this post was submitted on 03 Dec 2023
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What should Democrats be doing for black voters that they aren't?
There is a national black caucus that pretty well represents current black American issues before each election.
reparations for slavery, strengthening the right to vote and making it easier to access polls, outlawing the death penalty, abolishing prisons, removing the clause in the 13th amendment that allows for legal slavery, abolishing the police or at the very least force them to have oversight, banning AI for use in law enforcement, etc.
Reparations seems like a nonstarter but the rest of these are happening, to various degrees, at the state level in blue states
I think reparations are possible, we have to organize and do more than just voting to make it happen though.
I imagine the hardest part would be determining who was harmed by slavery given that not everyone has records of it. I think it would be nice to do to put that shameful chapter of history behind us. Whatever dollar amount we come up with probably wouldn't be sufficient for the generational wealth destroyed, but it would be an attempt at doing better and very symbolic.
I don't think reparations would work as direct cash payments, I think they would work best as investments into black communities. Your reasoning is exactly why I support reparations though. We cannot fix the harm, but we can try to make it right.
So any public works in a black community counts as reparations to you, but you also think none of that is happening?
Where the hell did you get that idea? Reparations would be separate from regular public works.
You, and what's the difference?
Porque no las dos? Most folks who've looked into it have concluded that it will take direct cash payment as well as community investment and multiple other simultaneous efforts to fully catch the black community up to their white counterparts in terms of opportunities and generational wealth they've been denied access to, and to work against the culture of racism that made all that denial possible in the first place.
I think when most Americans think of reparations, they think of direct payments and no other remedies, so they get upset about it for all manners of reasons. When discussing reparations, it's far easier to get people on board when you don't talk about direct payments. Payments are part of the solution, but they won't solve the problem. If we had to pick a single option, focusing on communities would have the strongest individual impact.
An example of what you discuss shows in the reparations to the Seminole tribe. Many freed slaves or escaped slaves never signed documentation (like a census for the tribe) as they were more worried about getting found/cheated etc. Last I knew there were court cases still open or closed in the past couple decades pertaining to such.
What would the lost wages in their entirety amount to?
Now that would be really hard to figure out, you'd have to determine what sort of jobs were done as slaves and how many hours. I don't think slavers kept those sorts of records in the antebellum South.
Even granting the value of 40 acres and a mule plus 200 years of interest to descendants of slaves would be a challenge.
I think they may have, as slavery was an industry so were plantations. The planters as well as the slavers probably kept meticolous books and records. I assume such as they probably lacked any guilty conscience for their crimes.
I will look it up once I am back home again and have access to the library.
I'd expect large plantations to have records of how many slaves they own and production numbers. Perhaps one could extrapolate from that an estimate of labor hours per slave, but individual slaves' productivity and hours worked, I'd be surprised if this was possible. Smaller scale slave owners might not have been so meticulous about record keeping and much documentation may be lost to time. It is regarded as a shameful institution today, discouraging holding on to such things.
I'm interested in what you find!
Some speculate nothing at this point since generational wealth doesn't tend to stick around for long,
The more sensible solution is instead paying reparations for red lining since the fiscal affects of that are directly observable today without argument over generational entropy, and because it's arguably still ongoing.
You'd need to mitigate the reparations paid by also calculating the generational loss of wealth over the same period by "unaffected" citizens.
What reparations should be paid for is for red lining, as that is a problem that is arguably still ongoing and which has impacts on today's generational wealth recently enough to not have been reduced by the average loss of wealth over generational entropy, not to mention the parallel to the original promise of reparations "40 acres and a mule", not sure how many urban black families would be looking forward to having basically a horse to now take care of but the value of land they were denied access to is deffo something that american black families would be greatly advanced by.
If you really want to fuel the GOP, pass some reparations that cross generational lines. They will immediately point out how some recipients are squandering the money. Resentment will build. It will ignite latent racism. And then the Indigenous Peoples will want the same deal, and the Chinese, and then everyone who had a female ancestor treated as an inferior human will want their cut! You make one minority segment happy while sowing discontent among the rest. Reparations that are not directly related to the wrongs done to an individual are a slippery slope. There are better ways to deal with the inequities of the past.
I have an ancestors who was owed money from the king of England for a loan made in the 1700s. The bank handling the account said that the money had to be evenly divided among the descends. What started out as a literal kings ransom got down to under $10 when divided evenly.
