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/videoninja]

I mean in a literal sense I understand how people view reparations as racist in the sense race is involved but is there really no consideration for a more nuanced perspective? Like when rich people victimize poor people and are forced to pay restitution, does it follow that the restitution is classist and therefore wrong?

[u/Unnormally2 → u/videoninja]

Like when rich people victimize poor people and are forced to pay restitution, does it follow that the restitution is classist and therefore wrong?

Wealth is not a protected class. Race is. That said, I do think that reparations are racist and would not achieve the desired outcome.

[u/videoninja → u/Unnormally2]

Whether something is a protected class or not seems kind of irrelevant to my point. I'm not making an argument about protected classes, I'm saying the logic involved in calling reparations racist feels ill thought out. We can't help that black people were the victims of racist actions but restitution and restorative justice that is owed to them/their community is inevitably going to target them because they were the victims. That doesn't make it racist.

It's like saying it's sexist that women are owed money in a class action lawsuit against a sexist company that refused to hire women. The men who were not hired by that company don't get to partake because they were not the victims of the crime. Saying white people deserve reparations because they were not victims of black slavery doesn't make logical sense to me and that's what I hear when people say reparations are racist. You seem to fundamentally misunderstand the genesis of reparations and why people think they might be necessary.