(09-21-2022, 06:35 PM)mikesez Wrote:

(09-21-2022, 06:20 PM)americus 2.0 Wrote: The point is- who wants to give Marty's family money? Not anyone who has no dog in that fight. And no one present day has a dog in the fight. But if your family wants to give Marty's family money y'all go right ahead. 

I can show via genealogy that no one in my family owned slaves. Hell, the Germans and Irish were treated quite badly when they came over here; look up Irish slavery. We had to pretend to be something else so we weren't treated harshly and only got away with it because we happened to be white. 

So, yeah, I'm not paying anyone anything because I owe no one.

My genealogy shows the exact same thing.  It's possible that my maternal grandmother's family was in the US prior to the Civil War, but unlikely that they owned any slaves. The rest came after. This whole question is very different in a US context vs. a British context.  In the US the freed slaves all immediately got education and many of them also got land (though many weren't able to hold on to it for long,  with the banks, shops, and courts rigged against them after 1876). And their slave owners typically went bankrupt during and after the Civil War. 
One can argue that the white people in the US owe reparations to the black people, but it's not for slavery.  It would be for things like Jim Crow and redlining, that happened afterwards.  And my ancestors were here for that.  So were yours.

I know you're just being devil's advocate here, and I appreciate that, but here's my opinion. 

I'm not in favor of assigning guilt or victimhood based on race.  Especially when so many people have the blood of multiple races in them, and so many people did not have ancestors who were perpetrators or victims.  Are my ancestors responsible for Jim Crow because they were white?  To say that, since some white people victimized some black people, then all white people are guilty and all black people are victims, is grossly unfair.  If a white person murders a black person tomorrow, would I share the guilt because I am white?  And if a crowd of black people have a riot and burn down several blocks of a city, are all black people responsible for that?  If you said they were, you'd be justifiably called a racist.  

And who in this country is white or black, anyway?  There are so many people of mixed race now.  Would we judge victimhood by measuring skin tone?  Would people have to do DNA tests to prove they are descended from a black person in the South during the Jim Crow era?  Better buy stock in Ancestry.com.  What if a person had a white and a black ancestor who lived in the South during the Jim Crow era?  Maybe he could move a few bucks from his right pocket to his left pocket.  Because he's a perpetrator and a victim.    

What do you think would happen if reparations are handed out based on race?  What do you tell a poor white person when a richer black person gets money because of his skin color?  Are you going to tell him that we should all be equal under the law, when you just violated that principle? That poor white guy is going to resent it, and you're going to see an explosion of racial resentment and racism when you hand out money to people of a certain race.  

The whole idea of assigning victimhood based on things that happened a hundred years ago, and basing it on skin color, is unworkable, and  destructive to our social fabric.  There's no denying history.  Things happened that were bad.  But we can't fix it in this case.

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