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How are slavery reparations fair?
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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It's not intended to be punitive. The idea is that slavery generated a massive amount of wealth for slave owning economies that left us richer and the descendants of slaves poorer. Think of it as being the child of a crime boss. You haven't committed any crimes but the hosue you live in and the school that gave you the education to get ahead were paid for with dirty money. The idea is fair, but just not likely to ever happen. I think the point is more so to make people recognize the problem so that more is done to catch up the people on the wrong end of the generational wealth spectrum
This.
OP is correct in the statement that any person alive has not been alive to either own slaves or be slaves. But that's not the point of reparations.
The point is that you have and continue to benefit from the times when slaves were legally permitted. It might not seem like it, and maybe someone along the line blew a bunch of that money on booze and gambling... But someone you are related to, and by proxy you are benefiting from the proceeds of slavery.
By extension, all of those proceeds from the work that slaves performed was robbed from them by their masters. Making most of the slaves insanely poor while the former masters were able to keep the money those slaves earned for them. So they started from nothing. Sure, they were "free" to some variation of free (not sure all the racism made it feel like much of a change)... Fact is, they started at zero, at a time when most established families were sitting pretty.
After all this time.... There's interest.
I don't know where they got these numbers and I haven't looked into it all that closely, but it doesn't seem too unreasonable given all of that.
That kids or later generations are liable for past crimes or wrong doings (by todays standards!!!) is not fair and it is no justice.
In German it is called Sippenhaftung and was even used by the Nazis.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sippenhaft
I think you missed my point. This is not about punishing white people, it's about getting the victims caught up.
by your logic, if someone stole something, have it to his brother and then got caught, having the brother give back the stolen goods is something Nazis would have done.
But this isn't Sippenhaftung, also known as gilt by association in English, this is a societal thing, you, even if your great great gandpappy didn't himself own slaves, the society is still at fault and needs to right the wrongs done to a whole ethnic group
According to Sippenhaftung the Nazis would probably have shot the thieve, his brother, their parents, other family members and burned down their houses.
In case of societies you mean collective liability then?
The society in question (which exactly?) of today is not the same compared to the society of the past. How can it be at fault?
look, YOU are the person framing this as some form of individually targeted thing.
as for the idea that the society is different, how can it be at fault? because the foundations of the society we have now are built on these injustices, to go back to the earlier example, "look, you can't take the stolen stuff back from the thief, he's a different person 10 years later"