Reparations

There are many good reasons to be against advocating reparations for slavery to black Americans. You might hate black people. Your family didn't have slaves- probably, you really haven't checked- and you think you're a good person, so your great great grandfather must have been too. Perhaps you are po' white trash and your life sucks and you need someone to blame for your own inadequacies, so you pick on blacks and Mexicans, and although you've never met a Jew, you know they control the money and want you to fail because of your strong belief in Jesus, and of course you can't acknowledge anyone else's suffering, even if it is systematic discrimination perpetrated by your own government. These are all good reasons to be against reparations.

But let's look at the issue from a different angle. An angle that is less obtuse, contains less crazy rants. Or at least a different kind of crazy rants.

I am the descendent of Holocaust survivors. And just as victims of Japanese Americans wrongly interned in detention centers during World War II, many Holocaust survivors have received compensation for their horror. My family attempted to get paid for their suffering, but were too poor to afford a good lawyer, so we were denied. Don't cry for me, we're doing alright now, we don't need reparations.

There are differences. The victims of slavery (at least the kind that we're discussing right now) have long been dead. So whom do we pay? Whom do we dish out the checks too? It's too complicated, let's not do it.

How about a different approach. The government should provide services for the poor as a means of providing reparations. Reparations are not useful if rich people get richer, although if we want to convince George Bush- reparations are a way to get rich people richer!

For the rest of us with "intellect," reparations are most useful if they solve the issues that still plague black America. Let's provide funding for inner city schools, that are so under funded it is an obvious form of racism. Let's use that money to enforce equal housing opportunities. Let's use that money to create scholarships to college for poor people. Let's do something similar to the GI bill after World War II. The government should create a partnership with black Americans. Imagine that, the government being responsible for its citizens. This really is radical stuff!