George W. Bush’s Great-Great-Great-Great-Grandfather Was a Slave Trader

[kwassa]

193. No, you don't.

I am not even discussing reparations, though you veered off on that topic.

I suggest you read the excellent "The Case for Reparations" by Ta-nehisi Coates, probably the best extended essay I've read in the past year. The article isn't about reparations at all, other than as a logical conclusion to the treatment that black people have experienced over history and are still experiencing with that history.

This treatment didn't end with the Civil War and slavery. The legal discrimination did not end until the 1960s, and the instiutionalized forms of it continue today.

Here is what I see as the central error in your thinking:

My family immigrated to the USA in the early and mid-20th century, some escaping from the routine pogroms in eastern Europe, later the rest escaping extermination in the Holocaust. My family was dirt poor and never owned slaves, no less engaged in the slave trade, in either Europe or the USA. Rather they were trying to sustain a meager existence while trying not to die in the periodic violence against Jews endemic to Europe. My grandparents and great-grandparents then faced systemic and institutionalized discrimination in the USA, by private enterprise and often the government, because of their ethnicity and religion. Antisemitism was commonplace, and is still a force today, including in many parts of the USA My family also did not receive any government benefits until such benefits were provided to all Americans under the law.

Now, why exactly do I or anyone like me personally owe reparations to anyone for slavery, and if so, how much do I purportedly owe and to whom?

If you want to discuss government programs to ensure that the descendants of slaves receive an equal opportunity to enjoy the benefits of American society and culture, you will find me to be an ally. However, neither I, nor the vast majority of Americans, will support punishing anyone or dispossessing them of their property when they personally

1) How is what you propose different from reparations? Does it simply have another name? Any program that would help the descendents of slaves would have to be paid for by taxes. Money out of your pocket.

2) The type of discrimination experienced by Jews in the US, as bad as it was, does not remotely compare to the hundreds of years of slavery and then Jim Crow that happened to African-Americans. Jews are also white and from that have white privilege that blacks will never have. Jews can disappear into white society, blacks cannot.

3) You apparently eschew the idea of societal responsibility that we as Americans currently have, regardless of whether our ancestors had slaves or not. My family has been here since the 1630s, but it is unlikely that they ever held slaves because they lived in New England and were rural subsistence farmers. My ancestor was also a soldier in the Union Army. That does not mean that we as a country don't have the responsibility regardless of our background to right societal wrongs as members of this society.