The original slavey reparations was an acre of land and a mule. Divided equally, even assuming multiple slave ancestors, would be a few square feet and just enough mule hair to make brush. Reparations done on the scale of harm done equally divided would be insulting. Making things better for everyone is a much easier sell.
Thanks for the thorough list, that all seems like good stuff to me except I'd prefer reforming prisons and making them like the Nordic model instead of abolishing them.
prison abolition is uncomfortable at first, so I understand. Nordic prisons would be a massive improvement, but to me it's just polishing a turd
So what are we going to do with actual terrible people? Murders, rapists, etc?
find and address the problems that cause people to behave that way, to prevent it from happening in the first place.
We absolutely can greatly reduce crime by doing that and should -- but that's not going to completely eliminate those crimes.
People are going to slip through the cracks, and sociopaths are still going to exist.
Yeah that's nice and feel good but you can't deny that there are people who behave badly because they're just rotten people.
Domestic abusers are a key example, people go through the same supposed stressors that DV perps go through without belt whipping their kid for not being man enough at the age of 5.
Have an upvote for understanding systemic issues.
A big part of what makes our prisons so terrible and why we throw so many people into them has to do with the 13th amendment, as you acknowledged. If they cease to be profitable, if prisoners cannot be used as slave labor, a lot of what makes them terrible will evaporate. If every prisoner costs the state money, expect them to create fewer of them.
Would the constitution be possibly changed to prevent slavery of prisoners? Would that conclude the abolition movement?
Reparations: what’s your suggested plan for this?
I'm not a legislator. In general, I think they would look like substantial investments into black communities, rather than direct cash payments.
That sounds pretty reasonable.
Look over black families that trace back to at least one person who would have been eligible for New Deal and Post War housing benefits but did not receive them due to the colour of their skin or for living in a redlined neighborhood or other factors of the like, calculate an average benefit to each generation following from Americans who did get those benefits, and pay out accordingly to modern black and mixed race households.
It is debatable if there's even money that could be paid back for slavery since those wages arguably may have already exhausted their extragenerational benefit, but redlining and housing benefits denial is a crime we can observe clearly in the present day, and who's generational benefits are well argued to be still in hand for the families that did get them.
Tax break
Tax break for… people who can prove their family history traces back to a slave?
That’s where it will be caught up in the court system. You can’t just say “I’m black gimme money!” They’re going to want documentation that probably doesn’t exist or was destroyed
Also The ‘Chinese Railroad Worker’ descendants may raise a hand.
Yes? Also what fucking evidence are you expecting nobody kept their great great grandparents papers of sale. I know for a fact my ancestors were slaves, can't prove shit though
Don’t cuss at me. That is exactly my point: that documentation is gone or never existed in the first place. It’s not like record keeping for slaves was very good.
No one is handing out free money without documentation. So that route won’t work.
It's a tax break not free money. There are plenty of ways off the top of my head immigration records would record immigrated from Africa but not those that came in the slave trade. Plus I can show my family has been here for generations on top of that likely certain markers in DNA would show being African American vs being from Africa.
Before I continue, I’m not against people being paid off for the crimes against their people.
That said, DNA doesn’t mean a person was actually related to a slave. Not everyone from Africa gets to have a tax break in the USA.
Additionally, not every black person from Africa who was here during slavery was actually a slave.
Proving a relationship to a slave beyond a reasonable doubt is next to impossible for most people to do, and proving a hardship now because of that slavery isn’t possible for anyone.
However, there are lots of other things reparations could apply to other than slavery. It’s not like you’d have to try very hard to find an instance where black people were treated poorly by the government.
Does all this come down to a tax break for individuals today? That’s the difficult argument to make. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be made, I’m just saying it’s a hard sell to become an action.
An easier sell would be large cash donations (perhaps ongoing, or over several decades) to various government run programs that are focused on providing services to minorities, and at risk groups of people.
I don’t really see the political landscape being receptive to that at the moment. There’s a lot of shit going on and next year is gonna be a political nightmare. The last thing any politician is going to do is pitch reparations, a generally unpopular topic—regardless of its merit.
I'm not reading all that.
And that’s why you’ll never get what you want.
I don't care one way or the other. A tax break would be nice but, doesm5 really make a difference to me at this point.
Can't tell if /s