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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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Let's say that 5 generations ago, your great-great-great grandfather had a farm. It was highly productive and had a great location.
Let's say that my great-great-great grandfather went to the local government and paid bribes and maybe did some light killing and stole that farm. No matter who your g-g-g grandfather talked to, they all pointed to the new deed and told him to suck eggs. Your g-g-g grandfather fell into despair and poverty. His children grew up poor but also worked hard and climbed up the wealth ladder a little. So too did their children, and so on, until your generation. Let's say you're lower middle class or so. No generational wealth to speak of but not in poverty.
Meanwhile my family has developed that farmland, partitioned it and sold or leased pieces of it for business and industry. We have phenomenal generational wealth all built on that initial theft of land.
But hey, you never had land stolen directly from you, and I never directly stole the land. Everyone in the area knows exactly what happened. Everyone in the area knows that my generational wealth is built on theft. Nowadays everyone talks openly about it, including me.
Now, from the outside looking in, I say that the absolutely morally right thing to do is restore the ownership of the land to the descendants of the person who owned it. But from the inside, the living descendants of the thief say hey, WE didn't steal the land. We just benefit every day from the original theft. Why should we do anything to make amends for that theft, which we don't dispute but don't want to be accountable for either.
Okay, and how about the millions of other people whose ancestors never did or had any of that? Of the families that benefitted, some of them are still rich and powerful, those are the ones that should be looked at, not some Joe Blow whose lineage has always been lower/middle-class, working for a living like everyone else.
I do genealogy and so I know that my g-g-g-grandfather had to give up farm labouring during the first decades of the British Empire and move to the Bermondsey slums, where he worked as a tanner. If you know anything about historical tanning, you know that this sucked. He was screwed over by the infiux of cheap food from the Empire and our family is part of the underclass to this day.
The thing is, we still live in a rich country because of that. My parents and grandparents and their parents did. We've still had access to education and free healthcare and all that shit. We still had access to all that cheap shit that we robbed the rest of the world for.
So yeah, we owe those people's descendents like it or not. Plus, considering that yes, we were repaying the descendants of slaveowners until just a few years ago, and paying off our Marshall Plan debts etc until very recently, I'm not too fussed if the government of my country pays its debts.
I mean, if you agree that descendants of people who benefitted from enslaving others owe the descendants of those enslaved people compensation of some sort, then I think we agree. The remaining questions are how to identify members of each group and how to accomplish the transfers. That's law and policy. Not simple, but achievable.
The corresponding Joe Blow from the group that got screwed over is going to be comparatively much worse off. Right? Or you can look at it from the other angle: if normal Joe Blow had ancestors who benefited from seriously screwing over people but made bad decisions, squandered their wealth and advantages so Joe Blow is just a Joe Blow then how much worse off would Joe Blow be? Possibly quite a bit.
But anyway, looking at it from the perspective of ancestors, who screwed over who, who's responsible for what is overcomplicating things. Are there people who are suffering from unfair disadvantages, are their people who are enjoying unfair advantages at the expense of others? If you're a decent person, that status quo shouldn't be acceptable: it's something that needs to be fixed. Maybe through reparations, maybe through affirmative action, maybe through some other approach. We should determine what the most effective use of resources is and do it.
This is a good analogy for the reparation argument, nice work.
Only partially. Those two gggf's had their spat; I'm the descendent of neither, yet it's me who has to pay the bill.
This is a decent analogy, but ignores the practicality of the situation.
How exactly do you get the UK electorate to support this, there really isn’t any benefit to them, it’s just like throwing money into a bonfire. Besides it’s not like the UK economy is currently doing that well, and given that, it’s unrealistic for anyone to support the government just taking more money away intentionally. You’re basically begging for a far-right populist to come in just because they say this is a terrible idea, which is in and of itself the primary reason why it’s a terrible idea.
So, American here. My family immigrated from Germany, Poland, England, and Italy (the nationalities of my four grandparents). My family never owned slaves, never owned farmland, never profited from any of that. Why should my tax dollars go towards paying reparations for something my family had no part in?
That’s the part that I struggle with. Should the families who directly profited off of slavery pay reparations? Perhaps. Should the families and individuals who had nothing to do with slavery? Absolutely not.
Nobody is suggesting that your taxes should increase to exactly match the amount you'd have to personally pay. It's the responsibility of the government to do it, and while the government does ultimately use your tax dollars it's not like you'll personally feel the effect.
Except you would feel the effects. The government would end up with less money for services so worse roads, hospitals, schools etc and probably higher taxes
Good news - your government will spend as little as it can possibly get away with on those things whether you pay slavery reparations or not!
This always seems such a strange argument to me, as if governments are just screaming to spend money on roads, hospitals etc. They spend it on pet projects and tax cuts for their voterbase.
Well, if we’re talking about ideal spending of tax dollars, this isn’t acceptable either. Any way we split it, the government will not spend our money the way we see fit, so it’s still a valid argument to me.
Of course they are, roads, hospitals, railways etc are vote buying. Doesn't mean they are doing it out of a sense of civic duty because they are generally scum. But if you think that 14 trillion in reparations (450k per tax payer!) Isn't going to have a massive impact on future spending then I have a bridge for sale!
It depends on the period of time they're paid over, doesn't it? Generational debts like these are repaid over, well, generations. It's not going to be something we notice, and the UK aren't the only country involved.
Plus, if that's what you think, I don't think you can have seen the state of the UK's roads, hospitals and railways.
I use them daily so imagine how much worse they would be with generational debt.
It would be used as an excuse to privatise every thing left :( I really can't understand how it wouldn't affect the average person. You can't just hand wave away the impact of a very large amount increased debt. Ironically the people that would have had the least amount 'benefit' from the slave trade would be the ones that feel the most impact from any reparations. Social programs would be the first ones hit
I promise you, we had massive generational debt all the time I was growing up in the seventies, eighties and nineties, and when my mother was growing up in the 50s and 60s. We had way better public services then than we have today. Whether or not the government is making debt repayments has no bearing on public services—that's all about the attitude of the government, and a government that wants to privatise everything and destroy the public trust will always find some pretext to do so, such as the triple lock being the biggest votewinner in the land.
The hospitals, schools, libraries, roads and services were built with the aid of the disputed money in the first place.
This is a fact of life for all people around the world. I promise you’ll go circles paying retribution if you look for these links of “who stole what”.