Introduction: Over the past couple of years, the Reparations movement has gained tremendous momentum in California. The California Reparations Task Force, which was created by the state legislature in 2020, is considering a proposal to give just under $360,000 per person to approximately 1.8 million Black Californians who had an ancestor enslaved in the U.S. Of course California was admitted as a Free State in 1850 and never had slaves, which makes this seem more of a racial extortion racket than compensation.
California Governor Gavin Newsom is facing increased pressure to use his authority to unilaterally enact proposals that would distribute billions of dollars to Black residents in reparations as a way to make amends for slavery.
Over 22 years ago, David Horowitz wrote the following article here at FrontPage, “Ten Reasons why Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks – and Racist Too.” The Freedom Center placed hundreds of ads in college papers at the time and David followed up with a bestselling book, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery, AVAILABLE HERE.
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Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks – and Racist Too
By David Horowitz
Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. There were 3,000 black slave-owners in the ante-bellum United States. Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?
[1] There Is No Single Group Clearly Responsible For The Crime Of Slavery.
Black Africans and Arabs were responsible for enslaving the ancestors of African-Americans. There were 3,000 black slave-owners in the ante-bellum United States. Are reparations to be paid by their descendants too?
[2] There Is No One Group That Benefited Exclusively From Its Fruits.
The claim for reparations is premised on the false assumption that only whites have benefited from slavery. If slave labor created wealth for Americans, then obviously it has created wealth for black Americans as well, including the descendants of slaves. The GNP of black America is so large that it makes the African-American community the 10th most prosperous “nation” in the world. American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes in the range of twenty to fifty times that of blacks living in any of the African nations from which they were kidnapped.
[3] Only A Tiny Minority Of White Americans Ever Owned Slaves, And Others Gave Their Lives To Free Them.
Only a tiny minority of Americans ever owned slaves. This is true even for those who lived in the ante-bellum South where only one white in five was a slaveholder. Why should their descendants owe a debt? What about the descendants of the 350,000 Union soldiers who died to free the slaves? They gave their lives. What possible moral principle would ask them to pay (through their descendants) again?
[4] America Today Is A Multi-Ethnic Nation and Most Americans Have No Connection (Direct Or Indirect) To Slavery.
The two great waves of American immigration occurred after 1880 and then after 1960. What rationale would require Vietnamese boat people, Russian refuseniks, Iranian refugees, and Armenian victims of the Turkish persecution, Jews, Mexicans Greeks, or Polish, Hungarian, Cambodian and Korean victims of Communism, to pay reparations to American blacks?
[5] The Historical Precedents Used To Justify The Reparations Claim Do Not Apply, And The Claim Itself Is Based On Race Not Injury.
The historical precedents generally invoked to justify the reparations claim are payments to Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, Japanese-Americans and African- American victims of racial experiments in Tuskegee, or racial outrages in Rosewood and Oklahoma City. But in each case, the recipients of reparations were the direct victims of the injustice or their immediate families. This would be the only case of reparations to people who were not immediately affected and whose sole qualification to receive reparations would be racial. As has already been pointed out, during the slavery era, many blacks were free men or slave-owners themselves, yet the reparations claimants make no distinction between the roles blacks actually played in the injustice itself. Randall Robinson’s book on reparations, The Debt, which is the manifesto of the reparations movement is pointedly sub-titled “What America Owes To Blacks.” If this is not racism, what is?
[6] The Reparations Argument Is Based On The Unfounded Claim That All African-American Descendants of Slaves Suffer From The Economic Consequences Of Slavery And Discrimination.
No evidence-based attempt has been made to prove that living individuals have been adversely affected by a slave system that was ended over 150 years ago. But there is plenty of evidence the hardships that occurred were hardships that individuals could and did overcome. The black middle-class in America is a prosperous community that is now larger in absolute terms than the black underclass. Does its existence not suggest that economic adversity is the result of failures of individual character rather than the lingering after-effects of racial discrimination and a slave system that ceased to exist well over a century ago? West Indian blacks in America are also descended from slaves but their average incomes are equivalent to the average incomes of whites ( and nearly 25% higher than the average incomes of American born blacks). How is it that slavery adversely affected one large group of descendants but not the other? How can government be expected to decide an issue that is so subjective – and yet so critical – to the case?
