Should America, or the United States government, pay reparations to African Americans for slavery? I answer emphatically NO! First off, it is illegal; where in the Constitution did we delegate authority to the federal government to make amends for past transactions against specific groups? And where does it have the ability to punish the children for the sins of the father?
How would we determine who pays? Most Americans never owned slaves. At the height of slavery, according to the 1860 census, less than 2% of Americans owned slaves. In my state of Vermont, we never had legal slavery. Must Vermonters pay for what others who look similar to us did in the past? Further, many slave owners were Native Americans, Jews, or blacks themselves. Thousands of blacks owned slaves in the South, so do they receive money from those who never owned any slaves? Some areas of Louisiana and South Carolina had a higher percentage of free black slave owners than the white community in which they lived. Do they pay other blacks for owning them?
Every race of people has been enslaved; it is just a matter of how far back. Whites enslaved whites, whites enslaved blacks, blacks enslaved whites, blacks enslaved blacks, so where do we draw the line?
Also, if they do not see it as unfair to punish later generations who do not own slaves, then it is not unfair for modern disadvantaged blacks to be unfairly treated. You cannot have it both ways; you can’t make modern whites suffer for sins they did not commit and also claim modern blacks should be treated fairly. Otherwise, you are creating a new disadvantaged racial group; you are not ending racism and mistreatment but promoting it.
It is worth noting that Blacks in America are better off financially, medically, and materially than in most of Africa, the center of slavery, where they enslaved each other and other races as well. It was white Christians who pressured to abolish slavery. Freedom is a “white privilege idea”; it did not derive from pagan Africa.
That’s not to say slavery in America is dead. The politicians in DC are guilty of a century of forced and unwilling labour and wealth confiscation. As professor Jason Brennan points out, “we are not volunteers, we are conscripts, we cannot opt out, we are forced into it…governments do not merely advise us to follow their rules….they enforce their laws and rules with violence or threats of violence.” In the “land of the free, but home of the slave,” our government places a heavy financial burden on us. They come for our money and place us in prison if we avoid paying, where we have far less liberty than even slaves had.
Shouldn’t they stop treating us as tax slaves?
Why are we blind to the most oppressive group, the government, and instead focus on a small minority of white slave owners so long ago? Let’s stop seeing ourselves as different races but as people. As friends, not enemies. Then we might just realize who is committing the true crime today and who sets us at war with each other, so we are so busy fighting amongst ourselves that we miss the most cruel master of all.
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