WSJ: PUBISHES SUPPORT FOR SLAVE-REPARATIONS: DUMB STUFF COMPOUNDING A PROBLEM!

The Wall Street Journal’s Saturday Essay, September 20, 2019,  

“The Long History of American Slavery Reparations”  

The Wall Street Jounral attempting to join the “woke generation” has just published, Saturday Sept 20, 2019, a fatuous piece claiming to recount the history of reparations for slavery—in the USA—but is actually an attempt to garner support for an idea that has no place in modern USA. 

The idea of reparations for those who have suffered harm by egregious injustices of a government or nation is one that appeals to our natural sense  of justice.  In the recent past the  USA has supported  reparations for Japanese -American citizens who—under war-time exigencies and fears—were unfairly treated and a a result lost their homes, their livelihoods and their freedom during WWII.  Jews who suffered even more egregious treatment and as well six million dead during WWII were offered reparations by the German state after the war.  These examples were justified and appropriate.  

But how can we address the atrocities of the long ago past?  What can we say of the extermination of American natives?  ow can we address these issues when those who perpetrated the injustice and their immediate ancestors are long dead.  The idea of reparations for American slaves had great merit at the close of the Civil War —when those who suffered and those who perpetrated their suffering (or their immediate heirs) were still alive.   But that period was more than a hundred and fifty years ago!  None of the slave holder or slaves or other participants or their immediate ancestors are alive.  The time for reparations for slavery is long gone.   

In modern USA there is no one alive who owned slaves. there are no slaves.   From whom should we take funds to generate the reparations.  Who would be taxed to raise the funds for such a fund?  All of those immigrants who are recent and those whose ancestors arrived here after the the Civil War had no connection and no culpability for that horrible system. What about all those who had ancestors who did live here prior to the Civil War?  Among those are many who fought bravely for the principle of ending slavery.. Some who lost their lives or were maimed or mutilated or who lost their livelihoods in the war.  Should their modern ancestors—who had no hand in the system— be further taxed to make reparations to those who suffered injustices in the distant past?.  

The concept of reparations is a fine example of how some actions can compound a problem by  perpetrating another injustice in an attempt to rectify a past one.  Slave reparations today would  aggravate and intensify a problem rather than ameliorating one.    Instead of divisive reparations let us concentrate on the future, on the positive aspects of our shared heritage, and put the old and divisive idea of reparations for slavery in the dustheap of history.  

Furthermore who would the recipients be?  Most Afro-Americans are more American than Afro. Today there are no individuals who are  100% pure anything—just as all the rest of us are a mixture of other ethic and racial groups.  Even Lilly white Elizabeth Warren (Senator From Massachusetts) has a few tenths of one percent non-Caucasian genes.  Many Afro-Americans have have genetic makeups which include both slaves as well as slave owners. 

How would the recipients of reparations be chosen?  What percentage African or slave genome would they have to have to  be eligible?  Can the author or this piece see how complex and how divine it would be?  

What purpose would such reparations serve other than to underscore and exacerbate the whole concept of racial differences, and a  painful past..  Would the process demean and sully the lives and histories of those  whom it is supposedly aiding?  

L

Time to move on.