05 August 2007

Reparations for Slavery

On the question of possible reparations paid (presumably) by the US Government to descendents of Africans enslaved in America, the answer is NO. The institution of legal slavery in the United States ended 144 years ago in 1863. The Confederate States of America continued the practice until its military defeat by US forces in 1865. In other words, the US fought and won a very costly war to end slavery, so the cost of reparations must be deducted from the cost of the war, with interest. But more to the legal point, there is nobody alive today who can show that they themselves have been personally damaged by the above referenced slavery.

On the other hand, there are plenty of people who can show that they have been damaged by the Jim Crow laws that used to be common throught the United States until the middle 1960s. Or the discriminatory hiring practices that were not stopped until the then farcical "Equal Opportunity" was replaced by "Affirmative Action," in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Or even the red-lining and steering practices of the banking and real estate industries that continued into the 1980s. Folks who have been on the receiving end of such practices are still very much alive, but somehow the idea of reparations for slavery always seems to push their causes out of public view. Could it be because someone might actually have to pay up if we could keep public attention on our more recent practices?

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