[7] The Reparations Claim Is One More Attempt To Turn African-Americans Into Victims. It Sends A Damaging Message To The African-American Community.
The renewed sense of grievance — which is what the claim for reparations will inevitably create — is neither a constructive nor a helpful message for black leaders to be sending to their communities and to others. To focus the social passions of African-Americans on what some Americans may have done to their ancestors fifty or a hundred and fifty years ago is to burden them with a crippling sense of victim-hood. How are the millions of refugees from tyranny and genocide who are now living in America going to receive these claims, moreover, except as demands for special treatment, an extravagant new handout that is only necessary because some blacks can’t seem to locate the ladder of opportunity within reach of others — many less privileged than themselves?
[8] Reparations To African Americans Have Already Been Paid.
Since the passage of the Civil Rights Acts and the advent of the Great Society in 1965, trillions of dollars in transfer payments have been made to African-Americans in the form of welfare benefits and racial preferences (in contracts, job placements and educational admissions) – all under the rationale of redressing historic racial grievances. It is said that reparations are necessary to achieve a healing between African-Americans and other Americans. If trillion dollar restitutions and a wholesale rewriting of American law (in order to accommodate racial preferences) for African-Americans is not enough to achieve a “healing,” what will?
[9] What About The Debt Blacks Owe To America?
Slavery existed for thousands of years before the Atlantic slave trade was born, and in all societies. But in the thousand years of its existence, there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians – Englishmen and Americans — created one. If not for the anti-slavery attitudes and military power of white Englishmen and Americans, the slave trade would not have been brought to an end. If not for the sacrifices of white soldiers and a white American president who gave his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation, blacks in America would still be slaves. If not for the dedication of Americans of all ethnicities and colors to a society based on the principle that all men are created equal, blacks in America would not enjoy the highest standard of living of blacks anywhere in the world, and indeed one of the highest standards of living of any people in the world. They would not enjoy the greatest freedoms and the most thoroughly protected individual rights anywhere. Where is the gratitude of black America and its leaders for those gifts?
[10] The Reparations Claim Is A Separatist Idea That Sets African-Americans Against The Nation That Gave Them Freedom.
Blacks were here before the Mayflower. Who is more American than the descendants of African slaves? For the African-American community to isolate itself even further from America is to embark on a course whose implications are troubling. Yet the African-American community has had a long-running flirtation with separatists, nationalists and the political left, who want African-Americans to be no part of America’s social contract. African Americans should reject this temptation.
For all America’s faults, African-Americans have an enormous stake in their country and its heritage. It is this heritage that is really under attack by the reparations movement. The reparations claim is one more assault on America, conducted by racial separatists and the political left. It is an attack not only on white Americans, but on all Americans — especially African-Americans.
America’s African-American citizens are the richest and most privileged black people alive — a bounty that is a direct result of the heritage that is under assault. The American idea needs the support of its African-American citizens. But African-Americans also need the support of the American idea. For it is this idea that led to the principles and institutions that have set African-Americans – and all of us — free.
“When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic. Sell not liberty to purchase power.” – Benjamin Franklin
I can attest that no one in my family ever owned or met a slave. In fact, they never met a black person until they moved to North America in the 1920s and 40s. So how can people who never owned slaves be put on the hook to pay people who never were slaves?
Think about this, slavery ended in the United States on January 1, 1863, when President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. That’s over 150 years ago.
If you still think of yourself as a slave, you always will be one, no matter how much ill gotten lucre you extort from innocent people. They are nothing but grifters bankrupting our country.
