You definitely have to have an opinion about this

[Patroklos]

Because she told me?

And how did she know this? Is every person chased on the playground the victim of racism?

Who's making assumptions here? Not I.

Yeah, you did. As am I. As did she. Unless she provided you some juicy details (which you then simply assumed were correct).

Patroklos doesn't make assumptions. Everyone else does.

You need to get over losing that thread

[Arrian]

Elok

My mom's family came here around 1900 from Sicily. My Dad got here in the 1960s, via Canada (UK before that).

Did we benefit from racism? I don't know - it's impossible to say for sure and by how much. I suspect the Sicilian side suffered from racism, but again I don't know how one could quantify it.

We owe no one an apology. We owe no one reparations. Acknowledging historical (or present-day) facts is one thing. Apologizing for and paying for things that you had nothing to do with is entirely another.

I will confront racism when I see it. I will pay my progressive taxes (and support their increase). I will give to charities helping the poor. But I get off the bus when it comes to the idea of collective retroactive liability.

-Arrian

[Wezil]

Originally posted by Patroklos

You need to get over losing that thread

You need to get over your idiotic debate style.

[Alinestra Covelia]

Originally posted by snoopy369
2. It is racism encased in a less racist tone, trying to appeal to those who are racist, sort of, but don't want to be or think they're not. There are a LOT of people, like my dad, who fit in this category.

I suspect all dads fit into that category to some extent...

[Agathon]

Originally posted by rah


Please provide a few examples. This generalization that is tossed out is never backed up with anything of real worth. Something recent would be nice.
And saying that some companies made there wealth off the slaves 150 years ago and since they still have influence it counts, is not what I consider relevant.
How does the Indian programmer that just immigrated that I hired benefit from what was done to the blacks?

Your country was built in significant part on the back of slave labour. More recently, many citizens lacked civil rights and were exploited because of it. It is still going on to a lesser degree with illegal immigrants. Remember, universal suffrage in the US was achieved less than 50 years ago.

If you think this has nothing to do with modern society, then I'd ask you what you've been smoking. Take Britain for example. Britons have a pretty high standard of living and Britain has a role in the world that is far greater than its proportion of the earth's population. The roots of that lie in its head start in industrialization, empire and plunder. Decisions that were made in some cases hundreds of years ago still have visible consequences in the contemporary world. That is one reason we study history.

Your Indian programmer emigrates to a country that is already wealthy, and has been historically wealthy, in part because of thieving from natives and from exploitation of blacks. His own country was less wealthy, in part because it was plundered and exploited by other white people.

To take an even more obvious recent example. White South Africans lived off of black labour for years. Merely abolishing discriminatory rules is not enough to compensate for that. Or what about Africa in general, or the Middle East, which is still living with the results of idiotic decisions taken well before most of us were born.

Or I could take my own country. Maori people do worse than others because until about 50 years ago, many of them lived in rural areas, where they had been living since colonization, discouraged from living in urban areas by racism and various daft government policies (including suppression of their language and culture). You might think that rural Maori would have excelled as farmers, except the colonial government confiscated the best farmland they owned and gave it to settlers.

In the fifties there was mass migration of Maori to urban areas to take on new jobs in manufacturing. That worked until our government basically abandoned that economic model and threw hundreds of thousands of them into urban poverty. Government policy for 150 years deliberately retarded the economic progress of Maori as a group. You think they don't know that? And these are Maori people who have had full status as Her Majesty's subjects since New Zealand was formed, and who can and have gone to court to redress some of these wrongs, and have in many cases received compensation (I don't think it is enough, but they seem happy with the deals they've made).

Where do black Americans who lived under Jim Crow get to go to court to request compensation from the state for denial of their civil and human rights? It's not like there aren't a hell of a lot of people who were alive and had to go through that crap. It's going to take a lot more than welfare checks and publicly sponsored slums to sort that out.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Arrian

We owe no one an apology. We owe no one reparations. Acknowledging historical (or present-day) facts is one thing. Apologizing for and paying for things that you had nothing to do with is entirely another.

