USA 2024 Elections Thread

[grarpamp]

Why Reparations Now?

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/12/why_reparations_now.html

The absurdity of the concept of reparations for slavery, an
institution that ended several generations ago, is beyond
mind-boggling.  But there’s a blatantly cynical reason for the sudden
lurch in that direction: formerly reliable Black voters are now
slipping away from the Democrats.  This also explains Biden’s recently
expressed profuse generosity towards the nations of sub-Saharan
Africa.

What is also painfully obvious is the lame, demagogic pandering that
is the Democrats’ knee-jerk response, especially to a defecting
constituency: just throw money at them and that’ll keep ‘em on the
reservation.  Never mind the exposure to ridicule attached to
redistributing money from people who never owned slaves to people who
never were slaves, since the despicable practice was abolished over
150 years ago.

“Oh, the wealth and education gap that plagues the inner cities is the
enduring legacy of slavery.”

Even if this were true, just throwing money at the problem is of
particularly dubious benefit.

The dystopic nature of our inner cities cannot be traced back to
slavery.  Modern-day political machines are the culprits.

Paying women to have fatherless children; running schools that avoid
imparting basic math and literacy skills while lowering the standards
for achievement; suppressing police responses to avoid bad optics and
litigation… all add up to imposed squalor.  And none of this can be
traced back to slavery or any of its aftereffects.

You may call it the “Trump Effect” or whatever -- “working-class”
voters have been shifting to the Republican party.  This includes
Black folks and other “minorities.”  Nowadays progressive Democrats
are mostly appealing to trust-fund-baby treehuggers and other guilty,
virtue-signaling middle-class liberals. This is what’s happening.  And
Trump didn’t even start it.  Some years ago, Pat Caddell, political
advisor to Bill Clinton, bemoaned his perception that the Democrat
party had been taken over by an “elite gentry.”  Trump did, however,
accelerate the process of blue-collar defection by allowing the
economy to fiercely expand and thus embrace many of those stuck on its
bottom rungs.

Another disquieting aspect of the reparations movement is its complete
reliance on skin color.  Much like affirmative action, reparations
promises to further institutionalize racism -- as did Jim Crow laws in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  This despite the
suppressed reality that not all slave owners were white.  Just ask
Kamala Harris’s Jamaican father, who freely admitted that his Black
ancestors owned Black slaves.  This was further corroborated by my
late former neighbor.  Though having been a Tuskegee airman, he
admitted that his Hattian ancestors owned slaves.  Ironically, one of
the founders of modern environmentalism, John James Audubon, was also
Hattian -- though of French descent.

It also so happens that not all slaves were black Africans.
Originally, the British colonists brought in Scots and Irish slaves to
fill the labor deficit created by the vastness of America.  These were
not indentured slaves who only needed to work off the cost of their
passage to achieve their freedom.  They were true chattel: property
that was bought and paid for.  However, these northern Europeans were
way too susceptible to malaria and proved to not be of much economic
value.  A further irony lies in the particular common genetic trait of
tropical African natives that allows them to be significantly more
resistant to malaria than Europeans -- it is also the cause of sickle
cell anemia.

So, should Americans with Scottish and Irish surnames also be entitled
to reparations for slavery?

Is there any limit to the absurdity to which craven political hacks
will stoop to cling to the reins of power?  After all, they cooked up
affirmative action ostensibly to nullify whatever lingering damage
that was done by previous racism… but instead, they enshrined
privilege based on pigmentation.

To cap it all off, California has a reparations task force that is
supposed to figure everything out by next July 1.  This includes
eligibility, amount(s) of payment, etc.  The question of what actual
fiscal impact such a splurge will have on a state with a rapidly
evaporating tax base simply does not come up. That’s entirely within
character for the nincompoops who run states like California.

The folks who are having the money thrown at them have no reason to
complain and the folks whose money it used to be have little, if any,
voice left to complain.  What a country!