Slavery in the United States did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation. That act only covered slaves in the Confederate States. It did not apply to slaves in the Northern slave states, such as Delaware, nor did it apply to slaves in Union held areas of the Southern States, such as New Orleans.
Lincoln made it quite clear why he invaded the South. The Emancipation Proclamation was issued almost a year and a half into the war when the North was not doing well. It was an act of desperation, and it’s announcement was delayed until a Union victory so as not to seem as such.
The last of those enslaved in the United States were not freed until sometime in December, of 1865, about six months after “Juneteenth”. They were the 500 or so people who were enslaved in Delaware, a Union state. It took the ratification of the 13th Amendment for that to happen.
This is not splitting hairs. It’s important to get facts straight if one is a serious student of history
lulz… slavery in the northern states was abolished 60 years prior to the EP. A couple of areas in Texas and Delaware held on to slavery but those numbers were insignificant and in no way altered the fact of slavery’s abolishment in the early 1800’s in the north.
Plus, the north was already doing well prior the signing of the EP as in 1862 the north essentially ended the confederacy’s effectiveness at Antietam, the battle for Kentucky, and the taking of New Orleans, all in 1862. It had nothing to do with the north “not doing well”.
It absolutely did. The North was losing the war BADLY.
The best example of the North’s failings was the Battle of Fredericksburg. Despite the North outnumbering the South, 120,000 to 80,000, the North took more than 2X the casualties and were forced into full retreat under cover of night.
And if the Union had suffered another Fredericksburg-scale defeat, the Confederacy could have demanded concessions or outright surrender.
>slavery in the northern states was abolished 60 years prior to the EP.
False. DE, MO, KY, and MD were slave states who stayed in the Union. West Virginia was admitted into the Union AS A SLAVE STATE.
The last state to outlaw slavery was New Jersey in 1866.
New Jersey in fact was the last state to outlaw slavery.
They still had slaves in 1865 and their state constitution wasn’t amended to ban slavery until 1866.
But technically the last ones to ban slavery were Native Americans, which the Union couldn’t care less about, and many Native American tribes owned and traded slaves well into the 20th Century.
So when we figure out how much we owe, can we get Native Americans to “chip in”?
My thought is that if reparations are to be paid then room and board and medical and dental and schooling and clothing and everything that was “given” to them should be deducted
Oh and much more deducted my friend. All welfare benefits and the cost of black crime both to the state and the victims of such crime in future earnings as well as immediate losses. This would include the losses incurred in riots taking into consideration immediate as well as future losses to the business owners and city/state/federal taxes. It would also include the cost of trials including compensation to juries and public defenders as well as any and all costs for incarceration.
The Emancipation Proclamation didn’t free a single slave. Not one.
It only applied to the South – rebel territory which Lincoln did not control. It didn’t apply to slave states in the Union, who got to KEEP their slaves (DE, MO, KY, MD, and NJ). West Virginia was admitted into the Union AS A SLAVE STATE.
Also the Union allowed slavery to continue in areas of the Confederacy occupied by the Union.
It was an act of desperation, as the North was losing the war, BADLY (see: Battle of Fredericksburg). Lincoln issues the proclamation to incite a slave revolt in the South, but that didn’t happen.
It only led to mass desertions from the Union army and draft riots in Detroit and New York City.
The last state to outlaw slavery was New Jersey, in 1866.
This isn’t about “slavery,” it’s about “transfer of wealth,” from Whites to blacks under the guise of “slavery.” If you object, you will be vilified a “racist.” It’s incredible how much damage 13% of the population can do if you allow it.
I agree with you except for the point that they are bankrupting the country. The country is bankrupt already and has been for a very long time. The politicians seem to take care of that pretty handily. Of course reparations would contribute as well.
It’s vote buying. In fact it will probably be most effective if it isn’t paid out.
