Not a single American alive today either owned slaves or was a slave himself or herself, yet for some reason, the Left – and especially Leftist minorities – believe that all of us owe a debt for which none of us are responsible.
The issue of paying blacks reparations has been around for decades, but it’s making a comeback again as the Black Lives Matter movement gains prominence in the wake of controversial, high-profile killings of black people by white police officers and white men, though under altogether differing circumstances.
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And yet, the issue of reparations is just as silly – and wrong – today as it’s always been. In fact, a vast majority of Americans think so – but only about half of black Americans do.
While polling data following the death of George Floyd has revealed that a significant majority of Americans support criminal justice reform, reparations do not have a comparable degree of support, the new poll shows.
The poll shows that one in ten white respondents supported the idea of reparations, while half of black respondents to the survey supported it. Each demographic makes up 76.5% and 13.4% of the U.S. population, respectively, according to the U.S. Census.
Republicans opposed the idea of reparations at nearly 80%, while one in three Democrats supported it, according to the poll.
And just how would these reparations be paid, if it ever comes to fruition?
In an interview with The New York Times, Duke University economist William A. Darity J. suggests that payments should be given to people who fall under two categories: Having at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the U.S., and having identified themselves as African-American a legal document for at least 10 years before any payments are approved.
“The reparations would be acknowledgment of the forced, unpaid labor, brutality and dispossession that slavery caused, supporters say,” the Daily Caller reports.
In fact, a form of reparations has already been paid – and it was actually provided to real former slaves.
In Special Field Order No. 15 issued Jan. 16, 1865, Union Gen. William T. Sherman designated that some 400,000 acres of land confiscated from former Confederate landowners be distributed to freed slaves in communities that blacks themselves governed. The term “40 acres and a mule” became popularized in the years following the Civil War, though the mule (to help till the ground) would come later; the land was the only ‘payment’ included in the order.
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Harvard Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr. notes that the idea itself actually came from African Americans at the time.
“The promise was the first systematic attempt to provide a form of reparations to newly freed slaves, and it was astonishingly radical for its time, proto-socialist in its implications. In fact, such a policy would be radical in any country today: the federal government’s massive confiscation of private property — some 400,000 acres — formerly owned by Confederate land owners, and its methodical redistribution to former black slaves. What most of us haven’t heard is that the idea really was generated by black leaders themselves,” he notes.
So why are we still talking about this? What’s the real motivation behind it?
What do you think? Comment below!
