Quote:
Originally Posted by FlamesAddiction
It was 155 years ago that slavery ended. For context, that is only like 2 consecutive Harrison Fords or Iron Sheiks.
When you consider that when slavery ended, there were 4 million people thrown into the body politic with no provisions. Most of them were illiterate with little training in anything but the lowest paying jobs.
There is still a considerable amount of wealth in the U.S. that was acquired through slavery and the subsequent underpaid black labour, and conversely a lot of poverty from slavery. This is why reparations are not an unreasonable proposition. It wouldn't need to be direct cash handouts, but rather things like interest-free loans for entrepreneurs and forgivable government scholarships. Or just more investment in black communities in general.
|
More than 50 years ago, MLK made the case for reparations.
It's 1862. Abraham Lincoln announces the Emancipation Proclamation. Three years later, the Union wins the Civil War. The United States ratifies the 13th Amendment, banning slavery. Hooray, racism is over! Yeah, no. The former slaves are now "free", but most have no homes, no possessions, no education. Many freed slaves had
no other choice but to work the cotton fields for their former masters (albeit their labour now had to be paid...poorly).
Meanwhile, the United States was experiencing a period of rapid westward expansion. Some states, like Oregon, passed racist laws forbidding black people from moving there. The Oregon black exclusion law would not be repealed until
1926. Concurrently, the Homestead Acts were giving away land (land that was stolen from Native Americans, but that's an entirely different topic)
for free to white European settlers. If you were a white peasant farmer from Ukraine, the US government gave you 160 acres of farmland. If you were a black peasant farmer from Mississippi, you got to go back to work for the landowner who abused and exploited you for years.
To this day, in 2020, many of the most opulent estates and mansions in the South are former slave plantations. The descendants of the slave owners have passed down their unearned family wealth for generations. The descendants of black slaves, who started with nothing, still largely live in poverty 150 years after they were freed.