Complete crap.

Nobody is asking you, as a person to apologize for slavery. Nor as far as I know in these cases are white people being asked to apologize. It is the state that is being asked to apologize – an institution, not a person.

Similarly, it is the state that would have to pay any compensation due (which if New Zealand's case is anything to go by, won't be that much). You have to pay for what the state does, because you are a citizen and it's your state. If the state wrongfully imprisons a criminal on your behalf, then you have to help pay compensation to that man if the truth is discovered. When our government does bad **** to people, we have to pay for it, because it is our government.

When new owners buy a company, they acquire all its liabilities as well as its assets. They still have to honour the contracts the previous owners signed, and they will be the ones who get hauled off to court if it is discovered that the company had defrauded customers in the past.

Similarly, you as a citizen, along with all other citizens, inherit liabilities that your state may have incurred, whether or not you were personally responsible for them. In fact, you don't have to pay if you do not wish to, since you are free to relocate to another polity that may not have similar liabilities. By choosing as an adult to reside in the United States, which is a democracy, you make yourself party to anything its government does, whether you like it or not. That is bad, but the alternative is worse.

[Arrian]

Complete crap.

Convincing.

Similarly, it is the state that would have to pay any compensation due

I AM THE STATE![/Louis XIV]

As you point out, if the state owes, I owe. And seriously, don't pretend that a state apology wouldn't really be "white people" apologizing to "black people." You know damned well that is precisely what it would be.

Even if I accepted your argument, which I don't, this is a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line on such reparations? Lots of people suffered discrimination. How do you choose who gets the green? What standard of proof is required for making a claim? This is nuts.

-Arrian

[Ben Kenobi]

Your Indian programmer emigrates to a country that is already wealthy, and has been historically wealthy, in part because of thieving from natives and from exploitation of blacks. His own country was less wealthy, in part because it was plundered and exploited by other white people.

Fails to resolve the question why the Europeans were able to do so. I can't believe you've bought all that is only the result of colonialism. My goodness. Why didn't the Renascence of knowledge emerge in India, or China or in the Middle East?

[rah]

Gee one generalization about the US and examples from other countries. REAL convincing arguement.
But then you have nothing specific. Except "gee some companies made money off of it many of years ago."
Crap.

And yes blacks were discriminated again earlier and as recent as the 50, 60 etc. Since then, while it still exists, it's mostly illegal.
My descendents were discriminated against in the 20 and 30s.
What's the difference? It gets to be a real gray area, and unless someone can prove DIRRECT harm personally, providing compesation is unfair because almost anybody can show historical injustices. And most of us prefer to stand our own. Entitlement is it's own slavery.

[Elok]

Originally posted by Agathon
When new owners buy a company, they acquire all its liabilities as well as its assets. They still have to honour the contracts the previous owners signed, and they will be the ones who get hauled off to court if it is discovered that the company had defrauded customers in the past.

Show me the contract we signed, then. And just to be clear, how exactly would we decide who got paid, the amount to be paid each, and so on?

Similarly, you as a citizen, along with all other citizens, inherit liabilities that your state may have incurred, whether or not you were personally responsible for them. In fact, you don't have to pay if you do not wish to, since you are free to relocate to another polity that may not have similar liabilities. By choosing as an adult to reside in the United States, which is a democracy, you make yourself party to anything its government does, whether you like it or not. That is bad, but the alternative is worse.

Why doesn't that sword cut both ways? Black people didn't have to stay and be discriminated against all those decades. They could have saved up cash and taken the first boat to the African country their ancestors were imported from. Sure, they couldn't possibly afford it, but then your average white American today can hardly afford to throw away his current job and home and move to a foreign country. Why should we pay for lazy blacks who couldn't just move back to Africa like the KKK (and Marcus Garvey) kept suggesting?

[Agathon]

Originally posted by Arrian

As you point out, if the state owes, I owe. And seriously, don't pretend that a state apology wouldn't really be "white people" apologizing to "black people." You know damned well that is precisely what it would be.

