Any halfway sane person knows that black Americans have been wronged by slavery and subsequent rights violations (segregation & expropriation, especially of housing.) The question is, how should such wrongs be righted?
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US politics has overwhelmingly chosen to *compensate for disadvantages* rather than *reverse and pay for injustices.* Affirmative action instead of reparations.
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This pattern generalizes. The US went directly from banning unions to mandating them (roughly speaking) -- from an injustice unfavorable to union workers to an injustice favorable to them.
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People who oppose employer discrimination against women are far more likely to advocate quotas for female hires than blinded hiring. (Even though blinded hiring *does* dramatically increase the number of female hires in many cases!)
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When the political center of gravity notices an injustice done to a group, it generally offers that group *preferential spoils* rather than directly reversing the injustice and compensating the victims and their heirs.
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If Alice wrongs Bob, our system, effectively, allows Alice to keep doing so indefinitely, but then also enables Bob to wrong Alice in some other way. This means Alice and Bob can *never* pay their debts and reconcile.
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People who thrive on politics like it that way. If it's impossibly complex to determine who owes what, then the ambiguity serves those who can exploit it: good negotiators, charismatic demagogues, and the industries surrounding politics and law and PR.
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I am sure I have benefited indirectly from unjust privilege. If there was a way to pay it back, I would genuinely want to do so. The problem is that it's hard to actually measure what I owe. I oppose the processes that make such measurement harder.
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I suspect slavery reparations was inserted into the national conversation to get the left to fight amongst themselves in preparation for the upcoming US election. Does anyone know how to test this hypothesis? Does anyone remember who first mentioned it in the last 10 years?
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Interesting hypothesis. Google Ngram of books shows increased mentions after WWII, shooting up in the 50's with a steady increase after that. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=slavery+reparations&case_insensitive=on&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=50&share=&direct_url=t4%3B%2Cslavery%20reparations%3B%2Cc0%3B%2Cs0%3B%3Bslavery%20reparations%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BSlavery%20Reparations%3B%2Cc0%3B%3BSlavery%20reparations%3B%2Cc0 … Web search results by year back to 90's didn't turn up a sudden spike since 2016, but there's been an increase
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