Yes, I have no problem with "paying for" the reparations by taxing rich white people.
That's hardly the full story. Abolitionist proposals for the redistribution of land and capital envisioned the direct redistribution of land from wealth white land-owners who prospered from the exploitation of black labour directly to those exploited blacks. What you're describing is far more nebulous: even if the redistribution is from "rich white people", you're not clearly identifying a group that has prospered from the exploitation of slaves, and you're proposing distribution to black people regardless of socioeconomic status, even those who have risen to the position of exploiters of back labour. Even if you add in the qualification about "taxing rich whites", and that's not really something I can see surviving the supreme court, it's still pretty directionless so far as class is concerned.
I expressed pessimism towards New Deal-style reforms' ability to address the issue of racial inequality. I am fully in favor of such reforms and I trust the government to carry them out. EDIT: Also, what metalhead said. When I said what I said, I believe it was in the context of refuting the claim that purely class-based measures are capable of addressing the unique problems faced by black people. The best example there would not actually be the New Deal but more recent affirmative action policies. When they are based on class, racial diversity in hiring and school admissions didn't happen. There needed to be an explicit race-based component for the goal of racial diversity to be satisfied. So that is really the kind of thing I'm talking about.
Anyway, you're just running into the same problem here: it's not enough to note that certain reforms failed to produce adequate results, it has to be explained
why that happened. Otherwise, "reparations" continues to look like a way of throwing money at embarrassing statistics rather than a serious project for reform, if it even looks like a sincere proposition and not just a way of demonstrating goodthink.
This isn't the first time I've encountered European myopia about the racial issues that exist in the United States. The problem is that it isn't simply a matter of black people being more likely to be paupers- it's that black paupers tend to be much poorer and less well-off than white paupers. There is a chart, somewhere in the woods of the internet (I've been trying without success every time I post to find it), that conveys this very simply by dividing the population into quintiles and showing how huge the black-white gap is at each quintile. So even among the poorest quintile, there is still a huge lopsided gap between white and black wealth.
I'd advise you not to confuse myopia with a lack of dogma. From a European perspective, "reparations" is a shibboleth for America leftists rather than a serious political project.
Anyway, what are you actually
saying here? That the statistics are unbalanced? An average only counts a a fact on the evening news; in any serious discussion, it only has as much meaning as it has context, and there's very little context to this.
Yes, black people suffer disproportionately from poverty, that's beyond dispute. But not all black people are in poverty, and not all people in poverty are black. The second and third observation don't lessen the first, they simply tell us that whatever dynamic is producing these outcomes is complex, that racism is only one of the forces at work, and that any proposed reforms have to be designed in response to this complex interaction of forces or they won't achieve justice, they'll just nudge the statistics enough to lessen the national embarrassment.
And by the way, there are certainly elements of experience which are racial and not class-based. Rich, famous, and powerful black people are hardly immune to the effects of racism due to their class position.
It's hardly the same experience of racism, though. There's a chasm between the experiences of somebody in the ghetto struggling to food on their kids plates and somebody finding that their career in finance isn't panning out the way they'd hoped.
I mean, the reality is, the experiences of most poor black people are a hell of a lot closer to those of poor white people than they are to those of rich black people. Their suffering is the suffering of the working class, doubled for good measure, so any reforms aimed at addressing those sufferings has to address class as fundamentally as race.
The assertion that black and white are not useful sociological categories is complete nonsense at least as far as the US is concerned. They lack empirical reality, they are nothing more than bizarre creations of white supremacy, but they are among the most important categories for understanding how things are here.
I also reject analyses that insist on making either race or class "fundamental." I prefer the intersectional approach.
Note that I said "socioeconomic", not "sociological". A socioeconomic group would be something like "skilled industrial workers", a group with broadly shared position within and experience of capitalism, but which may be further divided by race, religion and so forth. "Black people" and "white people" are sociological categories that exist across every conceivable socioeconomic group.
(And speaking of baffling American shibboleths, "intersectional" probably qualifies.)
There are laws which cite Native American lineage back 6 generations. That puts it in the 19th century. If you can prove that, you can probably prove lineage to slaves going back that far.
Possible doesn't mean practical. Native American descent is relatively easy to establish because the tribes have diligently maintained membership rolls since the late nineteenth century. No comparable source exists for African-Americans: it would be necessary to trace each individual through different, perhaps widely-scattered records of inconsistent detail and quality, something made particularly complicated by the migration of African-Americans in the early twentieth century. Even if it was only necessary to demonstrate a single slave ancestor, you'd still be looking at a very substantial task, more so than would be expected as part of the process of claiming public entitlements.
if past slavery adversely affects black people today regardless of being descendants or merely swept up in the demographic then... yeah?
It stretches the logic of "reparation" pretty thin, though. It's possible to cite the continuing influence of slavery as the historical basis for certain aspects of American racism without framing it in terms of the repayment of a debt, which I keep feeling the need to point out is the literal meaning of "reparation".
Besides, the emphasis on slavery can end up feeling like a form of apologism, as if slavery was the only tangible wrong to African-Americans, as if the following century and a half were characterised only by the failure to make amends. Given that the actual proposals increasingly have less and less to do with slavery and more to do with contemporary racism, it gives the impression that the speaker is so worried about offending white sensibilities that they're trying to shift blame to the Antebellum era. It'd be more honest to just call racism what it is and call the reforms what they are.
A remarkable shift of opinion for the guy who said
this.
Maybe. But you'll note that in that post, and in a follow up post, I specifically say I'm talking about groups and not individuals. My scepticism towards these proposals for reparations is precisely the assumption that individuals can substitute for groups.
I'm all for reforms that target the uniquely terrible card that working class African-Americans have been dealt, I just think that "reparations" is a shoddy rationale and individual payments a shoddier program. And, as I said, I think a lot of Americans implicitly acknowledge this by quietly shifting the substance of their proposals away from dealing with repayments to individuals descended from slaves towards investment in poor black communities.
It might help if I clarify, I absolutely do think their was a time when direct reparations for slavery were appropriate. If you ask me, Grant should have gone Red October on the plantations and let Congress worry about the paperwork. I just think we're about a century past that point, and that any measures aimed at addressing the socioeconomic impact of racism would be better addressing that impact directly, rather than playing this odd and insincere language of racial blood-debt.
I certainly don't see this as I'm right and you're wrong because I don't think we actually disagree all that much.