Except it isn't. The Australian government issued an apology to Aboriginals recently because of past government policy. I didn't read news columns ascribing this apology to white people, which it wasn't. Many white Australians opposed the government's treatment of Aboriginals. They had no need to apologize, but the state did.

It isn't a personal apology, but an institutional apology. It is no different in principle to the state apologizing to a wrongly convicted man, or a corporation apologizing to wronged customers.

Even if I accepted your argument, which I don't, this is a slippery slope. Where do you draw the line on such reparations? Lots of people suffered discrimination. How do you choose who gets the green? What standard of proof is required for making a claim? This is nuts.

You are making too much of it. The solution to these problems relies on the old Aristotelian distinction between justice and equity. It would not be to anyone's advantage to attempt to work out the precise amount of wrong done and then compensate communities to that amount. That would be just, but is not feasible because it would leave everyone, including Maori people, worse off.

The solution that naturally suggests itself is an equitable one, which involves negotiations between the representatives of each party. That's what gets done in New Zealand. The government sits down with Maori people and works out a solution that both sides can live with. The results haven't bankrupted the country and have instead generated much good will and allowed everyone to move on. One thing that people fail to understand is that strict applications of moral rules sometimes produce worse results than allowing people to simply work out an ad hoc solution.

The truth is that it will cost the state much much less than people think.

As for the other question, any group of people who have been historically wronged by the state can petition for redress. It just gets worked out on a case by case basis.

[Agathon]

Originally posted by rah
Gee one generalization about the US and examples from other countries. REAL convincing arguement.
But then you have nothing specific. Except "gee some companies made money off of it many of years ago."
Crap.

The question you were asking was ridiculous. It isn't a case of looking to see which companies made money from it. Many companies that existed 100 years ago no longer exist, yet they contributed to the economy we now have. Your assumption is rather absurd.

For example, everyone can agree that we all benefit in some way from the existence of mediaeval cathedrals. Some people worship there, but many people just go to marvel at them. The fact that we don't know how much labour each individual brickie contributed and that the fact that they are now all long dead does not stop it being true that their labour contributed to something we now benefit from. That's what people mean by economic development. It isn't the case that people consume all the value they produce, because future persons benefit from some of the value they produced as well. In our own case, we have created the internet, which will benefit human beings for a long time to come.

A nation obeys the same principle writ large. Economic development is necessarily historical. The economic development of Britain rests partially on a history of colonialism and plunder. The economic development of the United States rests partially on a history of slave labour. That we do not know the names of every slave or every slavemaster or every company that benefited from slavery makes absolutely no difference.

There's a book about this called Slavery and the Making of America.

And yes blacks were discriminated again earlier and as recent as the 50, 60 etc. Since then, while it still exists, it's mostly illegal.
My descendents were discriminated against in the 20 and 30s.
What's the difference?

You mean your ancestors I guess. Are you telling me that your ancestors suffered under Jim Crow like conditions.

It gets to be a real gray area, and unless someone can prove DIRRECT harm personally, providing compesation is unfair because almost anybody can show historical injustices. And most of us prefer to stand our own. Entitlement is it's own slavery.

Anyone can demonstrate historical injustices, but most people have no ax to grind about it. My great grandfather was a miner, exploited by the English system of capitalism in a dangerous job. Is there any need for the descendants of miners to be compensated? Of course not. At least he got to vote, and none of his descendants ended up being miners.

On the other hand, groups like African Americans and Maori have been the object of large scale historical wrongs, and suffer from diminished status in our societies in ways that can be plausibly connected to those historical wrongs, and continue to be the objects of private racism.

When you say you prefer to stand on your own feet, you are conveniently ignoring the corpses under them.

As for what should be done about it, see my reply to Arrian above.

[Agathon]

BTW. Didn't Reagan apologize to Japanese interns?

[Lancer]

That had to do with his acting.

[DinoDoc]

Originally posted by Agathon
BTW. Didn't Reagan apologize to Japanese interns?

They were still alive.