The situation in Australia is similar in some ways. Our Aboriginals are currently demanding a ‘voice to ;Parliament’ which would give them rights that the rest of us do not and will not have.. There are actually a number of black parliamentarians who represent mostly black electorates, but somehow they believe they need more of a say in how the country is run. They can make land-claims over land they do not own on the basis of unwritten ‘ownership’ i.e. their ancestors roamed there centuries ago. They hinder economically vital mining projects because they believe the mythical ‘Rainbow Serpent’ ( who they believe is the Creator) will be disturbed. These people complain they are treated brutally by whites, but they brutally treat their own women. The government gives them everything and yet they want more. They demand houses which they trash, money which they spend on grog, and schools their children never attend. The inter-tribal violence goes on, Teenage pregnancies are rife.
There are of course some fine people who have managed to rise above the primitive culture, but they are few.
What you write here is exactly what is happening in Canada with Canadian Indians (the preferred term by those who were here when Europeans arrived). The anti-white racism by many Indians and their white self-loathing supporters is blatant and disgusting. The pursuit of the unearned by Indians, socialists, Marxists, Muslims and other hate groups is entrenched and growing. The ridiculous attempts by Indians to “preserve their culture” don’t survive the most modest investigation. What happened to the concept of equality under the law? Dead. Gone, just like the hunter-gatherer cultures of wandering, warring tribes tribes that died along with the Bison. Indians, by the way, played a huge role in the inevitable slaughter of the bison herds. What happened is far more complicated than the ignorant and self-serving would have us believe. Are Indians in pain? Yes, many are, but it can be fixed. The education system must be repaired and re-thought. When Indians shun their own people who pursue education and self-betterment as individuals, Indians lock themselves into inescapable failure. We are all humans first. Race is an irrelevant accident (or a test by God). Is North American culture (the derivative of European culture) perfect? No, and unfortunately it seems to be failing. That is a discussion for another time and place.
Perhaps shunning education can be seen as a cultural norm. Education is valued only in certain cultures, and western education has been the very best. Education is a western value that should not be imposed upon other cultures.
If we eliminated the slavery of U.S. taxpayers to shoulder the burdens of life for others, close our borders and deport aliens, we could make some real progress. All cultures would ultimately benefit after some initial pain. But, hey, isn’t that what families and communities are for?
Race is important and Whites had better develop a racial identity and solidarity before we are steamrolled by these “aggrieved” groups that hate us.
These people view EVERYTHING from a racial lens and we had better start playing the same game, if we want to survive. We’ve sacrificed enough in the name of “diversity,” and it’s never enough. They come back for more and more and still hate us.
This is a superb argument against the latest example of perpetual victimization of African Americans
Prior to the Colonial Period, slavery and human sacrifice in Africa was about as bad as under the Aztecs.
This is all true, of course, but does anyone think blacks are going to turn down reparations? As a group, they are failures, despite living a more prosperous life in America than anywhere else in the world.
Black conservatives, which make up a small minority of the black community are not in favor of reparations. It’s the black Democrats who make up the majority, who are constantly walking around with their hand out.
There isn’t a majority race (white) that has done more for a minority race (black) where whites have written laws discriminating against themselves to favor blacks anywhere in the world. Blacks, when in power and the majority in black country’s, have historically been brutal oppressors of other minority’s. Does anyone think Arabs would change laws to discriminate against themselves to favor blacks?
If blacks want reparations they can go back to Africa where it all started and protest for reparations. Their ancestors were slaves in black Africa and they were sold off by black tribal leaders.
Don’t tell that to Viola Davis. The bullshit movie she’s in (currently bombing at the box office) portrays a falsehood.
The tribe she’s portrayed in didn’t rescue slaves – it enslaved others, and she gets a little touchy about it, if mentioned.
Africa is rife with slavery to this day – the few Christians that chickenshit muslims don’t kill, they enslave.
There’s a reason why Muhammad Ali responded to how he liked Africa with “Thank God my granddaddy got on that boat!”.
After reparations are paid, the blacks will still be poor and stupid and Al Sharpton and the race hustlers will have all the money.
