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For all the blather about reparations and who owes what to whom, we ought to step back and consider who among those who reside in the United States have been aggrieved, how recently, for how long, what was the impact at the time, are there ramifications today, and what is the overall assessment?
Many ethnic and racial groups at various times throughout our history made significant contributions, which across the broad swath of today’s population, remain virtually unknown.
Focusing on the Chinese
European Jews arriving in the 1890s and again in the 1910s were kept out of every corporation of prominence, denied housing, shunned by the guilds, and kept at a distance socially by “polite” society. The Irish were once considered vermin. So, pay their descendants reparations? The Chinese workers in the 1890s along the Pacific coast – Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle – were poorly treated. Pay them as well?
In the 1800s, for example, the Central Pacific Railroad in California (that hotbed of reparations proposals) employed as many as 12,000 Chinese as young as age 12. The pool of these workers represented America’s largest industrial workforce. Nine out of 10 people employed by the Central Pacific Railroad were first-generation Chinese in America – not merely of Chinese ancestry.
Precious little had been recorded or even noted about this vital workforce, while European and American workers of the same era had been described and characterized at length.
In 2012, the Chinese Railroad Workers in North America project assembled a massive collection of oral accounts, documents, photos, and other paraphernalia on this area of American history. This Chinese railroad workforce, it has since been determined, provided the lion’s share of the most labor-intensive tasks: cutting through granite or blasting through it when needed and effectively laying track across the far western states.
Productive and Unknown
How were they able to be so productive? As it turns out, many of these workers had been blacksmiths, silversmiths, carpenters, woodworkers, and even architects before their arrival in the U.S. In other words, they represented a highly skilled and, in some cases, educated group. Yet, they have been largely ignored by history, and when anything is written about them, it is often in the collective sense.
Whereas we know the names of pioneers in the black freedom movement, such as Frederick Douglass, Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Booker T. Washington, Sojourner Truth, and numerous others, the names of Chinese leaders during this era are virtually unknown. And we tend to view this workforce as monolithic — no individual personalities, aspirations, or objectives.
Among these Chinese workers, one has to wonder. Were they underpaid? Were the injury, illness, and mortality rates on the job significantly high? Undoubtedly. How about the ability of the individual worker to rise in the ranks, on property, or aspire to U.S. citizenship?
The Folly of Redressing All of History
All four of my Caucasian grandparents arrived in the U.S. after 1907, so how much do I pay? The ancestry of 80+% of U.S. Caucasians arrived after 1880. How much should these descendants pay?
Should descendants of all others throughout our history who did not get a fair share be given reparations? This is folly. We cannot go back and redress every incident, in every locale, for all time. Nor should we.
The history of the U.S., as with the history of EVERY other country on Earth, is replete with unfairness and injustice. Leftists, apparently, are the only group that does not know this and could care less.
Caucasian Suffering
If we consider Caucasian males today’s scourge among Leftists, their sacrifices have been extraordinary. At least 360,000 Union troops died in the U.S. Civil War, with over one million gravely injured and living miserable lives thereafter. What about their descendants?
Caucasian abolitionists (primarily male victims) represented one-quarter of all those who died by lynching in the U.S. Do their descendants get reparations? The death toll of Caucasian males in WWI, WWII, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and other battles is staggering.
The reparations proposed by some would total as much as $14 trillion. Meanwhile, the U.S. has spent more than $21 TRILLION since Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” on affirmative action and wealth redistribution programs, paid for mainly by Caucasians. This sum equals more than $13,000 per year, every year, to each black person alive, every year since 1965. This equals $754,000 per person who has been alive during all of those years.
Is the $21 trillion to be subtracted from the reparations total? Uh-oh! Looks like the request for reparations is actually several trillion dollars less than what the U.S. government has already paid!
So, ahem… pay up. That will be seven trillion dollars, please.
