Angela Winters presents an interesting view on the call for reparations for slavery at Pop and Politics. She writes:
It’s an incredibly divisive movement, but advocates don’t care about that. The call for reparations is teaching our children from day one that they are owed something based solely on the color of their skin. We are telling our people that the only way we can get ahead is dependent on what someone else does for us, and it’s insulting.
As she points out, February being Black History Month and all, we should follow the lead of the folks we should be celebrating by using our initiative and perseverence and embracing education and economic empowerment to move forward.
It pains me to see in my family how this idea of entitlement vs. initiative and hard work plays out. Of five of us, myself and four of my cousins who are very close in age (on my mother’s side) three, including me, have achieved some state of success through our efforts (with LOTS of support from our family not the gov’ment); one who I wouldn’t consider a failure but who thinks he’s owed something and one who, as my wife would say, I wouldn’t smack a bear in the ass with.
We all grew up in the same neighborhood pretty much with similar backgrounds and similar socioeconomic situations. The difference, to me anyway, was the parental support. The cousins whose parents took more active roles in our lives, seemed to turn out for the better. Writes Winters:
We need to put our morality, our families, and sense of responsibility for each other ahead of getting something from someone else.
3 Comments
My problem with reparations isn’t whether or not they get paid, but where do they end.? A lot of people don’t realize it but there were white slaves in this country as well, and contrary to popular opinion, all those white slaves did not sell themselves in return for passage. And “indentured servitude” didn’t end in 1776 either. Most “indentured servants” were imprisoned Welch, Scotts, and Irish peoples who were rounded-up on the streets of England and imprisoned for the crime of being poor. My ancestors were Welch slaves in the Jamestown and Williamsburg settlements who ran away to the mountains of NC. to be free.
And let’s not forget those men who were sent to “Debtor’s Prisons” and forced to work hard labor and the end of a gun barrel. While most debtor’s prisons were abolished by 1860 and all by the 1880s, the Navaho Tribes may still have debtor’s prisons http://www.gallupindependent.com/1999-2001/2-19-00.html
And up until the 1960s prisoners were often worked so that some wealthy politician wouldn’t have to pay wages to hired hands. Even some of the convicts who built roads were doing so for contractors who were paid by governments to hire men to build roads. Sure, it was another form of under the table slavery but it was slavery just the same.
Then, after the Civil War, the carpetbaggers came south and took any lands they wanted while forcing the people who lived on those lands to become sharecroppers. In eastern NC., most sharecroppers were blacks, but in Western NC. they were almost always white. My daddy was born a sharecropper. He told me how a crooked sheriff would throw men in jail who tried to move off a farm while still owing the landlord money. This was something that took place all over America, not just in the Southland. Sure, it was illegal but who was going to fight the high sheriff?
Daddy was forced into sharecropping at age 13 when my grandfather died leaving Daddy to take care of the family.
Daddy said it was an Army Colonel who explained to the sheriff that the boys in his jail had been recruited and/or drafted to fight WW2 and no sheriff would argue with the US Army over who got to keep ‘em. Daddy said being a soldier was better than sharecropping except when he was being shot at. He served in WW2 and Korea just so he wouldn’t have to go back to sharecropping.
There’s a small movement even today that wants to bring back debtor’s prisons. Let’s hope they don’t get the ear of the Bush Administration.
My point is: Slavery was wrong, but slavery has been practiced in many forms by and to every race on earth, and even today it is estimated there are over 1 million slaves in the USA., so at what point will reparations break the bank?
And lastly: a very small percentage of whites and a smaller percentage of blacks owned slaves in this country– is it fair to make you and I whose families probably never owned slaves pay the cost of reparations? Where would it end? If the slave owners were alive today I would shout, “Make them pay!” as loud as anyone else, but I can’t understand why folks who never benefited from slavery should have to pay.
Just my thoughts, that’s all.
Great thoughts, Billy.
I think there’s a thought that companies who benefitted should have to pay, very similar to what’s happened with companies that benefitted from the Holocaust.
But I agree with Angela and with you. Reparations are not the answer.
The companies who benefitted– now that’s something different all together. I agree, any corporation who was around prior to 1856 and is still around today– and there are many– should pay through the nose, perhaps not directly to individual persons, but at least to the communities in which the affected persons live. That’s something I never thought of and something I could get behind. Even though I’m white, my community is 95% black and most are poor blacks. Something like that would do wonders for my neighbors and would help my entire community.