moment. Very little benefit of the doubt being extended.
Dispassion is not trust.
Structural self-governance not only will not be granted as part of a reparations settlement, it can't be granted. The 'self-' part is dispositive.
That, however, can be gotten, and would be the basis for your first (and I believe most important to you) goal.Â
And the NAACP
should be precluded from getting a dime!
What did you "ask"?
Well, I'll have to beg your pardon. Didn't mean to speak to what you did not ask (just misread that part, I guess because of the primary question at hand). I think I did address your question though. We can try that again if I totally missed it.
You say this and that won't be granted. Well, again, my anecdotals say the same for Reparations per Jim Crow. That aside, please explain your last two points... Oh and how "dispassion" amounts to why you believe Reparations per Jim Crow will be "granted."
I don't know what you mean by "a dispositive." Can't square a thing you say because we're working under different definitions for Reparations. Meaning, there is no such "basis". But you can expound on that. And, again, you're too trusting if you feel MY goals will be reached without such structure. Obviously, you don't understand them as you think you do.
If you did, you would realize we're in agreement on addressing the "damage". Can't concede the healing points away. That's all I'm saying.
You say this and that won't
Agreed.
It doesn't. Dispassion is what you're mistaking for trust on my part.
Okay.
"Structural self-governance not only will not be granted as part of a reparations settlement, it can't be granted. The 'self-' part is dispositive."
...means no one gives you control of your own situation. Power concedes nothing without demand.
If a reparations settlement includes setting up governance mechanisms, how exactly would that be different than what's going on in Iraq? Nope...any self governance would have to come from Black folks, be accepted by Black folks. Do that and other people's willingness to accept or support it becomes irrelevant...it will be there.
You've been almost as direct as I am...harder than hell to miss your meaning (like 'too trusting' ~ 'some kinda sucka').
But that structure can't be created, inserted or imposed by an outside force. And even if it could, you think white folks would create one independant of their own needs? If so, you're too trusting.
If your goals can't be attained without such structure, then reparations are irrelevant to your goal.
I know. That's why I was trusting back when I was trusting.
That's not all you said though.
I ain't even going to the other thread.
You were never disrespected like that by me. I'm considering the need to be more disrespectful up in this mother fucker.
Tell me, am I a fool for opening the floor to people who aren't in lockstep with me?
Too convoluted... but thanks.
Power Concedes Nothing Without A Demand.
Apparently you just threw that in there... just to be throwing that in there. Demand, and the terms of Reparations (what is reparations) is what I said.
Who said something about White folks "creating" it? And, as always, the basis of your questions/statements are found NOWHERE in things I say:
Now, maybe I should get a hearty one or two out of you acting like I didn't already pre-empt your lameness. You might not be a "sucka" but as for playing fool... you sho ain't blameless. There was no doubt about "IF" and what I think. You can let the simmer a bit. Reflect on why you wanted to go there and all. Dumb mission.
I done told you: Don't pose. I am not fazed. You are. Anyway... thanks for agreeing to the my anecdotal.Â
Since you need it simple,
Since you need it simple, let's take one step at a time.Â
You said you want reparations, and that a necessary part of reparations is a structure to provide self determination.
Correct?
Now if that structure is not part of the reparations you receive from the USofa then you phrased that really, really badly. So now I DO have to ask, what is it you want from reparations? And how will that or those things advance the healing?
That's two things...sorry. But you can hang, right?Â
By the way
I'm expecting another ad hominem response instead of an answer.
Dude... Dude...
All I got to do is quote this:
 I'm considering the need to be more disrespectful up in this mother fucker.
C'mon, P...
And yet I didn't get more
And yet I didn't get more disrespectful.
And you didn't answer.
You're done.Â