Similar situation in Australia. The Aboriginals demand the whites give them everything they want. They already get free education – which many of their children ignore. They demand better health care while still using witch doctors. They demand free housing and yet they are happy to destroy the houses of rival tribes. etc. etc. They want all the benefits of a modern society yet don’t want the people who brought those things to the country. And what about those who have some European ancestry? What reparations are they due?
it’s all a Communist ploy – create divisions and set different ethnicities against others, and soon the society will crumble
Add to my previous comment
There are some fine Aboriginals who have achieved much – doctors, judges, airline pilots – without reparations. the rest just want a free ride.. mind you, some whites are no different
In reality only INDIVIDUALS exist.
That’s the reality the Marxist, tribalist, and the racist reject. Marxism, racism, and tribalism are all rejections of reason and reality.
“A genius is a genius, regardless of the number of morons who belong to the same race—and a moron is a moron, regardless of the number of geniuses who share his racial origin.” – Ayn Rand
Not reparations – repatriation.
It’s time for all black malcontents to stop their belly aching and return home to Africa. All you need is a one way ticket. Renounce your white supremacist citizenship and get on a plane and head home to Africa.
I can hear the drums of Africa beckoning. It’s time to return home to your people and correct the wrong to your ancestors. You will never fit in here.
Time to stop jawing, take action and leave. You will never have to see a White person again.
America, love it or leave it.
Seems to me that African-Americans are already getting reparations in the form of industrial-strength shoplifting with no consequences. But I may be wrong…
Oh, the Africans would love that, us sending them a bunch of useless malcontents. They would just leave them to starve.
Reparations is just another name for massive theft and rip off.
Free loaders just being free loaders.
I am really tired of this discussion. Are descendants of slaves owed something, still?
Maybe. Probably. (Not necessarily for slavery, but the list of their and EVERYONE’S unaddressed grievances is long.)
Would it change anything?
No.
Would it set a precedent for empty bribery schemes?
Yes.
Reparations for blacks, Japanese, Chinese, Germans, Irish, and I am sure plenty of other ethnic groups.
Reparations for the families of those who died in false flag incidents and uncalled-for wars entered on false pretenses. (Not even talking Iraq / Afghanistan / Vietnam here.) The same for those who survived.
Reparations for everyone who went to public school.
College debt forgiven and reparations paid to those who paid theirs off. College is a scam foisted on the vulnerable with the explicit participation of the state.
Reparations for every cancer patient. Every victim of unjust laws. Every person whose poor diet has been influenced by government propaganda and regulations. Every farmer. Every homesteader. Every person who needs to eat. Every child groomed by a corrupt top-down culture enforced by state institutions and mega corporations.
I could keep going but the long and the short of it is reparations for every legal breathing person in the US. Red, white, black, or blue for plenty of well known reasons and many more that are publicly unacknowledged.
This is an unjust country. Has been for a very long time. Slaves were given their freedom. It was paid for with gold and blood. Than they joined the rest of us. From unpaid slavery to paid slavery. Their humanity only gained for all of a few brief moments.
Reparations how it is framed keeps people distracted and in the past. This is part of how Their war on Us works. Those who want reparations for slavery and other things that happened generations ago – while ignoring current injustice that is inconvenient for the establishment – need to ask themselves if they want justice or just a better place in the system.
If it’s the latter, they don’t stand on the side of Justice, and they are contributing to the ongoing oppression of their people, and the rest of us.
Reparations for all who lost everything they owned to Looters, Rioters and Arsonists and make the ones who looted and Rioters pay the whole thing off and make those who instigated the Riots and Looting to pay triple the price
These folks have had reparations for many years. It’s called welfare.
“Should descendants of all others throughout our history who did not get a fair share be given reparations? This is folly.”
“Don’t bother to examine a folly-ask yourself only what it accomplishes.” – Ayn Rand
We have become a nation of lazy whiners. You have exposed the reparations debate as the idiotic idea that it is.