Good article. Do we need ten reasons though? The concept is insane; that’s the one main reason. All the rest is noise.
Why call them Arabs!?!?!?
Wiki reports that there are around 10-15 Arab Christians in the ME!
It was MUSLIMS who were into slavery… they still are!!!
Usually young girls . . . something the press is seriously uninterested in.
People who never owned slaves owe nothing to people who were never slaves.
Not to mention 1in 4 felons among blacks are the victimizers not victims. How about them paying their victims.
Detailed timeline.
Reason does not work against criminal hucksters. Arrest them and imprison them at hard labor.
All those who claim to be descendants of slaves should get on their knees and thank the Lord above for being in this country. If slavery had not existed they would most definitely not be here at all.
And where dies the word “slave” come from? Slavs! Where are the Slavs from? Eastern Europe/western Russia. They were once easy to conquer.
They’d most likely not exist.
Before a market enticed them, the winning tribe would slaughter the tribe that lost. The lucky ones weren’t purchased by muslims, but sold to the west where they weren’t castrated
There’s no push for reparations in Africa, because the blacks & whites that were enslaved by muslims were castrated & worked to death. Young women, & very young girls, were abused as sex slaves.
Such practice yields no offspring to demand reparations down the road.
A state that handed over properties seized from interned Japanese to blacks relocating to work there during WWII, where Chinese labor was mistreated during the 19th Century, and where slavery was never legal is going to take money from people who never owned a slave and give it to people who never were a slave. Makes perfect sense.
Do you know how the expression “A Chinaman’s chance” came about? Chinese workers were brought here to build the railroads. They were given such dangerous jobs handling dynamite that a great many of them were killed and thus were never paid. So it could well be said that they were also slaves. When the black slaves were freed, Scilians took jobs harvesting sugar cane in Louisiana. Paid $1 a day for back breaking labor in the brutal sun, I guess you could say they were slaves as well.
IT’S TIME FOR REPARATIONS FOR VICTIMS OF BLACK VIOLENCE AND CRIME
Metro Nashville police share video of laundromat assault suspect
https://news.yahoo.com/metro-nashville-police-share-video-093439351.html
he Metropolitan Nashville Police Department put out a video showing a suspect, later identified as 32-year-old Khadree Renfro, attacking a 45-year-old in a laundry mat Wednesday in Nashville, Tennessee.
I saw that. It made me sick to watch. Black people need to compensate those victims before any reparations can be determined. plus all court costs and incarceration expenses.
Make the Democrat Party pay their the ones who Kept, Sold, Traded Abuse Slaves and Separated Families they also created the KKK
Have the Democrat Party pay for their reparations for Black Americans. After all, Slavery, Jim Crow Laws, and the social club, the Ku Klux Klan, consisted almost entirely of members of the Democrat Party.
“African American?:” What’s that? Boers? Berbers? Arabs? Carthaginians?
They’re black. “African American” is a bullshit term.
If this country owes black people reparations, it’s not for slavery. We would owe them reparations for being the victims of Democrat Party policies, which have unwittingly destroyed black families, neighborhoods, and jobs. Democrats destroy everything good.
You see blacks as victims of democrat policy. This perpetuates the problem. Blacks must exercise their own agency and take responsibility for their poor choices. Just like everybody else. To exempt them from this basic human responsibility is to infantilize them.
My family nor I have ever had a slave & I have given enough to them already. That $300,000 would cover about a 1/4 of the surgery & rehab from the attack & robbery that almost killed me. The next thing they get from me will be copper & lead.
Programs like Affirmative Action employ or promote minorities who are less qualified than other candidates—as evidenced by looking at college admission data, for one example. This robs them of the single most important factor for future success: competence.
Blacks especially would be far better off without the ministrations of their white Progressive “friends.” Before Democrat FDR, black trade unions successfully competed with white ones. As a result, for example, there were black railroad engineers and firemen (the two highest paying jobs). FDR invented “exclusive bargaining” so the majority (white unionists) could exclude the black unions from competition. In modern times Democrat LBJ’s Great Society destroyed two parent black families, setting off a socially destructive pattern of single mother households that continues to wreak social destruction. No wonder liberals strive to ignore the past.
