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Intersting read. May be first Canoli post ive read all the way through Nargs Send a noteboard - 31/01/2019 03:30:14 AM

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And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans.

The alcoholics are dead. So are their bartenders and the family members and acquaintances they would have apologized to in their 12 step programs. These people have nothing to do with me, or with you or with anyone alive today. The concurrent injustices perpetuated on my ancestors in their countries of origin have nothing to do with me. If England was handing out reparations to the Irish, I would oppose the policy on principle, as I would Austria or whoever else oppressed my Italian and Swiss ancestors or whoever was responsible for making my German ancestors come to America or turning my Jewish ancestors away from their heritage and identity.

There are two contradictory arguments for reparations, and I don't need a comic book writer's turgid essays to make the points. One is that this is something done by America... but in the first place, that is patently untrue. The Constitution was set up with as many obstacles to slavery as could be put in it without driving the slave states back into the arms of the monarchy that imposed the institution on this continent in the first place, and a hard deadline for the end of the slave trade. America itself was such a hostile environment to slavery that the slave states spent decades desperately shoring up their power base in the US Senate, and bloc-voting to keep hostile presidents out of the White House, before they were finally driven to attempt to secede in desperate circumstances at the worst possible time for them. The United States did not bring slavery in, it was imposed by the British crown, for the benefit of British merchants and attempts by the colonies to root it out were vetoed by the mother country. America is not responsible for slavery and was an inhospitable environment from the beginning, with Benjamin Franklin intriguing to introduce anti-slavery legislation in one of the earliest Congresses. The ideology of the South was very much against Federal power but they felt so threatened by anti-slave sentiment in the country that they fought for that very level of power to protect their perverse interests.

The other case is that somehow the United States has benefited from slavery and that its current inhabitants are somehow beneficiaries of slavery because we live in a wealthy and powerful country that would not have been so without slavery. That "mudsill" theory is bullshit as anyone with a halfway decent knowledge of economics will attest. In general, it is well known that slavery is not a beneficial system to the overall economy or state, or anyone at all, except the lifestyles of a handful of people at the top. This was certainly the case in the southern United States, which were for almost all of the country's history, the poorest and least developed. Infrastructure was grossly lacking and industry was underdeveloped. Just as one example, Birmingham, Alabama is one of the best natural sites for steel production on the continent, possibly the planet, but was not even developed until well after the Civil War. Many otherwise historically and economically ignorant people might recall the scene in "Gone With the Wind", practically a slavery apologist work, in which Rhett Butler exhorts his fellow southerners of the dangers of a war, citing the vast industrial and manufacturing superiority of the non-slave portion of the country.

Beyond the economic dead-end of their labor system, in the South, most planters were engaged in a trade cycle of cash crops for manufactured goods, with European countries, mainly England. The first secession crisis involving the South came not in response to anti-slavery measures, but tariffs on imported goods. In other words, the money that the planters made off of slavery was sent abroad. It was not invested in the American infrastructure or as capital for American business nor spent to purchase American goods. The money from slavery flowed OUT of the country. The planters were usually in debt to foreign bankers and merchants, and needed the foreign trade to stay afloat. For another pop culture example, recall that in “12 Years a Slave” both planters who owned the protagonist were constrained by heavy debts and unable to act as they wished concerning him. Benedict Cumberbatch’s Ford could not protect Solomon, and Michael Fassbender’s Epps was forced to allow Solomon to work for a more benevolent employer.

Because of the economic stagnation in the South, immigrants were largely drawn to the North and spread westward from there. Beyond a few WASPs, almost all Americans are today descended from those immigrants, rather than the people who founded a country that tolerated a degree of slavery within its borders. The fact is that the United States, almost uniquely among slave states, went to considerable trouble to put an end to the practice. The fact is that a majority of the states were not slave states and outright forbade slavery. The slave states were forced to turn to terrorism to attempt to bring new states into the union on their side. To which the retort of the reparation advocate is immediate, that they were states where slavery was not profitable and gave up nothing by prohibiting the practice. How then does one argue that the USA was built on the wealth produced by slaves? Either slavery was an immensely profitable and advantageous practice, in which case the majority of the country refused to partake out of moral scruples, or it was an economic dead end and societal trap, in which case it was an affliction on the country and the case that we are still benefiting from its profits is blatantly false.

Finally, the author of this piece is a terrorist-spawned college dropout who is famous as a professional sophist and a court composer to the victocrat oligarchy. His writings are ill-informed op-ed nonsense that is given a platform and spread about because they support the ideological agenda of racial division. Unlike black pundits and writers of much greater productivity, he is an underachiever in real life, the only one of his siblings to fail to graduate college, whose only success is as an entertainer. Men like Thomas Sowell, Larry Elder, Ben Carson, Walter Williams, Herman Cain and Clarence Thomas, who actually suffered through racial injustices, rather than black-inflicted community hardships, and who have enough credentials that they should charge Coates tuition just for a conversation on economics, politics and history, have radically different views of what America is and what the worst injustices done to the black community were and to what degree slavery is responsible for their state and the relationship of living Americans to that institution.


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Intersting read. May be first Canoli post ive read all the way through - 31/01/2019 03:30:14 AM 383 Views
Let me start by saying that... - 28/01/2019 06:40:59 PM 364 Views
Well screw you and your nuance, whitey! - 28/01/2019 11:21:08 PM 377 Views
Thank you for this...(edit) - 29/01/2019 11:15:25 PM 339 Views

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