Anti Reparations

Anti Reparations

As we all know, there are deeds in this world that are viewed as evil, and dehumanizing on any level - rape, murder - and slavery, the holding of people to do work against their will. Slavery in the United States ended more than 150 years ago, with the end of the civil war, and Lincolns Emancipation Proclamation.

There is a movement in this country to give the descendents of slaves' reparations, or compensation - because their forefathers suffered through the horrors of slavery. Unfortunately, the reparations movement is seriously flawed.

In 1880 and again in 1960, there were two gigantic inflows of immigration into the United States. America today is a multiethnic nation, and almost all Americans have no direct (or indirect) connection to slaves based on the interracial and constant mixing of races. How should we decide who should receive reparations? Should you receive reparations if you are half black? A quarter black? One sixteenth black? Furthermore, what logic would require immigrants of these many countries - Cambodian victims of the Polpot regime, Armenian victims of Turkish persecution, Iranian Refugees - to provide reparations to black Americans for slavery they neither participated in nor benefited from?

Reparations advocates mislead the public by claiming that ALL African-Americans suffer from the economic consequences of slavery. The black middle class has already grown to outnumber the black "poor" class. Average incomes of the average black family are now approaching equivalency to the middle class white family. These African American people, that have made it on their own without reparations from the government, could see reparations as a slap in the face, undermining the accomplishments they have made without help from "the man". Paying out reparations would reawaken the feelings that slavery invoked 150 years ago - one of the victim. Victim hood is nothing that a community should dwell on; it cuts in on the path to healing.

Reparations could cause tension between races. There are millions of Americans that have suffered under foreign tyranny and genocide. Many of these individuals are worse off economically