This whole thing is a SHAM!!!The people who claim they are for”Reparations”only want to stir up”RACISM”!!!It’s called”Divide and Conquer”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I wrote this almost 4 years ago. Sigh.
David, I wrote this under a pseudonym.
Sorry…
Don’t tell me you are one of those that don’t allow links????
Search worldyturnings.com and reparations. That’s too bad!
I support One Way Tickets back to Africa for all Black malcontents! Maxine is first!
Perhaps the dude ruining, oops I meant running, California, could just hook up with the Mexican Cartels and score Kilos of Cocaine and then distribute that out to every Negro in California and then way California could block out the middle man and make the direct score for those poor folks in the Projects that will never learn that success is the best revenge..
Im just sayin…
Nobody “died to free the slaves”. That is the false narrative taught for over 150 years.
https://confederatehonorhome.files.wordpress.com/2021/02/tariffs-and-slavery.pdf
https://confederatehonorhome.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/back-in-the-1830s-south-carolina-gave-the-real-reason-they-wanted-to-secede.pdf
https://confederatehonorhome.files.wordpress.com/2020/07/why-the-civil-war-wasne28099t-about-slavery.pdf
There were slave states in the Union after secession with over 429,000 slaves. (1860 Census)
Did Black People Own Slaves? Yes!
https://www.theroot.com/did-black-people-own-slaves-1790895436
All the wasted time that some Black people do complaining about not getting any reparations for something they didn’t suffer but some of their grandfathers who had been slaves had suffered. Come on to far too late for their grandparents to get reparations, they were the ones who deserved some money payback. Not their grandchildren.
What all those modern complainers need to do and should do is look to many of the modern Chinese Americans who also had their grandfathers terribly mistreated and abused by given the worse and most dangerous jobs with little pay in the construction of the Pacific Railroad.
Likewise, their grandfathers had been given the very worse difficult backbreaking dangerous jobs in the mines of the Western States. In the city of San, Francisco during much of the 1800’s the Chinese hand been limited to life, or exist, in the ghettos of that city.
The point is that no one hears the Chinese alive today complaining about the awful treatment of the grandparents. .One of the. Reasons for this is that they are too busy in working to establish or have now established a entrepreneurship of an business. For just complaining about long past wrongs is a complete waste of time and effort the can be put in and investment in a business.
The Black may look to the Chinese of America and a role model for how to get ahead in life.
Should Whites pay blacks “reparations”?
No.
Whites didn’t enslave blacks; Whites emancipated blacks.
blacks have cost American Whites tens of trillions of dollars, not to mention a million or so lives.
Go to hell!
If only one out of five white people in the South owned slaves, the other four were substantially hurt by slavery. How does one compete in the labor market with a slave? The answer is he or she cannot. Wages for free non-slave holding whites and blacks were kept low because a slave could do the work for free and his/her master reaped the benefit by renting out the slave. However, if you really want to come up with a formula for reparations, subtract the cost of food and housing provided to the slave and any medical care as well. Subtract the cost of any welfare benefits given to black Americans since slavery was outlawed and subtract the cost of crime committed by black people. This would include the cost of police, attorneys, juries, court costs and incarceration. Also subtract the amount of loss to the victims of such crime including hospitalization and loss of income to the victim. Also subtract the cost of public education provided to black descendants of slaves. I think you would find the projected recipients of reparations would actually end up owing money to this country.
Reparations …..Now!
One way tickets to Africa!
Losing 13% of the population will cut the crime rate in half easily!
“The congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason; but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture, except during the life of the person attainted.”
§ 1294…Thus the innocent are made the victims of a guilt, in which they did not, and perhaps could not, participate; and the sin is visited upon remote generations.
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