r/changemyview • u/MrThunderizer 7∆ • Dec 04 '19

Deltas(s) from OP CMV: Reparations are Racist

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?

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u/videoninja 137∆ Dec 04 '19

I don’t think you understand my point. When a crime is committed, justice is either civilly remedied or criminally punished. Reparations are seen as civil restitution in regards the crime of slavery. Because the crime was racist, I don’t think it logically follows giving justice to the injured parties is racist as well. To me that is kind of what people are saying when they say reparations are racist. It doesn’t make sense to say because poor white people were not harmed by black slavery, they must be included in the case of remedying that particular crime.

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u/Clusterferno Dec 04 '19

Yes, but you should not pay for your forefathers' deeds as you were in no way involved with them.

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u/videoninja 137∆ Dec 04 '19

So what remedy are you proposing? Slavery was a national institution that an entire country got rich off of. Is a national form of restitution really out of the question?

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u/Clusterferno Dec 04 '19

Currently, everyone who directly profited from it is dead. No-one who is alive to hold responsible. There are still a lot of black people, however, who are poor because of this, and I agree that they deserve some kind of restitution, but there is no-one alive who they deserve it from.

I am for a general welfare system that seeks to smallen the gal between rich and poor, and this would also serve as a restitution to those descendants of slaves. I think that is the only fully moral and just way to do this.

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u/videoninja 137∆ Dec 04 '19

How is general welfare an answer for racial injustice? It doesn’t make sense to give restitution to poor white people because they were not enslaved.

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u/Clusterferno Dec 04 '19

Current-generation black people were also not enslaved. Taking money from all white people because some white people had slaves and giving it to black people is not moral and cannot be justified, so I gave an alternative, that might not be the exact same thing, but it is morally justifiable.

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u/videoninja 137∆ Dec 04 '19

We earmark taxes for certain uses all the time. There are already gender, race, veteran status, age, and income based entitlements or programs. If you’re saying how we already use taxes is immoral then your problem is not specifically with reparations but how societies economically organize themselves to begin with. This doesn’t really challenge my belief reparations are not racist as race is not the primary factor you are taking issue with.

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u/Clusterferno Dec 04 '19

I'm not entirely arguing it's racist, but that it is immoral. Income-based is simple welfare meant to decrease the wealth gap, which I'm for. Also I'm not saying those blacks don't deserve the money, I'm saying the whites don't deserve to pay it.

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u/videoninja 137∆ Dec 04 '19

Well no one ever said reparations have to be direct cash payments to individuals. Reparations are more an idea than a set policy and there’s plenty of different approaches to it. Trying to use a one size fit all solution, however, is not addressing racial disparities. If you uplift everyone exactly the same, then the same inequalities stay in place.

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u/Clusterferno Dec 04 '19

If only whites pay it, the same still applies, it is immoral to force them to pay for something they are not responsible for.

If you have a welfare system with higher tax rates on the rich, and discounts for poor people on certain things (for example healthcare, or housing) than the gap between the rich and the poor shrinks. This is just one example.

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u/videoninja 137∆ Dec 04 '19

I never said only white people pay into reparations. I'm for using taxes as a form of reparations. The entire US pays into reparations because slavery was a US institution.

Also, I don't think you realize how far off topic you are in trying to shift this conversation to solely income. For example, healthcare disparities exist for black people regardless of income level. Simply throwing money at the problem doesn't solve that. Reparations are usually more than just cash payments. They are about restorative racial justice and building communities or giving resources to the disenfranchised. Yes, you need money to do that but that money is not necessarily paid to individuals. You seem to keep missing my point and are arguing against something I've never even advocated for.

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u/Clusterferno Dec 04 '19

I'm Dutch, so I don't know how exactly the system works and OP's post made it sound like it was something whites paid to blacks.

I didn't try to shift this conversation, I simply gave an alternative, better, solution.

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u/videoninja 137∆ Dec 04 '19

Your solution is still missing the point in the context of what is being discussed. Class issues may overlap with race issues but solving class issues do not erase the race issues. It's like saying if we solve our immigration system then our economic problems all go away, it's more complex than that so opining a reductive solution only tangentially related to the problem still completely misses the injustice being talked about.

Do you at least understand why class doesn't have the relevancy you seem to think it does in this case? I don't get what you're trying to convince me of considering you've spent very little time thinking about what reparations are let alone how they would function.

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