“It is understandable that American blacks, on discovering the circumstances in which their ancestors were brought to this country, would feel at best a qualified patriotism. But upon reflection this ambivalence may be unwarranted. Africans were not uniquely unfortunate to be taken as slaves; their descendants were uniquely fortunate to be born in the only civilization in the world to abolish slavery on its own initiative. For Zora Neale Hurston, the black feminist writer of the Harlem Renaissance, the legacy of slavery is one of opportunities for the future, not unceasing submersion in the past.
“From what I can learn, it was sad,” she wrote. “Certainly. But my ancestors who lived and died in it are dead. The white men who profited by their labor and lives are dead also. I have no personal memory of those times, and no responsibility for them. Neither has the grandson of the man who held my folks. . . . I have no intention of wasting my time beating on old graves. . . . I do not belong to the sobbing school of Negroes who hold that nature somehow has given them a low-down dirty deal and whose feelings are all hurt about it. . . . Slavery is the price I paid for civilization, and that is worth all that I have paid through my ancestors for it.” – Dinesh D’Souza, “We The Slave Owners”
https://www.hoover.org/research/we-slave-owners
It is about time those who regard themselves as warranting money for their forefathers being slaves looked into the history of that dspicable phenomena, which has been going on since human civilization began. The white persons/ owners did NOT capture black persons but paid for them from Arab traders who got them from the African chiefs with whom the persons who became slaves, were prisoners and under sentence of death, so it can be argued the slave owners gave the erstwhile prisoners, the chance of life. Plus they were subsequently given countries, islands etc as their own, which are worth trillions. So maybe the white countries are due to be paid for the services they have given. Safe countries swapped for disease ridden, wild animal frequented places from whence they came. And why are white countries picked upon whereas he main abusers of the blacks from Africa were the Arabs. Why are there no black persons indigenous in Arab countries?.
How about tje Europeans demanding reparations from Morocco for the victims of the Barbary pirates? How about the SLAVS-the very word “slave'” comes from Slav-dmanding reparations from Turkey and the north African states for the Slavs who were kidnapped and sold into slavery? By the way, a whole lot of the kidnapping in the slave trade, was done by Arabs. Some of the kidnapped Blacks were mot put on slave ships to be sent to the New World;they were marched
across the desert to Nortj Africa. The Arab states should definitely contribute to the slavery reparations
Negroes in America have no right to call themselves as African American as they cannot tell you where in Africa their ancestors came from, whereas I have yet to hear the term European American even though such people can tell you where, which country and sometimes the City or area, their ancestors came from.
Black folks in America need to learn that success is the best revenge just as the Jews, Chinese, Irish did decades ago and so ask yourself which Race are always known as being poor and in which neighborhood do you not want to enter and then ask who is shooting whom in which neighborhood and why…
Inquiring minds want to know.
I demand to get in on this reparations gig. I qualify by dent of the fact that my ancestors were villainously persecuted, discriminated against, murdered, robbed, and run out of the their own country. I posit that it matters little that it was 450 years ago that my French Huguenot ancestors were fallen upon by Papist mobs, and offer that the offenses were even more intense than those founding the present call for reparations. My ancestor was culpably murdered for being a non-Roman Catholic and having the nerve to also be a mayor of a French city on Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre when up to 50,000 fellow-believers were slaughtered in France. They were summarily deprived of their status, worldly goods, driven from their homes & country if not killed where they stood. Indeed, based upon the time involved, interest alone on the damages far exceed the newer travesties, matters not that I have no clue what Huguenots believed and for what religious mysticism they died.
But, you say, we know nothing of these great injustices masked with the passage of time. All the more reason for my inclusion in The Big Payoff being arraigned. It matters not that every person on earth is descendant of some woefully wronged and enslaved antecedents. You have to boldly demand what was never yours but was taken from those in your lineage. It is only right and equitable. There is no Statute of Limitations on righteousness & justice. In the hierarchy of victimhood by proxy should not the first in line take precedence on the payout?