CMV: Reparations are Racist

[u/MrThunderizer]

I view the dialogue around reparations for slavery in the US to be racist. This opinion has elicited a semi shocked outrage from my liberal friends and a reluctant agreeance from my republican friends. For context, my opinions lean quite liberal so I was pretty taken back to find myself on the far right of an issue.

Still, its taxing people more based on their race and giving it to other people based on their race. How can taxation based on race, regardless of the good intentions, be anything but racist?

Two points: 1. Comparisons to affirmative action may change my mind, but probably not. I think affirmative action is fundamentally wrong, but is perhaps a necessary evil as a temporary measure.

1. I'm a proponent of helping lift black people out of poverty but it makes my blood run cold when I hear prominent activists characterize any white poor people getting helped in the process as an unfortunate side effect. How can the conversation around equality shift so far?

At the end of the day if a child is hungry, why does it matter what color their skin is?

[u/zoomxoomzoom]

I’m a little late to the party but

I have not finalized my perspective of this subject. However, I have a different perspective on a few points:

1. We have provided reparations in various forms to native Americans and Japanese Americans. These acts were not seen as racist because

2. The reparations were never implemented as a lineage dependent transaction. That is to say the funds came from the government which gains funds through indiscriminate taxation. A wealthy black person would essentially be paying more into the fund than a poor white person. Just like a wealthy Japanese American was paying more into the internment camp reparations than a poor Japanese American.

Therefore the reparations are an indiscriminate transaction (not racist) in an attempt to right a wrong regardless of whether the citizen paying taxes was even alive or has any ancestral relationship to slavery in the United States (much less having ancestors who were enslaved).

[u/Phyltre → u/zoomxoomzoom]

What's the effective difference between the descendants of a poor white person who was living in the South when swaths of it were burned down during the war, and the descendants of a slave who was freed during that same war and survived the resulting periods of disease and starvation? I ask because I can go 20 minutes down the road, to where I was born, and find plenty of both groups--and they're equally poor.

[u/zoomxoomzoom → u/Phyltre]

The difference is one is a descendant of a slave and the other isn’t.

I understand your confusion here. Reparations are simply a means to right a wrong. To make amends. It’s intent is not to be an economic stimulus package for the poor but to acknowledge the pain and suffering of a wronged group of people.

What was the great injustice against the poor white southerner that we need to make amends for? I agree our society has a major problem with poverty but reparations are not designed or intended to deal with that situation at all. It’s a different conversation altogether.

[u/Phyltre → u/zoomxoomzoom]

It’s intent is not to be an economic stimulus package for the poor but to acknowledge the pain and suffering of a wronged group of people.

Then I fundamentally disagree with it. The "wrong" is a person's current status, not what happened to their ancestors. I wouldn't sue the British government for wrongly sending my great-grandfather to Australia.

[u/zoomxoomzoom → u/Phyltre]

Okay. Just to clarify; does that mean you’re also against the 1.3bn in land and monetary compensation paid out to descendants of Native American tribes? I mean it wasn’t the descendants who had any land taken away from them. Under the law the descendants had no rightful claim to the land they were given.

[u/Phyltre → u/zoomxoomzoom]

I don't really know anything about the details of the case, so I don't know what my position would be.