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How are slavery reparations fair?
(lemm.ee)
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this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Ending slavery doesn't reset everything back to zero. Imagine if you're running a race against someone else. The person officiating the race (no clue what this kind of person is called 😅) lets your opponent start running the race and keeps you back at the start line. Then, they have a moment of clarity and say to themselves, "Wait a second… This isn't fair!" So, they stop that person where they are, apologize to you, say they promise never to do it again, and blow the whistle so that you can both start the race.
But wait! That person still ended up starting way ahead! But we already ended head starts before the race started so it's OK, right? Well, no, because the person who got the head start still got to start from their advantaged position.
But this isn't quite the same because your issue crosses generations. So, a better analogy might be a relay race. Maybe the head start is stopped just as the second person on the opposing team receives the… thing you pass in a relay race. (Why am I making an analogy to a thing I know nothing about? 😅) They didn't personally get the head start. So, it's OK to go ahead and start the race now with one relay team already on their second runner while the other is on their first, right? It wouldn't be fair to punish that person who didn't directly gain the advantage of the head start.
Well, no, because that team still got an advantage and the other team still started at a disadvantage. Reparations are less about punishing an individual and more about leveling a playing field.
I like to think of online gaming. 2 teams against each other. One side uses cheats for part of the match and runs the score way up. Midway through, they turn the cheats off and apologize, but the score is still lopsided.
Old players might drop out and new players might join in, perhaps to the point where most players in the match were never around when the cheating occurred. You might even argue that some of the score gap might be attributable to differences in skill between the two teams. But it's undeniable that one team is benefiting from an unfair advantage, and doing nothing to adjust for that perpetuates the unfairness.
Now, imagine that the game also has a mechanism that makes it easier to stay in the lead once you get there.
For my taste your analogy is faulty.
You put it like it was a game of Civ.
The history and development of nations and cultures on Earth was/is much more complex.