1. If there is any purpose to reparations, is it not to provide, in some measure, justice? If anyone can claim to be a descendant of slaves, because anyone can self-identify as such, where is the justice?
2. No, I don't think it would be nice if a lot of white Americans self-identified as African-American and descendants of slaves for purpose of receiving reparations. For the minute after they signed the form, they would return to a world in which the everyday presumption was that they were not, and they would have the privileges of being white. And prior to signing the form, they have lived lives without any of the injustices of being an African-American in a racist society.
3. With hundreds of millions potential recipients, exactly how are rebuttable presumptions based on self-identification going to be rebutted?
4. On the presumption based on race [which we still can't define]: A very substantial proportion of people of African descent in the US are people who have migrated from the Caribbean, Latin America and Africa this century. They are not descendants of enslaved African-Americans.
<< Who said I dismissed Robinson's trust fund or whatever it is? I never said anything about it. I don't know anything about it. And righting some wrongs doesn't mean a program that does it has to right all wrongs. >>
1. Sending an individual cheque to the entitled, as you proposed, is clearly contrary to establishing a trust fund which would provide certain social goods [ie, free tuition], as Robinson suggests. Doug's question was how should reparations be administered, and clearly focused on this contrast. If you don't know anything about it, you might (a) learn something, or (b) refrain from offering an opinion.
2. It is one thing to right a wrong, one at a time; it is another thing to right a wrong by a means that commits more wrongs. Why, pray tell, should Native Americans, who have suffered from American racism perhaps even more grievously than African-Americans, be contributing to reparations for what white Americans did? Ditto, Asian-Americans and Latinos.
<< Finally, although I expressed myself carelessly with respect to who would pay, a moment's thought would show that I meant that white workers, indeed all Americans, would have to pay, if a settlement camre from tax funds. You are dodging the political question, too, Leo: are reparations a good idea? If so, we can figure out how to implement them. As I say, bog class settlements provide an excellent model that often face harder administraive problems. But the first question is: are they a good idea? >>
Of all the things that could be said about what I have posted on LBO-Talk on the questions of reparations, surely the most ludicrous is that I am dodging the question. What exactly does one have to say to take a stand in your view?
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --
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