Oh, for the Love of Life Orchestra, the rotting spectral zombie of reparations for slavery of African-Americans is staggering out of the graveyard of bad political ideas once more, and onto the stage of public discussion. It’s a Biden-approved notion (or a notion of whichever puppet-master has their hand up Biden’s fundament) and I note that the thrust of the matter is only to discuss the possibility.
Which makes me suspect that this new and respectably presidential consideration is a token gesture, a sop to the militant BLM activists and the old racial shakedown coterie, and the constituents they proport to represent; mostly the semi-literate, barely skilled lifetime welfare-receiving urban thug element, who have an insatiable appetite for monetary graft, free stuff and slivers of unearned privilege. The racial shakedown coterie does very well out of catering to those clients in any case, and it is their best interests that the shakedown continues even unto the umpteenth generation. If we are very fortunate, the stupidest, most controversial and divisive bad idea since Prohibition will never get any farther than the discussion phase, but if it does – and I wouldn’t put it past the current batch of Woke-ists to their best to make it work – it won’t. It will likely fail, catastrophically.
The damage done will be the equal of the damage done by Prohibition – of that I am grimly certain. The resentment by the rest of us towards the racial shakedown coterie and their urban thug clientele will not be voiced, or not very loudly, because we are all the products of fifty years of being told to judge on the content of character, not the color of the skin containing it. But we will be boiling on the inside at the arbitrary and unfair nature of the proceedings. Declaring and enforcing the principle that African-Americans are due reparations from the rest of us because of slavery rides roughshod over a number of realities. Such as the fact that a) the ancestors of most Americans of every ethnic background today didn’t own slaves at all, b) arrived well after the abolition of slavery and derived precious little benefit from the existence of what was called the “peculiar institution, c) if present in the United States before the Civil War which ended slavery and secession, were just as likely to have disapproved of slavery, campaigned for its’ abolition and/or paid with their lives to end it. Additionally – a good few Scots, English and Irish immigrants to what would later become America arrived as slaves or bondservants themselves after failed rebellions or arrest and trial. A handful of Americans were also captured and held as slaves by the Barbary States early in the 19th century. If African-Americans are owed reparations because of being descended from slaves and bondservants, shouldn’t descendants of those slaves and bondservants be owed reparations as well? And if not, then why not? What also of those African-Americans in various communities in the antebellum South who themselves owed slaves? Do they get to pay reparations to themselves? Is having been a slave of any color conditions for receiving reparations? It is a matter of historical curiosity that there were a number of WWII survivors of Nazi labor camps and Japanese prison of war camps who were essentially slaves. Do they get a cut, and if not, why not?
I will concede that if reparations for slavery and the perpetuation of Jim Crow are owed to African-Americans by any existing entity that it should be the Democrat Party and only the Democrat party – the historic party of slavery, secession and segregation – who owes and should pay such reparations. Discuss as you wish and can bear it.